I'm probably quibbling but 'black' is less a cultural heritage than a shared experience. The black community in the US is/was incredibly diverse. The unity comes in how society treats you but that has nothing to do with what you learned inside your home and in your communities. If you had a white/mixed/light-skinned parent, you may have grown up with white cultural traditions, especially if that person was a recent immigrant, e.g. Irish. If you came from Gullah coastal SC, like Michele Obama's family, you had cultural traditions and language more akin to Africa, unusual given the determination that that culture be eliminated during slavery. If you are mixed with Cherokee, you may have incorporated those traditions. Even if you are 100% black on all sides - unlikely - one still has different traditions around you. My parents are mixed race Caribbean and I grew up as a 'Brit with brown skin' at home. Traditions differ from state to state, depending upon the tribal mixture as well, as well as the traditions of the white population. That's why it's incredibly frustrating when people assume that the black community is as culturally cohesive as the Irish, German, Cherokee, or Chinese and that right-wingers rant about fixing 'black culture.' There's no such thing, and to say so negates the influence of the dominant culture. Black 'culture' in the US is as much a reflection of white culture, either by inclusion or exclusion. Kwanza and other things like that are efforts to create a unifying culture, but it's artificial and by no means universal. Slavery in the US was not as brutal as in other countries, but black Americans have far fewer connections to the societies from which they came than in other nations, e.g. Cuba.