[Albion Wilde]

the African cultural “value” of getting over on someone else.... illustrated in the Brer Rabbit fables. The “moral” of the story was never to do what is right but to get over on whomever you’re dealing with. I read this great essay years ago (wish I could remember where) about the way this paradigm still affects sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti.

Could you have read Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music by Arthur Kempton? Here is an excerpt that explains "getting over."

[constitutiongirl]

I would have remembered reading something with such a great title!! I think what I read may have been an anthropologist’s dry PhD dissertation.