Black pledge draws angry e-mails

Millwood Public Schools Superintendent Gloria Griffin says she is "dumbfounded." Since Monday, she has been swamped with angry e-mails accusing her administration of espousing black separatist doctrine to Millwood students. She said nothing could be further from the truth.

At the center of the misunderstanding is a copy of "The Black Pledge of Allegiance," which appears on the Millwood Public Schools Web site immediately beneath the traditional American Pledge of Allegiance.

Griffin said the pledge, the origin of which is unknown to her, has appeared on the Web site since it was created last spring. She said she had forgotten all about it until the angry e-mails started arriving.

The pledge is not something the students recite in school, she said, although it apparently has been characterized that way in e-mails that have circulated over the Internet.

"Let me tell you how this came about," Griffin said. "Two or three years ago, one of the middle school teachers was doing a study on black pride or cultural pride.

"This particular pledge was among the items the students found through their research."

Black students make up about 99 percent of the Millwood school system's population, she said.

Some students found the pledge to be encouraging and inspirational and asked if it could be used in the Student Planner, a book where students keep track of their assignments, Griffin said.

Griffin said the idea that some people might interpret the pledge as advocating separatism never occurred to her when she read it.

"When I read it, I focus on the words 'united in love, freedom and determination,'" she said. "If you look at history, there is a great need for African Americans to love. It is very important that we appreciate freedom. And it is very, very important to have self- determination, and I don't mean that in a sense of separatism."

One of the nicer e-mails Griffin received said: "So much of the Millwood Web site is worthwhile. However, it is a shame that this pledge to black separatism is allowed in your school system."

Another says: "I am offended by the Millwood Black Pledge of Allegiance. It is one of the most racist pieces of propaganda I have read in many years. In a nation which encourages equality, I am surprised to see such stark racial division being taught by a public school."

Griffin said she is particularly upset by e-mails that have been blatantly racist, e-mails that falsely accuse the district of asking students to recite the pledge and e-mails that seem to question students' patriotism.

The pledge is not recited in Millwood schools, she said. The Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag is recited often.

"The elementary school opens each assembly with the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag," Griffin wrote in a response to one e-mail. "Since August, this pledge is recited each morning. With a backlog of requests for American flags, the elementary school art teacher made attractive American flags for the classroom."

Middle school assemblies begin with a presentation of colors by the Civil Air Patrol and students reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. At the high school, the Junior ROTC posts the colors and the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag is recited, she said.

"Other than being the target of misinformation, I don't know what to make of this," she said. "Something has been taken out of context. As a result, it really borders on slander."

Griffin said she doesn't know the origin of the black pledge or the red, black and green flag it refers to -- although she does recall seeing the flag surface during the 1960s civil rights movement.

She also said she didn't know whether the pledge would remain on the school's Web site. She said she has asked the middle school principal to research its origin so appropriate action can be taken. At the least, a paragraph of explanation identifying the pledge as cultural study material needs to be added, she said.

Don Ross, a black state representative from Tulsa, said he is unfamiliar with the pledge. Like Griffin, he recalls the flag surfacing during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

"I don't think it has anything to do with black separatism. If anything, it symbolizes unity," he said.

Ross referred to the red, black and green flag as the "freedom flag." He said it is frequently presented, along with the American flag, at gatherings of many traditional black groups that have nothing to do with black separatism.

However, as is the case with many symbols, the red, white and green flag apparently means different things to different groups.

The Kwanzaa Information Center Web site has an article on the origin of the red, black and green flag. It said the flag "has become the symbol of devotion for African people in America to establish an independent African nation on the North American Continent."

"Red is for the Blood. Black is the Black People. Green is for the Land," the Web site says.

Newsgroups: soc.culture.nigeria View: Complete Thread (8 articles) | Original Format Date: 1998/01/02

An Opinion by
Tony Snow

WASHINGTON -- Blacks in America have suffered an endless series of insults and degradations, the latest of which goes by the name of Kwanzaa.

Ron Karenga (a/k/a Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga) invented the seven-day feast (Dec. 26-Jan. 1) in 1966, branding it a black alternative to Christmas. The idea was to celebrate the end of what he considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans.

According to the official Kwanzaa Web site -- as opposed, say, to the Hallmark Cards Kwanzaa site -- the celebration was designed to foster "conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans" and provide a "reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans' ancestors."

Karenga postulated seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which gets its day during Kwanzaa week. He and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: "We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one God of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self- determination."

Now, the point: There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent.

Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term "matunda yakwanza," or "first fruit," and the festival's trappings have Swahili names -- such as "ujima" for "collective work and responsibility" or "muhindi," which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.

Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.

To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing "God Save the Queen" in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.

Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots.

No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don't necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy.

The inventors of Kwanzaa weren't promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term "ujima," which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.

Even the rituals using corn don't fit. Corn isn't indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.

The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport. Go to Kenya, where I taught briefly as a young man, and you'll see endless hostility between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Masai. Even South African politics these days have more to do with tribal animosities than ideological differences.

Moreover, chaos too often prevails over order. Warlords hold sway in Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and Zaire. Genocidal maniacs have wiped out millions in Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. The once-shining hopes for Kenya have vanished.

Detroit native Keith Richburg writes in his extraordinary book, "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa," that "this strange place defies even the staunchest of optimists; it drains you of hope ..."

Richburg, who served for three years as the African bureau chief for The Washington Post, offers a challenge for the likes of Karenga: "Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I'll throw it back in your face, and then I'll rub your nose in the images of rotting flesh."

His book concludes: "I have been here, and I have seen -- and frankly, I want no part of it. .... By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today -- my culture and my attitudes, my sensibilities, loves and desires -- derives from that one simple and irrefutable fact."

Nobody ever ennobled a people with a lie or restored stolen dignity through fraud. Kwanzaa is the ultimate chump holiday -- Jim Crow with a false and festive wardrobe. It praises practices -- "cooperative economics, and collective work and responsibility" -- that have succeeded nowhere on earth and would mire American blacks in endless backwardness.

Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.

This year, President Clinton signed his fourth Kwanzaa proclamation. He crooned: "The symbols and ceremony of Kwanzaa, evoking the rich history and heritage of African Americans, remind us that our nation draws much of its strength from our diversity."

But our strength, as Richburg points out, comes from real principles: tolerance, brotherhood, hard work, personal responsibility, equality before the law. If Americans really cared about racial healing, they would focus on those ideas -- and not on a made-up rite that mistakes segregationism for spirituality and fiction for history.

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