The TRUTH about Kwanzaa

Jewish World Review ^ | Dec. 31, 1999 | Tony Snow

[CrossCheck]

BLACKS IN AMERICA have suffered an endless series of insults and degradations, the latest of which goes by the name of Kwanzaa.

Ron Karenga (aka 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 G-d 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 "G-d 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.

[Dengar01]

oh, and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

[Woodkirk]

What is worse is when this stuff is taught in our public schools and universities to and by people whose common refrain is that they are able to discern the difference between fact and fantasy -- but I don't think they can because I don't think they want to.

[Spiff]

Another Kwanzaa thread!? Well here's another posting of my KounterKwanzaa Link List.

Kwanzaa Links

We Wish You A Phony Festival - Report (Canadian Magazine)

So This Is Kwanzaa - Newsmax.com

Ann Coulter on Kwanzaa - TownHall.Com

Mona Charen on Kwanzaa - Jewish World Review

Tony Snow on Kwanzaa - Jewish World Review

The TRUE Spirit of Kwanzaa - The New American magazine

The Story of Kwanzaa - The Dartmouth Review

The Truth About Kwanzaa - A Christian Viewpoint

A Momentary Loss of Reason - Binghamton Review

Kwanzaa & The White House - NY Post Editorial, 1997 (Freerepublic.com thread)

Michael Savage on Kwanzaa - NewsMax

Ron Karenga - Dialog from the Black Radical Congress - December 1999

Happy Kwanzaa - FrontPage Magazine - Link may not work, if it doesn't click here for the Free Republic thread.

I'm Dreaming of a White Kwanzaa - LewRockwell.com - Link may not work, if it doesn't click here for the Free Republic thread.

Letter to Editor - Ypsilanti Courier

What is Kwanzaa? - File Passed Around On Internet About Kwanzaa

Happy Kwanzaa by Patrick S. Poole

Ron Everett (aka. Maulana Karenga) / US Links

The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide? - NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - February 13, 1971 (Includes great detail of the murders committed by Karenga's thugs)

PBS Interview with black radical Ron Everett (aka Maulana Karenga) - the guy that invented Kwanzaa while in prison for torturing two young women

US, the organization the Ron Everett founded in 1965, the organization that murdered 5 members of the rival Black Panther Party, is back - well it was back in 1995, but they haven't updated their website since then. Their website is here.

Afrocentrism Links

Clarence Walker Encourages Black Americans to Discard Afrocentrism

Pride & Prejudice by Dinesh D'Souza, Vol. 6, American Enterprise, 09-01-1995, pp 51 (Google Cached Version)

Fighting Fiction With Fact by Mary Lefkowitz (Google Cached Version)

Fallacies of Afrocentrism - Grover Furr

The Skeptics Dictionary - Afrocentrism

The Skeptics Dictionary Review of Mary Lefkowitz' Book "Not Out Of Africa"

Review of Mary Lefkowitz' Books on Afrocentrism Myth "Not Out Of Africa" and "Black Athena Revisited"

The Trap of Ethnic Identity - New York Times - Jan 1997

AFROCENTRISM The Argument We're Really Having

[LibertyThug]

Good read

[Bagzilla]

Another great Kwanzaa link...

http://www.ratsalad.com/humor/zaza_douglaskwanzaa.htm

[Missouri]

I followed a thread of yours two days ago when GWB put out Kwanzaa greetings. I was surprised at the number of freepers defending him on this one.

To put Kwanzaa on the same level as Christmas is beyond me. We truly are now living in a world turned upside down.

[FrankR]

May be some truth in this article, but I don't trust journalist who list "God" as "G-d.

[Spiff]

May be some truth in this article, but I don't trust journalist who list "God" as "G-d.

It's Tony Snow, for goodness sakes. Who else are you going to trust!? As for the G-d thing, some people do that out of respect for God or something like that.

[the invisib1e hand]

a useful read. thx.

[Lauren BaRecall]

May be some truth in this article, but I don't trust journalist who list "God" as "G-d.

This article was originally published in the "Jewish World Review." I've seen it as being a common Jewish practice to write/print God's Name as "G-d." This is their way of giving profound respect to the Name above all names.

[Lauren BaRecall]

The link for "We Wish You A Phony Festival" doesn't work. I found this link on google:

http://www.floridaradioactive.com/issues/Holidays/Kwanzaa_phony.htm

Is this the same article?

[Lancey Howard]

Thanks for posting this. It is as good or better than even Ann Coulter's expose of Kwanzaa. Bookmarked!

[Lancey Howard]

Tony Snow was quoting Karenga's "pledge", and the G-d may be verbatim from the Official Kwanzaa website.

[185JHP]

Remember when the AlGore made the revealing gaffe about the famous saying, and said "Out of one, many."? That's the main reason a lot of people will support this monstrosity - grabbing for separatism and bucks, perks, and non-merit giveaways.

[RhoTheta]

Reference ping

[sionnsar]

BTTT

[word_warrior_bob]

So is Tony Snow going to inform President Bush about Kwaanzaa or is Bush going to equate it with Christmas like a pandering fool.

The first casualty of war is the truth. If we accept Kwaanza and elementary school sex education and global warming and a number of other hair brained things we have lost the war before it's begun.

No President has the ba!!s to NOT acknowledge Kwaanza because he knows the American public is a bunch of morons who don't know any better and is afraid to speak the truth because he'll be called a racist.

Cavemen had more common sense.

[DMZFrank]

The words for what you describe is cognitive dissonance. I encounter it all the time in my debates with my black brothers and sisters. When I point out that the Democratic Party is the party that had as part of it's Party PLATFORM from 1840-1860 the defense of slavery, or that they are the party of Jim Crow, the KKK, lynchings, poll taxes, Black Codes, opposition to Reconstruction, and the Great Society Welfare State that destroyed the 2 parent black family and that the GOP WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE 13TH, 14TH, AND 15TH AMENDMENTS, the first black US congressmen, senators and southern state legislators, every peice of foundational civil rights legislation from 1863-1973, most of the historically black colleges were founded by Republicans and that MLK was a registered Republican they often find such truth so cotravenes their former indoctrination that they cannot process it and just tune it out.

This dismal situation is an endlessly frustrating and maddening reality. The black community MUST start accepting responsibility for most of that which is negative about it's contemporary plight.

[DMZFrank]

Which is precisely why those of us who know better MUST challenge those whose current perceptions are largely shaped by viewing the present thru the prism of past racial injustices. Such thinking may hold some validity in nations where law and societal organization is largely determined by ethnic alligences. But in a nation with a putative commitment to the rule of law and a racially neutral constitution, it is destructive and Balkanizing to allow any such thought to gain currency here without vigorous challenge. The racial navel gazing, racial identity posturing, and puffed up grievance mongering should be rejected for the PC irrelevance that it is.

For the record I am a black man who is constantly engaged in often vicious debate with my fellow blacks over issues like this. Many of those outside the black community have no idea as to how crippling and distortive such dearly held commitments to past racial injustice are to the outlook of many American blacks.