By any rational measure this event remains the most momentous in the history of Western Civilization. Billions of words have been written, vast amounts of art created, awesome buildings and churches dedicated, nations' destinies decided, and finally, millions of individual lives transformed, because of this central fact. For those who believe, it provides joy, comfort, and repose.
Each December, America's Christians are persuaded, subtly, indirectly, and, more and more, directly, to deny and hide their belief. They must celebrate, not the joyous birth of a Redeemer, but rather the multicultural confusion of approved holidays representing different sentiments promoting a vague human kindliness. They are instructed and encouraged to pretend to believe in things an honest eight year-old would laugh at with derision. Against the stupendous Incarnation and the accompanying two thousand years of tradition and devotion what do we have arrayed? One genuine and two ginned-up alternative holidays.
The original multi-cultural offering is a Jewish historical and religious commemoration of a miracle – Chanukah – which is not counted among the High Holy Days of Judaism, but which is a genuine and ancient commemoration of legitimate significance. Conveniently, Chanukah takes place around the same time as Advent, and has become invested with temporal equivalence as an opportunity for the gift-giving, greeting cards, songs, and other less spiritual accoutrements of a religious commemoration, as have also attached themselves to Christmas.
Chanukah begins tomorrow night, and I wish all of my Jewish readers a meaningful celebration and commemoration, one deeply connected with the survival of the Jews throughout millennia of persecution. As such, Chanukah merits its own commemoration, not immersion in a vague and deracinated "Holiday Season" or a "greeting" keyed to Winter, not to the inspiring story it symbolically re-enacts. Chanukah deserves to stand and be celebrated on its own, distinctively Jewish basis.
However the American scene is also now featuring a neo-pagan, fake-Druid solstice Saturnalia and a modern invention of politics and hodge-podge spiritual nonsense--Kwanzaa. But I have said here the one thing you are not supposed to say. Have you noticed and experienced the inexpressible joy and ecstasy with which these latter two holidays are celebrated? No? Well, that's all right, you are not supposed to notice the ambivalence of their few celebrants. It doesn't matter anyway. These holidays are doing the job for which they are meant, to make credible the fiction of competing holidays. They have been artificially promoted and, in the case of Kwanzaa, invented, to lessen the impact of Christmas. Everybody knows this. Really.
The resulting "Holiday Season" allows the vast economic exploitation of Christmas while serenely ignoring its core. It naturally and inevitably leads to one blatant insult to Christianity after another, from "X"mas sales at the mall to Winter Festivals in the public schools.
Christians are certainly not blameless in this travesty. They complacently allow themselves to be denied the spiritual and psychological fruits of the central core of their faith. They are routinely cowed into accepting the preposterous nonsense that proclaiming and celebrating Christmas is a form of intolerance and hate. They go along with the silliness. For conciliation's sake, they agree to make sure to hide the Creche, or at least place it beside a Menorah, so as not to be labeled a bigot, or worse. And of course the educated elite would prefer a secular chorus of Jingle Bells or Frosty the Snowman to be sung at approved "winter" gatherings so as not to be offended, so remove Adeste Fidelis from the program.
Recent international events have served to illuminate the lack of seriousness of most of the west. Across the globe we see people dying for their beliefs. We see righteous anger and irrational savagery. At home we fight among ourselves to come to grips with realities and consequences of the fight between good and evil.
To survive in this world the West must regain its seriousness. We must put aside childish things, return fantasy and make-believe to children, and call things what they truly are, restore honesty, and return to substantive truths. Let us begin by restoring Christmas, and let its light illuminate our darkened world. Let us restore the glorious traditions of centuries and scorn the attempts at usurpation by the invasions and inventions of those who hate Christ and detest the celebration of His birth.
Andrew Sumereau is a writer residing in East Stroudsburg, PA
It is way past time for us to begin fighting back.
wonderful article. very true. Anybody who wishes me "happy holidays" gets a nice loud "merry Christmas" in return. It's not "the holiday season", it's Christmas.
I'm dreaming
of a whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite Kwanzaa ...
I don't see the inanity of Kwanzaa as something created "to lessen the impact of Christmas." I see it created to get more people to continue buying more crap from stores in our "ownership society". At this, I think it's been mostly a failure, since (like the article says) few people give Kwanzaa any credibility or observance.
I am 53 years old and I have NEVER heard of the phrase:
Feast of the Incarnation
Ahh yes -- KWANZA!
Ronald Everett - the convicted felon who invented Kwanza and burned a woman's mouth with a hot soldering iron.
Wonderful holiday for a race of people to celebrate.
Display your Festivas Tree proudly and prepare your list of grievances. Holiday Season draws near..
here's the entire song:
I’m dreaming of a white Kwaanza
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the treetops glisten and children listen
To hear Marxist diatribes
I’m dreaming of a white Kwaanza
With every Kwaanza card I write
May your days be silly and trite
And may all your Kwaanza-ah’s be white
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
Xmas
SYLLABICATION: X·mas
PRONUNCIATION: krsms, ksms
NOUN: Christmas.
ETYMOLOGY: From X, the Greek letter chi, first letter of Greek Khrstos, Christ. See Christ.
USAGE NOTE: Xmas has been used for hundreds of years in religious writing, where the X represents a Greek chi, the first letter of , “Christ.” In this use it is parallel to other forms like Xtian, “Christian.” But people unaware of the Greek origin of this X often mistakenly interpret Xmas as an informal shortening pronounced (ksms). Many therefore frown upon the term Xmas because it seems to them a commercial convenience that omits Christ from Christmas.
'Twas the night before Kwanzaa
And all through the 'hood,
Maulana Karenga was up to no good.
He'd tortured a woman and spent time in jail.
He needed a new scam that just wouldn't fail.
("So what if I stuck some chick's toe in a vise?
Nobody said revolution was nice!")
The Sixties were over. Now what would he do?
Why, he went back to school -- so that's "Dr." to you!
He once ordered shootouts at UCLA
Now he teaches Black Studies just a few miles away.
Then to top it all off, the good Doctor's new plan
Was to get rid of Christmas and piss off The Man.
Karenga invented a fake holiday.
He called the thing Kwanza. "Hey, what's that you say?
"You don't get what's 'black' about Maoist baloney?
You say that my festival's totally phony?
"Who cares if corn isn't an African crop?
Who cares if our harvest's a month or two off?
Who cares if Swahili's not our mother tongue?
A lie for The Cause never hurt anyone!
"Umoja! Ujima! Kujichagulia, too!
Collectivist crap never sounded so cool!
Those guilty white liberals -- easy to fool.
Your kids will now celebrate Kwanzaa in school!"
And we heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight:
"Happy Kwanzaa to all, except if you're white!"
Borrowed from Freerepublic last year (thank you, JohnHuang2):
One summer day, on a gay chorus discussion list, a conductor programming her December holiday concert solicited "suggestions for decent Kwanzaa pieces." She was not the first to have that multicultural inspiration; a colleague quickly shared a song entitled "Harambee" (A Call to Unity). The irony of this exchange between two white musicians was that there is nothing in the history of Kwanzaa, a seven-day African American festival that begins on December 26, to suggest that the unity in question was intended to encompass either white people or gay choruses.
Should Americans uncritically celebrate any and every alternative cultural expression, even when the alternative in question actually repudiates that inclusiveness? Are everyone's values entitled to be defended except our own? Can we at least try to understand what we are singing?
I am aware that a critical examination of Kwanzaa by a non-black author is bound to be met with suspicion by many blacks. A number of white conservatives have already slammed Kwanzaa for what they call its ancestor worship, or for its having been invented by an American. Those do seem rather brazen criticisms, considering that the critics honor their own forebears and have no objection to Thanksgiving. As someone who has written a same-sex wedding ceremony for friends, and as a fan of free markets, I respect the entrepreneurial spirit of those who respond to a hunger for new celebrations by risking creation. As to whose business it is, that is one of the questions I wish to explore.
My first impression of Kwanzaa was of an enrichment of holiday celebrations, an expression of pride in African heritage, and another aspect of diversity within the broader American community. Upon further examination, the philosophy and politics behind Kwanzaa are more troubling, precisely because Kwanzaa represents a turning away from the wider American community and a repudiation of the free markets that its own success exemplifies.
According to the official Kwanzaa website, the celebration was created "to reaffirm the communitarian vision and values of African culture and to contribute to its restoration among African peoples in the Diaspora," and "as an act of cultural self-determination, as a self-conscious statement of our own unique cultural truth as an African people." [1] In this one sees not only the primacy of the collective, but the erasure of the American in "African American."
Kwanzaa, or "First Fruits," was invented in 1966 by a black American named Maulana Karenga (formerly Ron Everett, now chair of the Black Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach), who drew inspiration from various African harvest festivals. [2] Kwanzaa and its father were true creatures of the Sixties. The year before Karenga created Kwanzaa he founded US, or United Slaves, a radical black nationalist organization. US (which Karenga has also explained as standing for "us black people") followed the "Path of Blackness," summarized by Karenga thus: "The Seven-fold path of Blackness is to Think Black, Talk Black, Act Black, Create Black, Buy Black, Vote Black, and Live Black." [3]
One wonders which of these was being practiced by the two US members who shot to death two Black Panthers at UCLA in January 1969 in a dispute over leadership of the university's new Afro-American Studies department. And how did Karenga's path of blackness lead him to torture two black women in May 1970, for which he was convicted of felonious assault and false imprisonment the following year? [4] I am not inclined to dismiss a creation as illegitimate based on the unsavory past of its creator, but looking to Karenga's past for insights into Kwanzaa's origins seems appropriate given that Kwanzaa is itself about origins. [5]
One seeming incongruity of Kwanzaa is its timing. December is not a traditional month for harvest festivals in either the Northern or Southern Hemisphere. There may be something harvested somewhere in Africa that month, but in fact the explicit reason for the scheduling of the festival was to create an alternative to Christmas, not to mark a particular event on the African calendar. While this may be a jarring note from a Pan-Africanist who seeks to break with the colonialist past and rediscover African roots, it is a pragmatic enough consideration. After all, Christmas itself was placed on the calendar against the Roman festival of Saturnalia.
Karenga in 1977 described Kwanzaa as "an oppositional alternative to the spookism, mysticism and non-earth based practices which plague us as a people." [6] The chief spook in question is the same Christian God that inspired a generation of African Americans to lead a non-violent revolution for civil rights. But Karenga, as we have seen, is not strong on non-violence. In fact, the red in the Kwanzaa flag stands for the Struggle - that is, the blood that must be shed in order for black people to be redeemed. In this at least Karenga shows greater affinity for American tradition, since our own flag and history also contain plenty of red.
From One Middle Passage to Another
Another incongruity of Kwanzaa is that the Seven Principles (Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba, and Imani) [7] are Swahili words, despite the fact that Swahili is an East African tongue while most African Americans are descended from West Africans. The notorious Goree Island, for example, which was used for three centuries as a slave warehouse, is off the coast of Senegal. [8] Those who passed through Goree Island were more likely to speak languages like Akan, Mende, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo. Most African Americans, unfortunately, are not able to trace their roots. Kwanzaa, therefore, is an attempt not to retrieve the past, but to reinvent it.
It is curious that in an effort to return to African sources Karenga should choose a language like Swahili, which was so heavily influenced by the trans-Arabian slave trade. Imani, for instance, the Seventh Principle of Kwanzaa, is from the Arabic for "faith." An Arab hearing Karenga refer to the Seven Principles as Nguzo Saba would recognize his own phrase for "seven parts." Swahili is euphonious and exotic enough, but what point is there in renouncing one's own legacy of past slavery only to adopt someone else's?
As a festival drawn from many sources, Kwanzaa tends to treat African traditions and cultural values as if they were monolithic, whereas Africa is notoriously tribalist and there are vast differences from region to region. If unity (the First Principle of Kwanzaa) existed in Africa, there would be far fewer languages and far more Tutsis alive today.
Among the African variations that receive little mention from Karenga and his fellow Afrocentrists are the indigenous forms of homosexuality that have been observed in cultures throughout the continent. This is reported in the 1998 collection, Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities, edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe. [9] When African leaders like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe denounce homosexuality as a Western vice, they overlook the fact that what was introduced by the West was not homosexuality but intolerance towards it. Nor are the cultural "corruptions" only from the West. In the case of Nigeria, anti-gay laws derive from both British law and Islamic Sharia law.
The greatest incongruity about Kwanzaa is that it is based on Marxist values more than African ones. [10] This is evident in the emphasis on collective work and cooperative economics, the subordination of the individual to the community, the utter silence on the subject of liberty.
Even if these values can be traced to African roots, there is nothing liberating in the embrace of doctrines that have succeeded nowhere in the world, certainly not in Africa. Ujamaa, the fourth principle of Kwanzaa (Swahili for "familyhood," from the Arabic for "community," translated by Karenga as cooperative economics), was the very word used by former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere when he forcibly relocated tens of thousands of his citizens to collective farms in a disastrous socialist experiment. Nyerere actually suppressed an existing coffee cooperative that did not conform to his theories, while demonizing the Swahili concept of soko huria, or free markets.
The largest African economy, South Africa, provides perhaps the best refutation of Karenga's cooperative economics. Nelson Mandela, despite his loyalty to his Communist allies, knew quite well that his goal of a non-racial democracy would be doomed if he did not keep the capitalists from fleeing the country after the collapse of Apartheid. The leg up that South Africa has on the rest of the continent is dramatically illustrated by a NASA composite photo of Earth at night, in which virtually the entire continent south of the Mediterranean coastal region is shrouded in darkness until you reach Johannesburg. [11] The light of Africa is not fueled by Marxism any more than the AIDS pandemic can be defeated with traditional healers. Those who reject Western economics and medicine do so at their peril.
Liberty by Any Other Name
African Americans can hardly be faulted for wishing to reclaim the African heritage that was stolen from, and beaten out of, their ancestors. Indeed, it can enrich all of us, just as American music was immeasurably enriched by African American music. This is called cultural appropriation by those who take a jealous view of their heritage, but such appropriation occurs naturally whenever different peoples encounter one another. However inequitable the circumstances, both sides contributed to what we are.
Facing up to that legacy, rather than escaping into a mythologized past, would be a more useful focus of collective effort. The cross-fertilization of intersecting cultures holds the key to a constructive approach to reclaiming one's roots. Instead of choosing between the different threads that make us up, we can embrace all of them without romanticizing them. Most of our ancestors, whether African or European, were not kings and queens. Neither can we overcome the legacy of slavery with a steady-state conception in which whites are forever the designated villains and blacks the designated victims. Idealized or demonized historical narratives provide little guidance for facing our common future.
Our destinies are inextricably intertwined by our shared history. Whether they like it or not, the heritage of white Americans contains African threads; and whether they like it or not, the heritage of black Americans contains European ones. You do not shed the European portion of your heritage merely because you take an Afrocentric name, nor do you give up your stake in the greater society of which you remain a part. In addition to colonialism (which existed in Africa before the white man came), Western heritage includes free markets and individual liberties, as well as the idea that all men are created equal.
Rejecting that idea four decades ago as a sham, Karenga and other radicals adopted a revolutionary posture and an Afrocentric program. In doing so they repudiated integrationists like civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin, who pointed out that Black Studies "will hardly improve [black students'] intellectual competence or their economic power." In the campaigns by Karenga and his comrades to "Buy Black" and create autonomous communities, the language of liberation was a poor substitute for development capital. As Rustin wrote in his 1970 essay "The Failure of Black Separatism," "The call for community control in fact represents an adjustment to inequality rather than a protest against it." [12]
Ultimately, we cannot escape the challenge presented by our diversity. For all our differences, we share a single economy, we ride the same planes, we work in the same office towers. Whether we accept it or not, our nation has not a collection of balkanized destinies but a.single American destiny. Despite our inequities, each of us can hurt and be hurt. Each of us can create and tear down. Whatever needs to be done, we cannot do it by withdrawing from each other.
Being the heirs of Western civilization and free markets carries responsibilities. There is something corrupt about enjoying the fruits and freedoms of the West while speaking only of its faults. Yet we are blinded by arrogance if we imagine that the only worthy fruits are our own. The world is not a zero-sum game. The vast continent of Africa offers many riches for those prepared to study it without ideological blinders. This does not require pandering. The white choral directors I mentioned earlier should ask themselves how progressive it is to applaud a message that essentially tells black people to stay in their ghettos.
There is another word that was brought to Africa by the Arabs, a good Swahili word that does not appear among the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa: Uhuru, or freedom, from the Arabic for a freeborn person. In the course of its travels, a word can be embraced by a new people and gain new meaning.
Thus Uhuru, taken long ago from Arabian slave traders and more recently adopted by groups like the African People's Socialist Party, [13] is no one's exclusive property. Now there is a fine theme for a festival.
Ah, yes, Kwanzaa...from the Swahili for "let's see if we can get black folks to overspend as much during the holidays as the white folks do."
Lighten up Francis.
Invented in 1966 by a Professor at my alma mater Wayne State University. He tried to incorporate all the celebrations of all the tribes on the continent.
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.
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.
All of them are made up holidays when you see the spirit of Christmas. Don’t blame Kwanzaa for the misdirection of “so called Christians”. Christians have been trying to find a reason to commercialize Christmas for as long as I can remember. The people that celebrate Kwanzaa do not necessarily disbelieve in Christmas. A Christian should celebrate the birth of Jesus, which includes advent. But the shopping at the mall and the pictures with Santa are not a part of the true Christmas celebration. Why do you think most people go into so much debt at Christmas? Kwanzaa didn’t cause that. When do
you think most kids feel the effects of being poor. Kwanzaa didn’t cause that. How do most people celebrate Christmas? I guarantee you it is not by going to church or praising the Lord for the genesis of his promise to us. Kwanzaa didn’t cause that either.
So, in fact the problem lies with Christians not with any of the holidays because truth be told we made up Christmas its current commercialized form.
Happy wishes for a Kwazy Kwanzaa and a Mhappy Mnew Myear.