brasspounder
2004-12-14 01:53:01 UTC
"What can be done to arrest the spread of Kwanzaa? First, preachers of all
collars and colors should explain and denounce the theological and
historical flaws in this man-made holiday. But most of all, black Americans
who still believe in Dr. King's dream should make it known that their god
remains He of the Sermon on the Mount and not some Swahili-spewing charlatan
out to make a buck from the greeting card industry."
I'm Dreaming of a White Kwanzaa
by Chris Griffith
Kwanzaa is May Day with a menorah. This fraudulent "holiday" is an affront
to God, America, and the free market. Kwanzaa's intense glorification of
socialist economics should have placed it squarely on the ash heap of
history. Instead, with each holiday season, its pernicious tentacles
penetrate ever deeper into the national iconography. The mainstream media,
forever in search of new ways to display its tolerance, has assimilated
Kwanzaa into its pantheon of "approved" holidays. Kwanzaa cards pop up in
stores; Kwanzaa books appear on the shelf; even that redoubtable
conservative bastion the New York Post publishes an annual Kwanzaa-for-kids
page polluting young minds who should not have to keep straight which
Kwanzaa candle celebrates socialist economics. At this rate, George W.
Bush's new inclusive administration might treat America to Kwanzaa candles
on the White House lawn in 2001.
Kwanzaa has no basis in historical reality, nor any real religious
significance. The whole concept of Kwanzaa is based on the same intellectual
tradition now championed by Louis Farrakhan and David Duke - racial
separatism. Only instead of wanting to send blacks back to Africa - or that
elusive mothership of Farrakhan's fantasies-Kwanzaa contributes to the
resegregation of blacks by cordoning them off in a separate world, separate
from the American mainstream, complete with its own fabricated traditions
and godless idols.
By appearing on the calendar between Christmas and New Year's Day, Kwanzaa
strikes at the religious and cultural traditions that bind together
Americans of all colors. The vast majority of American, whether black or
white, while differing in other respects, long have been united by a common
belief in some form of Christianity. It was Christianity that first cut
across the color line uniting whites and blacks in a common struggle against
slavery and, later, segregation. Kwanzaa threatens to tear asunder this
vital bond between the races.
It is a slippery slope from the seemingly benign celebration of Kwanzaa to
outright black separatism. Kwanzaa may be fiction, but, like Marx and Mao,
it is dangerous fiction.
The Origins of Kwanzaa
Kwanzaa's roots, like those of so many of the social pathologies that infect
America, lie in that decade of the damned, the 1960s. Building on the
revolutionary ideology of the anti-American black separatist movement,
Kwanzaa first was celebrated by racial revolutionaries in California in
1966. Its founder-a West Coast-based academic, Dr. Ron Karenga-currently is
the chairman of the Black Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach. An
intellectual captive of sixties socialism, Karenga, by dint of his dubious
invention, has achieved the status of that most disdainful of modern
specimens-a "black leader."
Cultural larceny plays a central role in the symbols and timing of Karenga's
holiday. The symbol most identified with Kwanzaa consists of seven colored
candles placed in a menorah-like candelabrum. To say the least, it is highly
doubtful that this similarity is accidental. More likely, Karenga plundered
the symbol of an authentic religious feast, Hanukkah, in an attempt to
legitimize his pagan feast day.
The seven candles of Kwanzaa borrow their color scheme from Marcus Garvey's
old black nationalist ensign. The candles-three red, three green, and one
black-sum up the subversive nature of the holiday.
The black candle obviously represents the so-called "black race." Unlike
those noble proponents of Martin Luther King Day who sought the support of
people of all races, there is no room for any white candles in Karenga's
inn. In his skewed worldview, blacks are so different from other Americans
that they need their own unique holiday to bask in the glory of their race.
The red candles evoke images of socialist realism with bloody red banners
waved on high to rally the oppressed for the overthrow of the established
order.
Finally, the green candles are meant to recall the splendor of, as Hemingway
put it, the wondrous "green hills of Africa." This belief in the purity of
the blessed homeland that views the Africa of yesterday as a pristine
paradise where Leonard Jefferies' "people of the sun" lived in peace and
enjoyed the abundant fruits of the land is pure fiction. Africa before the
white man came to assume his burden was no different from the rest of the
world. War, poverty, and slavery ran rampant there as they did elsewhere
else. Africa, however, lacked the technologies and medicines which enabled
Europeans to ameliorate many of the harsher aspects of life. Not
surprisingly, the black nationalist version of the Africa of antiquity omits
these realities.
Kwanzaa begins the day after Christmas and ends on New Year's Day. To
paraphrase Saturday Night Live's Church Lady, "How convenient!" The timing
of Karenga's celebration automatically places it in the same category as
Christmas and Hanukkah. By scheduling it between Christmas and New Year's
Day, Karenga gets the most bang for his Kwanzaa buck out of the
holiday-obsessed American public. Karenga, however, stole this clever
placement strategy from the early Christian Church. In the first centuries
after the martyrdom of Christ, the date which the Church chose to celebrate
the birth of the Savior was fixed on what we now know as December 25th
because of that date's proximity to the winter solstice. This maneuver
forced the peasantry of Europe to choose between a pagan feast and a
Christian one. Left unchecked, Kwanzaa may have the same effect on American
blacks.
Before too long, cultural pressures from within the black community may be
brought to bear on those black Americans who still choose to celebrate
Christmas. Traditional black Christians who continue to venerate Christmas
might be mocked as "Uncle Tom's" by the Kwanzaa-celebrating comrades. The
treatment of black conservatives by the self-appointed leaders of the black
community provides a clear precedent for this atrocious sort of behavior. If
the recent fascination with Kwanzaa continues to grow, "black leaders" soon
might accuse their Christian brothers who eschew the candelabrum of adopting
the plantation masters' religion.
The Rites of Kwanzaa
Some of the sillier aspects of Kwanzaa have to do with the "authentic"
African names Karenga bestowed upon the feast day's principles and symbols.
Karenga appropriated the word "kwanzaa" from Swahili. It means "first fruits
of the harvest." At first, such a name seems innocent enough. But even
Karenga's choice of language is steeped in deception. Kwanzaa is supposed to
be a holiday for American blacks-a time for a historically oppressed people
to celebrate the glories of the fatherland.
But if Kwanzaa is supposed to celebrate the roots of Americans brought to
America in chains from Africa, then why did Karenga choose Swahili, an East
African language? After all, no slave ship ever ventured around the Cape of
Good Hope to pick up slaves from present-day Kenya and Tanzania. The
historical reality of the situation is that the slaves brought to North
America came from West Africa and anyone who can read a map can understand
see why it would have been much more convenient for European traders to sail
south to West Africa for slaves rather than halfway around the lands
inhabited by Swahili speakers who, in fact, were the chief slave traders of
East Africa. Apparently, they do not cover the whole story of slavery in Dr.
Karenga's Black Studies Department.
Karenga chose Swahili because it was the trendy language in the black power
movement during the 1960s. Many blacks who studied it were interested in
finding a linguistic link to their ancestoral home. Today, instead of
learning Swahili, these frauds drape themselves in kente cloth and blame
imperialism for everyy single one of Africa's problems. The truth is, these
imposters would be laughed out of Africa because real Africans know that
black Americans have more in common-culturally, religiously, and
linguistically-with the reddest neck in upcountry South Carolina than with
the average Zulu warrior or Nigerian oil worker.
The Swahili swill continues with Karenga's equivalent of "Merry
Christmas"-"Habari Gani?" According to one of the foremost Kwanzaa scholars
(say that three times without laughing), Dorothy Winbush Riley, this
translates as "What's Happening?" Seriously.
There are Swahili names for the fruits, place mats, candles, candelabrum,
cups, gifts, corn, and, most especially, the seven principles represented by
the candles. The sheer quantity of Swahili terms submerges the holiday in
terminology alien to most whites-and blacks-and seems a little too much like
a desperate plea for legitimacy by someone who knows he is perpetrating a
fraud. It is as if Karenga realized his feast lacked intrinsic value and
consciously chose to emphasize quantity over quality. Karenga tried to dress
up his holiday in colorful African garb in the hopes that it would be
accepted as legitimate. He failed. For anyone who bothers to look, the fraud
shines through.
The Seven Days of Kwanzaa
The first principle of Kwanzaa is "Umoja" or unity. On this day, celebrants
are supposed to praise the monolithic greatness of the black race. Once
again, however, Karenga's delusional vision departs sharply from reality.
Blacks are no more united than Europeans or Asians. In America, blacks are
divided by geography, religion, and politics. If Africa, they are divided by
the archaic, artificial borders of inattentive, defunct empires. About the
only thing that unites nations as diverse as Ghana and Somalia was their
collective inability to resist falling prey to the false panacea of
Soviet-exported socialism.
"Kujichagulia," or self-determination, is the second principle of Kwanzaa.
No one can oppose the principle of self-determination, but this lofty ideal
is cheapened when placed in the context of Kwanzaa. The self-determination
championed by Karenga is racially exclusive and prone to being harnessed by
bigoted demagogues for their own ends.
The third day of Kwanzaa commemorates "Ujima" which translates as collective
work. One does not have to read too deeply into this principle in order to
be haunted by the ghosts of those who would not help with the work of the
collective under Mao and Stalin. Clearly, Karenga rejects capitalism and
embraces the atheistic ideology of Marx and Lenin. His inordinate emphasis
on "harvest" rituals, however, suggests that Kwanzaa is more of an agrarian
Maoist holiday. At a time when even the butchers of Beijing have discarded
most of Mao's teachings, Karenga embraces a system examples of whose failure
dot the planet like craters on the moon. The point Karenga fails, or is
unwilling, to grasp is that if American blacks lived by the principles of
Kwanzaa, they would doom themselves to totalitarian poverty. Just when
blacks are acquiring unprecedented amounts of economic and political clout
in this country, Karenga would sentence them to a life term in his racial
"Gulag Archipelago."
As if celebrating the glorious inefficiencies of collective farms was not
enough, the fourth day of Kwanzaa focuses on the principle of "Ujamma" or
cooperative economics. Object lessons in the failure of this sort of central
planning abound. For example, Ethiopia once exported grain, but when
communists overthrew the Emperor, the "rich" peasants came under siege and a
dreadful famine ensued. When one considers the misery and death visited upon
the world by cooperative economics, it becomes evident that Karenga
understands the lessons of markets even less than he comprehends the lessons
of history.
In his quest to scrape together seven principles for his week-long feast,
Karenga consecrated the fifth day of Kwanzaa to "Nia," or purpose. All sorts
of ideological claptrap can be poured into this vaguely defined vessel.
Winbush Riley believes that the purpose of this day is to celebrate the
restoration of the black people to their traditional greatness.
Unfortunately for Riley, there was no common nation which all black
Americans truthfully can refer to as their ancestral home.
When asked "What's happening?" on day six, a faithful apostle of Karenga
will reply, "Kuumba!" "Kuumba" means creativity. Now, do we really need a
holiday to celebrate creativity? A lovely concept, creativity, but the
traditional purpose of a holiday is to commemorate a person or event of
particular significance to the people celebrating it. Whether religious or
secular, holidays used to mean something. In a nation that cynically allows
Pearl Harbor Day to slip into the mists of history, creativity simply does
deserve a day of its own.
The godless aspect of Kwanzaa reveals itself on the final day which,
ironically, celebrates "Imani" or faith. The faith or Kwanzaa, however, is
not the faith which daily sustains Christians, Jews, and Muslims throughout
the world. Kwanzaa worships no god. Instead of traditional monotheism,
Kwanzaa deifies the self and one's ancestors in the manner of a pagan rite
or a Wiccan ceremony where the wind and the trees are worshiped in lieu of
God. Kwanzaa replaces faith in God with faith in one's self and the
collective. Thus faith is divorced from God, and man divorced from divinity.
What can be done to arrest the spread of Kwanzaa? First, preachers of all
collars and colors should explain and denounce the theological and
historical flaws in this man-made holiday. But most of all, black Americans
who still believe in Dr. King's dream should make it known that their god
remains He of the Sermon on the Mount and not some Swahili-spewing charlatan
out to make a buck from the greeting card industry.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/griffith.html
collars and colors should explain and denounce the theological and
historical flaws in this man-made holiday. But most of all, black Americans
who still believe in Dr. King's dream should make it known that their god
remains He of the Sermon on the Mount and not some Swahili-spewing charlatan
out to make a buck from the greeting card industry."
I'm Dreaming of a White Kwanzaa
by Chris Griffith
Kwanzaa is May Day with a menorah. This fraudulent "holiday" is an affront
to God, America, and the free market. Kwanzaa's intense glorification of
socialist economics should have placed it squarely on the ash heap of
history. Instead, with each holiday season, its pernicious tentacles
penetrate ever deeper into the national iconography. The mainstream media,
forever in search of new ways to display its tolerance, has assimilated
Kwanzaa into its pantheon of "approved" holidays. Kwanzaa cards pop up in
stores; Kwanzaa books appear on the shelf; even that redoubtable
conservative bastion the New York Post publishes an annual Kwanzaa-for-kids
page polluting young minds who should not have to keep straight which
Kwanzaa candle celebrates socialist economics. At this rate, George W.
Bush's new inclusive administration might treat America to Kwanzaa candles
on the White House lawn in 2001.
Kwanzaa has no basis in historical reality, nor any real religious
significance. The whole concept of Kwanzaa is based on the same intellectual
tradition now championed by Louis Farrakhan and David Duke - racial
separatism. Only instead of wanting to send blacks back to Africa - or that
elusive mothership of Farrakhan's fantasies-Kwanzaa contributes to the
resegregation of blacks by cordoning them off in a separate world, separate
from the American mainstream, complete with its own fabricated traditions
and godless idols.
By appearing on the calendar between Christmas and New Year's Day, Kwanzaa
strikes at the religious and cultural traditions that bind together
Americans of all colors. The vast majority of American, whether black or
white, while differing in other respects, long have been united by a common
belief in some form of Christianity. It was Christianity that first cut
across the color line uniting whites and blacks in a common struggle against
slavery and, later, segregation. Kwanzaa threatens to tear asunder this
vital bond between the races.
It is a slippery slope from the seemingly benign celebration of Kwanzaa to
outright black separatism. Kwanzaa may be fiction, but, like Marx and Mao,
it is dangerous fiction.
The Origins of Kwanzaa
Kwanzaa's roots, like those of so many of the social pathologies that infect
America, lie in that decade of the damned, the 1960s. Building on the
revolutionary ideology of the anti-American black separatist movement,
Kwanzaa first was celebrated by racial revolutionaries in California in
1966. Its founder-a West Coast-based academic, Dr. Ron Karenga-currently is
the chairman of the Black Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach. An
intellectual captive of sixties socialism, Karenga, by dint of his dubious
invention, has achieved the status of that most disdainful of modern
specimens-a "black leader."
Cultural larceny plays a central role in the symbols and timing of Karenga's
holiday. The symbol most identified with Kwanzaa consists of seven colored
candles placed in a menorah-like candelabrum. To say the least, it is highly
doubtful that this similarity is accidental. More likely, Karenga plundered
the symbol of an authentic religious feast, Hanukkah, in an attempt to
legitimize his pagan feast day.
The seven candles of Kwanzaa borrow their color scheme from Marcus Garvey's
old black nationalist ensign. The candles-three red, three green, and one
black-sum up the subversive nature of the holiday.
The black candle obviously represents the so-called "black race." Unlike
those noble proponents of Martin Luther King Day who sought the support of
people of all races, there is no room for any white candles in Karenga's
inn. In his skewed worldview, blacks are so different from other Americans
that they need their own unique holiday to bask in the glory of their race.
The red candles evoke images of socialist realism with bloody red banners
waved on high to rally the oppressed for the overthrow of the established
order.
Finally, the green candles are meant to recall the splendor of, as Hemingway
put it, the wondrous "green hills of Africa." This belief in the purity of
the blessed homeland that views the Africa of yesterday as a pristine
paradise where Leonard Jefferies' "people of the sun" lived in peace and
enjoyed the abundant fruits of the land is pure fiction. Africa before the
white man came to assume his burden was no different from the rest of the
world. War, poverty, and slavery ran rampant there as they did elsewhere
else. Africa, however, lacked the technologies and medicines which enabled
Europeans to ameliorate many of the harsher aspects of life. Not
surprisingly, the black nationalist version of the Africa of antiquity omits
these realities.
Kwanzaa begins the day after Christmas and ends on New Year's Day. To
paraphrase Saturday Night Live's Church Lady, "How convenient!" The timing
of Karenga's celebration automatically places it in the same category as
Christmas and Hanukkah. By scheduling it between Christmas and New Year's
Day, Karenga gets the most bang for his Kwanzaa buck out of the
holiday-obsessed American public. Karenga, however, stole this clever
placement strategy from the early Christian Church. In the first centuries
after the martyrdom of Christ, the date which the Church chose to celebrate
the birth of the Savior was fixed on what we now know as December 25th
because of that date's proximity to the winter solstice. This maneuver
forced the peasantry of Europe to choose between a pagan feast and a
Christian one. Left unchecked, Kwanzaa may have the same effect on American
blacks.
Before too long, cultural pressures from within the black community may be
brought to bear on those black Americans who still choose to celebrate
Christmas. Traditional black Christians who continue to venerate Christmas
might be mocked as "Uncle Tom's" by the Kwanzaa-celebrating comrades. The
treatment of black conservatives by the self-appointed leaders of the black
community provides a clear precedent for this atrocious sort of behavior. If
the recent fascination with Kwanzaa continues to grow, "black leaders" soon
might accuse their Christian brothers who eschew the candelabrum of adopting
the plantation masters' religion.
The Rites of Kwanzaa
Some of the sillier aspects of Kwanzaa have to do with the "authentic"
African names Karenga bestowed upon the feast day's principles and symbols.
Karenga appropriated the word "kwanzaa" from Swahili. It means "first fruits
of the harvest." At first, such a name seems innocent enough. But even
Karenga's choice of language is steeped in deception. Kwanzaa is supposed to
be a holiday for American blacks-a time for a historically oppressed people
to celebrate the glories of the fatherland.
But if Kwanzaa is supposed to celebrate the roots of Americans brought to
America in chains from Africa, then why did Karenga choose Swahili, an East
African language? After all, no slave ship ever ventured around the Cape of
Good Hope to pick up slaves from present-day Kenya and Tanzania. The
historical reality of the situation is that the slaves brought to North
America came from West Africa and anyone who can read a map can understand
see why it would have been much more convenient for European traders to sail
south to West Africa for slaves rather than halfway around the lands
inhabited by Swahili speakers who, in fact, were the chief slave traders of
East Africa. Apparently, they do not cover the whole story of slavery in Dr.
Karenga's Black Studies Department.
Karenga chose Swahili because it was the trendy language in the black power
movement during the 1960s. Many blacks who studied it were interested in
finding a linguistic link to their ancestoral home. Today, instead of
learning Swahili, these frauds drape themselves in kente cloth and blame
imperialism for everyy single one of Africa's problems. The truth is, these
imposters would be laughed out of Africa because real Africans know that
black Americans have more in common-culturally, religiously, and
linguistically-with the reddest neck in upcountry South Carolina than with
the average Zulu warrior or Nigerian oil worker.
The Swahili swill continues with Karenga's equivalent of "Merry
Christmas"-"Habari Gani?" According to one of the foremost Kwanzaa scholars
(say that three times without laughing), Dorothy Winbush Riley, this
translates as "What's Happening?" Seriously.
There are Swahili names for the fruits, place mats, candles, candelabrum,
cups, gifts, corn, and, most especially, the seven principles represented by
the candles. The sheer quantity of Swahili terms submerges the holiday in
terminology alien to most whites-and blacks-and seems a little too much like
a desperate plea for legitimacy by someone who knows he is perpetrating a
fraud. It is as if Karenga realized his feast lacked intrinsic value and
consciously chose to emphasize quantity over quality. Karenga tried to dress
up his holiday in colorful African garb in the hopes that it would be
accepted as legitimate. He failed. For anyone who bothers to look, the fraud
shines through.
The Seven Days of Kwanzaa
The first principle of Kwanzaa is "Umoja" or unity. On this day, celebrants
are supposed to praise the monolithic greatness of the black race. Once
again, however, Karenga's delusional vision departs sharply from reality.
Blacks are no more united than Europeans or Asians. In America, blacks are
divided by geography, religion, and politics. If Africa, they are divided by
the archaic, artificial borders of inattentive, defunct empires. About the
only thing that unites nations as diverse as Ghana and Somalia was their
collective inability to resist falling prey to the false panacea of
Soviet-exported socialism.
"Kujichagulia," or self-determination, is the second principle of Kwanzaa.
No one can oppose the principle of self-determination, but this lofty ideal
is cheapened when placed in the context of Kwanzaa. The self-determination
championed by Karenga is racially exclusive and prone to being harnessed by
bigoted demagogues for their own ends.
The third day of Kwanzaa commemorates "Ujima" which translates as collective
work. One does not have to read too deeply into this principle in order to
be haunted by the ghosts of those who would not help with the work of the
collective under Mao and Stalin. Clearly, Karenga rejects capitalism and
embraces the atheistic ideology of Marx and Lenin. His inordinate emphasis
on "harvest" rituals, however, suggests that Kwanzaa is more of an agrarian
Maoist holiday. At a time when even the butchers of Beijing have discarded
most of Mao's teachings, Karenga embraces a system examples of whose failure
dot the planet like craters on the moon. The point Karenga fails, or is
unwilling, to grasp is that if American blacks lived by the principles of
Kwanzaa, they would doom themselves to totalitarian poverty. Just when
blacks are acquiring unprecedented amounts of economic and political clout
in this country, Karenga would sentence them to a life term in his racial
"Gulag Archipelago."
As if celebrating the glorious inefficiencies of collective farms was not
enough, the fourth day of Kwanzaa focuses on the principle of "Ujamma" or
cooperative economics. Object lessons in the failure of this sort of central
planning abound. For example, Ethiopia once exported grain, but when
communists overthrew the Emperor, the "rich" peasants came under siege and a
dreadful famine ensued. When one considers the misery and death visited upon
the world by cooperative economics, it becomes evident that Karenga
understands the lessons of markets even less than he comprehends the lessons
of history.
In his quest to scrape together seven principles for his week-long feast,
Karenga consecrated the fifth day of Kwanzaa to "Nia," or purpose. All sorts
of ideological claptrap can be poured into this vaguely defined vessel.
Winbush Riley believes that the purpose of this day is to celebrate the
restoration of the black people to their traditional greatness.
Unfortunately for Riley, there was no common nation which all black
Americans truthfully can refer to as their ancestral home.
When asked "What's happening?" on day six, a faithful apostle of Karenga
will reply, "Kuumba!" "Kuumba" means creativity. Now, do we really need a
holiday to celebrate creativity? A lovely concept, creativity, but the
traditional purpose of a holiday is to commemorate a person or event of
particular significance to the people celebrating it. Whether religious or
secular, holidays used to mean something. In a nation that cynically allows
Pearl Harbor Day to slip into the mists of history, creativity simply does
deserve a day of its own.
The godless aspect of Kwanzaa reveals itself on the final day which,
ironically, celebrates "Imani" or faith. The faith or Kwanzaa, however, is
not the faith which daily sustains Christians, Jews, and Muslims throughout
the world. Kwanzaa worships no god. Instead of traditional monotheism,
Kwanzaa deifies the self and one's ancestors in the manner of a pagan rite
or a Wiccan ceremony where the wind and the trees are worshiped in lieu of
God. Kwanzaa replaces faith in God with faith in one's self and the
collective. Thus faith is divorced from God, and man divorced from divinity.
What can be done to arrest the spread of Kwanzaa? First, preachers of all
collars and colors should explain and denounce the theological and
historical flaws in this man-made holiday. But most of all, black Americans
who still believe in Dr. King's dream should make it known that their god
remains He of the Sermon on the Mount and not some Swahili-spewing charlatan
out to make a buck from the greeting card industry.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/griffith.html