Saturday, December 26, 2009

The Tenth Day of Christmas at SBPDL - Kwanzaa


The 26th of December has a special place in the hearts and minds of disingenuous white liberals everywhere: it is the start of a week-long celebration of innate Blackness and the glory of Black people, Kwanaa!:

Kwanzaa is a weeklong celebration held in the United States honoring universal African heritage and culture, marked by participants lighting a kinara (candle holder).[1] It is observed from December 26 to January 1 each year, primarily in the United States.

Kwanzaa consists of seven days of celebration, featuring activities such as candle-lighting and libations, and culminating in a feast and gift giving. It was created by Ron Karenga and was first celebrated from December 26, 1966 to January 1, 1967.

Kwanzaa... the event that Black people eagerly await for year-round, where disingenuous white liberals heap praise and joy upon them for the creativity in concocting such an ethnocentric holiday, devoid of white peoples help. Much like when a crusading white pedagogue teaches a Black person the quadratic equation, white people garner a deep sense of pride when Black people celebrate Kwanzaa - all by themselves!

Take this fantastic write-up in the San Francisco Chronicle, a city that has more than 800,000 people and a whopping 6 percent of them are Black, yet the white liberals who populate that metropolis treat the Black people there like Kindergartners who just learned the alphabet.

Here is the official webpge of Kwanaa, and a message from the founder of this monumental festival of Blackness, the incomparable Dr. Maulana Karenga:
As an African American and Pan-African holiday celebrated by millions throughout the world African community, Kwanzaa brings a cultural message which speaks to the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense. Given the profound significance Kwanzaa has for African Americans and indeed, the world African community, it is imperative that an authoritative source and site be made available to give an accurate and expansive account of its origins, concepts, values, symbols and practice.

Moreover, given the continued rapid growth of Kwanzaa and the parallel expanded discussion of it and related issues, an authoritative source which aids in both framing and informing the discussion is likewise of the greatest importance. Therefore, the central interest of this website is to provide information which reveals and reaffirms the integrity, beauty and expansive meaning of the holiday and thus aids in our approaching it with the depth of thought, dignity, and sense of specialness it deserves.

The holiday, then will of necessity, be engaged as an ancient and living cultural tradition which reflects the best of African thought and practice in its reaffirmation of the dignity of the human person in community and culture, the well-being of family and community, the integrity of the environment and our kinship with it, and the rich resource and meaning of a people's culture.
Kwanzaa celebrates the Seven Principles of Blackness, and these include:
  • Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
  • Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
  • Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers' and sisters' problems our problems, and to solve them together.
  • Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
  • Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
  • Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
  • Imani (Faith): To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
These are admirable principles and worthy of adulation from all people. Black people should feel pride in these ideals and strive to maintain them. However, a cursory glance at this website would show you that these seven principles of Kwanzaa are forgotten throughout most of the year.

However, an interesting historian - one Ann Coulter - has found some unappealing truths about Kwanzaa that paint a darker picture than the already Black hue of Kwanzaa would care for, as the holiday is nothing but a sham:
President Bush's 2005 Kwanzaa message began with the patently absurd statement: "African-Americans and people around the world reflect on African heritage during Kwanzaa."

I believe more African-Americans spent this season reflecting on the birth of Christ than some phony non-Christian holiday invented a few decades ago by an FBI stooge. Kwanzaa is a holiday for white liberals, not blacks.

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulana Karenga. Karenga was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI.

In what was probably ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the '60s the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the organization, the better. Karenga's United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American '60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police...

Kwanzaa itself is a lunatic blend of schmaltzy '60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. Indeed, the seven "principles" of Kwanzaa praise collectivism in every possible arena of life — economics, work, personality, even litter removal. ("Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.") It takes a village to raise a police snitch...

Now the "holiday" concocted by an FBI dupe is honored in a presidential proclamation and public schools across the nation. Bush called Kwanzaa a holiday that promotes "unity" and "faith." Faith in what? Liberals' unbounded capacity to respect any faith but Christianity?
The conservative vixen wrote another column on Kwanzaa here.

The Washington Post saw fit to publish one Michael Eric Dyson, an individual we have yet to chronicle here at SBPDL - but will soon - as he exalted the virtues of Kwanzaa and how it relates to one Mein Obama, Barack Obama:
The political climate affects black rituals too. A lot has been made of the number of posts that black life confronts: post-soul, post-black, post-racial, and post-civil rights. In this era of black posts, pillars fall, whether civil rights leaders whose approach is viewed as passé, or as rituals of black cohesion are viewed by many blacks as quaint and largely irrelevant. A lot of that talk picked up pace with the election of Barack Obama as president, a monumental event that eclipsed black fears in some quarters (racism could no longer keep black folk from the big prizes of American life), exacerbated them in others (because of his success the bulk of blacks who continue to struggle might be forgotten). What's a people - and how is "people" exactly defined in such conditions - to do?

But the holiday's most faithful practitioners proclaim its original intent: bridging black folk across the chasms of land, language, water and religion as they forge solidarity in resisting obstacles and embracing opportunities to their common destiny. As the devotees of Kwanzaa understand, those aspirations have never been of much interest to the mainstream during any period of the nation's history. And the increased fortunes of black folk cause many of them to focus their energy and attention elsewhere. But for its true believers, Kwanzaa is as relevant and necessary now as it's ever been.
Consequently, Kwanzaa is treated - by many Black people - as an absolute joke, unless you are an disingenuous white liberal or an adherent of a religious movement that makes the Hale-Bopp Heaven's Gate cult look sane in comparison.

Black people love a good party - especially a block party - and a week-long celebration in their own honor should be grounds for Bacchanalian revelry. However Kwanzaa isn't celebrated by a majority of Black people:

"The holiday was a way for African Americans to honor their culture, but it was also part of the black power movement of the era. The big boom in Kwanzaa came during its first two decades, according to Keith Mayes, author of "Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition."

But he said participation has leveled off. Based on his research, he estimates a half-million to 2 million people in the U.S. celebrate Kwanzaa, out of about 40 million Americans identified by the U.S. Census as black, including those who are multiracial.

Although Kwanzaa started here, it has become a Pan-African holiday. The African American Cultural Center places the number of those who observe Kwanzaa worldwide at 30 million, but even that is a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of people of African descent all over the world."

Some might even argue the kinara is going dim on the glory that was Kwanzaa, and once its magnificent light dims the magic of the holiday will be lost forever.

Let's be honest. Black people already a holiday that unites them forever, for it is the date that officially but to rest Pre-Obama America: January 20, 2008.

Stuff Black People Don't Like includes Kwanzaa, for this pathetic attempt at showing disingenuous white liberals the creative mind of Black people was really a blatant job at coloring outside the lines.

Black people find this celebration disconcerting and feckless, for if they wanted anything to do with Africa in 2009, then they would gladly return to whence they came.










7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I knew this site would be the place to go to learn about Kwanzaa. I just have one question. Do I place the Kwanzaa candles on top of the Christmas tree, the mantle above the fireplace, or the dinning room table?

-Black guy

Anonymous said...

Not gonna touch where to stick your candles BG, but Kwanza looks more like Halloween from the video!

Anonymous said...

There's even an official Kwanzaa cake. Looks dee-lish!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we2iWTJqo98

--Rob

Anonymous said...

An "official" Kwanzaa cake? I don't know what "Doctor" Karenga set out to accomplish whenn he came up with nonsense. If he meant to make black people look like a bunch of douche bags. Then to qoute our former fearless leader "Mission Accomplished"

-Black guy

Anonymous said...

When you dig down into Kwanzaa, you really have to laugh. It's nearly as absurd as President Bush declaring Mission Accomplished more than six years ago.

The only difference... a lot of good people have died since Bush stated that silly phrase.

Anonymous said...

Regarding the Sesame St. video, I noticed that the foods they showed were Mac-n-Cheese, and Fried Chicken. Given that Sesame St. is a DWL production, why am I not surprised?
They should have done a game like 'One of these things doesn't belong', because Kujo- caligula doesn't belong. All the others are about being a part of the collective. Self-
determination doesn't belong; unless it means being a black separatist, then it fits.

Anonymous said...

Bush didn't declare that the Mission Was Accomplished, someone put a sign up that said that. Geez, you can't blame Bush for everything.