As we're days into Hanukkah with Christmas around the corner, did you know another "important" date is coming up on the calendar: Kwanzaa, which seizes a whole week from Dec. 26 to the first of January? I didn't either, nor did I care. Why should we?
According to the race-obsessed Left, if you don't recognize Kwanzaa as a legitimate holiday wielding cultural importance the world over, you're a no-good racist bigot, even though most human beings on planet Earth don't partake in the annual seven-day "celebration of African American heritage." So, let's dive into the dark, very brief history of Kwanzaa and its murky beginnings.
CLAIM: According to "The Founder's Welcome" on the official Kwanzaa website, the "African American and Pan-African holiday" is "celebrated by millions throughout the world[wide] African community," bearing "profound significance" for African Americans.
Vice President Kamala Harris identifies as one of these longtime celebrants who repeatedly claims she can recall fond childhood memories down to the finest details of multi-generational family gatherings involving "the elders" leading Kwanzaa festivities.
Our Kwanzaa celebrations are one of my favorite childhood memories. The whole family would gather around across multiple generations and we’d tell stories and light the candles.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) December 26, 2020
Whether you’re celebrating this year with those you live with or over Zoom, happy Kwanzaa! pic.twitter.com/21bzGHZpYe
Our Kwanzaa celebrations are some of my favorite childhood memories.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) December 26, 2021
As families across the United States light the red, black, and green candles of the Kinara this week, our family sends our wishes and blessings for a happy and healthy new year.
When I was growing up, Kwanzaa was a special time. Friends and family members would fill our home. We would listen to the elders tell stories and watch them light the candles on the kinara. During dinner, we would discuss the seven principles.
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) December 27, 2021
FACTS: Despite the VP's descriptive tales of age-old Kwanzaa traditions in the Harris household, Kwanzaa wasn't a thing until 1966, two years after God gave us Kamala Harris. I could name a plethora of things that are older than Kwanzaa, aside from Kamala Harris pre-dating it herself: the polio vaccine, Brad Pitt, and my neighbor's pet turtle Sheldon. The list goes on.
It leads you to wonder: How does Kamala Harris have such a deepfelt childhood connection to a so-called holiday that didn't exist when she was born, an attachment that's supposedly one of the vice president's "favorite" recollections of her youth?
And who even celebrates Kwanzaa—other than a minute fraction of black Americans and a lump of white liberals in academia, the mainstream media, and the government? First, Kwanzaa is not celebrated in Africa; it's exclusively an American "holiday."
A 2004 marketing survey conducted for the National Retail Foundation found that only 1.6% of American consumers celebrate Kwanzaa. Flash forward to a decade ago, Kwanzaa's sway swelled to a measly 4%, just one percent above fictitious Festivus (the brainchild of "Seinfeld" character George Costanza's father), a Public Policy Polling study discovered in 2012.
Back to the topic of Kwanzaa's founder, Maryland-born convicted felon Ronald "Ron" McKinley Everett, who, like critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi a.k.a. Henry Rodgers, rebranded himself as "Dr. Maulana Karenga," likely because his birth name was too white-sounding for the woke masses. Karenga, a violent Marxist figure in the 1960s and sadistic torturer of women, also co-founded the paramilitary United Slaves group, which was considered rival to and more radical than the militant Black Panthers.
Monday 26 December 1966, was the Kwanzaa Maulana Karenga, as a means of celebrating West African culture. Karenga's group was responsible for the murders of Black Panthers, kidnapping and torture of two women members of his own organisation: https://t.co/j0Efu9poo3 pic.twitter.com/897ygiGMS8
— Patrick H. Munro (@Fijisufi) December 26, 2018
While fighting for control over the black studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Karenga's thuggish followers, in January 1969, shot and killed two Panthers who had confronted the United Slaves leader at the student center.
Then in 1971, Karenga was sentenced to prison on counts of felonious assault and false imprisonment for torturing two women because he believed the victims, who were dissident United Slaves, had attempted to kill him with "crystals" in his food and water.
The Los Angeles Times described the barbaric torture in an article covering testimony at Karenga's May 1971 trial:
Deborah Jones, who once was given the title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vice. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.
At trial, Karenga's sanity was questioned. A psychiatrist, who observed Karenga talking to his blanket and imaginary people, stated in a report: "This man now represents a picture which can be considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and elusions, inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the environment." According to the psychiatrist's assessment of Karenga, the founder of Kwanzaa also believed that dive-bombers had attacked him.
None of it stopped CNN from whitewashing the criminal and psychotic past of Kwanzaa's creator, characterizing Karenga in a puff piece on Kwanzaa as "a black nationalist and professor of Pan-African studies at California State University at Long Beach."
What is the true meaning of Kwanzaa? The seven pillars of Kwanzaa (unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith)—one for each day of the "African" feast—"reads like a communist manifesto," noted College Fix editor Jennifer Kabbany. As writer Patrick S. Poole pointed out, the fourth-day principle of Kwanzaa praises "cooperative economics," a clear Marxist reference, which Poole described as "a warm euphemism for communism."
Some also charge that Kanzaa's black, green, and red flag promotes racial separatism and violence.
The official Kwanzaa Information Center says: "red, or the blood, stands as the top of all things. We lost our land through blood; and we cannot gain it except through blood. We must redeem our lives through the blood. Without the shedding of blood there can be no redemption of this race." Kwanzaa's flag "has become the symbol of devotion for African people in America to establish an independent African nation on the North American Continent," the Kwanzaa center states, according to the Dartmouth Review.
Thus, Kwanzaa doesn't have deep African roots; it's a political product of the 1960s black power movement. Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine wrote that Kwanzaa has "nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with California in the 1960s," asserting that the black-separatist "holiday" was devised to divide Americans, not to unify us. James Coleman, a former Black Panther, argued: "By only stressing the unity of black people, Kwanzaa separates black people from the rest of Americans..."
Later on, Karenga even admitted Kwanzaa is fraudulent to an audience at Howard University in 1987:
''People think it's African but it's not,'' Karenga said. ''I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own, so I came up with Kwanzaa. I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn't celebrate it if they knew it was American."
Despite efforts to make Kwanzaa mainstream, the fanfare surrounding Kwanzaa is eclipsed by its seasonal adversaries.
Duke University professor of black pop culture Mark Anthony Neal in the department of African and African-American studies explained on an NPR news-talk program that Kwanzaa is strictly secular: "When you compare [Kwanzaa] to, say, something like Hanukkah, which is clearly a religious holiday, Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday, though it does have spiritual overtones."
Kwanzaa, indeed, is not rooted in faith, a black Southern Baptist seminary professor who doesn't celebrate Kwanzaa told Baptist Press. Ken Fentress, the dean of intercultural programs and assistant professor of Old Testament at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said he "reject[s] the ideologies" of Karenga. "He has toned down his rhetoric in recent years to make Kwanzaa more appealing to African American Christians, but initially he was very anti-Christian in his perspective," Fentress said.
"I prefer to celebrate the principles of biblical Christianity rather than the principles of Kwanzaa because I embrace the biblical foundation of the Christian faith," he said, noting Kwanzaa's lack of appeal to black Christians and asserting that Kwanzaa, which was invented as "a black alternative" to Christmas, "should not take precedence over the traditional observance of Christmas."
Karenga has voiced hostility toward Western religion, especially Christianity's concept of human sin and belief in God. How Kwanzaa is celebrated is detrimental to the cause of Christ, black Southern Baptist pastor Eric Redmon told Baptist Press.
RATING: Yes, it's TRUE that Kwanzaa is a made-up bogus holiday overhyped by a select few to score social credits. Kwanzaa is as real as Festivus is for the rest of us and as fake as the left-wing panderers who unironically wish you all a "Joyous Kwanzaa!"
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