I've always liked Morgan Freeman...

...dating all the way back to his "Electric Company" days. I hope he doesn't egt too much flak for this. I agree with him, even though I heartily subscribe to the belief that most stars can be trusted to know about as much or less about politics, culture, and religion as...well ME!

In a similar vein, my daughter has been learning about "Kwanzaa" in school. Okay fine, though I get the general impression that Kwanzaa is a reinvented holiday (c, 1966...correct me if I'm wrong) in the same sense that Wicca is a reinvented religion. I am forced to wonder: are they studying the way things are, or are we witnessing cultural engineering?

One thing that struck me as odd is that my daughter came home with a little booklet she wrote that tells all about Kwanzaa. The introduction says that "Kwanzaa is celebrated each year by African Americans."

Ok...well...I've known a fair number of African Americans in my lifetime, but I've never met ONE that celebrated Kwanzaa. So I asked my daughter; "Do all African Americans celebrate Kwanzaa?" Knowing her Dad, she paused trying to discern the trick in my question, but she eventually gave up and said, "yeah...I guess."

So, how to correct this misconception, tactfully? Umm...anybody doubt that the VAST majority of African Americans are celebrating Christmas rather than Kwanzaa? And if African Americans feel they are uprooted from African culture (as the official Kwanzaa website suggests), I might suggest instead of visiting THIS website, they try THIS one.

Don't tell me or THEM that Christianity is anymore foriegn to Africa than it is to western Europe.

Comments

Anonymous said…
They also probably fail to mention that the Black Power proponent who invented Kwanzaa was a committed Marxist, and it shows in much of the "mythology" of Kwanzaa. The fact that a mostly secular holiday such is Kwanzaa is presented to be taken at face value by the public schools, while nothing of the sort would ever happen with the Nativity should surprise no one...
2:31 PM
Paige said…
I used to live in one of the most heavily African-American populated cities in America, and even I have never met a person who celebrates Kwanzaa. What cracks me up is that the school kids in Lexington, KY, have Kwanzaa events, while those in Memphis don't. Probably because you can't walk into a classroom that's 94% Black and try to tell those kids that "all Black people" do something they've never heard of, whereas a bunch of White and Hispanic kids in Kentucky might actually buy it.
5:47 AM
Ecgbert said…
Morgan Freeman is cool.

Wicca and Kwanzaa aren't reinventions but simply inventions and rather recent ones.

The latter is nothing to do with Africa as well as nothing to do with most American blacks. As one of the latter put it to me, 'it's just a made-up holiday'.

A couple of examples showing it's not really part of American blacks' African roots:

The name and terms its founder came up with, in 1966, are in Swahili, never spoken by the ancestors of American blacks, who were from the west coast of Africa, places like what is now Ghana. It's a trade language from the other side of the continent!

(It's like saying that all Europeans, from the English to the Italians to the Russians, are the same: 'you all look alike anyway'. So the creator of Kwanzaa was either ignorant or in his own way being a racist!)

What traditional culture would have a 'harvest festival' in the middle of winter? None of course. Kwanzaa's inventor put it there to latch onto Christmas.
7:41 AM
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