Kwanzaa is Not the Black Christmas

Okay, good folks. PSA for the day – please, spread the word. Tell your kids, tell your students, peers, parents — Kwanzaa is NOT the black christmas!

I don’t know how many times growing up, when wintertime would come around, the white children would be wishing each other a merry christmas and then get to me and be like ‘happy kwanzaa!’ and I’m like ‘um’.

Also, the commercials, billboards, and everything else, in their effort to be all-inclusive, multicultural, and politically correct always throw kwanzaa into their conglomeration of otherwise religious holidays. “Happy Chrismakwanzika!”

What?

So this is my brief ‘get it right’ post about Kwanzaa. Not intended to be a comprehensive learning guide nor anything of the sort – just to give my perspective on the holiday, as someone who celebrated it growing up and doesn’t anymore.

First, Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday. It has absolutely nothing to do with yahweh, allah, parsva, oshun, or whomever else from wherever you’re coming from on the belief spectrum. It is not meant to replace, compete with, nor destroy christmas or any other holiday for that matter. Many people who celebrate Kwanzaa also celebrate other religious holidays.

Kwanzaa is more of a cultural, historical and community-building holiday. According to its founder, Ron ‘Maulana’ Karenga, Kwanzaa is intended to “give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.” First celebrated in 1966, it is a seven day holiday that begins on December 26 and lasts through the first day of January. For each of the seven days, there is a candle lit and a principle (collectively called nguzo saba) to go with it: 1 – umoja (unity), 2 – kujichagulia (self-determination), 3 -ujima (collective work and responsibility), 4 – ujamaa (cooperative economics, 5 – nia (purpose), 6 – kuumba (creativity), and 7 – imani (faith). It falls near christmas partially because that (i guess?) signifies the end of harvest and the beginning of a new planting season, and also, probably, because that’s already a celebratory holiday season when people have time off from work, are in the mood, etc.

Now, there is a whole vocab to go with the kwanzaa holiday. There is the mkeka (straw placemat), muhindi (corn placed on the mekeka for each child in the family), mazao (meaning crops, symbolized by fruits and vegetables on the mkeka to remember the earth’s abundance). The gifts are called zawadi, the wooden candle holder is a kinara, the karamu is a glorious feast, and so on and so forth (there are a few more). The word kwanzaa, along with these other names, of course, is derived from Swahili, which to many Americans, is the language of Africa.

This brings me to my next point, which is that Kwanzaa is an American holiday. It was invented by a black american man in the state of California. It is, therefore, this individual’s interpretation of African ritual, life, and so on.

Part of the point of Kwanzaa, in my opinion, is to give descendants of Africa (please don’t hit me with the ‘we’re all descendants of africa’ cowdung) and black americans in particular, a sense of connectedness to their history, and also, something to celebrate outside of the mores of the ‘dominant’ society within which they are oppressed and share a history that it hurts to remember. Now whether or not this sense of community and independence within the greater hegemonic culture of america has to come with middle class blacks gathering in public libraries in overpriced dashikis and patchwork kente hammerpants is up for debate. What do we make of it? Maybe it’s a starting place for greater awareness of ancestry, maybe it builds communities, brings families closer… or maybe it’s just black folks imitating their visions of a mythical and monolithic ‘african’ culture, learning token swahili words and walking around in ‘african’ garb in order to claim a history, home, and culture as their own. I mean, does this go back to the neverending issue of ‘home’ for displaced peoples, ‘culture’ for postcolonial societies, the controversial idea that black people in america and black people in africa are somehow the same…? that we are, or, at some point were, them?

I stopped celebrating Kwanzaa around the age of fifteen, when I learned that Karenga not only had beef with the Black Panthers (whom I was basically in love with) but also spent time in prison for torturing two black women with electrical cords, a hot iron, and some others of the master’s tools. This combined with the unsurprising fact that like many organizations at the time (inlcuding the BPP), Karenga’s cultural nationalist US Organization (United Slaves) was systematically sexist towards its female members, was pretty much enough for me to be done with Kwanzaa. For me, it represented an individual’s idyllic nostalgia, as well as the collective desire for a sense of belonging among black americans. While I loved coming together with my family and friends to laugh, share and discuss these principles that I did find important, the symbology of ‘africanness’ didn’t serve much purpose for me. it’s not that i didn’t recognize how my folks got to this country, or that i didn’t understand respecting history and ancestors and paying dues and whatnot. but i was american after all. and have been for a very long time.

So I say all this to say – Kwanzaa is an option. Some people choose it, some don’t. But whatever the case, it is not the black subsitute for christmas, and it is not a race-based celebration. So, good-intentioned white moderates — next time you see me anywhere around the cold season, do me a favor and stick to ‘have a good break’ or ‘keep warm out there,’ and I’ll do the same for you.

Religu-bust

I saw Bill Maher’s movie Religulous yesterday. It’s basically him traveling around the world harassing religious people, and it seems like he intentionally targets those enthusiasts who are least likely to engage what he has to say.

In the movie, Maher is the jehovah’s witness of agnosticism (he preaches the “i don’t know” doctrine). He goes around (mostly rural America) asking people why they believe in a story as fantastical as a space god who sends his son on a suicide mission (adjust accordingly for given religion). Near the beginning, he visits a little truck-stop chapel in North Carolina and he says to the patrons: “But, you all are smart guys…” as in they should “know better”. I find this assertion to be a tad offensive, and I’m not religious.

When did claiming atheism/agnosticism become the “smart” thing to do? (I should note that this is true particularly for liberals, who act as though thinking critically is incompatible with faith.). This puzzles me. There’s this idea that once you’ve reached a certain level of sophistication or education, you should be rational enough to not believe in the “fairy tales” of religious stories. I’ve even caught myself falling susceptible to this idea. Sometimes I’ll be surprised to hear someone speaking about left politics or something and in the next breath reference Christ. Wait, what..?

I understand where Maher is coming from in terms of questioning religious absolutism and the misappropriation of scripture that has often caused mass amounts of hate and violence. However, I don’t think faith is inherently absolute, and I attribute the problems of religious fanaticism to an inability to separate religious belief from the secular. Not to mention, ignorance in general. Bigotry (which is part of what propels Religulous) is to blame for people’s jacked up attitudes towards out-groups. To what extent does religion create ignorance, hostility, and political conservatism, and to what extent is it merely a fuel behind existing personalities and an already established right-leaning political ideology? Maher’s opinion that “religion must die for mankind to live” is pretty simplistic to me.

I’m not opposed to respectfully interrogating people’s viewpoints, but I think the approach that one way of seeing is right/smart/more reasonable is extremely problematic, whether coming from a devout Muslim or a militant atheist. In the words of George Shulman, “human beings cannot help but live by ‘faith,’ whether in reason, secularism, or ‘democracy’ as an ideal.” That is to say, agnosticism and atheism are “beliefs” that people hold and should be able to defend, but at the same time, those beliefs are also bound in a “faith” that is neither superior to, nor more mature than, anyone else’s.

Only In America: Obama and McCain Go To Church

On Saturday August 16, Democratic Senator of Illinois Barack Obama and Republican Senator of Arizona John McCain, the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, met up at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California to discuss politics. This was known as the Saddleback Civil Forum. The Orange County mega church claims 22,000 members, and just completed a $20 million student ministry facility called the Refinery in June. The church’s founding and senior pastor Rick Warren interviewed the presumptive candidates.

In response to the obvious inquiries about the separation of church and state that supposedly exists in the United States, Warren said on the Today Show: “I believe in separation of church and state. I do not believe in separation of faith and politics because faith is simply a worldview. Everybody has a worldview.”

Since when has faith “simply” meant worldview? And who died and named Rick Warren Webster? Who is this guy? If the church is in fact the “greatest force on earth” it has been in the service of colonization, slavery, and The Holocaust. “The Church” itself, an entity created by man, has been behind some of the greatest atrocities in the history of humankind on this earth.

But even that is beside the point. What I’m wondering is why we are having a key political event — the first time Obama and McCain “share the same stage” — at a mega church with a revenue that could pay my tuition 1,000 times over. Why, for a national political event, is the host a pastor of a white evangelical church? That just doesn’t add up to me.

Probably because Obama and McCain feel like they need to fight to win the vote of the white evangelicals.

Let’s get into it for a minute.

What is an evangelical? Theologically, evangelicals believe Jesus Christ was the sinless son of God, who was resurrected on Easter Sunday and is coming back to culminate history. They believe that salvation involves belief in Him and His sacrifice. Evangelicals also believe that they have a responsibility to share their faith with as many people as they possibly can.

Politically, about 20% of the electorate describes itself as evangelical or born again (a la GWBush). 40% of evangelicals describe themselves as moderate or liberal. (Moderate probably meaning McCain).

George W. Bush won about 78% of the evangelical vote in the last election, and Kerry carried 22%. In the polls, Obama has not gotten any more than 21% of the evangelical vote, and political analysts think this is because he is “more radically pro-choice” than any previous Democratic candidate. (Thanks to kcts for the stats).

When asked at what point a baby gets ‘human rights,’ McCain responded “at the moment of conception.” My follow-up question to McCain would have been “and when do those rights end?” because for a pro-war, pro-prisons, Vietnam vet I feel like there could be a handful of possible answers . . . Is it when you are born outside of the United States? When you decide not to marry? When you get arrested? Come on. People all across the board are claiming to be in favor of human rights for an embryo, yet they don’t support human rights for half of the people walking the earth. How are you anti-choice and at the same time in favor of capital punishment and a fervent cheerleader for an unjust war? What was I saying about holistic living…

Another statistic worth mentioning is that 70% of evangelicals say they plan to vote for McCain, but only 15% are enthusiastic about it. That’s not surprising. What Obama has to do to take advantage of McCain’s lameness is to emphasize his interest in reducing the number of abortions overall. Clearly, he’s not anti-choice and never will be, but winning more of the ‘moderate’ evangelical vote lies in reiterating his point that he does not encourage abortion, and that a situation where one has to consider abortion is undesirable in the first place. This goes back to “age-appropriate” sex education (uh-oh!), as well as access to contraception.

Speaking of unwanted children, when’s the last time you’ve seen one of McCain’s seven kids? Exactly. They’re hiding. Also, why hasn’t he been given more flack from the religious right for the failure of his first marriage (not to mention that he applied for another marriage license before the divorce was official and married 5 weeks after the split). And what about his vote against Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a moral failure? His public response to that was that “we can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing”.

But getting back to the forum, did anyone else notice that McCain, 71, seemed particularly fluent during the interview with Warren? Judging by his prior television appearances, there seem to be signs that he’s suffering from onset senile dementia. So how was the fellow so glib…

Well there is talk of McCain having some prior knowledge about the questions he would be asked. Of course the McCain camp vehemently denies this, and Rick Warren has called the accusations “sour grapes,” but who’s to say? We don’t know what McCain heard.

We Do Know, however, that when Rick Warren said jovially that McCain was in a “cone of silence” where he wouldn’t be able to hear the Obama interview, that he was lying. Lying’s bad, pastor. McCain wasn’t even in the building. He was on his way to the church in a motorcade supervised by the secret service. Meaning that he wasn’t present at the so-called “coin flip” that determined who would go first. As though there was a choice.

But we can’t be sure that McCain’s quick answers despite his tired brain were the result of having access to the questions. Maybe he’s on some new meds. Or maybe Obama’s just a better actor. The latter may be closer to the truth considering the New York Times Caucus blog says that Warren gave both candidates the general topics he would cover, as well as a heads-up about a few specific questions, including What is your greatest moral failing? What is America’s greatest moral failing? And who are the three people you rely on most for wise advice?

Hmm.

But I digress.

As an American (yep, i just identified), I am not down with mixing politics and religion.. nor politics and “faith”. That is not to say that candidates should not be able to run focused campaigns and address their constituencies specifically. But it is to say that no disproportionate amount of attention should be paid to a candidate’s religious beliefs, and, that a candidate’s religious stance should not be referenced during interviews and debates to imply his or her stance on a political issue. If religion does inform a candidate’s position on a particular issue, then that is fine, but at the end of the day it is still a political issue, which at most should be talked about in relation to morals and ethics.