Happy Kwanzaa!

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Here is the late great Tony Snow’s legendary column on Kwanzaa:

BLACKS IN AMERICA have suffered an endless series of insults and degradations, the latest of which goes by the name of Kwanzaa.

Ron Karenga (aka Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga) invented the seven-day feast (Dec. 26-Jan. 1) in 1966, branding it a black alternative to Christmas. The idea was to celebrate the end of what he considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans.

According to the official Kwanzaa Web site — as opposed, say, to the Hallmark Cards Kwanzaa site — the celebration was designed to foster “conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans” and provide a “reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans’ ancestors.”

Karenga postulated seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which gets its day during Kwanzaa week. He and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: “We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one G-d of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination.”

Now, the point: There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings have Swahili names — such as “ujima” for “collective work and responsibility” or “muhindi,” which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.

Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.

To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing “G-d Save the Queen” in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.

Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don’t necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term “ujima,” which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.

Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.

The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.

Go to Kenya, where I taught briefly as a young man, and you’ll see endless hostility between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Masai. Even South African politics these days have more to do with tribal animosities than ideological differences.

Moreover, chaos too often prevails over order. Warlords hold sway in Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and Zaire. Genocidal maniacs have wiped out millions in Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. The once-shining hopes for Kenya have vanished.

Detroit native Keith Richburg writes in his extraordinary book, “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” that “this strange place defies even the staunchest of optimists; it drains you of hope …”

Richburg, who served for three years as the African bureau chief for The Washington Post, offers a challenge for the likes of Karenga: “Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose in the images of rotting flesh.”

His book concludes: “I have been here, and I have seen — and frankly, I want no part of it. …. By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today — my culture and my attitudes, my sensibilities, loves and desires — derives from that one simple and irrefutable fact.”

Nobody ever ennobled a people with a lie or restored stolen dignity through fraud. Kwanzaa is the ultimate chump holiday — Jim Crow with a false and festive wardrobe. It praises practices — “cooperative economics, and collective work and responsibility” — that have succeeded nowhere on earth and would mire American blacks in endless backwardness.

Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.

This year, President Clinton signed his fourth Kwanzaa proclamation. He crooned: “The symbols and ceremony of Kwanzaa, evoking the rich history and heritage of African Americans, remind us that our nation draws much of its strength from our diversity.”

But our strength, as Richburg points out, comes from real principles: tolerance, brotherhood, hard work, personal responsibility, equality before the law. If Americans really cared about racial healing, they would focus on those ideas — and not on a made-up rite that mistakes segregationism for spirituality and fiction for history.

53 thoughts on “Happy Kwanzaa!

    • There is a reason Haiti is a spot of dirt and the Dominican half of the island is something resembling civilization. The Haitian slaves killed all the whites, it is true, all 5% of them. But they did something more profound. They killed all the Mulatto, 10%. Result: Bantu IQ of 68.

    • Thank you for sharing this, excellent read. As well as the “Fly The Beloved Country” article pasted in the comments section below the post — really gripping account written by wife of famous Lefty who wrote “Cry The Beloved Country” as she fled post-apartheid South Africa.

  1. Minor quibble: Eritrea isn’t in the grip of warlords, not was it at the time of the article’s writing during the Clinton administration. Rather, it is ruled by a good old-fashioned authoritarian strongman — already was in the 1990s, still is today. The gentleman’s very longevity in office (his name, incidentally, is Isayyas Afeworki, which translates as Isaiah Goldmouth) suffices to show that he isn’t a mere warlord.

    The effects for the country aren’t very different though: Repression, economic decline, people fleeing (just the severed limbs and mass rapes are lacking). Which is why it sometimes feels like half of the male Eritrean population between twenty and thirty years of age today is found in my mid-sized German home town.

  2. How does one heal inferior genetics?

    • Studies find that darker pigmented people average higher levels of aggression and sexual activity (and also lower IQ).
    sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000840

    • Scholars have noted that mean levels of self-regulation differ across racial categories with Black respondents tending to score higher on measures of impulsivity compared to Asians and Whites.”
    researchgate.net/publication/295097415

    • Genes influence criminal behavior more than environment.
    sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120125151841.htm

    • Blacks are more likely than Whites to be narcissistic.
    sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092656611000912

    • Study: Controlling for IQ and records of violence completely accounted for racial differences in arrest rates.
    researchgate.net/publication/256079484_No_evidence_of_racial_discrimination_in_criminal_justice_processing_Results_from_the_National_Longitudinal_Study_of_Adolescent_Health

    • There Are No Successful Black Nations
    foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/09/there-are-no-successful-black-nations-africa-diginty-racism-pan-africanism/

    • Wow. The last bullet point caught me by surprise. I had to put down Guns, Germs and Steel when he delved hard core into the Evolution aspect. So regarding all the previous bullet points I’ve been somewhat familiar with them but I’ve never considered the last. There are no successful black countries? Ahh yeah. Very interesting. I’ve been saying for years “we came on technological sailing vessels with cloth sails and percussion instruments that shot smooth round lead balls. They were and are somewhat for the most part still very tribal in nature.” Not all of them of course. That the majority is uneducated and still living in squalor (village like) is rather disappointing. I guess something’s are never going to change.

    • Someone in the past (attributed to various authors) claimed that if you were to give him a child for the first seven years of his life, he would return to you the man. If that is true, then most, if not all, of the observations you’ve listed above could be attributed to culture (the first seven years).

      What determines culture then becomes the interesting question. Is it primarily due to race or is it due to environment? Living in the equatorial regions is much easier than in arctic regions. Plenty of fruit, vegetables and animals at hand year around requires much less planning, coordination and cooperation than gathering seed, planting and harvesting. The two regions regions would develop markedly different cultures.

      On the other hand, if it could be proven that culture is determines primarily by race, then genetics might indeed be implicated as claimed. Measuring the attributes of a broken man (the first seven years phenomenon) more likely describes the damage than the root stock. For example, if all screw drivers were bent, we’d be hard put to describe screwdrivers.as beneficial.

  3. I am oh-so sick of hearing about the po down-trodden American Negro. Anyone who is legally living in America has won the lottory. There is nothing a determined man can’t do in America … good or bad. We have seen a lot of both.

    It seems that the American Negro has a lot more trouble with being black in America than white people do. Most of us don’t care about skin color anymore … We care about behavior … things like integrity, self-reliance, civility, good manners … Try it sometime … you will be treated with much more respect.

    • Wow Ofay Cat, that is a 1st class rant, Bravo!
      You deserve the official Truth In Commenting of the decade award.
      I’m saving your comment and plan on sharing at every opportunity.

  4. Pingback: Kwanzaa Day You Whiteys! | IowaDawg's Very Own Blawg

    • Like cultural shit stirring, kind of like beating the diversity bush so the Famous But Incompetent could keep the checks coming….

  5. and yet Kwanza celebrations lag far behind Festivus — even though the latter does not benefit from state sponshorship.

    • Actually, I haven’t heard much about Kwanza lately, i.e., in the last ten years or so. I suspect that reverence for Pres. Obama, along with black street activist nonsense like “hands up, don’t shoot”, have filled the Kwanza-shaped hole in the mass media.

  6. Kwansa is representative of the Establishment trying to create relevancy of something that has none in order to create a narrative of irrelevancy of something that is the most relevant thing of all.
    The crux of it all is it is of the most paramount importance for the continuation of the Establishments power that at no juncture can us dirt people be given any credence or recognition that our will and consent, our traditions, or our vote as in the case of Donald Trump, particularly our withdrawal of consent for the Establishment, be recognized as valid and legitimate.
    The thing here in all this is the Estabishment’s “power” is predicated upon the narrative we don’t exist, our existence is irrelevant, that marginalizing us, disenfranchising us is in itself morally right posturing somehow. Hence bullshit like Kwansa. When nothing could be further from the truth. We as dirt people, our consent, our traditions, values, principles, our faith, our guns, who we are, is what is relevant. And as with Donald Trump as a conduit of that utmost relevancy, that our culture, we as people, we are upstream of all politics, that the narrative it was the exact opposite has been shattered.
    That was the @Real November Revolution, The Great Fuck You.

  7. I’ll take Cinco de Mayo for my fake holiday. It’s all about drinking until you are sh*tfaced and acting like an idiot, as far as I can tell.

  8. You can bet the U.S. Postal Service will continue to issue Kwanzaa stamps every year (they might sell one out of every 50 printed). They are desperately looking for a Mexican holiday to commemorate with a stamp. Maybe the Day of the Dead. Or Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico.

    When was the last time we had a stamp with George Washington’s picture? Probably about 1950.

    • Don’t ask GWU. They probably won’t even have a picture of ‘ol George now that they have no US History required “History degree.”

  9. A great and very timely post Z.

    Yes, the Afro-scam was strong during the years of Clinton I when Feminism reached it’s fullness. During Black History month I remember being taught in compulsory re-education sessions at work by well-paid-yet-hostile black ‘community organizers’ that the pyramids (along with the rest of ancient ME civilization) were actually built by blacks, complete with pictures of proud builders that looked looked very decidedly W African. Now, the ancient Egyptians left many thousands of images of themselves, including pyramid builders, none of which look anything like W Africans in general or American Blacks in particular. Besides which, the builders were likely slaves.*

    So, like Feminism, Kwanza and the rest of PC Cloud Culture is built on an edifice of obvious lies. Know this is, no doubt, why we are seeing the post-Trump freakout: Their entire ecosystem is a house of cards and we are nearly out of OPM (other peoples’ money). If you are a follower of truth you have consolation in adversity. If your livelihood and self image is all based on obvious lies, you have a bleak Kwanza indeed as you contemplate the competent destructors about to begin their righteous work.

    *This is controversial. In some circles it is posited that this was off-season work-relief for the fellahin. Since only the elite of those days left records of their doings, ancient Egyptian elites were anxious to justify themselves to the gods, foreign sources were either fine with slavery or hostile (e.g. Exodus, the Book), the controversy will continue to be perfect: Unresolvable but a reliable generator of tenure-producing academic papers.

    • Excuse me, but … you were “taught in compulsory re-education sessions at work.” WTF was that about? Where did you work?

      Man, I would have beat feet out of there in a second. No way! I wouldn’t put up with that shit.

      • A large chunk of business was then on the table from a large nearby liberal city. Outright bribery was/is both unwise from a precedent point of view and dangerous since the US Attorney at that time was looking for scalps from local pols who went over the accepted limit. But there are other ways of transferring Dirt money to the Cloud. Among them is hiring local pols’ relatives to provide diversity training via contract. Various community organizers became sub-contractor cut-outs and the circle of life could continue in liberal land.

        Hence an extra special Black History Month for all employees. While not mandated for all, attendance was ‘encouraged’ “if you get what I mean, pilgrim” for all managers above first line. You didn’t HAVE to go but if one was still in the hunt for promotion it would have been very, very unwise to make a stink about it.

        • I see. So sort of recasting the ACORN trolls into “consultant/trainer” roles to continue their nefarious deeds. Another crime done by the Eric Holder gang. He should hang, especially for “Fast & Furious.”

          • The Cloud Money Machine (aka The Chicago Way writ large) has many moving parts. ACORN is one, just not the one I was describing: Likewise AJA Holder. IIRC the Kwanzaa-derived incident I recall was a complete Cloud-scam from top to bottom, just not involving ACORN or then AJA Holder at that time.

            ACORN was/is a lower-level ‘chump-change-for-urban-peace’ shakedown of various local notables: Main point to keep low-skilled community organizers usefully occupied and out of the way of the rest of the machine. Education and job training grants were the main transfer mechanisms, IIRC.

            Holder, OTOH, was running an elite fringe ‘donations-for-pardons’ scam during the latter parts of the reign of Clinton I after the GOPe Senate gave the Big Dog to know he had nothing to dread. Holder also ran the ‘anti-trust-tech-boom-shakedown’ (Remember the Microsoft anti-trust suit and how it and similar efforts kinda went away after Billy G & the boys got on board the Prog Bus via The B & M Gates Foundation, etc.,_?).

            The point I failed to make above was that the sessions I described were a one-time event: Didn’t reoccur once the major contract was signed. Now it’s possible that they were discontinued after mass protest, but I didn’t remember any and I didn’t dare instigate one myself (and there was a bit of ‘wink, nudge’ from above going on). IOW, it was a better done Clinton Foundation type operation: Big grant to local pol nominee shell NGO; Big haircut by said NGO, Low-cost sub-contractor cutout to do the actual rain dance; Report-to-file cover doc’s produced for the very, very unlikely event of a Clinton-Era IRS audit, Wind up shell NGO to hidden principals with liquidation distributions all around, etc. Kwanzaa-spawn handily solved the obvious ‘we-need-some-actual-content-however-skeezy’ dilemma. Given the hostile presenters’ obvious ignorance of the subject matter and their very minimal presentation skills I highly doubted that they wrote the material themselves. QED

            Sorry for the length of this comment but there may be some readers unfamiliar with how NGO World is integral to the Cloud Money Machine and so why President Trump needs to go after it hammer and tongs to Make America Great Again. Besides, it’s where the money is_!

  10. ” Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. ”

    Fits right in with every other 20th century black thing in America, doesn’t it?

  11. It’s a new age in America. Kwanza like diversity is dead. Lot of things died on that fantastic day in november. To me it was a pivotal moment in history. Political correctness is dead. Globalism is toast. But diversity, the foundational gateway lie of the cultural marxists ideology and their agenda, is clutching for relevancy in a world of us bitter clingers who have turned our backs, like beached carp gasping for breath in the hot sun. What’s poignant about it’s timely irrelevancy, is it never was a living breathing thing worth a damn to begin with. It’s only value was it had none, it was created to destroy values.

    • It certainly feels like a new age and that is great because “we” can effect change on the misdeeds of the past.

      However, I caution against your notion that the things you list as dead, are actually dead. They are ideas.

      The big lie of the last of the twentieth century was that “communism” had been defeated and was dead. No. The Soviet Union, the USSR, was dead. The Berlin Wall fell. But Communism as an idea continued to live is under a rock for awhile. But like virus, or a weed, it came back and began digging it’s roots into everything it could with a vengeance. Hence, BHO.

      We have a lot to fix. We still need to stand guard. We can only celebrate a short while. The wolf is always at the door.

      • Give it some time. Irrelevancy on this scale takes awhile to become a general apparently relevant sea change, aka the forest for the trees.

    • Yeah, Doug. I live where the civil rights movement was born. In prior years they made some noise, and Kwanza got TV and newspaper spreads. This year, not a peep so far.

      • Well you got to have empathy for these false narrative and meme makers. They been busy, what with running a faithless elector scheme, trying to delegitimize Donald Trump, and the 50 million or so of us dirt people who voted for him and withdrew consent for the cultural marxist establishment, it must be difficult to decide which optic and narrative the legacy media is to promote this holiday season when you have Chairman Mao White House Christmas, excuse me Festivas, decorations to hang, Kwanza holidays, Russian’s behind every tree influencing Lord knows what, battling fake news, trying to figure out how they can stay out of prison for treason and corruption, I mean these little red diaper babies and their little helpers have a hard life turning America into a banana republic and strip mining the dirt people of their intrinsic wealth.

  12. A teacher in my neighborhood was looking to borrow a kinara, which is the little Kwanzaa candleabra thing, for her school’s holiday celebration. If you can’t borrow a religious article from one of your students, it can’t be that relevant to their lives. And you have 180 instructional days in the year, and you’re wasting one on Kwanzaa? I have this theory that homeschoolers outstrip public schooled children simply because they spend more time on actual academic subjects.

  13. Now president Obama can go to Africa to try and find someone to celebrate Kwanzaa with. Good luck with that.

    • …go HOME to Africa…

      Fixed it for you.

      I base my birtherism on pure contrarianism and the fact that every thing Obama has ever said was a lie. But mostly contrarianism. Oh, and to annoy leftists.

        • Silly rabbit, his social security number says he is a natural born American from Connecticut. Or was that Hawaii?

        • Silly rabbit, his social security number says he is a natural born American from Connecticut… Or was that Hawaii?

          • The social,security number, first three digits, shows where a person is living and filed the application for an original card. It has nothing to do with place of birth.

    • White guilt? Whats that? Seem to remember something about it, but for the life of me can’t remember. Oh well, must have not been very important.

  14. Amen, Tony! Amen, Z-man!

    Can’t say it enough. Amen.

    God bless America, and all praise to the geniuses who bequeathed it to us.

    • Blacks and Whites cannot live under the same government, according to this genius:

      “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [blacks] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” –Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821

      To be sure:

      “It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State [instead of colonizing them]? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” –Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, 1782

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