KWANZAA

The Celebration of Family, Community and Culture in our Changing Times.

On Saturday, I dropped in on the Kwanzaa celebration hosted at the YWCA by Parlee Jones’ OurStory Edutainment, a multi-cultural learning institute.

Despite the event’s spiritual and uplifting importance, I couldn’t help but feel its message was being buffeted and drowned out by the contrarian winds of the time.

I couldn’t help but feel that the African American unity the celebration promotes seems to be fracturing, rather than moving toward a cohesive whole at the moment.

Created in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, Kwanzaa is an annual African American and Pan-African festivity running from December 26 to January 1.

Mr. Karenga, a black nationalist and professor of Pan-African studies at California State University at Long Beach, is clear in his vision of the celebration.

“Kwanzaa brings a cultural message which speaks to the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest sense,” he proclaims.

“The holiday,..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.”

The road to this enlightenment and affirmation is to be paved by adherence to seven principles-unity (umoja), self-determination (kujichagulia), collective work and responsibility (Ujima), cooperative economics (ujamaa), purpose (nia), creativity (kuumba, and faith (imani).

Each day of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the seven principles and is marked by lighting a new candle on the kinara, a seven-branched candelabra.

The principles, historically, represent the ideals of a long line of black liberation activists, among them Marcus Garvey, who adopted the Pan African flag of unity–red, green and black—at his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) conference in New York City in 1920.

Although created in the U.S., some 40 million people of African heritage around the world now celebrates Kwanzaa, according to “The Black Candle,” a film about the celebration.

And according to U.S. participants in a 2012 Public Policy Polling study, 4 percent said they “primarily” celebrate Kwanzaa, which, if the sample is representative of the country, would equal about 12.5 million Americans.

Nevertheless, Kwanzaa celebrations appear to be waning as black nationalism gives way to racial integration as the unifying philosophy guiding African Americans continued struggle for self-identity, and social and economic justice.

Of all the Kwanzaa principles, unity would appear to be the most important, as without it success in achieving the others would be difficult, if not impossible.

Some might argue that what appear to be fractures in African American self-identity are merely the ripples of a new political and social realignment, one that is moving from Martin Luther King’s racial integrated society, to Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise.”

Washington’s approach, as he explained it, was that “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

It was an accommodationist approach civil rights leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois denounced, fearing it would it would leave blacks in indefinite servitude to whites.

“Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission.…[His] program practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races,” Mr. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk.

Yet, even as we continue to celebrate Dr. King’s life, it is Washington’s philosophy that appears to be guiding the everyday lives of many African Americans.

Today we see the leaders of historically black colleges and universities giving aide and comfort to a racist president, in order to secure federal funding for their institutions.

We see high-paid black athletes, protecting their earning power, by refusing to condemn human rights abuses in China.

We see an African American group, ADOS, American Descendants of Slavery, separating their struggles from the Pan-African struggle, and in doing so appears to some as unwittingly championing right wing agendas on immigration and other social issues.

Given all of this, Kwanzaa would seem a relic of the past, a perfunctory celebration, lacking conviction, much like Christmas.

But I’m sure Parlee would disagree with me.

I’m sure she would say “faith,” is the most important Kwanzaa principle; that it is faith that will allow us to face the new year with the hope of achieving unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose and creativity.