Kwanzaa: May the Farce Be With You!

Kwanzaa, May the Farce Be With You!

 

Here in America, we’re blessed with a multiplicity of rights among which is the inalienable to create hoaxes for fun and/or profit and, with a modicum of luck, convince others to take us seriously as in the case of what is nowadays called Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community, and Culture.

Originally proposed as a Christmas alternative by its inventor, he apparently realized thirty years later that many of his Kwanzaa converts weren’t about to turn their backs on Christmas and that a specific Black alternative to the national holiday was more than a tad offputting to Christians as well as blatantly racist since America has no specifically White holiday so he decided his invention wasn’t really supposed to be an alternative, after all.

Got that?

You see, when you invent something, you’re pretty much free to tinker with it, even to the extent of radically changing its fundamental meaning and purpose.

And, the man who invented Kwanzaa (misspelled Swahili for “first fruits”) just two years after getting out of prison,  Maulana (Swahili for “master teacher”) Ron Karenga (Swahili for “keeper of tradition”), born Ronald McKinley Everett, knew all about radical change.

An avowed Marxist/Black revolutionary/Black supremacist, Everett had been convicted of kidnapping and brutally torturing two Black women members of his murderous Us (United slaves) cult, was sentenced to one to ten years in prison, served four, after which he immediately began rehabilitating his image and envisioning Kwanzaa.

In July 1971, psychiatrist W. D. Achuff described Karenga as “a danger to society who is in need of prolonged custodial treatment in prison . . . irrational and bizarre [and] “confused and not in touch with reality,”according to the LA Times.

In a 1978 article Washington Post article, Hollie West quoted Karenga on the formation of Kwanzaa: “I created Kwanzaa.  People think it’s African. But it’s not. 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. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods (Blacks) would be partying!”

But, enough about Everett-Karenga whose sadistic, criminal background includes shoving a hot soldering iron into one Black woman’s mouth and using a vise to crush another Black woman’s toe, and his racist history are open books to all but the mainstream media. 

Those media have so successfully buried his past that he is now Chairman of the Africana Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach, director of the Kawaida Institute for Pan African Studies, author of several books, former member of the organizing committee and author of the mission statement of the Million Man March, and is included on the 2002 list of 100 Greatest African Americans. 

Not bad for an accused rapist and convicted kidnapper and vicious torturer of Black women! . . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=34789.)