December 26, 2008
Quit Frontin on Kwanzaa
“Pro-Black like Craig Hodges but my dashiki’s in the cleaners.” – Common
Being Pan-African is a weird thing. To many folks it means wearing dashikis, avoiding swine, and shouting ase at every opportunity. I, however, realize that you aren’t going to do that. For most Black folks, the holiday of Kwanzaa is one tied to Pan-Africanism and thus gets mentioned more in their living rooms on TV commercials than at family gatherings. I’ve decided we’ve been frontin’ on Kwanzaa for no real good reason. So here are some pre-emptive responses to questions and concerns.
Yo, did you know Kwanzaa isn’t even real?
Okay, unicorns, not real.
Leprechauns, not real.
Kwanzaa = real. Kwanzaa, like all holidays was created and is celebrated for a reason. Dr. Maulana Karenga created it in 1966 and it’s not a secret. In fact, it is supposed to reaffirm the ability of African peoples to create meaningful cultural celebrations.
I can’t remember the words?
Dude, this is not a recitation competition, if you can’t remember the Kiswahili words you have a friend called the internet or books. Look them up! No one is challenging your Blackness, just trying to honor the spirit of the celebration.
But why should I even remember the words?
Doing extra work to think about the words in Kiswahili tends to make me actively think about the principle. We use words everyday and seldom think about their meaning. Using the Kiswahili words and the English words creates an opportunity to start to actively think about what they mean. For example: Umoja- Unity … what does unity mean? What is community? Who is in? who is out? How do we bond it or break it? See, that was easy right.
But I’m Christian, so I celebrate Christmas.
Glad to hear it, what’s that got to do with celebrating Kwanzaa. Kwanzaa isn’t “the Black Christmas”, nor is it anti-Jesus. In fact, you know all that commercialism that you complain about surrounding baby Jesus’ birth, yeah Kwanzaa is trying to fight it. Look you have an ally! Oh and fyi, you do realize Jesus wasn’t really born in December, right?
But I don’t have a dashiki, I only have a kente cloth bow tie that I got in the 90s.
Please don’t dust off that Kente cloth bow tie or that dashiki. The point is not about what you wear, but what you reflect on. People have asked me, “You’re all Pro-Black and Afrikan, why don’t you wear African clothes?” To which I respond, “Anything I put on is African clothing.” See there, I’ve given you permission, tell them Dumi said you don’t need to get your Baduizm on to participate.
Kwanzaa is a holiday that is designed to get Black folks, African-Americans, Colored, Negro, New Afrikans, etc (pick your favorite or least favorite monikers) to reflect on who we are as a community, a family and a global nation. Kwanzaa is about taking explicit steps to live by principles, not just for 7 days, but for 365 of them. For those who look at Kwanzaa as a fad or trite, that is because they’ve forgotten this important part. If you just reflect on these principles once a year, you will never see the fruit of your labor.
So the greeting for the celebration is “habari gani” which means, “what’s the news?”. Man, that’s so 60s/70s I love it! But you respond with the name of the principle to keep it on your lips and in your mind.
The seven principles, known as the Nguzo Saba, are:
Day 1: Umoja- Unity
Day 2: Kujichagulia – Self-Determination
Day 3: Ujima – Collective work and Responsibility
Day 4: Ujamaa- Cooperative Economics
Day 5: Nia- Purpose
Day 6- Kuumba- Creativity
Day 7: Imani- Faith
I think now, more than ever, we run the risk of being allured by an Obama presidency into thinking we have arrived at the promised land. Look around your family, your neighborhood, your nation, and tell me if we can afford to continue to not be self-reflective and work towards a better community? If you cannot take seven days to redefine you relationship to the people who live with you, love you, and look like you, what kind of change are you really invested in?
p.s. I hope you noticed Kwanzaa was spelled with one “a” in the picture. I’m pretty sure it’s from Futurama.
p.p.s I do recognize Dr. Karenga’s heinous actions towards sisters Deborah Jones and Gail Davis, which I do not ignore nor endorse! However, I do think holiday is important form of healing and re-centering in our community. This is an endorsement of the larger African spirit than an individuals actions.
>via: http://uptownnotes.com/quit-frontin-on-kwanzaa/
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Why LGBT African-Americans
Embrace Kwanzaa
KIMBERLEY MCCLEOD LOOKS AT THE CONNECTION SOME BROTHERS AND SISTERS HAVE TO THE AFROCENTRIC CELEBRATION
Although the relevance and popularity of the pan-African tradition gets debated annually, it’s no coincidence that Back lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans across the country have been embracing Kwanzaa in their homes and organizations as a way to form family and celebrate their identities fully. While the holidays can be a joyous time full of food and fellowship, for many LGBT people, this time of year can be quite isolating. Kwanzaa represents an opportunity and occasion to shift that.
Created in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga, Kwanzaa (celebrated December 26 – January 1) aims to reconnect Black Americans to their African roots by building community. It is this sense of community that has been so critical to the survival of LGBT people of color – a group that, despite being disproportionately affected by disparity, has managed to build resilience in creative and affirming ways.
Black gay and transgender youth, for instance, are more likely to end up homeless and living on the streets than their White counterparts. The statistics are startling. Over 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBT. Sixty-eight percent of those kids were kicked out of their homes because of their orientation and/or gender identity while 54% reported being survivors of abuse from their families. An estimated 65% of homeless people are racial minorities. Often without a place to fully express their authentic selves, young people can find refuge in LGBT Kwanzaa convenings.
“Organizational or chosen family Kwanzaa gatherings have special significance for those in our community who don’t have access to gatherings in their families of origin because of distance, homophobia or exclusion,” explains Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Project, an experiential archive that collects and amplifies the herstories of Black women who challenge heteronormativity.
Recognizing this harsh reality, the Mobile Homecoming Project is among the various LGBT groups organizing Kwanzaa celebrations specifically for the LGBT community. Following in the tradition of Detroit-based LGBT center Karibu House and New York City’s Salsa Soul Sisters (the oldest Black lesbian organization in the U.S., founded in New York City in 1974 and now called African-American Lesbians United for Social Change), the Mobile Homecoming Project has asked individuals in Durham, North Carolina to host potlucks at their homes on the different nights of Kwanzaa so that they can fellowship about the daily principles.
“We also go together to some of the amazing dance and cultural events here in Durham to build with the larger community,” adds Dr. Gumbs.
It’s not uncommon for these Kwanzaa gatherings to include participants from across generations. Imani Rashid, 73, is co-chair of the LGBT Annual Community Kwanzaa Celebration of New York City, Inc. and author of Kwanzaa in the Gay and Lesbian Family. She introduced the idea of a Kwanzaa celebration at a meeting of Salsa Soul Sisters back in the 70s and describes attendees of the annual celebration as everyone from curious 20-somethings to seasoned 80-year-olds who partake as modern-day griots (storytellers) and African drummers.
“When I was 20, I was literally sitting at the feet of my elders,” says Rashid. “We don’t have that kind of intergenerational dialogue today and we need it. Sometimes gay and transgender young people just need the support of someone that has been there.”
One could argue that LGBT elders also benefit from the support community can provide. Research shows that 10% of partnered Black women and men in same-sex couples are age 65 or older, and another 9% are between ages 55 and 64. Today, about 80% of long-term care in the U.S. is provided by family members and more than two-thirds of adults who receive long-term care at home depend on family members as their only source of help. By contrast, LGBT elders are more likely to be single, childless, and estranged from biological family—relying on friends and community members as their chosen family.
“It’s about umoja – unity,” says Rashid referring to the first of Kwanzaa’s Nguzo Saba or Seven Principles. “People need to be united. We need one another. We need the unity.”
Despite Kwanzaa’s roots in the Black nationalist movement which has historically been homophobic and patriarchal (the presence of Black LGBT people went largely unacknowledged, openly gay people were ostracized, a very rigid notion of masculinity was embraced, and women were often silenced), LGBT African Americans have managed to find what Dr. Herukhuti, founder of the Center of Culture, Sexuality and Spirituality and faculty member at Goddard College, describes as a “home” in the tradition. The reason? According to Dr. Herukhuti, it’s because being their authentic selves has been defined as deviant based on cultural values that first became dominant in Western Europe and were then exported through colonialism and imperialism.
“[LGBT] or same-gender loving people of African ancestry are
in a position to draw upon that resource in being able to find our place within the work of Kwanzaa given the heterosexist ideas of some members of our communities,” explains Dr. Herukhuti. “We do it because we find sources of nourishment and sustenance in embracing ourselves.”
However, for some Black LGBT people it’s self-acceptance that can make it challenging to celebrate Kwanzaa. When Dr. Gumbs first learned of Kwanzaa’s origins, she hesitated.
“As I learned more about its origins within an organization with a history of violence against outspoken women members and exclusion of LGBTQ people I started to distance myself,” shares Dr. Gumbs. “It was only a few years ago when we discovered through our Mobile Homecoming interviews that Black LGBTQ people in some of the earliest organizations had reclaimed Kwanzaa as their own ritual that it was possible to see the value in the community principles of the holiday without reproducing the homophobia of cultural nationalism.”
Rashid recalls being one of the only same-sex couples in the room at Kwanzaa celebrations decades ago. She was first introduced to the tradition at her son’s alternative school in Harlem, which focused on African heritage and culture. For many of the event attendees, she and her wife were the first lesbians they had ever met. Yet they always felt welcomed.
“While Kwanzaa is an Afrocentric holiday, meaning it is rooted in an African or African diasporic cultural context, it was not invented in Africa and it was invented after European colonization of Africa and kidnapping and enslavement of African people,” says Dr. Herukhuti. “Therefore, it has been informed, intentionally and unintentionally, by all of that history—the generative and the destructive, the communitarian and the individualistic, the African and the Western. Like much of the culture we have produced here in the United States, it is a hybridity.”
And it’s the hybridity of being both Black and LGBT – existing, surviving, sustaining and thriving at intersectional identities – that makes Kwanzaa so appealing to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender African-Americans. Dr. Kofi Adoma, president of Karibu House, has been helping coordinate Detroit’s Kwanzaa celebrations for over 30 years and shared with the Mobile Homecoming project that it feels good to have a safe space just for celebrating and examining Blackness.
“Historically we have cherished Kwanzaa celebrations as a time to specifically celebrate our Blackness and our connection to the Black community as a balance to the fact that we have sometimes been tokenized in majority White LGBT organizations,” adds Dr. Gumbs. “Kwanzaa has been a big deal for long-lasting LGBTQ organizations. And it still exists through those organizers to this day. That is huge in my opinion.”
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Kimberley McLeod is a media strategist and LGBT advocate. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of ELIXHER, a resource for multidimensional representations of Black LGBT women.
LGBT Kwanzaa Celebrations Across the Country
Umoja (Unity)
Thursday, December 26
7:00pm – 10:00pm
Host: KICK: The Center in Detroit
41 Burroughs Street, Ste 109,
Detroit, MI 48202
Kijichagulia (Self-Determination)
Friday, December 27
7:00pm – 10:00pm (African Naming Ceremony starts 8:00pm)
Host: Karibu House, Inc.
Home of Kofi Adoma
255 Worcester Street,
Detroit, MI 48203
Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)
Saturday, December 28
7:00pm – 10:00pm
Host: Adodi-Detroit Chapter
4696 Quarton Road,
Bloomfield Hills, MI 48302
Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)
Sunday, December 29
5:30pm – 8:30pm
Host: Marie Colts-Calhoun
4 E. Alexandrine Street,
Detroit, MI 48201
Nia (Purpose)
Monday, December 30
7:00pm – 10:00pm
Host: A.L.O.R.D.E. Collective
255 Worcester Place,
Detroit, MI 48203
Kuumba (Creativity)
Tuesday, December 31
11:00am – 3:00pm
Hosts: Jo, Nkenge, and Patrick Burkhead
2941 Crooks Road,
Royal Oak, MI 48073
Imani (Faith)
Kid’s Kwanzaa Klub!
Wednesday, January 1
3:00pm – 5:00pm
All ages are invited, especially children.
Host: Full Truth Church and Unity Fellowship Church of Detroit
4458 Joy Road,
Detroit, MI 48204
Dinner afterward at a Black-owned restaurant, an annual Ujamaa tradition.
Mobile Homecoming’s Queer Kwanzaa Retreat
December 26 – January 1
For more information, email mobilehomecoming@gmail.com.
Philadelphia Area LGBTQ Organizations Present Kwanzaa 2013
Saturday, December 28
6:00pm – 9:00pm
William Way LGBT Community Center
1315 Spruce Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19107
The 36th Annual LGBT Community KWANZAA in Manhattan
Saturday, December 28
1:00pm – 8:00pm
Judson Memorial Church
55 Washington Square South,
New York, NY 10012
>via: http://www.ebony.com/news-views/why-lgbt-african-americans-embrace-kwanzaa-495#ixzz2ok3X8Dpn
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Dec. 27 2013
Stop Making Jokes
About Kwanzaa—Seriously
The holiday that so many like to laugh at is about the same things we take seriously all year.
Camille Yarborough sings African music behind a traditional kinara during a preview of the “Kwanzaa 2004: We Are Family” festival at the American Museum of Natural History, Dec. 22, 2004, in New York City. / MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES
I don’t celebrate Kwanzaa. Or I haven’t, at least, since the days of green-and-red-draped Black Student Union programs in high school.
I admit that I couldn’t list the names of its seven principles and their accompanying meanings from memory if you held a lit candle to my head. A focus on this celebration—created in 1966 by Maulana Karenga to honor African-American family, community and culture, and now observed Dec. 26 through Jan. 1 by an estimated 2 million people—is not a tradition I was raised with or adopted as an adult. And like a lot of folks, I’m pretty holidayed out after Christmas.
But I’m really sick of hearing people joke about it.
I’m not talking about actual humor that’s pegged to a Kwanzaa theme, or the use of the unfamiliar Swahili names of Kwanzaa’s principles as comedic inspiration. Kwanzaa, like most things in life, is fair game for laughs. What I’m criticizing is the practice of mocking its very existence, when the punch line is that Kwanzaa exists.
A friend’s recent Facebook post captured my sentiment about this brand of humor pretty well:
To the person on this morning’s conference call who signed off with a sarcastic “Happy Kwanzaa”—I hate you.
Or “Chrismahanukwanzaakah,” the faux-funny mashup that grates me the same way. Just Christmas and Hanukkah squeezed together wouldn’t have been so funny, but add Kwanzaa—something wacky and foreign-sounding—to the mix and, whew! Hilarity!
And to be clear, I’m not playing the race card here. I know one black person who thinks the funniest thing to say as an ironic hipster greeting, year-round, is “Happy Kwanzaa.”
Not laughing.
Because it feels cheap. And, frankly, sad. Just under the surface of that humor, in my view, are the same basic beliefs about the holiday that Wisconsin Republican state Sen. Glenn Grothman expressed when he declared, “Almost no black people care about Kwanzaa,” and called it a “supposed African-American holiday celebration.”
Yes, the holiday’s popularity seems to have “plateaued” in the late 1980s and early ’90s. And of course, not all the criticisms of it are thoughtless or arrogant or grounded in a disdain for the unfamiliar. Imani Perry, a Princeton University professor of African-American studies, took to Facebook this week to say she understands that people have serious—if, perhaps, unfairly applied—gripes with the holiday.
There have been questions about Karenga’s past (“Although I do wonder what they do with Christmas given the whole slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, inquisition, etc., thing,” Perry says). There are qualms about the way Kwanzaa has been commercialized and Hallmark-ified. And there’s disapproval of its embrace of an East African language from a camp that thinks West African would be a better choice (“I guess the West should just give up this whole appreciation-of-Greece thing, too,” she muses).
But Perry says she ultimately admires the values of Kwanzaa and people who take the time to participate in a ritual that invites a community to share those values across religious and class differences, calling it “a wonderful reminder to love and live with purpose, creativity, faith, collaboration and a strong sense of self into the coming year.”
And after all, aren’t those the same sentiments many of us harness with unbridled enthusiasm outside of the holiday season? Isn’t Kujichagulia—“To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves”—just a word in another language for the quality that infused Beyoncé’s most recent album with its life-affirming powers for so many black women? Wasn’t it what delivered the cathartic effect of 12 Years a Slave?
Isn’t Imani—“believing with all our hearts in the righteous victory of our struggle”—what compels us to publicly take on every injustice, from Trayvon Martin’s death to the New York City Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy? Isn’t it what gets us to rally around a little girl who gets kicked out of school because of a racist policy that disallows her hair?
No one’s scoffing when these things are happening in June, September or November. So why would efforts to formalize and celebrate the values that fuel them be dismissed with humor the week after Christmas? As Melonyce McAfee put it, the holiday may be “made” up, but it still has worth.
Even in the midst of winter and at the end of a year that “pretty much sucked for black people,” when many times we’ve had to laugh to keep from crying, there are much funnier things out there than Kwanzaa. I’m sure of it.
The Root’s staff writer, Jenée Desmond-Harris, covers the intersection of race with news, politics and culture. She wants to talk about the complicated ways in which ethnicity, color and identity arise in your personal life—and provide perspective on the ethics and etiquette surrounding race in a changing America. Follow her on Twitter.
>via: http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2013/12/you_re_still_mocking_kwanzaa_it_s_getting_old.html