Dakota Beacon

Today is the second day of “Kwanzaa”.  The quotation marks are intentional, for this is neither a cultural, historic nor religious celebration.  Rather, it is another attempt by another fraud to cause division among American people.  

To really understand the underside of “Kwanzaa”, it is probably best to begin with its founder, an American man named Ronald McKinley Everett, aka, Ron Karenga, aka Maulana Karenga.  This man, the seventh son of a sharecropper, got his start in organizing at college in Los Angeles, where an older brother was teaching. He studied Swahili and Arabic, identifying himself with eastern Africa for unknown reasons, and changing his name to “Karenga”, a Swahili word for “keeper of the tradition”.  He was known as Ron or Maulana Karenga from that point on.  

Karenga was all about divisiveness.   Not content with merely preaching separation from white Americans, he took on the Black Panthers in an often violent rivalry, as “Us”, or “united slaves”.  In 1965 we witnessed the horrific violence of the Watts riots. In 1966 Everett, now “Karenga”, invented a new festival intended to help distance black Americans from what he viewed as over-commercialized - and “white-based” - Christmas celebrations.  It didn’t matter that black Americans were chiefly devout Christians and that Christianity is a major, world-wide religion with customs borrowed from countries around the world. Karenga wanted to create something exclusive and black, even though it was artificial.  To add to the artificial aspect, he added a symbolic extra “a” to the end of the Swahili word “kwanza” (“first”) to make seven letters to more or less represent seven days and seven concepts - the translation: 1. Unity, 2. Self-determination, 3. Collective work and responsibility (communism), 4. Cooperative economics (again, communism), 5. Purpose, 6. Creativity and 7. Faith.  What kind of faith? “The righteousness and victory of our struggle,” (divisiveness).

Flowing from Karenga’s paranoia, perhaps drug-induced, that two black women were conspiring to poison him, he tortured them, lashing them with electrical cords, forcing detergent and water into one of them while his own wife sat on her stomach, putting a hot soldering iron into one’s mouth and burning her face with it, crushing her toe in a vise.  His wife turned evidence on him and he was convicted of this in 1971 and served about four years of a ten-year sentence, paroled in 1975. He claimed to have been a “political prisoner”. He is, as of last report, still a professor of pan-African culture in California.

Since we are looking at the misdeeds of the FBI of today, we should mention that both the Us organization and the Black Panthers were being manipulated by the FBI of the 1960’s.  The FBI wanted to set the two groups against one another so they sent letters, purportedly from one to the other, insulting each other. This resulted in several shooting incidents and gun battles - a really nice way for the FBI to serve and protect.  It would appear that they should have been under investigation themselves quite some time ago.  

Tony Snow, several years ago, offered some insights into the background of Kwanzaa.  There is no reason not to celebrate our heritage - it need not be divisive or combative.  We are a remarkably diverse and colorful nation, but black Americans have no shortage of people of their own ethnic heritage to inspire them.  Our history is full of amazing intellectual and cultural American heroes who happen to be black - Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Allen West, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Duke Ellington, Alan Keyes, Mia Love, Jesse Owens, Tim Scott, Diahann Carrol, Ella Fitzgerald, Candace Owens, to name but a tiny fraction of them.  Karenga seems irrelevant.

So, today, Kwanzaa is observed by some 2% of Americans.  The other day I was in the bank. A gentleman who was also there wished me and another lady, a black lady, “Merry Christmas”.  She wished him a “Happy Kwanzaa”. I asked her what day Kwanzaa began and she said she didn’t know. Apparently that’s not that unusual.  It seems as though it didn’t really have roots. I can’t really wish anyone a “Happy Kwanzaa” because it’s not in my knowledge, really. But I can and do sincerely wish people a happy time during Kwanzaa!  

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