The day after Christmas, President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama wanted all Americans to share in their overflowing holiday spirit, so they wished everyone a Happy Kwanzaa.
On the second day of Christmas the First Family gave to us an official statement celebrating a “holiday” invented by an ex-con turned Marxist professor whose fanatical followers killed two men. (They issued a similar proclamation last year; Presidents Bush and Clinton have also praised Kwanzaa.) The Obamas’ Kwanzaa message praised the holiday’s notion of black ethnic solidarity and collectivism. The president wrote:
Michelle and I extend our warmest thoughts and wishes to all those who are celebrating Kwanzaa this holiday season. Today [Dec. 26] is the first of a joyful seven-day celebration of African American culture and heritage.
The seven principles of Kwanzaa — unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith — are some of the very values that make us Americans.
As families across America and around the world light the Kinara today in the spirit of umoja, or unity, our family sends our well wishes and blessings for a happy and healthy new year.
The terse announcement induces boredom unless one knows the history of Kwanzaa, its Marxist creator, and its racially focused teachings.
Kwanzaa: A Made-Up Holiday for Black Marxists
Kwanzaa was created by Ron Everett, who in the fashion of Malcolm X dropped his “slave name” and dubbed himself Maulana Karenga; Maulana means “master-teacher” in Swahili, and Karenga means “nationalist.” He founded The Organization US, and once again the name possessed hidden significance: US stood not for United States but for “United Slaves.”
He invented Kwanzaa in 1966 as a pan-African holiday of black liberation and racial solidarity. He pretended the week-long celebration that begins on December 26 was invented in Africa and even gave its seven precepts, which he invented, Swahili names. He later admitted to The Washington Post:
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. I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of ‘bloods’ [Blacks] would be partying.
But he and his “Slaves” had loftier ambitions. They intended to take over UCLA’s Black Studies department. Unfortunately, the Black Panthers had the same idea, and the two groups clashed on campus, often violently. In 1969, two of Karenga’s followers murdered Black Panthers John Higgins and Al “Bunchy” Carter.
Convicted of Torture
One year later, Karenga would dish out the violence against his fellow black nationalists, this time against his own faithful. He was convicted and served time in prison for imprisoning and torturing two women, Gail Davis and Deborah Jones, inside his Inglewood, California, home in May 1970. Karenga accused the two women, who were living in his house, of attempting to assassinate him by placing “crystals” in his food and clothing. A reporter recently summarized the Los Angeles Times‘ coverage of Karenga’s 1971 trial:
Karenga and the other [three] men forced the women to remove their clothes, and beat them with an electrical cord and a karate baton. The men put a hot soldering iron in one woman’s mouth and against her face, and they squeezed one woman’s big toe in a vise, the Times reported. Karenga’s former wife, Brenda Lorraine Karenga, testified he sat on one woman’s stomach while another man forced water into her mouth through a hose.
All the while, Karenga verbally terrorized the women, saying, “Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I know.” The Times added the next day “Karenga, holding a gun, threatened to shoot both of them.” His own wife testified against him in his 1971 trial.
After being sentenced to between one and ten years in prison, he served four or five. While in the big house, Karenga is widely suspected of turning stool pigeon for the FBI.
After getting out of prison, Karenga recycled his nonsensical theories into a Ph.D. thesis and in time became head of the Department of Black (now Africana) Studies at California State University at Long Beach. According to Jesse Lee Peterson’s book Scam, Karenga headed the department for 13 years, using it as a platform to teach racism and political radicalism. That extremism pervades the holiday that our president has celebrated.
How Barack Got His Umoja Back
In this year’s Kwanzaa proclamation, Barack and Michelle Obama specifically praise Karenga’s seven principles of Kwaznaa as the quintessence of American public life, “the very values that make us Americans.” They specifically mentioned “umoja,” or unity. However, Kwanzaa’s unity is a racial unity of all black people — in a struggle against others. In his 1988 book The African American Holiday of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family Community and Culture, Karenga wrote that umoja “means a oneness, a similarity and sameness that gives us an identity as a people, an African people. And inherent in the identity as a people is the ethical and political imperative to self-consciously unite in order to define, defend and develop our interests.”
The post-racial president and his wife just saluted black racial solidarity.
One thing is clear: whatever pan-African umoja is, it is not one “of the very values that make us Americans.”
The remaining six principles are, if anything, less subtle. Kathy Shaidle pointed out, “Ujamaa, or ‘cooperative economics’—one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa—is the term the socialist leader of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, used for his disastrous policy of putting tens of thousands of Tanzanians on collective farms.” (Emphasis in original.)
All of Karenga’s “collective” actions and racial focus sound as though they were plucked from Jeremiah Wright’s church, with its “African values” and racialist focus. Obama, who spent a few decades imbibing Wright’s poison, now encourages the world to celebrate Karenga’s black nationalist festival, claiming its values embody the American way as he sees it. Is Obama a racially obsessed collectivist? At some point, the American people must accept his words at face value.
