Being Vice President to a chap who has not been shy about liberally “quoting” from the speeches of others like former British Labour leader Neil Kinnock, – don’t even ask what might possess a body – no doubt lowers the bar when it comes to strict adherence to, well, the truth.
Thus it is that Kamala Harris has opened up a debate with regards to her claim that her childhood memories of the “Holidays” centre on her family’s celebration of Kwanzaa. Kwanzaa is a sort of makey-up alternative to Christmas for black Americans, even though the vast majority of black Americans do all the same stuff as the rest of Americans at Christmas, and if anything are as deeply attached to its Christian aspects.
Kamala Harris on Twitter: “Our Kwanzaa celebrations are one of my favorite childhood memories. The whole family would gather around across multiple generations and we’d tell stories and light the candles. Whether you’re celebrating this year with those you live with or over Zoom, happy Kwanzaa! https://t.co/21bzGHZpYe” / Twitter
Our Kwanzaa celebrations are one of my favorite childhood memories. The whole family would gather around across multiple generations and we’d tell stories and light the candles.
Whether you’re celebrating this year with those you live with or over Zoom, happy Kwanzaa! pic.twitter.com/21bzGHZpYe
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) December 26, 2020
A 2012 poll found that just 4% of respondents celebrate Kwanzaa but as it has not credible basis in either African or black American culture and history, it is probably a pretty nebulous concept to most people anyway.
Indeed, as several African commentators have pointed out, Karenga’s claim in regard to Swahili roots for all of this – dubious in themselves – are made even more tenuous by the fact that the vast majority of black slaves taken to American were from regions where Swahili was not the spoken language.
The reason that Kamala Harris has attracted such scorn is that her own background makes it highly unlikely that Kwanzaa was a big thing with her folks when she was a child. It was only invented in 1966, two years after Harris was born, and her mother was a Tamil who appears to have introduced her children to Hinduism. Harris later lived in Montreal.
Kwanzaa was invented by Ronald Everett who changed his name to Maulana Ndabezitha (Ron) Karanga as an alternative to what he depicted as the psychotic racist Christian Christmas. Like the black supremacist Nation of Islam, Karanga’s ideology was largely made up with little or no relation to African culture in the one instance, or Islam in the other.
One of the seven principles which Kwanzaa celebrates is Ujamma which is the ideology that was used by corrupt regimes such as that in Nyerere’s Tanzania to justify a brutal Maoist inspired socialist mess in that country. Karanga himself would have thrived in such an environment.
Also in 1966 Karanga established an organisation, United Slaves, which attempted to compete with the Black Panther gang which led to a feud that involved several murders. Karanga was convicted in 1971 of the horrific torture of two women who he suspected were using magic against him. The torture was alleged to have included the placing of a hot soldering iron in one of the victim’s mouths.
None of this prevented Karanga from following in the footsteps of his Panther drug dealer and rapist rivals like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver in becoming an icon of the white university left, to the extent that he has built a thriving academic career on the basis of what many serious black and African scholars regards as rather spurious theoretical concepts drawn from ancient Egypt.
Harris’ real fault is not so much in possibly embellishing or inventing stuff for political reasons but in perpetuating the spurious mythologizing of the likes of Karenga and the other gangs that hated her other putative idol Martin Luther King. In that she is no different to the white Democrats who have made heroes of the middle class brats of the Weather Underground.
Of course, only history nerds and people with long memories get any of this or understand the absurdity of it all. To its purveyors history is no more than what you want it to be, based on whatever emotions or requirements are the flavour of the month or the day.