Khrist Kwanzaa?



Reflecting our evangelical zeal, we now are more deliberate about recognizing African-American contributions to our Catholic culture. This, too, is positive and enriching and it helps remind us that “catholic” means universal. For instance, one popular new book of saints includes a lengthy entry for Venerable Pierre Toussant, a descendent of black slaves who migrated to New York City in the late eighteenth century.

But when Catholics try to “Catholicize” this thing called Kwanzaa — as it seems some are now doing — we are making a mistake. Kwanzaa is not an African-American tradition. In fact, it is not a tradition at all. It was invented in 1966 by an avowed anti-Christian for the express purpose of, among other things, diverting attention from Christmas.

The father of Kwanzaa, Ron Everett, began his career as a black separatist and follower of Malcolm X. After Africanizing his last name to “Karenga,” Everett formed a group called “United Slaves” which, while supposedly devoted to the cause of black nationalism, spent a considerable amount of time brutalizing other blacks. Everett’s followers murdered two members of a rival group, the Black Panthers, on a college campus in 1970. Everett himself did time in prison a few years later for assault, stemming from charges that he tortured two women with a hot soldering iron, a toaster, a vise, and other household implements, after making them drink detergent.

When he wasn’t committing violent crimes or spending time in prison for doing so, Everett/Karenga wrote tracts elucidating the exclusionary, anti-Christian philosophy behind Kwanzaa. In The Quotable Karenga, he wrote of seven principles of blackness, corresponding to the seven principles of Kwanzaa: “think black, talk black, act black, create black, buy black, vote black, and live black.” He has openly mocked Christianity, writing that “Belief in spooks who threaten us if we don’t worship them and demand we turn over our destiny and daily lives must be categorized as spookism and condemned.” After he emerged from prison, he embraced Marxism. His years of self-directed scholarship earned him a departmental chair at a university in California.

Years of effort by a sympathetic media establishment to market Kwanzaa as a genuine tradition have lately started paying off. Everett himself has started softening the racially-exclusionary, anti-Christian themes that inspired Kwanzaa, speaking blandly in recent years of Kwanzaa as a time of “reverence for the Creator.”

And so it is that some Catholics have lately smiled upon this curious holiday. Just in time for Christmas — or, rather, just in time for “Khrist Kwanzaa” — the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s Catholic Telegraph presented a warm, fuzzy article this past month by Sister Jannette Pruitt celebrating Kwanzaa. In the photograph accompanying the article, she appears not in a habit (American nuns over a certain age just don’t wear habits anymore), but in a blue, African-style headdress and robes that would have warmed Everett’s heart.

Her essay speaks admiringly of Everett as “Dr. Maulana Karenga, a leading theorist of African-American history and culture.” The article describes all the Kwanzaa-inspired Catholic activities in Sister Jannette’s home city of Indianapolis and at the motherhouse of her sisterly order. The week-long Kwanzaa festivities are capped off by a Mass celebrated by Father Steven Brown, SVD, “with lively Gospel song and liturgical dance.”

Although the Church has taken no specific position with respect to Kwanzaa, this is one “tradition” that we Catholics should be wary of embracing on strictly prudential grounds. Taking her cues from the Incarnation, the Church has a praiseworthy history of selecting what is good from the traditions of the surrounding non-Christian culture and “baptizing” it into Christianity. As we have learned, however, Kwanzaa isn’t a tradition in any real sense. Traditions develop over centuries; they aren’t dreamed up in the imaginations of “theorists,” even under the best of circumstances. (Given the circumstances surrounding the invention of Kwanzaa, “best” isn’t the first word that comes to mind.)

And at the risk of stating the obvious, Kwanzaa falls during the octave of Christmas. It distracts Christians from the uniqueness of the season. But that is exactly what Everett intended Kwanzaa to do.

Moreover, as Catholics, we do not define ourselves by faddish, reductionist theories that make a person’s race the essence of his identity. We are privileged to be members of the Body of Christ. Perhaps Sister Jannette — and all of us — should spend more time focusing on what that means.

Kwanzaa can wait.

© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange

Rich Leonardi, publisher of the blog Ten Reasons, writes from Cincinnati, Ohio.

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