Does Anyone Celebrate Kwanzaa???
Each year at my daughter’s school I am asked if I would like to help with the Kwanzaa display at school. Being one of two African American families at our school I guess I should be excited to share a part of African American history with the student body – after all I am a champion for multi cultural education (right??). The issue is that Kwanzaa has never been a part of my history. I never celebrated Kwanzaa growing up and only briefly celebrated it while I was in college. I don’t know any of the seven principles unless I google it first and other than a salad bowl and a mudcloth I received in college we have no Kwanzaa paraphernalia that we can even use if we chose to celebrate Kwanzaa.
Why We Don’t Celebrate:
There are many reasons why individuals do not celebrate Kwanzaa. Some out right refuse to celebrate Kwanzaa for a few reasons and some of us are just ambivalent. I’ve heard many emphasize that Kwanzaa is a “fake” or “made up” holiday and refuse to celebrate for that reason alone. Others critique Karenga – Kwanzaa’s founder. While some that straddle both camps decide not to celebrate Kwanzaa out of the growing commercialism of the holiday. In recent years Kwanzaa has developed into a much more widely accepted media-friendly holiday than one that is actually practiced by African American families.
Why We Celebrate:
How can anything that was created to uplift and support our community be viewed as “stupid” (recent comment posted on Clutch Magazine)? Those that celebrate often were actively involved in the 60’s movement and adopted Kwanzaa principles while also adopting a new perspective on life where African heritage was central in their self identity. I informed my husband this morning that we will begin celebrating Kwanzaa. Reading a friend’s blog post this morning I realized that all of the work I’ve done this year in attempting to redefine our Christmas celebration highlights very similar principles as Kwanzaa.
Today I will buy a kinara and tonight we will light it in celebration.
The Seven Principles of Kwanzaa:
- Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
- Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves stand up.
- Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems, and to solve them together.
- Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
- Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
- Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
- Imani (Faith): To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
Share with us why your family does or does not celebrate Kwanzaa and other views you may want to share about this holiday.
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Our family doesn’t celebrate Kwanzaa but we do believe it’s an important cultural reference point for our children to understand. We recently attended a lovely age appropriate Kwanzaa celebration and I was struck by the simplicity, grace, and caring that went into creating the experience. I’m grateful we have another point to bring us together and expand our horizons.
Thanks for adding to the conversation Glenda. And please feel free to post about cultural events that other families may want to attend or email me directly at jamila@paassc.com and I’ll post it. Glad you and your family enjoyed the holiday.
Jamila,
I am so grateful for this post. We had really been ambivalent about celebrating anything. We went through the debates. My Dad asked, “Why use Swahili? Our people came from West Africa and wouldn’t have spoken ki Swahili.” But of course, it is the most widely spoken African language.
On the other hand, we really get into sharing our time off to really spend quality time together, making meals together, playing games together, cleaning up together, etc. My boys thoroughly enjoy making presents for each other and loved ones and our gifts to our boys are always educational. The new year is a time to reflect and evaluate where we are and where we would like to be. In the end, the idea of celebrating the values of Kwanzaa aligns most closely with what we are about as a family.
Another parent and I did a Kwanzaa presentation for all of the classes at Yu Ming. He read a book to the children and I orchestrated an art project where each child wove a mat out of construction paper. It went really well, but I have to say the most endearing piece for me, was how proud our children were that we were in their classes talking about something so close to them. In the Kwanzaa book there was a part that mentioned the art of braiding hair and this one little girl just lit up! My son proudly placed the candles in the kinara and held it up for his classmates to see. His excitement was contagious and his peers were visibly interested in learning more. It was also a great way to connect with the other Black children at the school.
Having Black children at Chinese-immersion schools means that we as parents have to really make an effort to support our children’s cultural growth and development. We want them to love themselves and be proud of who they are, not solely immersed in cultures outside of themselves. I believe Kwanzaa is a part of that.
Happy Kwanzaa!
Love and blessings,
Dawn
Thanks for sharing Dawn. I agree with everything you outlined in your comment. As an African American parent at a Chinese Immersion school the strong presence of cultural celebrations has been noted. It has encouraged me to look for additional opportunities to embrace cultural celebrations that help the girls better understand our heritage and their ancestry. Hopefully I will be able to help at our school next year by creating a similarly enriching and fun Kwanzaa craft for the children.
Jamila
thanks for the post, it helped me a lot.
Keep working ,great job!
thanks for share this great thread.