Kwanzaa Commentary

Well, I actually expected people to say, hmmm another viewpoint, maybe I should check out his blog… Incidently, I think people will find a lot more than they probably care to read in support and clarification of Kwanzaa, which brings me to the question of who’s actually doing the drive by. I can state without exaggeration that at least 40 blogs have assented to the trashing of Kwanzaa by pointing to Barber, Mulshin or Coulter, without much thought.
At any rate, I can’t say how may people have come by my blog to read up, but that was the expectation, after all the link is implicit.
The value of promoting the truth about the smear against Kwanzaa is that it illustrates mean-spiritedness some people pass off as research and the shallowness of the actual critique.
It’s all here:
http://www.mdcbowen.org/cobb/archives/cat_kwanzaa.html
And specifically here:
http://www.mdcbowen.org/cobb/archives/005050.html
In your format:
Here follows an open letter to all defenders of liberty.
I have found myself in a very uncomfortable predicament. You see I celebrate Kwanzaa. I do so for all the best reasons you might imagine, including the rather unique fact that my parents and I were there at its inception. Because I am a blogger and have no mainstream media credentials, there isn’t much that I have been able to do to correct the revisionism attending much of the publicity given to Kwanzaa by certain Christian activists and their defenders on the web. Yet I feel very strongly that there should be some balance given the distortions of this tradition and its meaning, and so I appeal to you.
The difficulty with defending Kwanzaa is part of its redeeming quality. As with Christmas, there is no central authority that controls the way its celebrants behave or what they think. People come up with all kinds of reasons and ways, some good some bad, but not strictly dictated and controlled to spend Kwanzaa week. And yet the primary attack on this meek celebration presumes that very thing – that all of us who enjoy Kwanzaa are under the spell and thumb of its primary founder, Ron Karenga. There are plenty of ugly things to say about Ron Karenga, and the enemies of Kwanzaa have spared no details. I think it is sufficient to say that he was a convicted felon. But those who continue their attacks on the holiday have found no end of ways to putting their interpretations of his intent on center stage in their rants against it. To say that Karenga’s definitions of Kwanzaa supercede all others is very much like saying there could be no improvements to America and those who celebrate it based on the sins of Thomas Jefferson – whatever those sins might be. Literally that the sins of Karenga should and do haunt everyone who celebrates Kwanzaa.
This is particularly distrubing and hurtful to me, not only because it indicates the depths to which people will debase themselves to smear others, but because of my personal connection to it and my relative inability to counter the onslaught. In a very real and significant way this has come to represent to me a failure of the blogosphere to live up to its promise of getting useful information to the public by people who are personally invested but not attached to some media machine. But I hold out hope.

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