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Kwanzaa's Anti-Christmas Roots 🧠 Memory Hole 🕳️
posted ago by bluewhiteandred ago by bluewhiteandred +16 / -0

Looks like something like this has been posted in other wins but maybe not here:

Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by radical Black activist Ron Karenga, a felon convicted of assault and false imprisonment after he tortured two women.

https://www.conservapedia.com/Kwanzaa

During the early years of Kwanzaa, Karenga said that it was meant to be an "oppositional alternative" to Christmas.[6] However, as Kwanzaa gained mainstream adherents, Karenga altered his position so that practicing Christians would not be alienated, then stating in the 1997 Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community, and Culture, "Kwanzaa was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion or religious holiday."

https://infogalactic.com/info/Kwanzaa

For Karenga, a major figure in the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the creation of such holidays also underscored an essential premise that "you must have a cultural revolution before before the violent revolution. The cultural revolution gives identity, purpose and direction."[5]

So it was intentionally created as kind of anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-Western culture kind of tradition. But in some ways I imagine it's been stripped of that original intent, or I imagine a lot of people who do keep up the tradition probably don't care about this philosophy explicitly (although they may do so implicitly) - although probably some others do.

What do you think of the history of Kwanzaa and what it is today?