Kwanzaa is a week-long festival celebrated mainly in the U.S. from December 26 through January 1 each year. It was established in 1966 by the socialist and black nationalist Maulana Karenga, who branded the holiday as a black alternative to Christmas. Karenga's idea was to celebrate the end of what he considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans.

According to the official Kwanzaa website, the celebration was designed to foster "conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans" and provide a "reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans' ancestors."

Karenga postulated seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith, each of which gets its day during Kwanzaa week. The third and fourth principles in that list are overtly Marxist. In fact, the seven principles as a whole mirror precisely the principles symbolized by the seven-headed cobra emblem of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a pro-Marxist, revolutionary terrorist group of the 1970s.

The philosophy underlying Kwanzaa is known as Kawaida, a variation of classical Marxism that includes also enmity toward white people. Practitioners of Kawaida believe that one's racial identity "determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding."

Karenga and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: "We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one G-d of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination."

The name "Kwanzaa" derives from the Swahili term "matunda yakwanza," or "first fruit," and the festival's trappings have Swahili names -- such as "ujima" for "collective work and responsibility" or "muhindi," which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family. But Swahili has no historical relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were taken from the shores of West Africa; Swahili is an East African tongue. Even the rituals using corn don't fit. Corn isn't indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists. The inventors of Kwanzaa were not promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism.


Adapted from "The Truth about Kwanzaa," by Tony Snow (December 31, 1999), and "Kwanzaa: A Holiday From the FBI," by Ann Coulter
(January 2, 2008).