(December 12, 2018 at 12:25 am)Rev. Rye Wrote:(December 11, 2018 at 1:41 pm)T0 Th3 M4X Wrote: It's an African holiday. Many Muslims celebrate Kwanzaa and Ramadan. Maybe you're thinking of Hanukkah that the Muslims wouldn't observe.
Actually, it's an African-American holiday that was more or less created as a Black Power alternative to Christmas (by a radical who ended up in jail on torture and false imprisonment charges, which explains why many black families don't celebrate it). And, of course, since the 1990s, it's been more or less a supplement to Christmas that black families may or may not celebrate. To be honest, apart from my research for this post, my most substantive education of Kwanzaa was from that special episode of Rugrats where Susie's aunt railroads the Carmichaels into celebrating Kwanzaa and we celebrate the black experience through their lives, so I may not be the best authority on Kwanzaa practice, but it seems like it's shed its founder's radicalism.
Yeah, funny thing about Kwanzaa is it's pretty much based on cultural appropriation: the Kinara is pretty much a ripoff of the Jewish menorah with two candles removed and the remaining seven in the Red, Green, and Black, which, to be fair, isn't really cultural appropriation), deliberately placed around Christmas, and most of the vocabulary around it is in Swahili, which is from the exact opposite side of Africa that their ancestors were taken from (and seems to have a level of Arabic influence on par with the borrowed "non-Germanic" parts of English, if you're into linguistic purity.) Anyone who insists that cultural appropriation is inherently/automatically bad and still celebrates Kwanzaa really needs to explain themselves.
Sure, and lots of Muslims recognize it so I don't see what your point is. Lots of Muslims come from Africa and there are even American Muslims that migrate to Africa. Approximately 1/3 of the world's Muslim population is on the continent of Africa. Really though, anybody can choose to celebrate it.
