Kwanzaa Isn’t ‘Fake,’ But America’s Outrage Over It Is
Every year, like clockwork, white conservative media and their self-hating Black mascots crawl out of their ideological chamber pots to remind us that nothing rattles them more than Black people lighting candles and refusing to ask the whites for permission to celebrate Kwanzaa. And because they have nothing new to say, they chant the same dusty greatest hits on loop.
“Kwanzaa is fake.”
“Kwanzaa is communism.”
“Kwanzaa is Marxist.”
To the haters, Kwanzaa is a scam perpetrated by Black radicals, white liberals, and allegedly “clueless” public school teachers. Kwanzaa is illegitimate because it was created in the 1960s. It is irredeemable because its founder committed violent crimes against women. It is dangerous because it doesn’t orbit Christianity or capitalism. It is suspicious because it encourages Black people to value unity, self-determination, collective responsibility, and other African diasporic values.
It doesn’t matter that the claims are old, debunked, or intellectually bankrupt. It persists because it performs a function, which is to reassure a certain audience that Black people creating meaning outside of whiteness, Christianity, and capitalism is inherently suspect. And it also rewards the Black voices willing to repeat the lies on cue.
This year, that lie was dutifully recycled by CJ Pearson, a professional culture-war surrogate whose entire public relevance depends on performing Black disapproval for a white conservative audience. He is a human forwarding service for right-wing talking points, paid in attention and proximity.
Pearson wrote in a post on X: “Reminder that Kwanzaa is a fake holiday created in 1966 by a communist “Africana Studies” professor at Cal State Long Beach who went to prison for torturing women with electical cords and was the founder of a violent black nationalist organization with ties to the FB. And it’s entire purpose was to draw the black community away from Christ. I still have never met a single person who celebrates it.”
His post is a mess in every sense of the word: factually sloppy, conspiratorial, drenched in evangelical paranoia, and riddled with basic errors that betray how little he understands what he’s condemning. He recycles the Karenga narrative without context, accuracy, or intellectual honesty, throws in scare quotes around “Africana Studies,” misspells “electrical,” invents FBI conspiracies, and then lands on the predictable punchline that Kwanzaa exists to seduce Black people away from Christ. This is from someone defending a religious tradition that was used to justify slavery, segregation, lynching, and child abuse for centuries. The audacity would be impressive if it weren’t so stupid.
“I’ve never met a single person who celebrates it,” he adds, as if his social circle were a form of evidence rather than a self-own. That sentence alone tells you that his social world is small, curated, and engineered to keep him comfortable. Black people who don’t mirror his theology or politics simply don’t register as real to him. If it doesn’t exist in his feed, it doesn’t exist at all.
Pearson gets claps from an audience that enjoys watching a Black man scold other Black people on their behalf. He traffics in the lie that Black culture is only legitimate when it submits to Christianity as policed by white evangelicals, to capitalism as practiced by exclusion, and to a national identity that has never loved Black people back.
Let’s start with his premise that Kwanzaa is “fake” because it was created in 1966. This is a strange accusation coming from a whole political movement that venerates Thanksgiving, which is a holiday literally manufactured to launder genocide, land theft, and mass death into gratitude and stuffing.
But consistency has never been the point.
Christmas itself is a Frankenstein’s monster of appropriated pagan rituals, imperial Christian branding, and modern consumer capitalism, stitched together centuries after the birth of the Jesus they claim it faithfully commemorates. Easter is a rebranded fertility festival retrofitted with resurrection theology.
Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark-sponsored celebration of compulsory romance that has absolutely nothing to do with its alleged saint. Mother’s Day was invented in the early 20th century, promptly hijacked by florists, and now functions as an annual guilt campaign. Father’s Day was a marketing afterthought. Halloween is a mashup of Celtic ritual, Christian anxiety, and plastic garbage bags full of candy. Even the American flag rituals they drool over were formalized long after the founding, deliberately engineered to manufacture nationalism in schools.
And then there’s the Fourth of July, which is the crown jewel of American mythology. It is a holiday celebrating freedom declared by a group of white slaveholders who quite literally did not believe Black people were human, Indigenous people were sovereign, or women were political beings. Fireworks, cookouts, and red-white-and-blue merch now paper over the fact that July 4, 1776, meant nothing resembling liberty for the majority of people living on this land. Enslaved Africans remained property. Indigenous nations remained targets. Poor white men without property remained excluded. The holiday exists to ritualize contradiction to celebrate what Frederick Douglass in 1852 called a “sham” and a performance of liberty masking ongoing violence.
The United States is a nation of invented traditions, improvised rituals, and retroactive myth-making. The outrage is not that Kwanzaa was created. It’s that Black people did the creation on purpose, in public, without pretending it fell from the sky or was ordained by white men, God, or the free market..
The fixation on Maulana Karenga’s personal history is equally revealing. But nothing about acknowledging that fact undermines Kwanzaa as a cultural practice. Two things can be true.
By the Kwanzaa haters’ logic, Thomas Jefferson’s serial rape of the enslaved teenager. Sally Hemings should nullify the Declaration of Independence. George Washington’s lifelong trafficking of human beings should disqualify the presidency itself. James Madison’s slaveholding should void the Constitution. Andrew Jackson’s ethnic cleansing of Indigenous nations should collapse American democracy outright. John C. Calhoun’s open worship of slavery should invalidate every theory of states’ rights still taught with a straight face.
Martin Luther’s vicious antisemitism should dismantle Protestant Christianity at its root. Henry Ford’s admiration for Hitler should shut down modern manufacturing. Walt Disney’s racism should burn the entire American nostalgia industry to the ground. Cecil Rhodes’s genocidal ideology should have erased his scholarships, statues, and institutional afterlife decades ago. And Christianity itself would not survive five minutes if the brutality of crusaders, colonizers, enslavers, and child-abusing clergy were treated as disqualifying.
America has never been a society that discards its institutions because their architects were criminals or morally grotesque. In fact, it has built an entire mythology around excusing them. What offends haters like CJ Pearson is not Karenga’s treatment of women. It is that Kwanzaa centers Black people without reference to whiteness, Christianity, or American nationalism.
Notice the sleight of hand. When white men commit violence, their ideas are separated from their actions. When Black men do, their violence is treated as proof that any cultural contribution they make is permanently contaminated. This is not moral consistency but racialized gatekeeping.
Haters have also insisted that Kwanzaa has “nothing to do with Africa,” as though African diasporic identity must meet some anthropological purity test administered by white conservatives who couldn’t locate Mali on a map, or think Africa is a whole country. Kwanzaa does not claim to be an ancient African ritual. It is a diasporic practice and a consciously constructed response to historical rupture. Enslaved Africans were stripped of language, lineage, ceremony, and continuity. Expecting African Americans to produce an unbroken, untouched tradition after centuries of forced erasure is pure gaslighting.
Kwanzaa is not pretending to be older than it is. It is doing something far more threatening, which is teaching Black folks that they are allowed to build meaning deliberately. It is teaching us that values can be named. That community can be centered. That identity does not have to be mediated through whiteness, capitalism, or Christianity to be legitimate.
This is where the hysteria about Kwanzaa being “Marxist” comes in. The seven principles of Kwanzaa, which are unity, self-determination, collective responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith, are not some damn communist manifesto. They are values. Values that have existed in Black communities long before Karl Marx wrote a word. Mutual aid did not begin in a European library. Collective responsibility did not originate in a pamphlet. Cooperative economics was practiced by Black churches, mutual aid societies, and freedpeople’s communities precisely because white capitalism excluded them.
Calling these principles “Marxist” is a dog whistle. It is the same move that labels public libraries socialist and unions un-American. It reveals a worldview in which anything that does not revolve around profit extraction, hierarchy, and individual hoarding is treated as ideological contamination.
What truly animates this annual sneer campaign is the fear that Black people might stop orienting themselves around white approval and toxic traditions that don’t liberate us. Kwanzaa does not require belief in a white savior. It does not center on American exceptionalism. It does not ask Black children to imagine themselves as guests in someone else’s story. That is the threat.
Kwanzaa does not need permission to exist. It does not need validation from people who believe whiteness is the default setting of humanity. And it does not collapse because its founder was deeply flawed in a nation built by men who raped, enslaved, lynched, and lied their way into monuments.
Calling Kwanzaa “fake” is not a critique. It is a confession from people who refuse to engage seriously with anything that affirms Black interiority, healing, autonomy, communal care, and self-love.
SEE ALSO:
Everything To Know About Kwanzaa
Arizona Republican Blasts Kwanzaa As ‘Anti-American Holiday’
