Word: africanism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...quasi-alternative to Christmas. The inspiration for Kwanzaa was born not in a manger, but in the mind of a would-be wise man, Dr. Maulana Karenga, a college professor in the 1960s. The holiday is founded on a fairly simple, if somewhat alarming, syllogism: blacks share a common African cultural heritage; blacks do not have a winter holiday of their own to celebrate; so blacks ought to have a holiday of their own with African underpinnings, festive rituals and all the trappings of a religious feast...
Kwanzaa's premises raise important questions answered persuasively by the practice of Black History Month. Is an assumed African cultural heritage the most preferable source of identity and ethnic pride for black Americans? Do blacks as such require separate holidays? Black History Month suggests otherwise...
Celebration of rightly famous historical figures, both American and black, supports a source of black identity and pride significantly more relevant and accessible to modern black Americans than any notion of common African cultural heritage. Also, both blacks and whites celebrate Black History Month. As McDonald's and Better Foods evince, Black History Month lacks all of Kwanzaa's exclusivity and divisiveness. Black History Month provides a unifying, healing celebration of black identity...
...earlier, I was getting the lowdown on her profession from two of New York's Finest. Over a late lunch at the Tick Tock Diner, Detective Ralph Aiello briefed me about his undercover work for Operation Crystal Ball, a crackdown on exploitative fortunetellers. "They're like vultures on the African plain," says Aiello. His boss, Lieutenant Robert Groth, in a sleek blue suit and crisp haircut, puts it simply: "They're professional con artists...
DIED. MARIUS SCHOON, below, right, 61, white South African antiapartheid activist; of lung cancer; in Johannesburg. Schoon was jailed for 12 years for a failed attempt in the '60s to bomb a police building. In 1984 his wife and daughter were killed by a mail bomb sent at the behest of a police official who later admitted to the crime. Said President Nelson Mandela: "He destroyed the myth that all Afrikaners were racists and oppressors...