Friday, December 27, 2024

Kwanzaa 2024: Progressive Holiday Meditations in the Time of Trump

 

Kwanzaa 2024:

Progressive Holiday Meditations in the Time of Trump

December 26th is the first day of Kwanzaa, the African American Festival of the First Fruits. A cultural construction of the 1960s, Kwanzaa was created out of the ashes of the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles in 1966.

 I’m attaching a newspaper article interviewing me about the origins of Kwanzaa and the rituals associated with it. As a preface for the article, I’d like to talk about the value Kwanzaa can add to the holiday season for all Americans, but especially those of us who share a progressive vision for our country.

 

American progressivism embodies the idea of a secular nation in which there is no established state religion and where people can worship the religion of their choice, or no religion at all. Progressivism also advances a multiracial/multicultural nation and a democratic political culture in which we can debate what “liberty and justice for all” means and make policy to reflect those meanings in each generation.

 

The other major holidays that large portions of our population celebrate in this season, Christmas and Hanukkah, are religious. For large percentages of those holidays this is part of a 5-6 week season beginning with Thanksgiving and culminating on New Years Day, or perhaps even the 12th day of Christmas, January 6th.

 

For many In the mainstream of society Thanksgiving is a festival of the harvest and thanks by the English settlers for having survived their first year on these shores. Many progressives, mindful that Indigenous people view European success as the beginning of dispossession, attempt to join our Native fellows in a more somber recognition of Thanksgiving.[1]

 

Nevertheless, the festival of the harvest morphs seamlessly into a celebration of birth (of Christ), of the miracle of the Virgen de Guadalupe, of the rededication of the desecrated temple (Hanukkah) a pagan new year (solstice), i.e., the transit from past to future. For many these celebrations are not religious at all, but chances to bask in the company of family and loved ones as seasons change and the calendar flips.

 

Kwanzaa also does all that, but in a this worldly way with a slight nod to spirituality. It was born in the spirit of Black Power, and a yearning by Black people to create our own value system and institutions, because America was failing to assimilate us. That failure was one of white assimilationism, which is a cornerstone of American Traditionalism. Assimilation into White supremacy didn’t work for African Americans and before the 1960s were over all peoples of color had developed nationalist identity movements. Assimilation wasn’t working for them either.

 

The founders of Kwanzaa were Black separatists and there are those today who would still wish to reserve its observance for people of African descent. After marrying Rebecca who is of Anglo-Irish descent, having two beautiful children and living in ultra-White Bellingham, Washington, I wanted to give my family “something African American” for the holiday season.[2] We started having Kwanzaa parties and offering it to the entire community.

 

In our neck of the woods Kwanzaa became a multiracial celebration. And so it has across America. I don’t know how many African Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa and live in White communities share in with White people in their communities, but information about the holiday is available in mainstream media. News of Kwanzaa events is available in metropolitan areas with significant African American populations nationwide. Woke folx everywhere now say Happy Kwanzaa in the litany of their holiday greetings.

 

For all y’all African Americans in White communities who aren’t already doing it, I encourage you to invite White friends, and folks of all races into your Kwanzaa celebrations. In my last post, traumatized as we all were by Trump’s victory, I wrote that “we must defend our political and cultural positionality in the slim hope that we can force traditionalists to the table to attain a pragmatic middle-ground.” I promised going forward “to map some of the ways that progressives are defending the right to live according to our values.”[3] 

 

The principles of the nights of Kwanzaa talk about Unity, Self-determination, Collective Work and Responsibility, Cooperative Economics, Purpose, Creativity ... things we must marshall in this world if we are to shape it to our liking.[4] In my house, in keeping with Kwanzaa tradition,  we discuss the principle of the evening and how we can pursue it in practice in the coming year.

 

So this year celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah in the spirit of birth, rebirth and renewal. And embrace Kwanzaa for the possibilities it offers to create a world that embraces  the values of multiracial/multicultural democracy.



[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2022/11/23/thanksgiving-from-an-indigenous-perspective/

 [2] See "A Beginner's Guide to Kwanzaa," https://www.wabe.org/a-beginners-guide-to-kwanzaa/

[3] Vernon Damani Johnson, The Case for a Pluralistic Notion of Nationhood, Damani: Let’s Talk Politics, Sunday, November 24, 2024.

[4]  The last night. Imani (Faith), implies spirituality; but faith in the prospects for a better day in the future can be held in a secular fashion.

 

Sunday, November 24, 2024

The Case for a Pluralistic Notion of Nationhood

 

The Case for a Pluralistic Notion of Nationhood

Historians often talk about the United States as the first new nation in the world to have emerged out of European colonialism. Many go on to talk about the US as new in comparison to European nations like France, Great Britain or Russia, which had a sense of peoplehood, or national identity long before the 18th century.  

But in terms of modern nationhood the US is one of the oldest nations in the world. By modern I mean those nations that transformed their governments according to the values of the Enlightenment.[1] The idea that the people are sovereign was the application of Enlightenment rationality to statecraft. That meant creating states committed to popular sovereignty, the notion that the people control their governors, rather than being ruled by them. That was the way that the seminal Enlightenment principle of progress and the idea that the future could be better worked in the realm of government.

The US has been grappling with the issue of popular governance and what it means to be an American for nearly 250 years; longer than any European country except Great Britain.[2] Once the genie of popular sovereignty was let out of the bottle the issue of the people really ruling could not be kept out of the conversation. The Shay’s and Whiskey Rebellions of the 1780s and 90s were early challenges by common folk who felt they weren’t being heard by elites after the Revolutionary War. That was at a time when few White men even had the right to vote. Elites were able to stave off urges toward broader channels of formal participation by including a Bill of Rights in the constitution in 1791. Like the question of slavery and systemic racism that I write so much about, the issue of expansion of suffrage was a container that was kicked down the road at the constitutional convention.  

Since the revolutionary era, a succession of identity politics movements have waged struggles to to incorporate their people into equality before the law in the heteropatriarchal capitalist system.[3] One of the bloodiest civil wars in world history was fought in the US over the issue of the enslavement of African Americans. Women, some of whom cut their teeth fighting to abolish slavery, waged an eight-decade struggle to gain the right vote. I confess that I don’t know how many decades workers organized before they won passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. But I do know that lynchings of European immigrant worker activists, less numerous than  those of Blacks or Mexicans, also occurred in the late 19th century.[4]

Then there were all the identity politics movements of the 1960s, each arrayed against a different pillar of heteropatriarchy: the Civil Rights Movement against racism, the women’s movement against sexism, and the LGBTQ movement against heteronormativity.

Traditional American nationalism is synonymous with heteropatriarchy. Those founding forces have faced pressure to assimilate and incorporate succeeding generations of identity movements into the mainstream of society for nearly 250 years, while holding steadfastly to their core values. Demographic data this century has been suggesting that younger people are becoming less racist and homophobic, while the record on sexism at least to me, is more mixed. But all of those forces and growing concern around climate change have fueled very powerful “anti-systemic movements.”[5]

Traditional conservatism was exhausted with fighting off the persistent challenges from the left on policies where public opinion polling consistently shows that majorities favor leftist positions on things like gun control, abortion, the green economy, etc. In a hint that traditional conservatives will hedge on democracy, they were already making gerrymandering and voting restriction the law in most Red states. But the relatively equal partisan divide in terms of actual political outcomes remained.

Then along came the Tea Party reaction to the Great Recession and the crass extremist rhetoric of Donald Trump and the hopes for entrenching conservative policies for the foreseeable future were within reach.

As we enter a second go ‘round with Trump progressives are now depressed, demoralized and also exhausted as we wonder if fascism will be the fate facing the country.

Both sides in this bi-national country have been locked into a struggle to control the national institutions and policies according to their values. The great fear of each side is that the other may be able to put laws and policies in place that denied them the ability to live “with liberty and justice for all” according to the way that they interpret those values.

The US is a culturally pluralistic nation; another way of saying that it’s two nations, not one. Western Enlightenment models for modern nationalism all in one way or another posit that nation-building is an assimilationist project aiming to make disparate populations homogeneous, always to the advantage of the dominant group pursuing the nationalist project. Those homogenizing projects suppressed much diversity, but almost never completely erased it.[6]

After the West colonized most of the world, the colonies began to clamor for national self-determination following World War One. But the colonies were metropolitan constructs that were in most cases, ethno-linguistically pluralistic. Indian political philosopher Partha Chatterjee writes about how the newly independent countries also pursued homogenizing nation-building projects. He laments that global southern countries failed to exercise indigenous political imagination, acknowledge their diversity, and script a national narrative embracing their cultural pluralism.

In the 1990s Chatterjee foresaw the danger of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-centric Indian nationalism which claims that the 170 million Muslims in the country don’t belong. Muslims have been in India for over 500 years. They governed the country for more than 300 years. They’re not going away. A narrative that valorizes their Indianness and maps out how all the inhabitants of the sub-continent can live side by side in harmony begs to be crafted.[7]

Most countries in the world today of any size are culturally pluralistic, and possibly bi-national.[8] The US is no exception. We are presently locked into an unending struggle in which each of the two nations seeks to control national political institutions and steer the country according to its values. We gotta get off that treadmill! Because neither nation is going away. The US also needs to craft an all-inclusive national narrative.

Traditionalists, for the time being, control national political institutions. But progressives have enormous reservoirs of political strength in several of the most economically vibrant states. And traditionalist fear the power of progressives in the arts and sporting spheres nationally. Blue state governors and blue cities are already signaling that they will not assist the Trump administration in its efforts to deport undocumented immigrants.

Thus, we are again reminded that we must return to the Gramscian “war of position,” the battle in the trenches of political and other institutions in the struggle, still not lost, for “intellectual and cultural leadership in civil society.”

There is more than one way to interpret the meanings of values like liberty, equality and justice for all, especially in a nation built on a foundation of group inequality along racial and sexual lines. Progressives since the time of FDR have established our interpretation --- We are a multiracial nation, We demand equality for women and those who are not heteronormative. And “we are not going back” in a simple-minded way to the values of the wealthy capitalist who wrote the constitution[9]

We must defend our political and cultural positionality in the slim hope that we can force traditionalists to the table to attain a pragmatic middle-ground. In future posts I’ll endeavor to map some of the ways that progressives are defending the right to live according to our values in the meantime.

 

 



[1] The Enlightenment in European political history is the period between the “Glorious” English Revolution in 1688 and the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789.

[2] Most European nations only embarked on the path of popular sovereignty after the wave of revolutions across the continent in 1848.

[3] Heteropatriarchy is a hierarchical society or culture dominated by heterosexual males whose characteristic bias is unfavorable to gay people and females in general,” https://www.dictionary.com/browse/heteropatriarchy

 Heteronormativity is “the attitude that heterosexuality is the only normal and natural expression of sexuality,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/heteronormative

 [4] John Higham, from Strangers in the Land, Ronald Takaki From Different Shores. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987,, 78-82

[5] Immanuel Wallerstein characterizes the “new social movements’” of the 1960s as also “anti-systemic movements” in “Anti-Systemic Movements: History and Dilemmas,” from Samir Amin et. al., Transforming the Revolutionary, Monthly Review Press, 1990, 13-53.

[6] E.g., persistent Scottish, Welsh and Irish nationalism within Great Britian, the north-south divide in Italy or Catalan and Basque speaking populations in the south of France.

[7] Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 100-115

[8] The prime difference between sub-national populations like ethnic groups and nations is that nations in addition to being culturally different make political claims vis-à-vis the state. These can include revenue outputs toward cultural sustenance, cultural quota systems legally allocating political office and bureaucratic positions by cultural group (consociationalism), or outright secession.

[9] When I say simple-minded, I mean that the founders were not people who believed in racial or sexual equality, nor equity for workers on gender non-conforming people. That we cannot go back too.