Jessica “Culture Queen” Hebron is on a mission to make Kwanzaa fun, enticing, and effortless for families to celebrate. “We have several different black people holidays, but this is the big one,” she explains. “I think it’s really cool that black people have something just for them that lasts seven days, helps you to align yourself culturally, and gives you like a cultural sense of self.”
She believes that the keys to bolstering participation in the holiday she loves are to start slow and focus on the fundamentals. Kwanzaa’s Swahili language, formal table setting, and candle lighting ritual can intimidate newcomers, so she recommends that people of all ages learn about the holiday through picture books. The illustrations, examples, and simple wording make the holiday accessible and engaging. “Once you’re interested in it, then you’ll go and read all the heavy material,” she says.
Above all, the holiday affirms cultural pride and solidarity. “If you’re trying to find yourself and you’re trying to figure out what it means to be black and American or African American, these are very uplifting, positive, universal principles that you can try to follow and align your life with to give yourself self-empowerment,” she explains. “When I was a kid, I just liked anything that made me feel black and proud. And every year, the thing that keeps me celebrating Kwanzaa is to help to teach other people who might have misconceptions about it.”
Here are five picture books Culture Queen recommends. Each shows families living the seven principles of Kwanzaa: Umoja (Unity), Kujichagulia (Self-determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity), and Imani (Faith).
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Culture Queen Resources
In December 2014, I attended a Kwanzaa workshop at Central Montessori School in Richmond, Virginia, that continues to resonate, across years and miles. The speaker was Kwanzaa educator Jessica “Culture Queen” Hebron, and her celebration—culturally rooted, historically aware, hands-on, and high-energy—introduced Kwanzaa to my toddler daughter in grand fashion. She transformed the gathering space with an ornate Kwanzaa table and song, dance, crafts, and stories that kept families engaged from beginning to end.
Culture Queen’s hallmark is crafting experiences that leave kids humming with positivity and enthusiasm for themselves and African American culture. Her method builds self-esteem through repetition and affirmation; her multisensory engagement immerses kids in a world of color, sound, movement, and excitement. She stimulates young minds through the body, then uses stories and activities to make important cultural and historical lessons stick.
Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with her about her own formative Kwanzaa experiences and how we parents can introduce or elevate the holiday in our own homes this holiday season. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.
What’s your first Kwanzaa memory?
Well, the very first one was with a family friend named Njambi. She was our aunt’s best friend, and she was very Afrocentric. She invited us to a celebration in someone’s home and I didn’t understand what was going on at the time; I just knew that there was a lot of stuff about Africa and there was music and drumming and dancing and great food. And I remember liking it because I loved everything she did, because she was like a cultural fairy godmother.
My first official Kwanzaa celebration was with Jack and Jill and it was in the early nineties. I was probably in second grade—I have the picture from it. My mom dressed my sister and me in matching African outfits and I remember the whole room being decorated with red, black and green balloons and streamers. And, you know, I remember the parents of my friends working together to create the ceremony and to educate us. It was great. Since then I’ve been to many more and facilitated many more, but I have the picture from my first, so it’s kind of cool to see that I still do it now.
What’s kept you celebrating it all these years?
Most holidays that we have are so old. You might know the origins from looking them up, but you really can’t pinpoint a founder. So the founder of Kwanzaa is still alive. I’ve met him several times and he’s aware of my work. Kwanzaa is only 53 years old.
It’s not our only African American holiday, but it’s our only African American holiday that lasts seven days. This is the big one. I think it’s really cool that black people have something just for them that lasts seven days, helps you to align yourself culturally, and gives you a cultural sense of self.
If you’re trying to find yourself and you’re trying to figure out what it means to be black and American or African American, [Kwanzaa celebrates] very uplifting, positive, universal principles that you can try to follow and align your life with to give yourself self-empowerment. When I was a kid, I didn’t know that I would take such a liking to it, but I just liked anything that made me feel black and proud.
Every year, the thing that keeps me celebrating Kwanzaa is to help to teach other people who might have misconceptions about it. I try to make the celebration seem so fun and enticing that it’s effortless for them to celebrate and they see how easy it is to incorporate it into their holiday traditions.
How do you think your own celebration of Kwanzaa has evolved over time as you’ve gained experience with the ceremony and have performed it yourself and participated in different versions of it over time?
It’s always a creative challenge to see how do I keep it fresh for the year and every year. Even though I try to have some things that I do every single year, I always try to challenge myself to do one thing differently.
[The first] year I had my sister, who’s an architect and interior designer, design me a really giant kinara, the Kwanzaa candle holder…When I’m doing big events, I want people to be able to see it because I’m teaching from it. The prop didn’t hold up too well after so many programs, so for the second year, she designed it out of wood, and that was amazing. The third year I asked her could we make the candles flameless LED candles so I could let the kids have the experience of lighting the candles without us having to do fire. In this 10th year, I actually had my logo engraved on all of the Kwanzaa kinaras. I also had a collapsible Kwanzaa set designed so that when I’m traveling on a plane or going from place to place I can lift it.
For me, it’s about how do I use ingenuity to make Kwanzaa engaging. There is a competition with Christmas, I have to admit. Christmas is glittery. It’s sparkling. It’s a big holiday and full of decorations. So what I try to do is not compare Kwanzaa to Christmas, but to give it the same magic as Christmas. I really try to make the activities, the music, and the decorations super eye- catching and exciting so that it appeals to children. Every year I have a challenge: How do I recreate this Kwanzaaland so that people feel like they’re stepping into a world?
How do you keep learning and deepening your own understanding of Kwanzaa?
I always go back to the Kwanzaa founder Dr. Maulana Karenga’s book on Kwanzaa and the official Kwanzaa website. It’s interesting, I’ve found that some adults that started celebrating Kwanzaa when it first came out do it differently. They have their own way.
I think the main thing for me is trying to keep the integrity of Kwanzaa like people would keep the integrity of other holidays. That’s one thing that honestly irks me. When I see a holiday celebration that celebrates everything but Kwanzaa or the care that was taken to have the Christmas tree and the care that was taken to have the menorah and then there’s not the same care for the Kwanzaa display. That really bothers me because there’s just no excuse with the internet and Amazon Prime.
Do you think Kwanzaa is growing in popularity or declining in popularity?
I think Kwanzaa is growing. I think that it’s promising. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. And I think actually the political climate that we have with Donald Trump and all that’s happening [supports that]. I can’t remember who said this, but it was an African American writer who said something along the lines of, When we have racial injustice and political unrest in our culture, that’s the time when the best black art comes around and that’s the time when the best resistances to make change happen. So actually this political season that we’re in is even more reason why we should draw near to our cultural sense of self. I’m thinking that Kwanzaa will inspire parents more if they understand how easy it is to incorporate into their existing family traditions.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Culture Queen Resources
Do you celebrate Kwanzaa? If so, how did you first learn about it and what keeps you celebrating it? If you don’t, why not?
Stay-at-home orders resulting from the new coronavirus have got many of us holed up inside 24/7 with kids and partners. All that togetherness can mean lots of quality time, if we make it that way. Luckily, books can be heroes every family needs to experience wonder, connection, and enjoyment during long days spent indoors.
Engaging texts keep independent readers happily occupied and create valuable time for parents to work, relax, or tackle household chores. Reading to yourself, reading aloud to kids, and encouraging kids to listen to recordings are great options for family reading time. For kids of all ages, reading together can bookend daily schedules to create relaxing rituals and a calming cadence to our days.
Here are three ways to boost book access and read more as a family during the pandemic:
1) Get digital library access. Visit your public library’s website to explore offerings for streaming or downloadable ebooks. Austin Public Library, for example, gives users access to OverDrive Kids, OverDrive Teens, TumbleBook Library, and MakeMake, a Spanish-language ebook source. Readers just need their library card number and password to log in via the web or a mobile device app. As with traditional library borrowing, there may be limited availability of individual titles and limits on how many books you can check out at once.
No library card? No problem. There are other ebook sources, such as Epic!, that you can sign up for directly. Epic! has an extensive collection of 40,000 ebooks, learning videos and quizzes for kids 12 and under. Free for elementary school teachers and librarians, the site costs $7.99 per month for parents, who can be assured that no ads or in-app purchases disrupt the reading immersion. Scribd offers a large ebook and audiobook library for adults and teens.
With so many ebooks at your fingertips, you can put kids’ I-don’t-have-anything-to-read complaints to bed immediately—and read more than you ever have before, yourself.
2) Listen up with audiobooks. Yes, audiobooks count as reading, so queue some up to enjoy together—and to wind down at the end of the day. Researchers, teachers, and librarians have all lauded audiobooks’ ability to engage even the most reluctant reader. A good story well narrated can boost oral language skills, vocabulary exposure, background knowledge, and reading comprehension. And audiobooks can be a great introduction to new-to-you cultures, ideas, and language traditions to boot. The format also allows families to experience multicultural content without stumbling over unfamiliar dialects or words.
Just as with ebooks, readers can check out audiobooks through public libraries that subscribe to OverDrive, Hoopla, and similar services. Libby, OverDrive’s much-loved app, delivers thousands of library-loaned ebooks and audiobooks directly to users’ phones or tablets. Librivox, another free audiobook option, offers public domain books read by volunteers. Little Women, anyone?
Vooks, an ad-free digital library, brings children’s picture books to life with music, professional narration, and eye-catching animation. It highlights each word in bold as it’s read by the narrator, making it a great option for young readers navigating text on their own and for parents who are unable to read aloud to children due to language or other barriers. Vooks offers a one-month free trial and then is $4.99/month.
Audible, Amazon’s audiobook division, is offering a limited selection of children’s content for free during coronavirus school closings. Kids can now stream stories, from fairytales and folktales to mystery and history, in six languages via desktop, laptop, phone, or tablet. Audible’s paid plans start at $14.95/month. Other paid audiobook subscription services include Audiobooks.com, Scribd, Kobo, and Downpour. Libro.fm stands apart by allowing you to buy great audiobooks from your local, independent bookseller. iTunes, Google Play, and Nook let you buy individual titles without a subscription.
3) Tune into virtual storytimes with authors. Kwame Alexander read from his book, The Crossover, on Instagram Live every day for a week. Author and illustrator Mo Willems does daily lunchtime doodles on YouTube thanks to a new Kennedy Center @ Home series. Oliver Jeffers captivated an audience of 267,000 followers by reading aloud on Instagram.
Author and celebrity-led storytimes are at an all-time high as people reach out across the social distance to bring kids and families joy. But how do you find them? There’s no comprehensive clearinghouse of online author appearances so your best bet is to follow your favorite authors and children’s book publishers on social media and keep an eye out for appearances in your feeds. Searching related hashtags like #operationstorytime and #stayathomestorytime is hit or miss.
It’s worth the effort to tune in when you can. A story read by its author often sparks greater reading interest and enthusiasm in kids long after the tale ends.
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I was late to embrace ebooks for kids. Convinced of the superiority of print books for young children, I joined multiple kids’ book-subscription programs and regularly stocked up on physical books at school book fairs, our local independent bookstore and public libraries to make it easy for my daughter to read more and more.
But the inflow of books dwindled during my daughter’s second-grade year, with the coronavirus pandemic and the stay-at-home orders that followed. Our local library system closed, our favorite bookstore shifted to curbside pickup and then halted in-person sales altogether, and we worried that book delivery by mail might be disrupted, too.
In need of fresh reading material for my daughter, I turned to Epic!, a kid-focused digital library that offers 40,000 ebooks, audiobooks, learning videos, and quizzes. It did not disappoint. Easy to use and ad-free, it creates a great immersive environment for children 12 and under to seek out fiction and nonfiction that interests them. It’s accessible through a web browser or mobile app, and costs just $7.99 per month after a 30-day free trial. You can create profiles for up to four children for at-home use.
Epic! quickly became my daughter’s go-to reading platform. Its interface was so appealing that she started searching for and reading books on Epic! even when her teacher had assigned the books from another digital library. Here’s why kids love Epic!:
- Freedom of choice. Kids read more in their
leisure time when they have access to a good selection of books and free rein
to decide what to read next. Epic! delivers both, allowing kids to navigate the
huge digital library on their own. They can scroll through titles by genre,
theme, series, awards, or popularity—or plug their own criteria into the search
bar for reads about a particular topic.
- Seamless experience. Epic! titles load quickly and there are no wait times in Epic!. When kids see a title, it’s available right away, unlike ebooks from libraries, which may have limits on how many users can access the material simultaneously. With no pop-up ads, banners, in-app purchases, or other intrusions, kids get to immerse themselves in books without distraction.
There’s a lot to love for parents too:
- Safe online environment. Epic! provides the book selection kids crave with the guardrails parents know they need. Made for kids exclusively, all of the content has been vetted for educational benefit and age appropriateness. Plus, there are no upsells, nor harmful personal data collection. Epic! is compliant with the Children’s Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
- Accurate reading-time tracking. Through the parent dashboard, moms and dads can take a peek at kids’ reading habits without being intrusive. The child’s profile shows which books the child has read, including how much time they spent, and on which date. This is a brilliant replacement for the much-maligned homework reading log, which studies have found to be demotivating to children, not to mention inaccurate and cumbersome.
- Affordability. For the price of one children’s paperback book, you can give your child access to 40,000 ebooks, audiobooks, and educational videos for a month. This expense easily fits within most family budgets and the return on investment in terms of educational impact and productive time will be well worth it.
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Emphatic and unsparing, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy explores the weight of wellness in a culture obsessed with lean. His expansive intelligence and fluid prose bear up to haunting family secrets and American deceptions with deep, potent wells of beauty, humor, and empathy.
Initially conceived as a weight-loss story chronicling his family’s struggles with food and violence, the writing of Heavy, which was recently named a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, got murkier when relatives sidestepped his interview questions or lied altogether. “We’re a family, like most families, of addicts, but we never talked about the addiction,” he says. “We would talk about losing weight or gaining weight but we never talked about why. We never talked about particular memories around domestic, sexual, and racial violence.”
He became convinced that no one in his family wanted to reckon with the weight of where they had been or do the work of freeing themselves of it. “You need to keep that for your journal,” his mother would say of the revealing material he wished to mine for the book. “Nobody else needs to see that kind of writing.”
Click here to read the full post at KirkusReviews.com.
I would like to designate December National Quitting Awareness Month. After reading Seth Godin’s The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (And When to Stick), I’m fired up to pare down before the New Year.
The slim volume argues that quitting (despite its poor reputation) is a key to success. Quit fast. Quit often. Quit without guilt, Godin urges. Because quitting worthless pursuits gives you the time, energy, and focus to obsess about something that matters.
“Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success,” he writes. “In a free market, we reward the exceptional.” And the exceptional have learned to quit strategically.
Godin argues that when you trade busyness for obsession, you win. When you spot a dead end a mile away and reverse course, you win. Never underestimate the costs of staying stuck, he warns. Dead-ends are not neutral. Idling burns gas and keeps you from going somewhere exciting. Quitting unworthy projects, investments, and endeavors is the shortcut to success.
Most people quit reactively. “They quit when it’s painful and stick when they can’t be bothered to quit,” he writes. His advice? “The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.”
The “dips” that the book’s title refer to are the exceptions to the quitting rule. Unlike dead ends, Godin’s dips are temporary. They’re the barriers that thwart most but reward those who tough it out. “Your marketplace is competitive, filled with people overcoming challenges every day,” Godin writes. “It’s the incredibly difficult challenges (the Dips) that give you the opportunity to pull ahead.”
He’s talking about entrepreneurship, but we can apply the insight to any period when our motivation is tested and our resources are stretched for our good. If excellence were easy, everyone would do it, and no one would profit, he insists.
Godin does advocate some quitting when laboring through a dip. Quit tactics, products, and features without hesitation while staying true to your market, he advises. The larger aim is to be a trusted source to a specific audience, not to foist an unwanted product on it. “Don’t fall in love with a tactic and defend it forever,” he writes. “Instead, decide once and for all whether you’re in a market or not. And if you are, get through that Dip.”
After reading The Dip, I’m examining all of my activities and deciding which are worthy of my time and talents. The resentment and fatigue that accompany some are sure signs that it’s time to move on. Cutting my losses, I now see, will give me the resources I need to tough out the dips in the commitments that matter. Why cope when you could quit? Why muddle along when you could push through?
Have you been stuck in a rut with work, personal, or volunteer projects this year? How do beliefs about quitting shape your decisions to continue or discontinue activities? Are some things easier for you to quit than others? If so, why?
Quote to Remember
“A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty thousand times on one tree and get dinner.” – Seth Godin
The Texas Book Festival launched by former librarian and then First Lady of Texas Laura Bush and philanthropist Mary Margaret Farabee in 1995 continues to grow in size and impact. Today the literary event brings more than three hundred authors to Austin each fall for a weekend of thought-provoking book discussions. What’s more, its book sale proceeds and attendee donations support powerful student programs in schools throughout Texas year-round.
One of those programs is Reading Rock Stars, which sends noted authors into Title I schools to inspire kids with great books and powerful live presentations. To date, the program has facilitated more than 400 author visits to Title I elementary schools in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and the Rio Grande Valley, and distributed more than 100,000 autographed books to students at those schools.
The newer Real Reads program serves middle and high school students in similar fashion, pairing close readings of urgent books with deep conversations with their authors. Participating authors include Kwame Alexander, Matt Mendez, Jason Reynolds, Erika Sánchez, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Jacqueline Woodson.
I recently spoke with Lea Bogner Loy, who, as the outreach manager for the festival from 2017 to 2019 expanded Reading Rock Stars and launched Real Reads. We discussed what separates these programs from other author visits, why kids need to see themselves in books and authors, and what she hopes her Texas Book Festival legacy will be.
What was the most meaningful part of your Reading Rock Stars experience for you?
I think the focus I brought to the program on working with authors of color. I just saw what a difference it made when the students saw an author that looked like them up there. How much they really connected with the book. I also saw how grateful librarians were because they always felt like they struggled so much to find books that related to their kids. And so for me, being able to give a platform to those authors, and also give kids that experience, was really meaningful.
What are some of your favorite Reading Rock Stars memories?
Oh man, so many. There was one in the Rio Grande Valley with Ying Chang Compestine, presenting [her book The Chinese Emperor’s New Clothes] to PreK, K, and 1 students. She was talking about how she was an immigrant and all the kids were saying how they were immigrants too. There was that moment of cross-cultural understanding that was really special.
And there were always moments where kids would say, “I get to keep this book?” or “I’ve never had a book before.” That happened at every school we went to and every time it was always a gut punch. It was a reminder that we were doing important work.
During your tenure, you also launched the Real Reads program for middle and high school students. Why was it important to you to provide author programming for older students?
I think there’s a magic of reading that starts to get lost as you get older, especially for the students who aren’t seeing themselves in books. It’s an issue across the board. I remember being in school thinking “I can’t read The Grapes of Wrath or Shakespeare anymore. I want to read something that’s relevant and interesting to me.”
When you don’t have any reason to get connected to a book, you’re just not going to read as much. And it’s so important to continue to read—not only for vocabulary acquisition or to do well on standardized tests, but to be connected to modern issues.
And so that’s what Real Reads did. It gave students books that were really interesting to them and relevant, but that were also connected to things that they were seeing in the news and dealing with on a personal level. So they were able to really bring it all together and ignite that spark for reading.
I think people, especially literacy programs, have started to write off older students and think that they’re kind of a lost cause by the time they get to high school. And I really disagree with that.
What do you hope your Reading Rock Stars legacy will be?
Legacy is a big question. There are two parts of it. One is you’re just getting kids excited about reading, which so many authors are great about. But I think in publishing and in charity it’s easy to fall into the white savior complex of “I’m going to do these nice things for these kids of color and it’s going to change their lives.” If we’re not more intentional about it, it’s not going to make the kind of impact that it should.
I hope my legacy is that this program is not only about showing kids that reading is fun and important, but that they deserve books and that they’re empowered to do whatever it is they want to in their lives.
When I was in the classroom, the curriculum that was given to me was all about young white boys and 100% of my students were black. It was heartbreaking. Kids deserve to see themselves in books and if I had the platform to be able to bring a book to a child, I wanted to make sure that either it was going to be really funny and make them really love reading or they were going to see themselves in the book and feel empowered and seen.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Learn More About Reading Rock Stars and Real Reads
Pronouns just aren’t what they used to be. Apparently, new uses of the word they sent people to the dictionary in droves in 2019. Online searches for the word spiked 313% from the year before. And the upsurge in curiosity about the 600-year-old word lead dictionary giant Merriam-Webster to name they the word of the year.
We’ve long thought of they as referring to groups of people, animals, or things. Or even (though more recently) to singular people if their identities aren’t known or specified. For example, “the person who answered the phone said they didn’t know when the homeowner would be available.”
New to the scene is using they to refer to an individual person whose gender identity is nonbinary or unknown. The usage bubbled up from personal prerogative to the media to professional organizations. “The American Psychological Association now recommends that singular they be preferred in professional writing over he or she when the reference is to a person whose gender is unknown or to a person who prefers they,” dictionary editor Peter Sokolowski said. “It’s also increasingly common to see they as a person’s preferred pronoun in Twitter bios, email signatures, and conference name tags.
Merriam-Webster added this nonbinary sense of the word to its dictionary in September. And chose an excerpt from a New York Times article to illustrate the usage. “They had adopted their gender-neutral name a few years ago, when they began to consciously identify as nonbinary—that is, neither male nor female,” journalist Amy Harmon wrote. “They were in their late 20s, working as an event planner, applying to graduate school.”
So why should we care? Because words matter. The language we use to express ourselves and learn from others demands attention in thought and use. In this case, the care with which we use the word they speaks volumes about our willingness to accept people on the terms they’ve chosen. When we call people by the pronouns they prefer, we use language in the service of human connection.
Perhaps pronouns aren’t what they used to be because we are more complex than we once acknowledged. Maybe our language is evolving to reflect greater understanding—and acceptance.
Have you noticed an uptick in new uses of the word they? Did you look it up in the dictionary to check for new insights or understanding? Can you think of other words that are changing in meaning or use?
Sources and Further Reading
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/they
I marvel at book talk attendees. People trek from great distances, clutching worn copies of favorite reads. They stand in long lines for a brief word with (or autograph from) a favorite writer. The brave ones step to the podium to share stories or ask questions. Their remarks bring more voices and perspectives into conversation. Their contributions add welcome depth and texture to the occasion.
At a Jacqueline Woodson BookPeople talk that I moderated in October, an educator in the audience asked, “What has been your hope, as a writer yourself, that your children’s teachers would do for them in the area of reading and writing?”
I loved the question, and Woodson’s eloquent answer. She spoke about celebrating all reading and giving kids the time and books they need to find their own pathways into literature. We all should listen.
Her response, word-for-word:
That’s a great question. What is my hope that my children’s teachers do for them in the area of reading and writing? I hope they let them read slowly. I hope they let them read whatever they want.
You know, I was in fifth grade reading picture books and people felt some kind of way about it. I remember, back in the ’90’s and early 2000’s, the pushback against graphic novels. My son read graphic novels forever and what cracked the code for him to read other books was to continue to read graphic novels and The Outsiders in fifth grade. He had a really great teacher that taught that book so slowly, so, so slowly, and the reward was they could watch the film at the end of it.
Letting them read what they want, letting them read slowly, and having, when they can afford to, really diverse classroom libraries. I’ve gone into classrooms where the kids have been all white and the books have been all white and I’m like, that’s not helping anybody, especially me, for when they first meet me and don’t know what a black person is. But, just having those diverse books, not only in terms of race and gender stuff and sexuality, but in terms of economic class and in terms of readability, you know, the different reading levels.
So, when my kids were younger, whenever I was looking for a new school for them, the first thing I would do is go into the classroom library and then, if there was a school library, into the school library. But, really, so many books, even if there’s not a classroom library, there’s a public library, there’s First Book. There are all these organizations that are able to help teachers get those books into their classrooms if they don’t have the funding for them. That’s what I would love.
And all reading is celebrated. When kids are in different reading groups because they read at the lower level or at the higher level, they know that. I wouldn’t mind if that didn’t exist anymore. I’ve talked for a long time about getting rid of that term, “struggling readers.” They know when someone considers them a struggling reader. So how do we talk about them being where they are and where they are is okay?
Culture Queen Discusses Top Kwanzaa Misconceptions
Got questions about Kwanzaa? You’re not alone. Here’s Kwanzaa educator Jessica
“Culture Queen” Hebron’s rundown of the top five misconceptions about Kwanzaa.
Misconception 1: Kwanzaa is a Religion
Kwanzaa is a celebration of Pan-African family and community, not a religious ritual. “People think that if you start celebrating Kwanzaa, you’re devil worshiping or you’re worshiping principles instead of God. That’s not true. The principles were created to be universal for black people in America, so no matter what their religious experiences or cultural experiences, they have one thing that they can unite with—Kwanzaa.”
Kwanzaa is compatible with any family’s religious faith. “You could celebrate Kwanzaa and be Jewish and black,” Culture Queen explains. “You could celebrate Kwanzaa and be Christian and black. You could celebrate Kwanzaa and be Buddhist and black.”
Misconception 2: Kwanzaa is a Christmas Knock-off
Culture Queen cautions against dismissing Kwanzaa as a “knock off” of Christmas just because it starts on the day after Christmas. Kwanzaa “has its own principles, its own traditions, its own decorations, its own meanings and purposes,” she says. “The reason that it takes place in December is because traditionally in Africa there are a lot of harvest festivals that take place during that time. Kwanzaa is a Swahili word that means first fruits of the harvest.” The holiday’s timing has its advantages, though. “It is convenient that it’s during a time when families are already gathering.”
Misconception 3: There Are No Gifts in Kwanzaa
Contrary to popular belief, people who celebrate Kwanzaa can give and receive gifts. “Gifts during Kwanzaa, called zawadi, should be either purchased from black-owned businesses or handmade by the people who are giving them,” Culture Queen explains. “You can be so creative with that. It doesn’t mean that you’re getting some rinky-dink present.”
Misconception 4: Kwanzaa Isn’t a “Real” Holiday
“I always challenge people to treat all holidays with respect,” says Culture Queen. “There are no fake holidays. There are no holidays that aren’t serious… I find myself always advocating for people to give reverence to the holiday the same way that they would [other holidays].
“When black people, specifically, don’t treat Kwanzaa with respect, what they don’t understand is that it’s almost like they’re saying it’s not real, and because it’s not real, they aren’t real and shouldn’t be taken seriously,” she explains. “Because if you’re not going to celebrate the holiday that was created just for you, then why do you expect the world to respect and take care of you?”
“This is a holiday,” she affirms. “This is something that’s supposed to be joyous and fun for you.”
Misconception 5: To Celebrate Kwanzaa is to Celebrate Its Founder
Like many founders of historical movements, Kwanzaa’s chief architect has a controversial personal history. Maulana Karenga was convicted in 1971 of two felonies
for assaulting and tormenting women in his California home. Culture Queen draws a firm line between the founder’s history and the holiday’s positive impact. “My response to this is the same response that I would give to someone who would talk about Bill Cosby and The Cosby
Show,” she says. “What I would say is he should be ashamed of what he did. However, the holiday that he created for black people is one of the highlights of his life and one of the positive things that he did. I would like to just isolate that and leave that for what it is.”
“This holiday is now so much bigger than him,” she says. “His history and the things that he’s done don’t affect the positivity and the intent and the mission of the holiday. A lot of times people think that he owns it, and he does. But one day he won’t be here and it’ll be years and years later and people will still be celebrating Kwanzaa. The intent of the holiday will rise more so than his history.”
See the official Kwanzaa
website to learn more about the holiday. Also, check out Culture Queen’s thoughts on bringing
Kwanzaa to life and Kwanzaa
picture book recommendations.
Did any of these points change your understanding of Kwanzaa? Are you more or less likely to celebrate the holiday as a result?
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