With the holiday season in full swing, students from different backgrounds are preparing to celebrate the customs and traditions of their native cultures.
Unlike religious holidays such as Christmas and Hanukkah, Kwanzaa is an African celebration of family, community and culture.
Maulana Karenga, Africana Studies professor at California State University, founded the holiday 34 years ago. Kwanzaa was created to ignite a sense of unity among the African-American and worldwide African community.
Tag: culture
As a teenager in suburban New Jersey with a black father and white mother, Thomas Chatterton Williams, who was named after an 18th-century English poet, thugged up and dumbed down his speech. He was “keeping it real,” as he saw it, in the hip-hop era. But thanks to his scholarly father, Williams, now 29, came to see hip-hop as self-destructive: “petty, limited, money-hoes-and-clothes obsessed.” Losing My Cool is a provocative, intellectual memoir. It ends with a plea “to stop confusing the shoes on our feet or the songs in our ears for ourselves.” — Bob Minzesheimer of USA Today
The Rev. Al Sharpton dropped by Baltimore on Monday to seek support for a fledgling plan to create a new arts district in the city to honor African-American cultural achievements.

Spotted on akaTito’s Blog
A native New Guinean asks, “Why do you white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?” Cargo in this instance is a reference to general material possessions. The author of this bookdocumentary asserts that the idea of any race being intellectually superior is absurd, but still he is unable to answer the question. Why didn’t the people of New Guinea create metal tools or build large cities?