Of course, the holiday season isn’t devoid of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s usual antics. While millions of Black people around the world began celebrating the weeklong holiday of Kwanzaa on Sunday, Greene used her twitter fingers to do what she does best: talk about things about which she has no clue.
According to Insider, Greene tweeted that Kwanzaa is a “fake religion created by a psychopath” in response to a tweet from the College Republican National Committee.
“Wishing you a happy and prosperous Kwanza,” the national conservative college student organization wrote.
From using the slur “yellow people” at a convention for conservative youth to calling Black Lives Matter a “terrorist group” while shouting down New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Congress, you can always count on Greene to show her ass. I mean, this is the same woman who’s been suspended from Twitter twice.
Greene also continued to write that the organization is turning away new voters with their holiday greeting. “People are tired of pandering and BS,” she twote.
Before you scream fake news, check out the tweet below:
So let’s clear up a few things.
Kwanzaa is not a religion, it is a seven-day celebration of African heritage from Dec.26 to Jan. 1, every day highlighting principles that double as Black America’s survival kit: unity (umoja), self-determination (kujichagulia), collective work and responsibility (ujima), cooperative economics (ujamaa), purpose (nia), creativity (kuumba), and faith (imani).
Founded in 1966, activist Dr. Maulana Karenga, who Greene seems to be referring to in her tweet, is often credited as the sole founder of the holiday. The Root previously reported that its creation was really a collaborative effort of the US Organization, a Black nationalist group that Karenga founded with Hakim Abdullah Jamal, Malcolm X’s cousin, that same year.
Karenga’s has long been accused of abusing Black women and was convicted of felony assault and false imprisonment in the torture of two Black women, also members of his organization, in 1970. Karenga is currently a professor and chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State University, Long Beach.
While Kwanzaa has become commercialized, especially after last year’s racial reckoning, the holiday isn’t “fake” or about Karenga and his misdeeds at all. While it is hard to digest the activist’s legacy or the organization’s violent clash with the Black Panther Party, Kwanzaa is really about Black people connecting with an African ancestry that was ripped away from them.