Celebrate Kwanzaa!

This year, the first day of December brought the region’s first snowfall. At Edmonds Community College, it brought a night of African-American culture and history through an early celebration of Kwanzaa.

Kwanzaa events have been celebrated at the college for the past nine years, organized by the Equity and Diversity Center in an effort to “involve and educate the college community in diversity awareness and gender issues.”

“(Kwanzaa) is not a religious holiday, but it is a time to focus on Africa and African-inspired culture and to reinforce a value system that goes back for generations,” said Shirley Sutton, the Equity and Diversity Center’s director.

Students from the Black Student Association started off the evening by lighting, one by one, the red, black and green candles, and explaining each of the seven Kwanzaa principles. The Lora and Sukutai Marimba and Dance Ensemble brought out whoops and cheers from the audience as they livened up the room with drumbeats, colorful costumes and traditional storytelling dances.

In 1966, in the midst of the civil-rights movement, Dr. Maulana Karenga introduced Kwanzaa to the United States as a means of celebrating African-American culture and history.

Kwanzaa, a Swahili word that means “first fruits of the harvest,” begins on Dec. 26 and continues through Jan. 1. Each day of Kwanzaa is devoted to study and reflect on one of the seven Kwanzaa principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith.

The event was well attended despite the weather and participants were rewarded with food including chicken drumettes, black-eyed peas salad and creamed cornbread muffins.

“If it wasn’t snowing, it would be packed, I’m sure,” Sutton said.

Looking at slavery legacy

The highlight of the event was when Joy Degrury-Leary, assistant professor at Portland State University, spoke about her research into what she calls “Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome.”

“I wanted to look at race, and why we are so twisted around it,” said Leary, who has masters’ degrees in social work and psychology, as well as a doctorate in social work. “People don’t talk about race. Why would someone look at an obvious difference and then say they don’t see it?”

According to her new book, “Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Injury and Healing,” a result of the past 12 years’ worth of research, Leary said she has developed “a theory that looks at trauma as the result of the slave experience, the oppression that followed and the adaptive survival behaviors passed down through the generations.”

The idea is that the trauma experienced during America’s slavery years has had a lasting effect, similar in many ways to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, on the African-American community.

“This is not simply interest, or intellectual research,” Leary said. “It is because of what I saw happening in my community, within the African-American community.”

Leary’s theory says that the magnitude of the event, 265 years of chattel slavery, followed by the years of institutionalized slavery, has lead to the syndrome within the African-American culture that affects how people live their lives.

“Behaviors that we call ‘cultural’ are behaviors that we adapted to while living in a hostile environment,” she said. “We cannot change what we do not understand. We cannot change what we don’t see.”