Kwanzaa White Allies — Rationale and Summary for the Series of Articles

A recap of the seven-part series about why Kwanzaa can help white allies reflect on their work

Over the past week, I have written a series of articles designed to encourage white anti-racism allies to use the concepts from Kwanzaa to reflect on their allyship. The premise of the series was that the Kwanzaa framework, while created to help people from the African diaspora connect with important and nourishing concepts from African culture, is so sufficiently grounded in universal principles that anyone committed to community building and social change might benefit from reflecting with this conceptual tools.

I thought that the Kwanzaa framework would be useful because it does a great job of directing attention to oneself, one’s community, and one’s efforts to improve the word. We all need to think about these issues, but white allies have three communities they need to figure out how to relate to — other allies, racism skeptics, and people of color — and relating to each of them has its own complexities that merit examination.

As someone who spends a lot of time coaching white allies, it was clear to me that the Kwanzaa concepts had relevance to four questions that I think do not get enough focus by white…