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Dr. Dawn Hicks Tafari, Jamillah Neeairah Nasir, and Dandara Boyd of the Greensboro Kwanzaa Collective join me this week to talk about the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa:

  • Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.
  • Kujichagulia (Self-Determination): To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.
  • Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems, and to solve them together.
  • Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops, and other businesses and to profit from them together.
  • Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
  • Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
  • Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

We share how we can apply these principles to our everyday lives. We also discuss the Kwanzaa celebration in Greensboro and the service projects of the GKC.

(Oh yeah, and Dawn gets a plug in for my location-based desktop and mobile black business directory, Black Buy Day. #Ujamaa)