"Kumbaya" {a Gullah phrase meaning "Come By Here"} started out as a heart felt plea for God to intervene in the lives of enslaved people. "Some one's cryin, Lord. Come by here"... Someone needs you Lord. Come by here. Oh, Lord, come by here".

However, in the 1960s or earlier in the USA, this African American spiritual became popularized by singers such as Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul,& Mary who sung folk songs in support of civil rights and equality for all. As a result, this song was added to the folk song repertoires taught to children & youth summer campers. It seems to me-admittedly from the outside looking in-that the song Kumbaya was added to those campfire song repertoires as a tribute-token or not-to multiculturalism.

Over time, the song "Kumbaya" became a symbol of and a catch-phrase for Pollyanna-ish racial and ethnic unity.* That same desire for unity across racial, ethnic, religious, and other socially meaningful but ultimately meaningless boundaries is encapsulated in the question that Rodney King asked in 1992 when he was pleading for calm at a televised news conference during the Los Angeles riots- "People...Can't we all get along?"

Unfortunately, the song "Kumbaya" and, even more, the 21st century political colloquialism that people are having a "kumbaya moment" or "kumbaya experience" speaks to this fake sentiment of sweetness and light.

In my opinion, we should not just pretend that differences don't exist, and we shouldn't just act like we have reached a time in the world when personal racism and institutional racism {and classism and gender bias, and homophobia etc etc etc} does not exist. Instead, we take off our rose colored "Kumbaya" glasses, and work for this goal. It's worth it.

So why is "Kumbaya" a dirty word?

Imo, because if we pretend that we have reached the time when racial, ethnic, national, gender, religious, sexual orientation etc differences don't make any difference, we'll never really get to that time.


* "The Pollyanna principle or Pollyannaism describes the tendency for people to agree with positive statements describing them. It is sometimes called positivity bias. The phenomenon is similar to the Forer effect.

The concept as described by Matlin and Stang in 1978 used the archetype of Pollyanna, a young girl with infectious optimism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna_principle