What the hell is Kwanzaa, anyway?

This question has plagued me every year since I first heard of it in the nineties. Jay inspired me to go ahead and google it. Why not? I have to confess, as with all religious customs (Is it even religious? We'll find out in a moment.) I roll my eyes, and assume its some made up, based in craziness, excuse to party. I have never known anyone that celebrated the holiday, hence the lack of knowledge. I usually get a whole earful about some religion or other whether I like it or not. This leads me to roll my eyes again, and think, crazy humans....
So, Kwanzaa....
As defined at the above website, Kwanzaa is a celebration of family, community, and culture created by Dr. Maulana Karenga.
I admit that after reading through the pdf on this site I needed to get a fresh site that was a little more straight forward.
This site is easier to navigate, so I start reading. The simplest definition is:

"Kwanzaa celebrates what its founder called the seven principles of Kwanzaa, or Nguzo Saba (originally Nguzu Saba—the seven principles of blackness), which Karenga said "is a communitarian African philosophy," consisting of what Karenga called "the best of African thought and practice in constant exchange with the world." These seven principles comprise Kawaida, a Swahili term for tradition and reason. Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the following principles, as follows:

• 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 heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle."

During the celebrations, the above are recited, as well as the African Pledge:

We will remember the humanity, glory and sufferings of our ancestors,

And honor the struggle of our elders;
We will strive to bring new values, and new life to our people;
We will have peace and harmony among us.

We will be loving, sharing, and creative.
We will work, study and listen, so we may learn;
learn so we may teach.
We will cultivate self-reliance.

We will struggle to resurrect and unify our homeland;
We will raise many children for our nation;
We will have discipline, patience, devotion and courage;
We will live as models to provide new direction for our people.

We will be free and self-determining;
We are African people...We will win!

I feel bad now...I just wanted to know what it meant, now I feel discriminated against! Assuming that the above is correct (it is from Wikipedia) it seems like this celebration is in place to keep the culture completely separate from all others in America. This seems to be counterproductive. Aren't we all supposed to be a cohesive unit? One country? United we stand? I love the idea of knowing your culture, and loving each other, but I feel like this is more a manifesto I might read in a KKK meeting. I have always hated how white people have treated African Americans in the past, and I grew up thinking that there needed to be unity, not more separatism. "Separate but equal" seemed nasty and unfair, but are there some African Americans that would have like things to stay that way? I wonder if there is anyone brave enough to let my readers in on the secret. If you have answers, please enlighten me! Perhaps there is a better website? Maybe I'm reading too much into the whole thing.