NationStates

It's very common to see people complaining about how say, there's gay pride, or African-American Pride, or other minority groups celebrating themselves, but it's considered wrong for there to be talk of white pride or straight pride. I can understand the reasoning. At first glance it seems like reverse racism, that you're not allowed to be proud of who you are if you're not a minority.

But there is one big difference between the two, as I see it, that some people seem to miss.

Being part of a minority comes with it's problems. Whether it's explicit racism against someone for being Arab in the weeks after September 11, 2001, having fewer opportunities in life because you're African American, or being on the receiving end of screams of "faggot", minorities often get the message that they are somehow inferior. That they're not as good as the people in the majority, and should "keep to their own kind", or be "fixed" when possible. That they are lesser people.

The whole point of the minority having pride in themselves, having a pride celebration, is to fight back against that. To say, "I am PROUD to be (part of X minority)". That they're not ashamed of being a part of it, because there's nothing wrong. It's a way of telling their detractors that those people are wrong. After all, who would openly celebrate something they should be ashamed of?

This is why pride movements for the majority don't get accepted as well. Nobody is being given the message that there's something wrong with being white, that they should be ashamed of being Christian, that they're inferior because they are straight. Yes, I know, fringe groups may suggest that, but they aren't really taken seriously.

Because there isn't that message of being a lower form of human, there's no need for people in the majority to admit to being there. No inferiority to shake off.

And since there's no need to defy people giving them a negative message, there is a question of what purpose majority pride really serves. If you don't need to say "I'm just as good as anyone else", then the perception becomes that you're actually saying "I'm better than everyone else" - even if that's not the message.

I suppose the answer for those people who want to be proud of themselves when they're in the majority is to find an event for celebrating all forms of whatever attribute you're talking about. If you want to be proud to be straight, do it at a gay pride parade - yes, there are plenty of straight people there, either in support (such as PFLAG), or just to enjoy themselves, and by supporting minority sexuality, you're supporting the freedom of sexuality, and thus your own sexuality. If you want to celebrate being white, see if there's an event celebrating racial diversity - as you'll get to celebrate yourself in the process, since you fit into the picture of diversity also.

The point is that movements or events to celebrate minority pride are usually not exclusionary - you don't have to belong to the group to give them your support, and in the process, you show your pride in who you are. Majority pride, on the other hand, is almost always exclusionary - and this is why they're often seen as negative to the minority. By excluding those minority groups, they're once again implying they're not as good, since they're not welcome.

Note that I feel any group that celebrates pride in themselves while excluding people who are not part of that minority, yet wish to offer their support, or supports pride in a way that suggests they are "better" than others groups, is sending the wrong message, and should not be looked upon as being a positive influence, but a negative one.

Addendum: Note that I don't see ethnic pride such as "Irish Pride" as fitting into the category of "majority pride" (at least here in the US). They're not a majority, and they're not celebrating the attribute that puts them in the majority. Sure, they're white, but they're not having pride being white, they're having pride in being Irish - being white isn't really relevant there. Just wanted to clarify that, as some people have expressed concerns I was suggesting that those kinds of pride were also harmful.

In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope...

[T]his victory--as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom--"is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society--to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities--physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.

Even though we know better, we cannot seem to control our behavior. That is what it means to be addicted.

Likewise, the United States is addicted to racial discrimination. Even though we know that treating racial minorities as inferior to whites is inconsistent with the moral, ethical, and legal theories of equality to which we have long subscribed, the benefits to the white majority of continued discrimination against racial minorities are apparently too compelling for the culture to resist. From the seizure of Indian lands, to slavery, to official segregation, to wartime hysteria, to de facto segregation, to the invalidation of affirmative action,⁹¹ and most recently to the resegregation of public schools,⁹² white majoritarian United States culture has been committed to the subordination of racial minority interests in pervasive and persistent ways. That is a form of white supremacy. And our addiction to it is an addiction from which we appear no more able to wean ourselves than we have been able to wean ourselves from our addiction to foreign oil.

The belief that white interests are more important than racial minority interests is simply a constitutive element of United States culture. One of the things that it means to be an American is to have internalized, at some very fundamental level, the realization that it is permissible to sacrifice minority interests for the benefit of whites. And that realization is often both deep and unconscious in nature.⁹³ That is why we tolerate the dramatic discrepancies in the allocation of societal resources that continue to exist between whites and racial minorities. Justice Ginsburg has emphasized that conscious and unconscious biases have caused large racial disparities to continue to exist in unemployment, poverty, access to health care, and access to education.⁹⁴ Moreover, minorities continue to suffer discrimination in employment, real estate markets, and consumer transactions.⁹⁵ Minorities are also statistically discriminated against in matters as diverse as retail car negotiations, kidney transplants, and bail setting.⁹⁶ Recent social cognition research using the Implicit Association Test to measure unconscious racial prejudice has demonstrated that most of us remain influenced by vast amounts of unconscious prejudice.⁹⁷ And other recent research has indicated that our culture transmits subtle racial stratification messages so successfully that even young children quickly learn to internalize the culture’s commitment to minority inferiority, despite the efforts of their parents to instill in them values of colorblind race neutrality.⁹⁸

Subtle forms of voting discrimination against racial minorities remain serious enough that Congress recently, and overwhelmingly, authorized the Voting Rights Act of 1965—even though the Roberts Court has now threatened to hold the Act unconstitutional.⁹⁹ And, of course, residential housing segregation continues to exist in the United States at such an alarming rate that it has been referred to as “American Apartheid.”¹⁰⁰ The advantages and sense of natural entitlement entailed in being white in the United States remain so strong that Cheryl Harris has characterized whiteness as a property right.¹⁰¹ Commentators have even suggested that the surprising vitriol that has accompanied conservative assaults on President Obama’s undeniably moderate health care and other economic programs—as well as the personal attacks on President Obama himself—are motivated at least in part by lingering racial animosity emanating from the intolerable idea of having a black person serve as President of the United States.¹⁰² Even racial minorities themselves have at times kept a low profile in the health care debate for fear that popular recognition of the degree to which health care reform would benefit minorities might increase the chance that reform proposals would be defeated.¹⁰³

If you are white, and you have any lingering doubts about the existence of embedded racial inequalities in the culture, simply ask yourself whether you would mind waking up tomorrow morning as a member of a racial minority group. If the culture has truly freed itself from the influence of embedded racial inequalities, you should be largely indifferent about the race that you will become overnight. But I suspect that most whites are not indifferent. Indeed, one informal survey showed that white college students thought that they would be entitled to $1 million in damages per year if they were suddenly transformed from white into black.¹⁰⁴

...Race is so deeply embedded in the fabric of the United States that racial discrimination is simply a constitutive aspect of the culture. Nevertheless, the United States did recently elect Barack Obama as its first black President. Despite contrary suggestions, however, that does not mean that the United States has now evolved to a post-racial stage of development in which the problems of racial discrimination have largely been relegated to the past. Rather, it means that the United States has now evolved to a new stage of development in the sophistication of its techniques for practicing racial discrimination.

Racial discrimination used to be both blatant and explicitly rooted in the doctrine of white supremacy. But post-racial discrimination is now more subtly rooted in the very doctrine of racial equality itself. The discriminatory allocation of benefits and burdens, to which United States culture has always been committed, has now simply been folded into the baseline allocation of resources that we treat as the neutral starting point for assessing the racial legitimacy of any reallocation regime. And redistributive efforts to upset that baseline by diverting resources from whites to racial minorities can now be viewed as entailing reverse discrimination against whites. This form of post-racial discrimination has been developing over the last few decades, but the election of President Obama seems to have given the technique more widespread appeal than it has previously been able to command. That makes post-racial discrimination particularly dangerous because both the perpetrators and victims may come to view the practice as morally and legally legitimate.

Post-racial discrimination permits the ways in which the culture generates and perpetuates racial differences among its members to be subsumed by the core concept of racial legitimacy. Historically, the things that we have done to each other in the name of race always seemed legitimate to the white majority at the time that they were being done. Seizing Indian lands was legitimate because conquerors are permitted to keep the spoils of their successful conquests. Slavery was legitimate because white supremacy made slaves subhuman. De jure segregation was legitimate because God and nature established intrinsic differences between the races. Persistent de facto segregation was legitimate, even after the invalidation of de jure desegregation, because the value we place on liberal autonomy precluded compelled association. More recently, the invalidation of affirmative action and antidiscrimination laws has been deemed legitimate because our efforts to prevent discrimination against racial minorities has ended up producing the more serious problem of discrimination against members of the white majority.

As the culture matures, prior justifications for racial discrimination inevitably lose their luster and eventually fall out of favor. New justifications must then be found to take their place. The claim that redistributive efforts to aid racial minorities actually constitute reverse discrimination against whites appears to have considerable present appeal. But the plausibility of that claim does depend upon the belief that there is no longer any significant discrimination against racial minorities to be remedied. It is this belief that has given rise to the claim that we now live in a post-racial culture. And it is this pursuit of racial “equality” for whites that has elevated post- racialism into our presently preferred form of discrimination against racial minorities.

Our collective predisposition to sacrifice the interests of racial minorities for the interests of whites seems to be firmly embedded in our cultural attitudes and values. Accordingly, it is difficult to imagine how our inclination to engage in racial discrimination can ever be overcome without adopting some sort of precommitment strategy that forces us to engage in the behavior that would be produced by racial equality even if we do not yet have the capacity to assimilate the values of racial equality. Recognizing the moral and legal legitimacy of disparate impact discrimination might well serve as such a precommitment strategy. By forcing ourselves to allocate societal resources in a way that approximates the resource allocation that would exist in a race-neutral culture, we might be able to escape the gravitational pull of our embedded racial attitudes.

92. See Parents Involved in Cmty. Sch. v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 551 U.S. 701, 746–48 (2007)(plurality opinion) (citing Brown II as authorizing resegregation of public schools).
93. See Charles R. Lawrence III, The Id, the Ego, and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism, 39 STAN. L. REV. 317, 322–23 (1987) (arguing that much contemporary racial discrimination is unconscious).
94. See Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244, 299 (2003) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).
95. See id. at 299–302 (discussing striking racial disparities that continue to exist in distribution of societal resources).
96. See Ian Ayres, [url]PERVASIVE PREJUDICE?: UNCONVENTIONAL EVIDENCE OF RACE AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION[/url] 19–44, 165–232, 233–311 (2001) (documenting statistical discrimination).
97. See Jerry Kang, Trojan Horses of Race, 118 HARV. L. REV. 1489, 1509–14 (2005) (discussing unconscious racial bias revealed by Implicit Association Test).
98. See Po Bronson & Amy Merryman, See Baby Discriminate: Kids as Young as 6 Months Judge Others Based on Skin Color. What’s a Parent To Do?, NEWSWEEK, Sept. 14, 2009, at 53 (describing racial attitudes in young children).
99. See Nw. Austin Mun. Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, 129 S. Ct. 2504, 2508–11, 2513–17 (2009) (discussing facts and holding); id. at 2511–13 (suggesting that section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would now be unconstitutional). Justice Thomas expressed similar sentiments, stating that “[t]he Court quite properly alerts Congress that § 5 tests the outer boundaries of its Fifteenth Amendment enforcement authority and may not be constitutional.” See id. at 2519 (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part).
100. See generally LOEWEN, supra note 26, passim (documenting history of intentional residential segregation in United States); MASSEY & DENTON, supra note 26, passim (discussing concept of urban residential “hypersegregation” in United States).
101. See Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property, 106 HARV. L. REV. 1707, 1714–15 (1993) (discussing sense of white entitlement).
102. See, e.g., Yamiche Alcindor, Seeking Healing, Seeing Hostility: Some at Black Family Reunion Criticize Protests Against Obama, WASH. POST, Sept. 14, 2009, at B1 (discussing racially motivated opposition to Obama); Maureen Dowd, Boy, Oh, Boy, N.Y. TIMES, Sept. 13, 2009, at WK.17 (same); Colbert I. King, A Dangerous Kind of Hate, WASH. POST, Sept. 12, 2009, at A17 (same); Anne E. Kornblut & Krissah Thompson, Race Issue Deflected, Now as in Campaign: Obama Maintains Criticism Is About Policy Differences, WASH. POST, Sept. 17, 2009, at A1 (discussing comments of former President Carter that some opposition to President Obama is racially motivated); cf. Hendrik Hertzberg, Comment: Lies, NEW YORKER, Sept. 21, 2009, at 33 (including race among factors motivating paranoia generated by Obama and his programs).
103. See Krissah Thompson, Minority Groups Raise Voices on Reform: Advocates Still Wary of Making Race a Central Issue in Health Care Debate, WASH. POST, Oct. 8, 2009, at A9 (discussing participation of minorities in health care debate).
104. See ANDREW HACKER, TWO NATIONS: BLACK AND WHITE SEPARATE, HOSTILE, UNEQUAL 43–44 (2003) (describing survey). See generally id. passim (describing many ways in which blacks and whites continue to live in two different worlds, where blacks are treated as inferior to whites).