| Race and Racialism: Q&A |
A: Parents take pride in their children's achievements. A voter can be proud of her representative. A town's residents can be proud of a local sports team. A nation's citizens can be proud of it's military. Webster's New World Dictionary defines pride as "a person or thing in which pride is taken." An individual may feel that people should not take pride in race (which is taking pride in the actions and lives of one's ancestors) but there is little principled reason not to. Patriotism is a form of national pride and helps maintain a country's cohesion and stability. Race is larger than nation. And, indeed, as national pride decreases a country's internal strife, racial pride may decrease it externally among many nations by forging extra-cultural ties between them. Most blacks have racial pride to spare. They prove this by tying everything they do and believe with the label Black or African-American: Black Entertainment Television, the Congressional Black Caucus, there are the Black Reel Awards which honor only blacks in the movies, there are even Bibles made just for blacks . Dinesh D'Souza in his 1995 book The End of Racism lists more:
Now is it shameful for blacks to behave in such an exclusionary fashion by identifying organizations they found with their own race? Of course not. It is a natural expression of the pride of a people in themselves. And, by principle, if this is not hateful for blacks and Hispanics, then it's not hateful for whites. Personally, I could care less if whites ever have "their own" Congressional White Caucus or National Coalition of White Meeting Planners. It doesn't seem important. But what is important is the eradication of the double-standard currently dominant in our society which dictates that ethnic pride is okay for blacks and Hispanics but not for Caucasians. It is the hypocrisy which is truly shameful. |