Pride

Recently, I've been getting some good, probing questions on Facebook through my personal pages, friends' feeds, and our organizational page at The Table Setters. One of the questions yesterday was : why are blacks encouraged to have pride but whites are seen as hateful if they are proud?

So first off, I think Wikipedia is helpful here. Language has always had different connotations in different contexts, and culture and society location are certainly contexts. (And remember, the Eskimo tribe has multiple words to describe the one word English has for "snow.")   Pride is an inwardly directed emotion that carries two antithetical meanings. With a negative connotation pride refers to a foolishly and irrationally corrupt sense of one's personal value, status or accomplishments, used synonymously with hubris. With a positive connotation, pride refers to a humble and content sense of attachment toward one's own or another's choices and actions, or toward a whole group of people, and is a product of praise, independent self-reflection, and a fulfilled feeling of belonging.

Growing up White (with pinkish-orange skin) is a different context than growing up Black (with brown skin).  I believe that too many white people try to claim this is not so, some desperately want to believe we live in a color-blind world, some desperately believe we live in a world where #AllLivesMatter is the reality, but it's just not.  From God's point of view, yes.  Jesus died for all of God's children.  But we constantly fail to live into the original design, and in a fallen world, all lives do not matter equally.  We know this.  It's whether or not we admit it, that's the question.  

Jane Elliott has done masterful work in exploring this.  When white people are asked if they'd like to be treated the way black people are treated in our society, even with all the unfair complaints white people level at poor black folks about welfare and entitlement, nobody claims they'd rather be treated like a black person in the USA.  Why?  Because we all know that our cultural norms revolve around Whiteness.  I hear it every day, in some form, from other well-meaning white people.  "Oh, they are just a regular, normal family."  "Oh, this is a nice neighborhood for people like you."  Ask yourself, who do you imagine is normal, regular, nice?

So, when talking about pride, and the apparent "double standard," why blacks are encouraged and whites are discouraged, I think we are talking about two different emotions.  It's like this:

Imagine there are two brothers in a family.  One is an amazing athlete and the other is not.  The athlete wins all kinds of trophies, people come over to be around him because they think he's so awesome.  Girls have crushes on him, boys have crushes on him.  He is written up in the local newspaper often.  One night, his brother, who is not talented athletically, is heard crying in his room.  Their father goes in and asks him why he's crying.  This son says, "because I'm nothing, because I'll never be as good as him."  The father embraces him and says, "nonsense, you are good at a great many things.  You should be proud of the talents you have, be grateful for the gifts God has given you.  Do not see them as less than your brother's talents, just because he gets so much attention for them now."

Nobody tells the athletic brother he should be proud because he doesn't need that in the culture of his high school.  In fact, if he walked around saying, "I'm so awesome, I'm so proud of who I am!  I can do everything.  I never drop the ball.  I do all the right things.  I never make a mistake...." we would see him as arrogant, suffering from pride, or hubris.  Probably.  

On the other hand, if his brother took a deep breath and said, "you know what, my dad is right," then decided to put, let's say, his art skills to use, and created a really beautiful and complicated self-portrait, we might expect him to be proud of his work.  We might hope that he is proud of his work.  That's a different context.  Of course, if that brother started getting attention and accolades, he would also be at risk of falling into the same arrogance we could imagine for his brother.  Except that in this country, athleticism is still valued much higher than most forms of art (with the exception of movies)......

Black people, (specifically to answer this question) and all our citizens who are not able to "pass" as white are taught, both in overt and subtle ways, to be ashamed of themselves every single day.  There have maybe been some improvements, but when students are given punishments for wearing their hair in an Afro, you cannot deny this statement.  (Side note: there is great cost and time to alter very curly hair, and very harsh chemicals involved in doing so.  So, imagine you're a kid who can't afford to get that done as often as other kids, and now the school is fining you for it.)

Some of you tell me this is a media invented guilt trip.  I promise you, I am not writing this out of guilt, and I hardly watch CNN, FOX or MSNBC (we don't have cable).  I do feel guilty when I say something mean to someone in a way of trying to hurt them.  I am not feeling guilt as I write this. I'm feeling hope.  Hope that you, if you are white and this is something you've never considered, that you might start noticing this issue.  Watch TV commercials, and for me, that meant noticing TV commercials during football games from the couch of a black family in New Orleans that invited me over for the party.  It's suddenly really apparent when you're sitting in a room full of brown-skinned people that the commercials are talking to me, and only me, selling me a product for my hair, skin, for my ways of life.  Now, that has changed some since 2000, but turn on the local news in those homes, and sit down.  Who are the "villains", who are the "heroes?"  Who comes to your mind, and this could be a question for all people of all races.  White ideals aren't just something white people aspire to.  Whiteousness can infect all of us, equally.  The problem is, when I let Whiteousness dominate me, I can feel "normal" if I choose to.  When my brown-skinned friends let Whiteousness into their thinking, how do you imagine they might feel when they look at their skin that isn't as pinkish-orange as mine?

These are the kinds of discussions we are having at the Table Setters.  We hope to visit you soon!

Peace by peace,
@matthewjschmitt
 +Matthew John Schmitt
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