Pride...
Are you proud of your ethnicity (if you have one)? Why? Today, it is taken as self-evident that if you have any identifiable racial pedigree, no matter how obscure, you can take justifiable pride in your ancestry. In fact, the more obscure, the better. Are you Peruvian? 3 stars. Are you a descendant of Japanese immigrants to Peru? 4 stars. Are you an Hispanic person in the US? 3 stars. Are you an Afro-Native American, the descendant of the so-called Buffalo soldiers who intermarried with Indians? 5 stars. And so on.
This attitude was exemplified (ludicrously) in a statement by a female news anchor, reported on Yahoo (12/13/2012): "I am very proud of my African-American ancestry which includes my hair....Showing little girls that being comfortable in the skin and HAIR [sic] God gave me is my contribution to society." So the essence of a person's value is their skin color and hair? Pathetic!
The only exception to this ethnic love-fest is if you are a white person with no ties to the old country. You can boast of being Irish or Italian or German or Scottish or Swedish, but not of being white. This is, of course, the consequence of the devaluation of the historic white identity: the sins of world history are laid at the feet of "imperialists," "colonialists," "racists." This is why white people hasten to take refuge in a sub-culture: "I'm Welsh, I suffered too."
Are you proud of your sex? Possibly -- if you are a woman, or some variety of gay. Why are you proud of this? "Because we suffered much in previous centuries, but have overcome the barriers." If you are male, you cannot be proud of this fact. You must be ashamed of the historic domination of men over and discrimination against other gender(s). Your role now is to applaud from the wings the new actors on the central stage -- women and gays.
If you are an ethnic male, you are in conflict. You are allowed to take pride in your ethnic predecessors, but at the same time you must be ashamed of the oppression of women in your traditional culture: arranged marriages, exclusion of women from politics and education. This leads to a logical self-contradiction -- was your ancestral culture morally good because it is non-white and a victim of colonialists, or morally evil as an oppressor of women and gays? We'll let the college professors of Anthropology debate that one.
Rather than complain about this situation, however, I need to cash in as everyone else is doing, even white people like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who self-identifies as Native American. What physical attribute of mine can I claim moral superiority for? Lefthandedness, perhaps? No, that's been tried, and besides, I am part of the righthanded majority (ie, the oppressor class). What about having been born outside the United States? No, that won't work because I was born to American parents and am not an immigrant, legal or otherwise. Unfortunately, I fail to qualify for victimhood by any popular measurement. People like me are doomed to play the role of bogeyman for every political ranter or academic huckster who dominates the public square.
This racial/sexual pride of self and debasement of others is ubiquitous in modern media, so much so that it is not even open to discussion. Race-talk or sex-talk is the currency of educational advancement and of political association. But it is all irrational and anti-Biblical, as will be shown in the next post. The main significance of this new language of self-segregation is as a litmus test: the degree to which you appraise yourself and others in these terms is a mark of your subjection to modern propaganda. No truly rational person, let alone a Christian, bases her self-worth on biology or ethnicity.
In the next post, I shall cite a non-Christian opponent of racial pride, just so that it is clear that both faith and reason agree in their disdain for the self-esteem faddists.