Essay:Why "White Pride" is a sham

White Pride is term used primarily by white supremacist groups as their public raison d'etre. They reason that since other groups express "pride" in their racial identity, it is acceptable for them to have "white pride". They focus on the idea of race, rather than ethnicity. There are several problems with this line of reasoning.

The race problem
As discussed extensively in the biologic, sociologic, and anthopologic literature, race, as such, is a societal construct, not a biological one. While there are obvious, superficial differences between groups of people, race, as such, is not all that useful a concept. Ethnicity is a more proper term.

The power problem
While the argument is perhaps a bit shopworn, "whites" hold the majority of political, corporate, and professional positions in the U.S., the idea that there is oppression of whites is ridiculous.

The lie
While any individual is certainly allowed to define their own ethnic identity, white supremacists invent an ethnic identity where there is none, and then assign an involuntary identity to others.

Invention of white ethnicity
Whites in the U.S. do not have a unified ethnic identity. White supremacists often share certain beliefs, etc, that resemble ethnicity in some ways, but vary from group to group. Most white Americans do not self-identify as "white" as much as they do as "American".

Involuntary assignment of others' ethnicity
White supremists tell others what ethnic group they must belong to. They decide who they think is black, Jewish, etc, and also decide what that identity means. The inherent contradiction is that they create their own fake ethnic identity because they consider it their "right", but they deny that same right to others.

The "If White Pride is racist, then Black Pride is racist too!" canard
The "Black Pride" movement, starting all the way back with Marcus Garvey and "Black is Beautiful," arose to rebut the (then-widespread) assumptions that black people were inherently worse than white people. It did not strive to say that black people were superior to white people, but instead to help the oppressed black Americans take pride in themselves. This was necessary because the oppressive systems of slavery and segregation both included means of making black people internalize the logic of oppression. While it can be argued that some specific organizations took this too far, such as the Nation of Islam and its strange mythology about the origins of white people, by and large mainstream "Black Power" is and has always been about infusing self-esteem into the down-trodden, not asserting that blacks are superior to whites.

In contrast, White Pride is something specifically crafted by white supremacists to justify recreating that system of oppression.

The truth
White pride is a cloak for racial and ethnic hatred. In some, it is simply a misguided home for the lost; in others, an avenue to irrational violence.