(July 22, 2013 at 3:57 pm)Faith No More Wrote: Telling black people to be proud of being black, however, only exacerbates the situation, in my opinion.
On the margins, telling people to be proud of something that is not the result of their own purposed personal accomplishment, such as their ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, is always capable of generating a bad situation where none existed, and worsening a bad situation where one already exists.
However, this has to be balanced against the fact that prejudices almost by definition targets attributes of the victim that is not the result of their own personal accomplishment. Prejudice has the effect of making people feel debased by attributes which are not of their own doing.
In a society with continuing inequities stamming from from past and present prejudices, motivating people to be proud of a specific attribute which had been at the root of the prejudices directed at them, may be on the whole a necessary corrective for that debasement.
