: Aye, but do you get hetero pride marches? Do you get heteros racing around in parks or public toilets making their private lives public issues?SDF: Here in California the big issue preoccupying the legislature, & which will also show up as a ballot proposition in next year's elections, is one of whether the State will forbid marriages between members of the same sex. Now, even to GET a ballot proposition on the ballot in the State of California requires at least 100,000 signatures, involving a sizeable amount of statewide campaigning. Sure as hell doesn't seem to ME that the heteros of California are going to shut up about people's PRIVATE lives & about whom they can or can't choose to marry...
And I do want to say something about "pride" marches. Whenever a particular social group wants to hold a "pride" march, it usually has only a tangential relationship to the word "pride". We might be proud of our accomplishments, our possessions, our girlfriends, our boyfriends, or the freckles on our cheeks, but this "pride" of ours typically has little to do with marching, much less to do with going to City Hall to obtain a march permit and police protection, that little chore isn't a matter of "pride" for the organizers either. So we then have to re-understand (the Spanish verb "revisar" seems appropriate here) the word "pride" as it's used for "pride" marches.
I've concluded that "pride" marches are a polite-society way of saying "this is our share of the symbolic power in this society." "Pride" in this context means "we're not ashamed of being the targets of discrimination within a society where economic and political dominance rests in the hands of rich White alpha-males." (Of course, the meaning and import of such discrimination often gets lost in particularistic "pride" marches... but have you really ever met a Black person who wanted to talk about racism, or a gay male who wanted to talk about heterosexism? And if they did, did you want to listen? Maybe not. How embarrasing! So there's another social problem to overcome.)
Racists in this country use the same rhetorical tack that heterosexists such as Lark use. Lets' look at Charlton Heston's question here, in a site sponsored by Ku Klux Klan president David Duke:
So why should I be ashamed of white guys? Why is
"Hispanic Pride" or "Black Pride" a good thing, while "White Pride" conjures shaven heads and white hoods?
It's really quite simple, Charlton, once you drop the polite-society jargon and talk instead about society's real power relations. "Hispanic pride" and "Black pride" mean celebrating one's resistance to racism, whereas "White pride" means celebrating the racism itself.
