Pride.

(This is a lot more utopian than I usually swing, and I'm not entirely sure I agree with myself here or how implementation wouldn't be disastrous, but I thought the idea was interesting enough to share. Also, I'm not a Nazi or anything, I hope that at least is clear.)



We need white pride. We need male pride. We need straight pride.

Because the only way racism is going to go away is if white is just another race, with white culture and white events no more or less special than any other kind. When we have black and Latino culture but white things are just culture, we make white the default in a very unfortunate way. We should have White Entertainment Television, showing white-made programming aimed at white people, with news and politics of interest to whites, and ads for products popular among whites. Instead of just calling it "the major networks."

Likewise with other forms of discrimination and identity politics; while eliminating all divisions would be nice, given people's propensity to divide themselves and their (often perfectly reasonable) desire to stay true to their roots, another solution is to make the dominant group an identity too.

"Equal rights for women," by that standard, misses the point; it's too close to saying "women should be equal to people." Having a women's movement means that men are considered the default gender and being as good as men means you've got it made. How about equal rights for men and women? The distinction might be subtle in practice--it's not like we're going to have to raise men's wages to match women's very often--but important in philosophy. A man's right to wear a dress is just as important as a woman's right to wear pants; and a man's right to be respected in his relationships and safe from abuse can't be taken for granted. Because the only way for feminism to succeed is for women's issues to become people's issues, and the only way to do that is to treat men as a gender too.

And only when straight is just another spot on the continuum can we really have equality for gay people. When finding out that your son likes girls is an event worth noting. And when that son gets older, he can meet girls at straight bars. (Of course he can go to regular bars too, but he'll have to make some effort to look for girls who are acting stereotypically straight or who are giving him straight vibes, and there's always the chance he'll be wrong.)

Saying "but whites/men/straights already have so much privilege" is missing the point; I don't want us to have the dominant culture and White Day too, I want White Day to be a path to letting the dominant culture be truly mixed. I think there's a certain emptiness to being a generic white American these days, a feeling of not belonging to any groups, and it's that feeling that leads majority members to define "everyone, except when specified otherwise" as their group. Which frequently ends up sucking for the specified otherwise.

I really don't want to Balkanize the world further, I obviously don't think white/male/straight people should be separatists, but neither do I think they should be assumed as mainstream. I don't think their identity should go unspoken. Too often it seems like someone's race is either defined as either Black/Latino/Asian/etc. or raceless. So I'm in favor of white racial identity, because to respect other races we don't need to be apologetic, "politically correct," guilty-by-genetics; we need to be a race ourselves.