Pride Day

Today is Pride Day at Shawnigan. There are a couple of students who want to tell you about some of the goings-on. But before they do I have a few thoughts to share about how every one of us might enter into the spirit of this day.

This is a day when we recognize the diversity in our community with regard to sexual orientation and gender identity, issues that are more alive, and more challenging, for some than others.

But the reality, of course, is that our identity as males and females is broader than our sexual preferences.

Gender identity confronts every one of us with a variety of challenging and interesting and inescapable questions.

These are questions that call to all of us.

The movement that has led to us celebrating Pride Day, (and that movement is very complex and multifaceted), has always had as its edge the common value of allowing every person the freedom to wind their own way along these questions without being ridiculed, bullied, condemned, or judged.

So Pride Day can serve us all by supporting us in the freedom to seek to be ourselves, regardless of what is stereotypically considered “normal.”

Of course we do not develop who we are in isolation. No one is an island. We develop our sense of self in the context of our relationships with one another. So Pride Day isn’t primarily about our individual freedom as much as it is about the way we treat one another.

The use of the word pride is an interesting part of the evolution of our thinking about social change. It is good to understand where it came from.

The common usage of the word pride has to do with the feeling that we get from our accomplishments – more in an individual way. Too much or the wrong kind of pride has traditionally been thought of as a dangerous thing. Perhaps it is.

But the usage of the word that gives meaning to this Pride Day has its roots in the politics of the 60s, when the black pride movement flourished. That movement gave birth to Chicano Pride and other pride movements.

In that context, pride meant something different. It was the process by which minorities – who were told that they didn’t matter, that they were inferior, that they were not to aspire to the same things as the majority white culture – realized that they were not going to be given a sense of worth and value by that mainstream culture: They had to cultivate and internalize a sense of worth for themselves. We see the most recent manifestation of this in a movement that specifically states this notion as its reason for being, Black Lives Matter. This has turned out to be an effective strategy, especially as a way to re-program the brains of young people in minority communities. Jessie Jackson, a civil rights leader, whose movement was called the rainbow coalition, was famous for his call and response chants to large audiences of high school students.

He would shout “I am somebody” and the students would respond, “I am somebody.”

It was this notion of pride in oneself and one’s community in the face of disdain, unfair treatment, and sometimes violence that has been picked up by the catalyzers of the movement for rights and recognition of people whose sexual orientation and gender self-understanding is different than what has traditionally been found acceptable.

The first Gay Pride marches were not celebrations; they were political protests. In Canada the first Gay Pride march took place in Toronto in 1978 as a response to the arrest and incarceration of gay men. Particularly; it was a call for the decriminalization of homosexuality and for a safer and more equitable society for everyone. I was in the march that day.

The notion of pride as it has come down to us from the politics of the 1960s and 70s is about the fact that every life matters, and that bigotry in all its forms is unacceptable.

Today I invite you to celebrate our common bonds, our pride in our community and in one another, and our common commitment to a community in which we are all safer, freer, and more able to express our true selves.