Whether it be nationality, race, heritage, or gender, there are so many benefits that come from being proud of our backgrounds. These identities create a sense of community, confidence, and connection that brings meaning and purpose to our lives. When we’re proud of a community that we came from we’re constantly driven to make it better, creating a virtuous circle of elevated meaning and pride within it. Even when we disagree on what exactly better is it’s because we care, and with this caring comes a lot of good things.
Unfortunately, pride is a double-edged sword. Problems begin when it leads us to build borders around our community, to adopt an “Us vs. Them” mentality. We start to push others out. We put those outside of our community down. We lose the ability to appreciate other ways of life. When we become so obsessed with proving that we’re better than them, we lose sight of trying to be better than who we were yesterday.
We can and should celebrate our nationality, race, heritage, and gender, but be wary of pitting it up against some group of “others“. A New Yorker is also a North Easterner who is also an American. An Americans is a Westerner, and all of the above are united under the banner of humanity. The concept of identifying as a human is so fundamental that it feels foreign. There’s no group of “others” to unite ourselves against. It doesn’t feel like some special group despite it most definitely being so. We fail to consider that being human is something we all have in common, with tens of thousands of year of history (far more than any single culture or heritage). We fail to consider that the “other” is the human struggle that we all face on a daily basis.
We have special days to celebrate nationality, culture, and heritage. Let’s not forget to make time to unite and celebrate our humanity, or better yet, let it pervade in our day-to-day lives.