The many identities of Pride
There is a word that, in Italian, has more difficulty than in other languages remaining fixed within a single meaning. Pride oscillates between the deadly sin and political achievement, between the hubris that precedes the fall and the raised head of those who, for centuries, have had to keep it lowered. For a large part of the Western moral tradition, pride has been the first of the sins: the illusion of being self-sufficient, of owing nothing to anyone. But starting in the twentieth century, with liberation movements that made pride a watchword – Black, queer, feminist – pride changes meaning. It becomes the antidote to imposed shame, the tool through which those who have been defined by others learn to define themselves. Saying: “I am proud of who I am” is, for those who belong to a historically discriminated minority, a political act before it is a psychological one.
I spoke about this with Adama Sanneh, CEO of the Moleskine Foundation, who leads a new generation of young creative activists determined to change their own future and that of their communities. With Sanneh, beyond the professional dimension, we have spoken several times about identity and diversity, about the experiences – positive, negative, sometimes incredible – connected to both of us being halfway between two cultures and two very different physicalities. Even starting from an apparently similar experience, the different origins of our parents created a perception, and therefore an experience, profoundly different with respect to the body, identity and the pride that follows from it. The bilingualism I share with Adama, for different reasons, sparked the same reflection in both of us: pride and orgoglio, often translated into one another superficially, actually have very different connotations.
“Orgoglio carries with it a negative meaning, linked to arrogance and conceit; pride, on the other hand, is associated with self-esteem and self-respect, with constructive social emancipation. It cannot be denied that on an emotional level the two aspects sometimes coincide. In all the liberation movements from colonialism and the affirmation of minority rights, attention to one’s own identity has been central, as has its assertion, in order to emerge from an oppression based on the systematic deprivation of personal and collective identity,” Sanneh points out.
But that same assertion, if it finds no outlet, can lead to social tensions and violence. Yet within this knot there is also the seed of a possible rebirth: when the struggle manages to connect itself to ideals greater than the specific claim. Here Sanneh cites bell hooks and her concept of the beloved community (in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope), which she explains as: “A community-building process in which diversity and pride become merely a means, one of many ways to trigger an ongoing process of accepting different differences, until reaching a truly open and welcoming community.”
Claim and co-optation
When a claim succeeds and becomes visible, it immediately becomes available to be used as well. Rainbow flags in shop windows in June, logos that become colourful for a month and return to monochrome in July tell a precise story: pride moves from claim to brand. It is not merely corporate cynicism: it is the destiny of every language of liberation that manages, even only partially, to become mainstream. Co-optation is proof that a struggle has conquered a piece of public space, but it is also the most effective way to empty it of content, transforming a demand for redistribution of power into an aesthetic available to everyone, including companies that continue not to redistribute that power.
Audre Lorde was already writing this in 1979, addressing a feminist academy that treated her as a token: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Translated into the present: the languages created to dismantle a system of exclusion, once reabsorbed into that same system, at most allow one to win temporarily at its game, not to change its foundations. The question organisations should ask themselves is not whether to symbolically support marginalised communities, but what concretely changes in their own structures when they do so. The difference between authentic support and pridewashing is measured in December, not June: it can be seen in who sits on boards of directors, who is hired and retained, who can afford to be visible without paying a professional price for it.
On this too, Sanneh offered me his perspective: “For a leader, pride must translate into an invitation to deeply listen to the people one works with. Change only comes from listening, and only through listening do the barriers that pride erects between people fall. Leadership should resemble the work of a social architect: building the conditions so that everyone can bring their talent and contribution to the common goal while feeling safe.”
The individual and the group
There is then a more intimate tension, between individual identity and collective belonging. Group pride is powerful because it gives those who are alone a “we” that protects and amplifies. But every “we” risks asking, in exchange for protection, for conformity: conformity to totalising queer ideas or to the rigid thinking of a certain origin in a certain way, in order to receive acceptance within collective pride. When belonging becomes a compulsory script, identity ceases to be a space of freedom and becomes a performance, no longer for those looking from the outside, but for one’s own group. This is where identity pride can slide into tribalism, when internal cohesion feeds more on opposition to a hostile outsider than on mutual recognition. The same mechanism, on a different scale, explains how legitimate national pride can turn into exclusionary nationalism, when asserting oneself requires denying the value of others.
Toni Morrison offered, on this point, a precise compass: if you are free, you have to free someone else. It is the difference between a pride that closes itself off to defend a boundary and one that, having achieved recognition, extends it to others instead of guarding it as a privilege.
Self-affirmation and humility
A third tension remains, perhaps the most difficult: that between necessary self-affirmation and necessary humility. Those who have had to fight for recognition know that humility demanded too soon is often just another way of asking for silence. But it is also true that pride, when it becomes a rigid identity rather than a lived experience, can close itself off to listening: it makes it impossible to recognise a wrong committed by others belonging to one’s own community, or to admit that one’s own suffering does not automatically legitimise every claim. The distinction between a legitimate claim and identity-based arrogance does not lie in the content of the request, but in its relationship with listening: pride capable of questioning itself builds communities; pride that shields itself against every doubt erodes them, even when it originates from a real wrong. There is, however, a form of self-affirmation that should not be confused with closure: the one bell hooks claimed when she wrote that she would not allow her life to be reduced, nor would she bend to anyone’s whim or ignorance, the rejection of a humility demanded only of those who are already on the margins, different from a refusal to listen within oneself.
Visibility or spectacle
The final tension, perhaps the one that connects them all, is between authentic visibility and spectacularisation. Being visible has been, for generations of marginalised people, a risk before it was a right: exposure, vulnerability, sometimes violence. Winning the right to be seen without hiding is a victory that should not be taken for granted. Maya Angelou grasped its urgency when she wrote that there is no greater agony than carrying an untold story within oneself. But today visibility is also a market: attention is sold, identity becomes content, and there is an enormous distance between being seen for who one is and being forced to display oneself in order to be considered credible. It is the same distance that separates an environment in which one can bring one’s identity from one in which one has to display it in order to be recognised: the former is a space of freedom, the latter a performance that weighs most heavily on those who are already more vulnerable. Roxane Gay brought this into focus, in a younger generation, when she embraces the label of bad feminist precisely because she is human: not the perfect example to put on display, but a person with her contradictions intact.
Perhaps the only reliable compass, amid all these tensions, is not a fixed definition of good pride versus bad pride, but a question to reformulate each time: does this pride, at this moment, open up a space of recognition – for oneself and for other people – or is it closing it? It is an uncomfortable question to ask ourselves and the communities we belong to, whether social or professional.