I wasn’t hostile to this book when I read it the first time, but I wasn’t really attuned to it, and so I shall have to re-read it to understand it better. However, I have been thinking about this book as I remember it and I think I am beginning to agree with it. I didn’t intentionally, or desire to, shoehorn Mike into the kinda brainless-yet-uselessly-brainiac assumptions of Anglo philosophy, you know. Aristotle and Augustine say different things, yet we know as an historical fact, that Aristotle bonded with Augie 500 years later or whether (700 years? 1700 years? 2000 years?) over their shared skin tone, right. (Perhaps they both fielded a few “goddamn dago” comments, right—remember, these guys have been around for a LONG time! 😸). But yeah: I went into my reading thinking I was going to like having a Black philosopher’s book—I know: ONE book! 😸—and I found the whole non-Anglo (and non-Anglo-Asian! OMG! 😱) POV very hard to digest, right. It’s like, Wow…. He really looks at things different, right! I didn’t know that that’s what philosophy was about! I thought it meant we were all agreed! 😹

But yeah: I do now think that his ideas that pride, proper or basically human pride, as a good thing, and white pride as an infamous evil, are complementary and do not militate against each other…. He does talk about Black pride, as a Black person, and having participated in the oft-neglected Black accomplishment of survival in an incredibly colonial/hostile world, right: but he’s not actually arguing that palefaces never have any accomplishment to be proud of, right. He’s literally just saying that we shouldn’t be proud of how we look like slaveholders, you know: that’s a pernicious, false pride. But the classic theologian thing where you’re filled with shame for being a human being isn’t the answer.

And yeah: as an example—and I hope this doesn’t come across as personal animosity: as an actor, (arguably but not exclusively, certainly, in those times) his job was literally to be a sort of type, you know—not quite an archetype, or cross-cultural type, exactly, but a sort of specifically Anglo American type, was how we were meant to implicitly conceptualize it, I think: and certainly he was a handsome individual and a symbol of what Old Hollywood considered charming, but I think James Stewart kinda represented the man who was extremely reticent to accept praise for his own individual accomplishments, but who implicitly wanted to be praised for being the American white man, you know—in other words, he shunned proper or human pride, and accepted in its place white pride, or perhaps male chauvinist pride (of the cultured variety). He represented the neurosis of the time, right.

He certainly did have some personal accomplishments. Aside from his literal acting career, I saw a book in a library yesterday that says he was in WWII—apparently he signed up even before Pearl Harbor: so he must have been both brave and a news junkie, sorry, an informed citizen—and that for his whole life he refused to speak about it and deflected praise about it, and they had to wait until after he was dead to research and write this book. It was a very pro-mythology book, it sounded like, it was called “Mission” and sounded like it referred to him in very romantic/saintly terms, you know. And even onstage, his characters are often kinda…. Like, you’re meant to walk away thinking that if that guy is a hero, ANY white man is a hero, right: it’s not that ~James Stewart~ is a hero, right. Like, as Senator Smith he’s kinda—I mean, people literally make fun of him because he’s a joke—and as George Bailey, he’s sitting around wondering if he’s a bad sort because he didn’t get to fight in the war, right. (!). But the sorta background-pride fills in, you know: there are so few Black actors that it’s hard to get a sense of ‘race’ other than the sheer overwhelming exclusion, right—although nobody of that generation as ‘patriotic’ or whatever as James minded having the Black mammy just kinda being convenient furniture, right, (“It’s a Wonderful Life”), and in the “Mr. Smith” movie you get kinda some examples of his style of masculinity, you know—polite exclusion, a style he seems to embody pretty comfortably, you know; he just delivers the lines perfectly. Like, he literally gives one of those “for a woman, you’re ok” comments—and of course, it’s 1939, so she responds with shock, you know: “you mean I’m not total shit, only 50%? Oh, that’s more than I deserve….”—you know, it’s like…. I mean, it’s two things: one, is that they’re bonding, and so he wants to send this ambivalent message, you know: I want to bond with you; but you’re not me, and you’re not like me: we’re different…. We can hold hands, but our arms have to remain fully extended, right…. But you can work for me. I can assign you tasks to complete for me, because for someone like you, you’re not so bad, you know…. And the other, yeah, is the polite-exclusion-pride that men extended to women: which was also how white people treated Black people, right. (When they weren’t lynching them, of course.)….

So yeah: it’s almost like being a human being—just a concrete, enfleshed, in-the-abstract-capable-of-both-good-or-bad condition, isn’t really the problem, right. It’s almost like the problem is having such contempt for yourself that you deflect praise, pride—and even happiness—and have to demean and shame others to compensate, right.

(pauses, considers this) (waves hands) Nah, it can’t be that….

First chapter was good, particularly Aristotle's concept of "proper pride". Rest of the book was not really a reflection on pride as one of the seven deadly sins, nor as the chief of sins. Instead, the author chose to take on white pride, black pride, and national pride. All worthy subject, perhaps, but not what I expected from this series. Disappointing. ( )

A promising start but disappointing. To be truthful, I'm not sure how this book is about pride. I anticipated a theological or philosophical discussion of some kind; I ended up with social commentary on white pride (bad) and black pride (good) for about 75% of the book. The consideration of what constitutes pride in each case I found to be accusatory and superficial. While this is truly not your Pope Gregory's pride, bring the discussion back to something remotely universal, if one can even speak of universals anymore (as anything other than guises of oppression). But call me naive. It ends with a shallowness that perhaps aims to bring shame to white folks for the sins of pride as the instigator of social injustice and racism. It's a shame that this book could not move beyond that. ( )

This book differs from the series in the way it approaches the sin, in this case pride. However, the way that Dyson talks about pride for American culture makes this book pivotal. ( )