It is ugly and scatterbrained and opens the door for any and all oppressed groups to demand inclusion and prioritization.
It is ugly and scatterbrained and opens the door for any and all oppressed groups to demand inclusion and prioritization.
F ortune 500 companies, dining establishments, and Facebook profile pictures are awash these days in the colors of the Noahic covenant — the rainbow, for those who didn’t go to Sunday School — as a signifier of Pride Month.
Intended to be a celebration of sexual heterodoxy, Pride Month includes parades, corporate kowtowing, and progressives competing with one another over who can be the most inclusive. The symbol of “Pride” is the Pride Flag itself, multi-colored with horizontal stripes; or at least it was. Over the last few years, the Pride Flag has seen multiple revisions, each time adding more colors and symbols — and it’s gotten ridiculous. It is now the true product of a flag-by-committee, the modern intersectional movement in a single frame: It is ugly and scatterbrained and opens the door for any and all oppressed groups to demand inclusion and prioritization.
Charges of ugliness may seem unkind, but this newest pride flag can only be described as a sin against design and its observers. Left-wing writers will admit as much. The inclusion of black and brown stripes to represent “Blackness,” and light blue and pink stripes to represent transgenderism, all bundled into a rightward-pointing chevron on the left side of the flag makes for a clash of colors and visual noise that is deeply off-putting. If the Left is aware of this violation of viewers’ ocular faculties, why not revert? Because they are caught up in this philosophy similar to the legal principle, expressio unius est exclusio alterius, the explicit mention of one thing is the exclusion of another. Everyone must be represented for fear that his or her specific oppression is not considered as serious as some other groups’ difficulties.
You may have noticed this last February when sexual politics were dragged into Black History Month and how now in June there are BLM pride marches. It has gotten to the point where there is such a cacophony of representation that it is difficult to suss out who or what is being elevated. With this latest iteration, the flag is now messaging about sex, gender, and racial politics. The thinking goes, you cannot be pro-gay without being pro-BLM without being pro-transgender. Intersectionality demands the inclusion of all at the expense of the individual cause. That’s a heck of a lot of ideology for one standard to bear.
Because so many movements have been added to the flag, supporters will find it difficult to argue that other sexual/racial minority groups should not be added. The Left cries “erasure” constantly, the idea being that the absence of a particular skin tone or lifestyle implies society would rather do without said person. If this is so, why should black and brown be present, but not a color for Asian groups? Is their suffering not worthy of a stripe or two? What of intersex individuals? (Actually, there’s already been an intersex addition, and it has helped the flag to continue its crime against design.)
There is no limiting principle on the trend. The intersectionalists will either need to get a bigger flag a la Acuity or sit down and hash out who gets to speak their oppression when. In the coming years, it will be interesting and disturbing to see which groups exert their will to land atop this hierarchy of intersectionality, and the Pride Flag could act as a real-time bellwether.
I do not envy the activist Left. The Pride Flag is but one example of the ground ever shifting beneath their feet, with progressive norms one day being regressive the next. They make rules for themselves that they cannot possibly hope to uphold, locked in a race with one another to be ever more inclusive and empathetic; ironically making them abrasive and power-hungry to effect their goals. They cannot win their own game, but can never admit defeat for fear of being cut apart by their “allies.”