"Exaggerated self-importance is deemed an individual fault, but a racial virtue"
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A neat little scalpel of a sentence: it cuts the same human impulse two ways and lets the audience wince at the inconsistency. Millar frames “exaggerated self-importance” as something we all recognize as obnoxious in a person, then flips it into something rewarded when it’s packaged as collective identity. The bite comes from the moral accounting: vanity is a vice until it can be laundered through “race,” at which point it gets renamed pride, heritage, destiny.
The specific intent feels less like condemning self-regard than exposing how social categories reroute our ethics. When self-importance becomes racialized, it stops reading as arrogance and starts reading as loyalty. That’s the subtext: communities don’t just tolerate overreach from their own; they can sanctify it, especially when status has historically been denied. The line is provocative because it refuses the comforting story that group pride is automatically wholesome. It suggests the same mechanism that makes an individual insufferable can, at scale, fuel nationalism, supremacy, or grievance politics.
Context matters. In contemporary discourse, “racial pride” often lives in tension with “racial supremacy,” and different groups inhabit different histories of power. Millar’s phrasing risks flattening those asymmetries, but that may be part of the provocation: the sentence is built to trigger the reader’s internal footnotes about who gets to be proud, who gets called arrogant, and who gets punished for either. Its power is in the uncomfortable recognition that moral judgments aren’t stable; they’re negotiated through identity and advantage.
The specific intent feels less like condemning self-regard than exposing how social categories reroute our ethics. When self-importance becomes racialized, it stops reading as arrogance and starts reading as loyalty. That’s the subtext: communities don’t just tolerate overreach from their own; they can sanctify it, especially when status has historically been denied. The line is provocative because it refuses the comforting story that group pride is automatically wholesome. It suggests the same mechanism that makes an individual insufferable can, at scale, fuel nationalism, supremacy, or grievance politics.
Context matters. In contemporary discourse, “racial pride” often lives in tension with “racial supremacy,” and different groups inhabit different histories of power. Millar’s phrasing risks flattening those asymmetries, but that may be part of the provocation: the sentence is built to trigger the reader’s internal footnotes about who gets to be proud, who gets called arrogant, and who gets punished for either. Its power is in the uncomfortable recognition that moral judgments aren’t stable; they’re negotiated through identity and advantage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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