Happy Pride Month — and Please Don’t Add Any More Colors to the Rainbow Flag

 

Happy LGBT+ Pride Month to everyone who is observing!  The LGBT+ community has spent so much time forced into the shadows — I’m talking about decades and centuries — that I think it’s marvelous its members can now live openly and honestly without the awful stigma and disparagement once attached, at least in most of the Western world.  And I hope that all hate crimes against them will soon be completely and utterly relegated to the past.

As anyone who knows me can attest, I’ve spent a lot of time advocating for the greater inclusion of people of color (POC) in the media, and I’m a big fan of anything that can help raise their profile and those of other marginalized communities.  However, I’ve never grown to like adding colors to the now-familiar rainbow Pride Flag, with the six alternating primary and secondary colors.  While I think it’s important to recognize the contributions of further marginalized groups within the already marginalized LGBT+ community, I don’t think that adding extra colors to the Pride Flag is the way to go.  Why?  Because, very simply, it would mean — or be interpreted to mean — that LGBT+ people of color, and the others represented by the additional colors, were never a part of the original rainbow flag to begin with, that the rainbow flag never represented them.  Additional colors would mark the six-hued rainbow Pride Flag as exclusionary.

Still, I’ve kept my opinion on this matter to myself largely because (1) I’m not a part of the LGBT+ community and (2) an “official” Pride Flag has never been declared (and I understand that no one is in authority within the community to make any such declaration, which is as it should be).  I always figured that the LGBT+ community would resolved this issue on their own.

So, I was pleased to come across the above video by the YouTube user Shaaba, a member of the LGBT+ community and POC who also doesn’t believe that any additional colors should be attached to the six-striped rainbow flag.  She also discusses issues within the LGBT+ community which I, as an outsider, wouldn’t be able to articulate.  I’m glad that she agrees with me.  I hope that the other Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts, and the additional letters that make up the community will listen to what she says.