Musings on the concept of pride

[Dids]

This started when Guids made some post in OOT about being proud to be Scicilian.

Got me thinking.

I'm proud of my own personal accomplishments.

I'm proud of what father and grandfathers have done.

I'm proud that the WSU Cougars are having a good basketball season (I grew up in Pullman, but did not attend WSU).

I'm proud that the people I've hired are almost universially great employees and pretty sharp people.

I don't have much pride attached to things like my race, my state, my country.

I started this thought with the basic premise of "race pride is dumb, because what attachment do you have to people of your race beyond the obvious". Then I thought about those aspects where I do derrive pride from those trivial attachments.

I thinking "Why do these things matter to me. Why do I get some value out of these items, and not from others?".

Some of it is obvious, I care about what affects me directly and those things over which I had control.

Some of it is more distant. Specifically the sports example. Why the hell does what some team with whom my only interaction is as a fan, fill me with pride when they win? I haven't done anything to help them.

And if that's the case, and I can feel pride in something to which I'm only tangentially attached, why don't I feel similar in terms of racial identity or nationalism?

(racial identity is a trickier one for me, since I'm a total european mutt and don't really indentify as anything but "white")

So:

Beyond the obvious, what groups do you belong to, or associate yourself with that fill you with pride when they accomplish something?

Why?