A better word might be arrogance, of which the principal characteristic is that, unlike pride, it is always unmerited.
Pride doesn't need to strut, or put others down, or put walls around the community. That kind of thing is done by people who desperately want to convince somebody, mainly themselves, that they are not as inferior as they know themselves to be (if only by their deeds). The only thing keeping the D'ni in their elevated position, allowing them to enslave and exploit other races, was the Art, and they were clever enough to know that that was something any human could learn to do given the chance; in other words, their "superiority" wasn't innate, and in fact was purely superficial, like the white men's boom-sticks. If the savages ever worked out that the eclipse was going to happen anyway, they'd be completely up the creek...and they knew that, and trembled, and hence the whole racial superiority thing.
The trope about "the sin of pride" comes, I think, from Christianity, and in its more extreme form from various flavours of Puritanism and/or Quakerism. I don't want to disparage those belief systems here--not the place--but not everyone shares them, or thinks that fetishised humility and self-abasement is necessarily a good thing for everyone.
I think that in general parlance there should be a line drawn between, as I said, the desperate arrogance born of insecurity (which isn't "pride"), and reasonable self-respect (which is). Because "pride" should be able to be a good thing as well.
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