Critiquing the concept of “White privilege”

I’ve long been uncomfortable with the concept of “White privilege,” mostly because I feel that the concept doesn’t really tell White people why they should give up their White privilege. I envision a conversation that goes something like this: “Hey, check your White privilege.” [reply spoken externally] “Oh, right, sorry!” … [reply spoken internally] ((Wow, I got White privilege? that sounds pretty good, I’m gonna hang on to it.))

That’s not a serious critique of the concept of White privilege. It’s just this feeling of discomfort that I have. Yet the feeling is strong enough that I find myself not wanting to use the phrase “White privilege,” due to some kind of nameless fear that it’s just going to reinforce the behavior in us White people that the phrase is supposed to put an end to.

In an essay titled “How ‘White Privilege’ Obscures Black Vulnerability,” Mukasa Mubirumusoke, a professor at Claremont McKenna College, provides a more serious critique of the shortcomings of the concept. Mubirumusoke ends his essay with this rhetorical question:

“In what ethical universe could the possibility afforded by whiteness to dominate another human being just because they are Black be considered a ‘privilege’? In the ethical universe of white America today, apparently.”

(Parenthetical note: The essay appears on the Public Seminar website, which I hadn’t seen before. Looks like a lot of good stuff there.)

But wait, there’s more. In a recent post on the American Philosophical Association blog, Lewis Gordon offers a constructive critique of Mubirumusoke’s critique. SCroll way down to find it, and (as I understand it) Gordon’s basic point is that Mubirumusoke’s critique is based on Afropessimism, an intellectual approach that Gordon finds unsatisfactory.

In the course of his longer discussion of Mubirumusoke, Gordon asks a question that may provide a better grounding for a critique of “White privilege”:

“[W]hy center so much of reality from white perspectives?… Fanon, after all, stated that the Black (‘Le Noir’) had no ontological resistance ‘in the eyes [that is from the perspective] of the [White].’ But he never claimed the White was correct. The White needs that lie. I can go on, but at this point, it should be clear that I’m concerned that Mubirumusoke gives too much credence to the problematic, almost Zeno-like forms of problematic argumentations of impossibility as well as the concomitant Stoicism of individual resignation — perhaps even ressentiment — that such arguments occasion….” (N.B.: in this quotation, the notes in brackets are Gordon’s.)

Gordon’s philosophically nuanced critique of Mubirumusoke takes the critique of “White privilege” to a whole other level. It’s a level above my pay grade, to be honest. But let’s be clear, Gordon is not some “anti-Woke” political conservative, like the ones who dominate U.S. politics these days. Trump and company cannot take comfort from this philosophical conversation. By the same token, political liberals who get uncomfortable when their White privilege is called out aren’t going to find much comfort in Gordon’s critique, either. Gordon even goes so far as to criticize that idol of liberalism, the individual:

“Added to all this is the larger history of Euromodern thought as emerging with the global expansion of enslavement while centering freedom in its discourse. The history of political theology and its role in racism and the advancement of capitalism offered rationalizations of a philosophical anthropology in which ‘the individual’ collapsed into stoic models of rationalization instead of understanding the fundamental incoherence of an individual, treated as real in and of itself like an Aristotelian substance, or, worse, a minor, or perhaps egologically inflated sense of self as, a god.” (N.B.: in this quotation, the emphasis is mine.)

Whoa. Take that, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Gordon is striking at the root of our theological commitment to “the individual.” Because — following Emerson — we Unitarian Universalists really do have this tendency to treat the self as a god. Which is idolatry. And we are fundamentally opposed to idolatry.

Well, as I say, all this is well above my pay grade. But I’d also say both these essays are worth reading. Every time I read Lewis Gordon, I find myself getting insight into problems that have been bothering me. And based on what Gordon says about Mubirumusoke, he might be another one of those thinkers….

World Ukulele Day

February 2 is “World Play Your Ukulele Day.” This holiday was established in 2011 by Mike Lynch (a.k.a. “Ukulele Mike”; see below). In the original announcement, Mike Lynch kept his expectations low. “Take your uke out of its case,” he said, “and play it.”

Simple enough.

Screen shot from a video showing a man holding a ukulele and talking
Screen grab from Mike Lynch’s original Youtube video announcing World Ukulele Day. Click the image to see his video on Youtube.

OK. I did that.

What else can I do?

Mike had a suggestion: “Find someone who needs a smile. You might take it to an elder care, you might take it to a shut-in….” In other words, try to make the world a better place by playing your ukulele. But I went on a field trip with teens from our congregation’s youth group, which didn’t leave time for ukulele excursions.

Since I don’t have time to do anything else, I’ll share a ukulele song sheet for “It Was a Lover and His Lass,” Thomas Morley’s 1600 setting of poetry by William Shakespeare. Before you get all critical, yes I know it’s a pretty primitive song sheet. And no, I didn’t attempt to transcribe Morley’s lute accompaniment for ukulele (way above my pay grade), I just put in chord indications based on a simplified form of Morley’s harmony. Yet even in this simplified form, it’s kind of challenging. We tried it at our Cohasset ukulele circle, and people noted the nine different chords you have to know, the fast chord changes, and the tricky rhythm in mm. 22-23. Whatever, it’s a great song — and this is the best I’ve got for World Ukulele Day 2025.

(N.B.: Public domain music, public domain words, and I’m releasing my mediocre typesetting into the public domain. Go ahead and copy it all you want.)

More about Ukulele Mike

Michael B. Lynch (1945-2018) was a career music educator and an accomplished ukulele player. As a youth, he played in a ukulele ensemble led by the legendary ukulele educator Chalmers Doane. Beginning in 2009, he produced a popular series of instructional Youtube videos under the name “Ukulele Mike.” He also published a number of instructional CDs and books, still available through his website that his wife continues to maintain.

Web, c. 2007

I’ve been spending too much time online for the past two decades. But recently I’ve been reducing my screen time, and — surprise, surprise — I feel better. That’s why I’ve reduced my posting schedule to about once a week.

But back in 2007, I lived way too much of my life online. I spent way too many hours writing daily blog posts, commenting on other people’s blogs, hanging out on Twitter, producing a weekly video, watching other people’s videos (back then, blip.tv was the place to really hip creative videos), and on and on.

I also created several random websites, just for fun. Recently, I found the HTML code for a whimsical website I created in 2007. What happened was this: Carol had a website called fishisland.net which she used to publicize ecological projects. Last year, that site got taken over by malicious actors. Our web host shut it down for us. I told Carol I’d restore it but never got around to it (I’m limiting my screen time, remember?).

Well, this week I came down with a nasty head cold. I couldn’t sleep last night because my cough kept waking me up. So I wrapped myself up in a sleeping bag, and tried to resuscitate the hacked web site. And lo and behold, I discovered what I had forgotten — that fishisland.net had originally been my website, that I had hand-coded it in HTML 3.0 with state-of-the-art CSS. The hackers had trashed everything else, but plain old HTML is pretty robust, and I was able to resuscitate the website pretty much as it looked in 2007.

Here’s the resuscitated website. The only real problem I ran into was that the full-size photos had disappeared; I had to take the 200px-wide thumbnails and scale them up in GIMP. Actually, the whole website looks so primitive today, but back then it looked pretty slick. If you’re into HTML, check out the CSS — can you believe how few lines of code it required?

However, don’t try to look at this website on your phone — it will look like crap. And that’s really the big change in the web since 2007. Back then, no one looked at websites on their phones. Now, more than half of all web views are on phones.

Screenshot of website.
A screenshot showing what the resuscitated website looks like.

Update (1/31/25):

A little bit of thought and research revealed that it is in fact possible to have a static HTML website render reasonably well on different sized screens (e.g., laptop, smartphone) without building a responsive site using Javascript. In the case of this website, my CSS originally had an ID selector that styled the second nested div (the first div sets the background color, this div sets size on the screen) as follows:

#wrap {width: 42em; margin: 0 auto;} 

I simply changed that to:

#wrap {width: 95%; max-width: 42em; margin: 0 auto;}

Duh. So obvious. Of course I also had to change padding and margin for various other CSS elements so the site would look OK on a smartphone, which took some time. I also added the following line to the header:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Now the site works reasonably well on various sized screens. Is it as good as a responsive website? No. And I’m sure I’ll find more problems. But I had fun, and I like that the CSS is compact and manageable.

And now I’ve spent waaaaay too much time staring at screens today.

Asian art scavenger hunt

On Sunday, Tracey and I are taking the Coming of Age class for First Parish in Cohasset and First Parish in Norwell into the Harvard University Art Museum.

The point of the trip is to look at Asian art that depictions deities and sacred objects. This gets interesting because Asian religious/cultural traditions have different understandings of divinity than Christianity (or the other two Abrahamic traditions).

For example — is Buddha a deity, or not? The answer: It depends. In some art works, Buddha appears very human; in other art works, Buddha appears more than human. (Similarly with Jain tirthankaras.) And what about Hindu deities? They are clearly gods, but they also have human-like characteristics.

In Western culture, we tend to think all deities are like the Christian God, transcendent and far above humanity. But Asian art reminds us that there is a scale of divinity, from ordinary mortals through divine humans, and through human-like deities, all the way to transcendent unknowable deities.

So that’s the purpose of the scavenger hunt — look for works of art, then figure out how divine a being is portrayed in the art work. To show you better what I mean, here’s the first page of this year’s scavenger hunt:

If you’re near Cohasset and enjoy ukulele…

…I’m helping organize a free ukulele workshop. The online registration form is now live. Here are the details:

Woman holding a ukulele shown in profile.
‘Ukulele workshop leader Anne Ku with her Pepe Romero “tiny tenor” ‘ukulele.

FREE Ukulele Workshop with Anne Ku

Sun., Feb. 9, 2025, 2-4 p.m.

What: Free ukulele workshop led by Anne Ku. Anne says: “I’ll teach you the 20% you need to know, to play 80% of what you want to play.”

WhoAnne Ku is a well-known Boston-area ukulele teacher and workshop leader.

Where: Location: 23 N. Main St., Cohasset, Mass. Parking map (PDF).

Downloadable flyer (PDF)

More info about the Cohasset ‘ukulele circle, who are hosting this event.

The workshop

2 p.m.: Fun with Ukulele — for all levels, but especially useful for beginners.
3 p.m.: Common Chord Progressions — what you need to know to play your favorite songs.

Doors open at 1:40 p.m. Be ready to start at 2 p.m. with a tuned ukulele. Need help tuning? Show up early and we’ll help!

Bring your ukulele, music stand (if you have one), and water bottle. Tea and snacks will be provided.

Registration

Please register at the link below. This workshop is customized to workshop participants, catering to all levels. The more you describe yourself, the better the fit.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Alternate definitions for “socialism”

Sometimes I wonder why the religious right, and the political conservatives, express so much disdain for “Marxism” and “socialism.” It kinda makes sense that the religious right might dislike “Marxism” and “socialism” so intensely, because Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses,” and because many Marxist-Leninists promote a crusading atheism that wants to get rid of religion entirely.

But wait. The definitions for “socialism” and “Marxism” are not always the definitions you’ll find in the dictionary. For an example of what I mean, let’s go back in time to 1963.

Not long after Martin Luther King, Jr., was released from the Birmingham jail, White terrorists bombed the house of King’s brother. This violent act provoked a violent response from the Black community, which in turn prompted the infamously racist Governor George Wallace to respond with even more violence: he sent in state troopers who mercilessly beat Black people. Jonathan Riedler takes up the story in his book Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and the Struggle That Changed a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 124:

“The violence of the state [of Alabama] was the physical expression of an ideology of white supremacy…. George Wallace had sworn to the Alabama State Assembly that he would squelch ‘agitators’ and ‘integrationists’ who aimed to ‘destroy the freedom of Americans everywhere.’ Twenty-one times the legislators applauded him. Not long after the bombing, when President [John F.] Kennedy moved federal troops to Alabama bases, Birmingham’s lame-duck mayor, Art Hanes, fulminated against ‘bayonet brotherhood’: ‘They gonna tell the people of Birmingham, “You’ll love this nigger at the point of a bayonet, whether you want to or not” … This is Socialism of the rankest sort.’…”

Note that in the above example, Art Hanes is not using the dictionary definition of socialism. For him, “socialism” has an alternative definition: it is government action that prevents him from committing acts of racial violence. He perceives this as infringing on his rights as an American, and he defines anything that infringes on his rights as an American as “socialism.”

This helps me understand some of the visceral emotion I sense when people reference Marxism” and “socialism” in today’s political debates. There are times when opponents of “socialism” and “Marxism” are not using the dictionary definitions for those words, but rather more emotionally-loaded meanings pertaining to race.

The wrong kind of atheism

Still reading Talking God: Philosophers on Belief by Gary Gutting (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). When Gutting interviews Michael Ruse, a philosopher of biology, he asks Ruse about Richard Dawkins’s arguments against the existence of God. Ruse has a good reply:

” Like every first-year undergraduate in philosophy, [Richard] Dawkins thinks he can put to rest the causal argument for God’s existence. If God caused the world, then what caused God? Of course, the great philosophers, Anselm and Aquinas particularly, are way ahead of him here….”

There actually are interesting arguments to be made about the various proofs for and against God, but Dawkins remains stuck at the level of a certain kind of college freshman who is both ignorant and arrogant.

Noted without comment

From an interview with Howard Wettstein, in the book Talking God: Philosophers on Belief by Gary Gutting (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), pp. 58-59:

Gary Gutting: “You say you’re a [religious] naturalist and deny that there are any sujpernatural beings, yet you’re a practicing Jew and deny that you’re an atheist. What’s going on here? What’s a God that’s not a supernatural being?”

Howard Wettstein: “Let’s begin with a distinction between participation in a [religious] practice and the activity of theorizing, philosophically and otherwise, about the practice. Even an advanced and creative mathemetician need not have views about, say, the metaphysical status of numbers. Richard Feynman, the great physicist, is rumored to have said that he lived among the numbers, that he was intimate with them. However, he had no views about their metaphysical status; he was highly skeptical about philosophers’ inquiries into such things. He had trouble, or so I imagine, understanding what was at stake in the question of whether the concept of existence had application to such abstractions. Feynman had no worries about whether he was really thinking about numbers. But ‘existence’ was another thing.

“It is this distinction between participation and theorizing that seems to me relevant to religious life.”

Another niche hobby

An entry under the category of Niche Hobbies: handbell change ringing.

If you’ve read Dorothy Sayers’s murder mystery Nine Tailors (or watched the TV version), you know what change ringing is. It’s very English: you have a tower with eight or so bells, and a bunch of people stand around and ring the bells in certain defined patterns. If you don’t have a tower full of bells? Then you can use handbells, and you get handbell change ringing.

One musician describes handbell change ringing like this: “A series of 4-12 bells are rung in a series of mathematical permutations. Remember work with 12-tone tone rows in 20th-century music theory class? This is similar in practice, but with diatonic notes.” Also, to my ears it sounds much better than most twelve-tone music.

Click on the image below to see a video of handbell change ringing in action.

Four people sitting in a circle, each ringing two handbells.
Screen grab from the video. Note the looks of intense concentration on the faces of the ringers.

This is the kind of niche hobby that’s going to appeal to a certain kind of person: someone who likes mathematical patterns, someone who likes cooperative efforts in small groups, someone who likes the meditative effect of intense concentration, and so on. OK, I admit it: that someone could probably be me. Since the last thing I need right now is yet another niche hobby, I’m fortunate that there’s no handbell change ringing group near me.

General info on handbell change ringing:
handbell change ringing bloglinks to change ringing websites

Math and change ringing:
a bit about math and change ringing — Prof. Sarah Hart of Gresham College gets into group theory and change ringing

Instructional materials:
quick overview for conventional handbell ensemblesthe cross-and-stretch techniquethe ringing on bodies technique (ringers move, not bells) — instructional bookhandbell change ringing for beginners (booklet) — change ringing for handbells (more advanced) — instructional websitehandbell change ringing online simulator (for solo practice) — methods for three bell ringing (with a tenor behind, that would be 4 bells = 2 handbell ringers) — cross and stretch demonstrated (the video with stuffed animals is particularly clear, believe it or not)

Performance videos:
3 people (easy to follow the changes) — blindfold handbell change ringing4 person cross and stretch (watch closely) — 6 person cross and stretch

The year in music

I have to spend a lot of time thinking about music for my job. Honestly, though, much of what passes for sacred music in Unitarian Universalist circles these days is pretty dreary stuff. To avoid dreariness and boredom, this will not be a post about UU sacred music. Instead, here’s some of the more obscure music I’ve encountered this past year.

I’ll start with the ‘ukulele. This under-appreciated instrument still gets no respect, but there are some stunning players out there. Like jazz great Benny Chong, now in his eighties and still going strong. Here he is with bassist Byron Yasui on “Just the Way You Are.” Chong is also a fabulous solo player. Here he is playing “My Romance.”

Two men playing musical instruments
Benny Chong and Byron Yasui performing in Hawai’i (screen grab from video)

I’ve also been listening to Carmen Souza, who mixes traditional Cape Verdean music with contemporary styles. Here she is with “Amizadi” from her latest album. Souza writes: “For this song, I composed a Funaná [a traditional Cape Verdean genre] based on the story of Francisco Cruz, a.k.a B.Leza. This genre promotes fun and social interaction, so I called it Amizadi (Friendship).” Next, here she is solo, singing “Confiança & Bonança”, a video released on International Women’s Day 2024.

A woman singing
Carmen Souza, performing live in France (screen grab from video)

One of my musical obsessions this year has been handbells, because I started playing in our congregation’s handbell choir. Sadly, much of the handbell music you find online tends towards dreary Christian sacred music. Yawn. But if you look, you can find more interesting stuff. Like the Double Mallet Ringers, based in Hong Kong. Most of their ringers are professional music educators, they commission compositions, and they even have a resident composer. In addition to more serious music, they also do goofy covers like this.

Double Mallet Ringers, Hong Kong (screen grab from video)

Finally, So Percussion and Caroline Shaw released another new album together this year. What they do could be described as singer-songwriter meets avant-garde. Do their lyrics actually mean anything? Whatever, it’s incredibly refreshing music. Here’s the title track from their new album Rectangles and Circumstance.

There’s a lot of great musical creativity out there, from a variety of different cultures, in a variety of styles. Maybe the new year will bring some new creativity and variety to UU sacred music….

Addendum: I just have to throw in this piece I found today, by Kenyan sound artist Nyokabi Kariuki, “Raw Sugar” performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.