Sunday Morning Observances: On Privilege, Entitlement, and the Extended Damage it Does to Our Communities

If you're like me, you've got some anger to burn off these days.

I've started to spend Sunday mornings in my basement gym, whaling on my heavy bag while listening to something inspirational. This appears to be an excellent combination for allowing me to respond to and engage with the rest of the world in a nonviolent manner. 

There are a few human behaviors in this miraculous, beautiful world I actively despise, and they are all so prevalent at this moment, actively roaming around in our lives like zombies, that it is difficult not to feel embattled and aggressive.

These include but are not limited to:

• White Privilege, male privilege, entitlement, and their everyday, negative impacts on our communities large and small: racial, social, economic and cultural oppression and inequity at every level, rural and urban.
• Unauthorized uses of armed force, the next steps onto the slippery slope of authoritarianism; 
• Presidential Lying -- 'nuff said; 
• Mismanagement, such as the federal government's response to COVID that is going to extend the community health and economic suffering far longer than necessary;

Having done my rounds of jabs and power punches at the bag this morning, let's think about this first set of behaviors -- unacknowledged privilege -- and how they relate to the last -- mismanagement.

And let's take this away from the federal government, as that is just too easy and obvious. Let's acknowledge instead that the patterns that exist in our families, small organizations, towns, businesses -- nonprofits and otherwise -- and communities are amplified at the national level.

Using my experiences with rural nonprofit boards as a consultant and a board member, here's how this works. (Truthfully, its underpinnings can be found in the white Calvinist Protestantism on which our nation is founded: the idea that American "exceptionalism," success, and wealth are signs of God's providence. Go with me here.)

a. People who have been materially successful, due to birth (including but not limited to historic land theft and enslavement), education, work, or a combination of any of these believe this success makes them uniquely qualified to do anything. This is ENTITLEMENT.

b. These "uniquely qualified" people are sought after for nonprofit boards or community service in the hope that they will share their wealth and bring their friends along with them. They immediately vie for leadership roles because their privilege is evidence that they know best. Thus, people with no experience in leadership roles believe they should be leaders. People with no experience in event production believe they should be producers. Etc.

c. In meetings and during decision making, such people--feeling themselves uniquely qualified by their wealth (or maybe even chosen by God, who knows?)--take up a lot of air space with their opinions. So much so that others often can't get a word in. White/male privilege is terrible at listening as the nature of these complexes lead individuals to believe, mistakenly, that they don't have much to learn: rather, they believe others need to learn FROM them. They promote themselves and their own opinions over others, even when said opinions lack the foundation of any expertise.

The sad truth is that there are many, many organizations -- and whole communities -- whose mission-based work is hampered by dysfunctional boards and committees weighed down by the entitled behaviors of privileged white people.

I've been a reporter, silently observing, in many of those meetings. I've been a consultant, hired to observe and to counsel. I've watched local rural people talked over, talked down, and otherwise silenced by newly arrived retired residents from the city. As a board member I've had to endure people with no expertise taking up so much space that decisions never get made. I've watched as people unconscious of their privilege assume their rightness, speechifying without ever asking questions. I've watched good programs get sunk by the obstructionist behaviors of those who feel they are more right than those they are there to serve.

White privilege and entitlement is a CULTURE. It is a set of habits and behaviors that are the root of racial and economic and gender inequities. Its behaviors--characterized by an unconscious inability to put one's own needs and beliefs to the side, TO STEP OUT OF THE CENTER--are also the enemy of the good in many other situations.

This is why a heavy bag and a pair of boxing gloves come in handy during Sunday morning observances.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire: Ovations at Home

Here we all are: at home, respecting the need for social distancing in the era of COVID-19, the "novel" coronavirus, and all feeling vaguely...on fire. With a passion for the arts.

The last public event I attended before hunkering down was a new French movie: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, written and directed by Celine Schiamma. It's informed my consumption of art at home over the last week. Because not only is this an 18th century love story between women, it is also a portrait of an artist -- and the movie's passion for arts at the center of our lives is inspiring.

It reminded me that the way I initially knew who I was in the world was, in fact, via these three creative forms: by drawing. By reading. By playing and listening to music. And it lit a fire in me to once again fill my days with art, coronavirus or no.

The film is built around the creation of a painting: i.e., seeing and being seen. One of the two lead characters, having recently departed a cloistered life, mourns the lack of music outside the monastery. We are then treated to an exploration of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" as well as some incredible vocal harmonic singing by a group of women around a bonfire. And finally, the film includes and uses as metaphor a vibrant discussion of Ovid's literary version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Within this magical context, which I wish also for you, here's a few things I've enjoyed at home this past week: I've been listening to everything from the the complex musical stories of Vivaldi to those on Esperanza Spaulding's newest recording, 12 Little Spells. I've finished reading Tommy Orange's debut novel, There There, and moved on to Becoming Ms. Burton, hailed here by the NYTimes Nicholas Kristof. I'm trying to draw a little bit every day. And oh yeah: even though I'm a bit of an anglophobe, I've been watching the British Netflix series Sex Education -- and being glad I don't have to re-do those high school years.

How about you? Tell us what is working / not working in your household during COVID-19 social distancing.

We're All Touched By the Same Water: Arturo O'Farrill, Son Jarocho, and Us

So much more connects us than divides us. 

Like...water. Water divides our continents, our states, our cities, our nations. And it connects us. Not only does it run through our places and our planet, it runs through our cells.

Cuban-American pianist Arturo O’Farrill reminded us of this last night during a free concert at @Bowdoin College here in Maine that I was highly privileged to attend. Sharing space in the same room with these fantastic Afro-Latin musicians and the audience was, as O’Farrill noted, sacred. One of the finest parts of the evening was watching the musicians wordlessly communicate with each other on stage: their eyes. Their gestures. Their smiles. Their music. Their bodies. We were, briefly and for this one moment, never to be repeated, bodies together in that room. We were, briefly and for that one moment, breathing the same air. 

O’Farrill is a soft-spoken, energetic, sweating teddy bear of a man, son of the great Cuban musician Chico O’Farrill and father to two successful musicians, Adam and Zack. We had the great pleasure of meeting and hosting the O’Farrill family when the boys were quite young for a week in Stonington when O’Farrill appeared at the Deer Isle Jazz Festival, as part of which he was in residence at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. I chased him into the backstage elevator after last night’s concert, to be rewarded with a giant hug all the way down. #blessed

Arturo reminded us of all that we share in his brief comments between extended stretches of music. Music is a language, he said. It connects us to mother Africa and to each other, trans-migration, cross boundaries. He told us about a new project he had recently completed, a documentary of which is scheduled to appear this month: Fandango at the Wall, in which he gathered musicians on both sides of the wall between San Diego and Tijuana for a jam session that built upon son jarocho music: Veracruz sound, “a venerable 500-year-old Afro-Mexican musical tradition.”

“Sound is not stopped by a wall,” O’Farrill reminded us lightly. Later, he told us that at a concert in Washington, D.C., he was making similar comments and a woman in the audience told him that music and art should not be political. “But music has always been political,” Arturo said, again in his calm, mild voice. “All of jazz. Nina Simone. Folk traditions. We have always used music to communicate about what matters to us.”

You can come experience some authentic son jarocho music on March 19 in Portland, when Portland Ovations brings the Los Angeles bad Las Cafeteras to PortCity.  Their enthusiastic style crosses musical borders, and will bring the world to Maine that evening, welcoming us all home here from wherever we may start.

O’Farrill’s 18 piece Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra mixes players young and old and, despite its traditions, features three female brass players as well. With five saxophonists, four trumpets, one bass and three regular trombones, three percussionists, a bassist, and O’Farrill on piano the Jazz Orchestra finesses an amazing range of modalities, treading softly and sweetly on ballads prior to blowing the doors off the hall with the four trombonists coming to the edge of the stage to rock out a grand finale of New Orleans tradition in “Iko, Iko.”

Hey now. Hey now. How has art transformed YOUR heart and mind today?

Improv on Immigration: Gabriela Montero Rocks Maine

Immigration. It is the hottest and most critical issue of our era.

Pianist and Venezuelan ex-pat Gabriela Montero knows this dearly enough to have built a performance around what she called "a very emotional theme." Montero's unique program, "Westward," was presented by Portland Ovations as part of an extended focus, commemorating Maine's bicentennial of statehood, its people and places, past, present, and future.

"I'm an immigrant," Montero said from the stage at Hannaford Hall Saturday afternoon, January 25, 2020, in introduction of her improvised score to Charlie Chaplin's classic silent film, "The Immigrant." "Being an immigrant is something you carry with you all your life, it never leaves you."

Fully attending to her words and music in the packed house were not only those one might expect to see at a classical music concert featuring the works of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninoff--three Russian composers/pianists who fled "westward" to the United States as a result of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The rapt, enthusiastic audience also included University of Southern Maine music students; and Portland High School students and their mentors from the Portland Mentoring Alliance program, participants in Ovations' new pilot for greater ticket accessibility, O2 Community Tickets.

"This was fantastic," said Jennifer Cook, PMA's Program Coordinator as her students, most of them immigrants as well, swirled happily around Montero after the concert, snapping photos and acquiring her autograph.

Montero's performance was preceded by an Ovations Offstage panel discussion, "The History and Impact of Immigration in Maine," in partnership with the Maine Historical Society on January 18. Panelists Maulian Dana, Tribal Ambassador, Penobscot Indian Nation; Tilly Laskey, curator, Maine Historical Society; Alain Nahimana, Executive Director of the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center; Colin Woodard, journalist and historian, author of The Lobster Coast and American Nations, among others drew the full arc of immigration in Maine, beginning with the impact of the first white settler-colonists from France and England on the region's native peoples. And just prior to the concert, pianist Laura Kargul delivered a lecture-demonstration on the renowned improvisational skills of some of the greatest classical composers including Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin.

"I do believe Chopin invented jazz," she said, in reference to the composer's Ballade No. 4. "If anyone had brains in his fingers, it was Chopin."

"When I improvise it is something new that will never happen again," Montero said before launching into an audience-suggested improv on the "Star Wars" theme.

The well-received programs were made possible by the generous support and kindnesses of two former Ovations' nonprofit trustees: Susan Goldberg whose family fund, the Susan and Jerry Goldberg Fund, underwrites Ovations' piano concerts; and Jane C. Wellehan, whose bequest provided the foundation for O2 Community Tickets.

#ExperienceOvations #Maine200 #ImmigrationInMaine

Are We Merely Visiting?

I am in the midst of this undeniable privilege: traveling to explore other places and communities in this world. For a week of rest and relaxation and learning, Judith and I chose an island further down east from our home in Deer Isle, ME, and journeyed to Prince Edward Island.

PEI is an island community home to approximately 135,000 souls and, like Deer Isle, hosts a robust fishing community -- although theirs is both more regulated AND more supported by the Canadian government, making Canadian lobster the primary competitor to our Maine crustracean. Additionally, there appears to be a somewhat robust bluefin tuna fishery here at this time of year, complementing the potato harvest. The red soil and long beaches make this a beautiful place, and we pass by field after field of potatoes newly harvested and awaiting the wheat, oats, and barley that will come next. The potatoes love the red, iron-rich soil and Irish Cobblers and other potato varieties are much beloved. With the decidedly Celtic lilt in the people's voices, it is easy to imagine a time when no ocean divided Ireland, Scotland, and Canada's Maritime Provinces.

Yet all over, too, we see how the economic consolidation of agriculture -- where once a 75-acre farm could support a family, now potatoes are grown on 1600-acre farms, just as in the U.S. midwest -- is creating gaps and shifts in the traditional island ways. Potato fields are given over everywhere to tourist cottages and second homes. And the Canadian government, either sensing or responding to these shifts or both, is a huge supporter of cultural tourism; which on PEI means Anne of Green Gables.

The beloved book by the native PEI author has an entire tourism trail named for its various locations, complete with actors dressed as Anne and a huge visitor center hosting bus loads of international tourists at the House of Green Gables. It's quite astounding.

As we drive, however, it is difficult not to wonder: are we merely visiting this earth, or living on it? As we have allowed our economies to develop uncontrolled, they at times appear to be eating us up rather than serving us. The truth is, the way native peoples once lived sustainably on our shores for thousands of years was never the colonial plan. British colonists in particular were in service to an empire on which "the sun never set" and from the time they set foot on these shores created economies that were about exports: exporting livestock (and enslaved peoples) and timber to the British colonies, in the West Indies or England; importing the rum and sugar and other goods they then needed to survive on their own. Colonization is about acquisition and consumption and the white narrative of North America is defined by this.

The House of Green Gables.

The question now remains for us to face and future generations to experience: now that we've eaten it all up, exported most of it and destroyed the rest (the deforestation of this island and much of the Maritimes is, as in parts of New England, a sad sight to behold) -- do we re-learn how to sustain our human (not just individual) selves and this world? Or will we be content to be merely visitors to this beautiful planet? And if the latter: how temporary will we make our visitation? how much of a foot print will we leave, how quickly will we consume what remains? Will we leave sustainable places to live for the generations of humans who could follow?