Is Micheal Moore's vision of a more democratic, more inclusive United States distorted by white privilege? Kenyon Farrow & Kil Ja Kim seem to think so, they write:
"[W]e think Michael Moore is a white nationalist. . . .
Some will be confused by our use of white nationalism since it's a term usually reserved for "extremist" organizations. To the contrary, we consider white nationalism to be normalized in US social relations since by white nationalism we mean the project of nation building that is driven by the experiences and history of white people. White nationalism, however, is more than just being white-centric, per se. Rather, white nationalism is the project of maintaining or expanding the white nation-whether established along state lines or as socially created communities or both-in ways that reflect the anxieties, fears, dread and aspirations of white people. As such, in a white nationalist discourse, whiteness and US civil society as well as the racialized and sexualized project of citizenship that maintains both are not confronted. Instead the point of departure for a white nationalist approach is: what stands in white people's way of being able to claim the nation as rightfully theirs? A white nationalist project therefore is fixated with what government forces, "subversiveness" from below or shifts in the global economy threaten the rights of the white citizenry.
I find this critique of Moore challenging, because if he is engaged in revisioning the white nation state then Unitarian Universalists need to probe deeply into the vision behind our social justice statements and resolutions. Does this critique extend to Unitarian Universalism? Kenyon Farrow & Kil Ja Kim's complete critique of Moore can be found on


Challenging, really? I haven't read such a high-handed and pretensious confection of pseudo-academic jargon in years. Moore has his problems, but the linked article shows that he's got a better touch with the lives of poor Americans with real problems than the authors do, whatever their ethnicity or origin.