An open letter to White Quakers
Dear Friends,
I don’t know where this blog may go in the future, but at present I feel compelled to publicly speak out, and this platform seems like the easiest way to do that on multiple platforms at once (email, social media etc.). I am writing this as an active member of Berea Friends Meeting, and the Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting and Association (SAYMA). For years our Yearly Meeting has been laboring with issues surrounding race, racism, and white supremacy. In some areas we are making good progress and I am hopeful. In other respects I feel like we are backsliding dangerously, and it is in these areas that I feel I need to give my public testimony of the truth as I have come to see it, bearing in mind that my perceptions are also filtered through my lived reality of being a White, middle class, cis-gendered woman.
There have been recent, very public escalations of the racial conflict occurring at SAYMA. Popular Quaker blogger Chuck Fager has taken up this conflict in a series of one-sided, extremely misleading posts, the link to the most recent of which can be found here. It is important to note that while Fager clearly has connection with SAYMA members, he himself is not an active participant in the life of our Yearly Meeting. I have been active in our Yearly Meeting for at least the past five years and have never witnessed his attendance in our Meetings for Business at SAYMA. His “report” is based entirely on hearsay and second-hand interpretation of half-truths taken completely out of context.
The irony of Fager, who is not an active participant in our Yearly Meeting, calling Sharon Star Smith the “Intruder”, (Sharon is a birthright Quaker who has been active in one capacity or another in our Yearly Meeting community for the better part of a decade), is not lost on those of us really paying attention. Nor is the timing of his public rants. He has timed his blog posts to drop in the days running up to our Business Meetings. He is tactically undermining all of the good anti-racist healing work that our Yearly Meeting is trying to do in the times between these contentious Business Meetings, and he is enflaming the uncertainty and mistrust of those who, for whatever reason, are not deeply engaged in the work of transforming our internal conflicts at SAYMA.
I am grateful to those who have spoken against this travesty already. In various places SAYMA Finance has endeavored to set the record straight on the factual misrepresentations. I am sensitive however to the adage that a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. For the purposes of this missive, suffice it to say that Chuck Fager is not reporting truth. If you are interested in digging deeper, there is plenty of information publicly available on the SAYMA website archives that will completely debunk much of what he is claiming.
The truth is that Sharon Star Smith and the other members of SAYMA Uplifting Racial Justice Committee are engaged in truly amazing and meaningful racial justice work. I am absolutely thrilled that our organization is helping to support the establishment of the Paul Cuffee Abolitionist Center in Sumter, SC. Their groundbreaking weekly podcast Abolition Today is overflowing with in-depth analysis about the intersecting oppressive systems that have allowed the continuation of slavery in the USA in the form of the prison industrial complex. In addition SAYMA-URJ has been supporting the programs of POC-led organizations like BLM Asheville, has worked to set up a “victory garden” for the benefit of the local community immediately surrounding the Abolitionist Center, and has provided “hardship” funds to Friends of Color who were experiencing oppression at the hands of our racist legal system and/or threatened with eviction. If you would like to be a part of supporting that work (and you need not be a SAYMA Quaker to do so) please consider a donation of any amount that you can to the SAYMA-URJ Fund. Instructions on how you can do that can be found here.
One of the most simple and profound pieces of wisdom that Sharon Star Smith has drilled into me is that racism is all about controlling the process, the narrative, and the resources. This is exactly the dynamic that we are witnessing at SAYMA. A group of primarily White Male Quakers, so called “weighty Friends” who have held power over the process, the narrative, and the resources for years, and in some cases decades, are feeling all kinds of things because their rule is being challenged.
I have witnessed White Supremacist cultural norms being weaponized against Sharon Star Smith and her team on the SAYMA Uplifting Racial Justice Committee. I have witnessed tone policing, false equivalencies of harm, and efforts to de-legitimize the participation of Sharon, Max, Tribal and Delores in our community, and their efforts to lead us into becoming a more equitable, diverse and actively anti-racist organization.
There is a continuum that those of us active in anti-racism work are familiar with, when considering where our organizations are in working towards being more welcoming of diverse perspectives. Not everyone in SAYMA is in the same place. Some of us would probably hope that we are currently working on enacting symbolic change and working towards being an affirming institution (3 and 4 on the linked continuum). From my perspective, I see our organization being mired in the first two categories, but especially the second “Club” category:
· Tolerant of a limited number of “token” People of Color
· members from POC identified groups allowed in with "proper" perspective and credentials
· May still secretly limit or exclude People of Color in contradiction to public policies
· Continues to intentionally maintain white power and privilege through its formal policies and practices, teachings, and decision making on all levels of institutional life
· Often declares, "We don't have a problem."
· Mono-cultural norms, policies and procedures of dominant culture viewed as the “right” way, ”business as usual”
· Engages issues of diversity and social justice only on club member’s terms and within their comfort zone.
Much more can and should be said by active White SAYMA Friends who consider themselves in any way “anti-racist” or “allies”. We Quakers tend to place great value on silence, but in this case, the continued wall of silence at SAYMA is providing a convenient cover of tacit approval and complicity for those who would like to blame Sharon Star Smith for the problems that we are experiencing at SAYMA. I encourage SAYMA friends who want to move our organization forward in this work to start speaking out more, wherever and however you can. Even simply saying “This Friend does not speak my mind” is a powerful message that change is both wanted and needed at SAYMA.
Finally, I would like to spend some time urging all White Friends to sit with this notion of “safety” that so many of us seem to value. For whom are we seeking safety? I would argue that having our feelings hurt by being called a racist is nothing compared to Friends of Color being very rightly concerned that they are literally fighting for their lives. Have White Friends fully considered the implications of alleging what amounts to criminal behavior for our Friends of Color at SAYMA URJ? The criminalization of POC racial justice activists is nothing new. Ask historians how many times MLK, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X were subject to investigations into their financial honesty, before they were murdered by people who believed that narrative. Ask any number of current activists like Linda Sarsour and Shaun King how often they get accused of misuse of funds. Sharon, Max, Tribal and Delores are real people with real lives that we are putting at stake. This is a very dangerous “game” that some of us are playing. I, for one, am prepared to stake whatever comfort I need to, in order to protect our Friends of Color from undeserved and completely unnecessary attack. I hope more White Quakers will actively step up beside me.
In the Light,
Shannon Roberts Smith
Member, Berea Friends Meeting
Southern Appalachian Yearly Meeting and Association (SAYMA)