FGC's Commitment to Ending Racism
At the
November, 2000, meeting of FGC's Central Committee, a new Committee for
Ministry on Racism was approved as a standing committee of Friends General
Conference. Our Central Committee of some 170 Friends had spent considerable
time at each of the three preceding annual sessions examining the roots
of racism and the lack of major racial and ethnic diversity within our
affiliated yearly meetings and our own organization. In establishing the
new committee, Friends agreed that it should:
a) Seek to provide vision, leadership and support (including human and material resources) for enhancing racial and ethnic diversity and eradicating racism among Friends; and
b) Seek, with God's guidance, to help Quakers transform themselves institutionally and individually into a beloved community--whole and enriched by its diversity.
Discerning a Vision for Our Work
Realizing that eradicating racism in the Religious Society of Friends is a daunting task, the committee agreed that we needed to ground our work in the leadings of the Spirit. Meeting a few months after the committee was established, members first shared how the Spirit was working within each of us individually, and then discerned a shared vision for our work. We were moved by the image of a flower, with Divine Love at the center and the petals representing different facets of our work and of this Love. With this foundation, we developed the following vision for our work to transform racist behaviors and to enhance racial and ethnic diversity among Friends:
- We see FGC's work against racism as ministry, ministry to Friends and meetings. Our work will include preparing individually and corporately for this ministry, as well as carrying it out.
- At the center of our vision is divine love.
- We see our work, and the work of FGC, as healing and transforming in the deepest spiritual sense.
- FGC's work in this area should be characterized most by empowerment, not guilt. When we raise our awareness of the realities and sufferings of racism and our own responsibilities for these, we cannot help but feel anguish and remorse. But the ultimate goal of this work is to empower Friends to transform themselves, their meetings and their institutions. To remain focused on guilt runs counter to this goal. We can choose whether to be agents of suffering or agents of divine love.
- Our work to increase racial diversity arises out of a sense of continuing revelation. We seek to ground this work in a clear commitment to Quaker forms of worship and corporate decision making.
- Our work should incorporate an understanding that racism, like all evils, hurts both the oppressed and the oppressor, and that the dominant groups carry a privilege whether intentional or not.
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"Beyond Diversity 101" workshop sponsored by the Committee for Ministry on Racism
FGC’s Committee for Ministry on Racism, in cooperation with Quaker training consultant Niyonu Spann, held a "Beyond Diversity 101" workshop for forty-three Friends at a retreat center near Pittsburgh on January 16-20, 2003. The invited participants included two Friends selected by most of the fourteen yearly meetings affiliated with Friends General Conference, the clerks of most FGC committees and all of the members of the Committee for Ministry on Racism.
This proved to be a very powerful experiential training workshop on understanding and challenging racism within our Religious Society of Friends. Fifteen of the forty-three participants were Friends of Color; the remainder were "white" Friends. The five-day training involved many activities and discussions in the full group, support groups of three or four, discussions in single-race groupings, films, "games," music, and "body work" by Niyonu’s colleague, Rebecca De Bus.
Niyonu suggested that we all "co-create" our realities, including the reality of the racist institutions and behaviors in the United States and Canada. As we searched ourselves, each other, and our religious society to better understand how we individually and corporately contribute to a racist system, we went to some hard places and did some painful work. Yet many of the participants spoke of the love and the community that we felt as a group of Friends united in our concern and committed to challenging racism and contributing to a more racially diverse organization and North American Quaker world.
As Niyonu Spann stressed throughout our time together, this is "heart work." Through "Beyond Diversity 101," we learned a lot, but we also grew in love in the truest sense of the word.
FGC's Committee for Ministry and Racism
CMR is a committee of eight members, who are appointed by the FGC Nominating Committee to three-year terms. FGC is committed to having parity in this committee's membership, with equal numbers of Friends of Color and Friends of European descent.
Resources:
- Epistle from the Committee on Racism of FGC
- Bibliography
- Seeking Racial and Ethnic Diversity
- Articles on racism from FGC's Quaker Library
- Pastoral Care Newsletter, Jan. 2002 (Philadelphia Yearly Meeting)
- New England Friend, Winter 2002 (New England Yearly Meeting). Note: this is a Adobe PDF file
- What Do Quakers Owe Blacks, by Bill Brown.
- Sarah Douglass and Racial Prejudice within the Society of Friends, by Margaret Hope Bacon.
