|
What Do Quakers Owe Blacks?
Bill Brown 07/’02
on’t
feel stupid if you’re confused by this incredibly baffling question.
It’s a brainbuster. What Quakers owe blacks, may not be all-embracing
as it appears. It is a perplexing proposition. Measurement difficulties
may make the question unanswerable. The question, unfitting some may say,
is a matter of assessing probabilities upon the basis of evidential behavior
and the indeterminacy of religious worship. The drama of the question,
its details, intentions, and consequences are fitted to embrace the static
purpose of contained truth and spiritual needs of a neglected and dispossessed
people.
Culturally, racism is part of America’s national character. Therefore,
it would be unreasonable to believe that Quakers would be free of so integral
part of our culture. Quakers, unharried by their own racist underpinnings,
and espousing a “melting pot” liberalism, deceived themselves
with racially emancipated identities. I am not saying that racism is a
common trait of Quakers. I understand that the full measure of racial
determinants among religious groups would probably find that Quakers are
considerably less racist than others. As an etiological agent, racism
is a disease or disordered cause agent so deeply rooted in the fabric
of our country that it has ruptured some of our religious and cultural
cohesiveness. Talk of racism and Quakers leads to “enlivened”
conversation that doesn’t fit appropriately into the fabric of Quaker
fantasy.
Some Friends find the term racist being applied to them offensive. To
them it is a rotting word synonymous with some kind of social or lack
of racial conscientiousness. Indeed, it may be imprecise and simply a
deliberative form of linguistic bullying. However, I offer it as a wake-up
call for Quakers to emancipate themselves from the archetypal historical
mode of thinking—from the abolition of slavery to equal rights for
women—shaped by the impassioned debate or discourse. The question
of Quaker indebtedness to blacks is an opportunity for deliberative discussion
that seems to have little ascendance in our broader culture. There is
a temptation, under such circumstances, for Quakers to talk about racial
“color blindness.” “Color blindness” is a hoax.
Racism is an expressive cultural process that does not disrupt the dominant
discourse of society. It is the acceptance of cultural gestures, customs,
and character rooted in the status quo. Racism is a venting term. Its
expressive elements serve as a bullying vector. An easy-to-use, efficient,
attention-effective gateway term heavily gathered with resonance from
disembodied cultural angers, is a pulsating syllable-inflected pejorative
that unbearably leaves someone slowly turning upon its point of reality.
Also, its cultural dimension, at the core and surface of visibility and
invisibility, is about inattention. For instance, the worship invisibility
and cultural disconnection of our “color-blind” diet in our
color-conscious society results in an institutional climate of racial
ignorance. As such, it throws culpability for racism on the likes of Quakers
who are the standard bearers of pacifism and racial justice. “Color
Blindness” diminishes our cultural bounty. Mine may be an egregious
case of language misconduct. Many Quakers are complicitous in their behaviors
and attitudes that are located within the cultural practices of the status
quo.
Admittedly Quakerism never occupied the center of black worship. Perhaps
its architecture—quiet, introspective, and—spiritually speaking—seemingly
lacking in worshipful transparency and thus poor in pious depth. Perhaps
the answering of the owing question flows from just such an ongoing misinterpretation
of Quaker spiritual vitality and relevance. There is a stillness about
Quaker worship that attracts one to God’s voice. There is no pretentiousness;
the plainness of language is captivating.
Quakers owe us INCLUSION. The inclusion I refer to is the responsibility
of Quakers to increase the moral tone of truth-telling about exclusion.
They owe us the courage and good sense to live beyond gossamer loyalties
of racial clothing. We are owed a certain amount of internal thinking
by Quakers who accept their provisional white identity without question.
We are owed a grasp of inside of America’s moral illness: its distortion
of black vigor, the exacting horror and evil efficiency of being imprisoned
by racism, and the interrupted white pleasures and profits of witnessing
us as victims. They owe us the experiential evidence of their commitment
to justice. I’m not talking about the self-deceptive hospitable
assuagement of the white conscious embodied in racial vanity talk. I’m’
talking about the pseudo pleasantries sheltered in the constrained words
used to and about us.
In our short-attention span culture where honesty seems an extreme sport
and listening is in remission, Quakers owe us affiliated listening. Hearing
and understanding us is a central component in the approach to partnership
worship. Such attentiveness would forge a coherent sense of empathy and
sensitivity. Cooperative listening acts as a check on our “shrill”
and ravenous abuse allegations Quakers consider overreactive. Stop treating
our entreaties as grist for the pass-it-off mill of indifference. Such
an attitude leads to corrosive distrust. A consultative voice, at the
very least, would be most appreciated. Respect is the premium Quakers
pay for a penetrating curiosity about our felt pain. Non-respectful listening
to us is devastating. Worshipful listening is an understated core aspect
of Quakerism. Its presence speaks to a ministerial venture in which allied
listening demonstrates the rich light of God’s visibility. Also,
Quakers must try to override that obligatory “oversensitive”
comment.
We are owed revelations of kindness, strength and unyielding courage to
confront the Quakers cursory connection with us in the self-deception
of their vanity. By this I mean that because racism foregrounds what Quakers
share with the broad pattern of American xenophobia they must deal with
their own racial inequalities. I do not expect a racial epiphany that
will reveal us as people. Without a doubt, the subject of racism is emotional.
Therefore, I expect that Quakers will have the emotional and spiritual
strength not to tell me that race is not a part of Quaker consciousness.
I will believe that when black mobility has become an Horatio Alger story.
It hasn’t. I am caught in the dilemma of trying to be a loving and
trusting Quaker in a religious home that seems not to understand my most
foundational needs: shelter in a perilous time, comfort from the cyclical
cause-and-effect relationship of class and color, and a stable location
in the human family.
There is a capricious cruelty to the cost burden of racism’s emotional
overcrowding. Its inflicted wounds threaten to psychologically unravel
us. Because we (blacks) are uninitiated in the inward discipline of the
Seeker congregation we are owed a method of threshing among the worship
rudeness’ we encounter. Quakers, with their sense of unadornment
and exhibited fitness for plainness owe us the understanding of functional
simplicity. Because materialism is one of the most injurious interests
to the character of the black community Quakers owe us some way of qualitatively
and functionally dealing with the ornamented furnishings of contemporary
America.
Because we have a disproportionate share of the country’s poverty,
a vector-borne parasitic disease so widespread in the waste container
poor communities, Quakers owe blacks access to elimination of such structural
problems and other crucial determinants of unhealthy living. Cockroaches,
flies, fleas, substance abuse, violence and housing-related problems such
as lead-based paint poising, and poor sanitation caused by building problems
are vectors that typically infect the low-income black community. Quakers
owe us their stability, promise, and location—in particular, proximity
to breeding sites for survival, safety, and security.
If the Light Within the Quaker heart to be envisaged in such a way that
the divine Light will be an actual experience, Quakers must step out of
that twilight zone of ill-reason and irrationality when it comes to making
their meetings a properly ordered community of diversity. Although Quakerism
has no brand equity or down hominess in the black community, Quakers owe
us more than an interpretation of the metaphysical character between God
and man.
Can Quakers cope with the urgency invested in the question of what they
owe blacks? Like a pulp novel, one might begin with an urgency on some
dark and dreary place with time scurrying nervously beyond the play-acting
of liberal words to the white privilege profit reality of racism. I suspect
that there is apprehension in the mind of some Quakers about the dubious
benefit of offering widespread access to worship sharing with blacks?
After all, isn’t racism the continued bogeyman in the nightmare
of American race relationships?
Personally, I live with no illusions that blacks have first cut at racial
prejudice in America. Quakers, with their equalitarian leanings were one
of the earliest to offer social testimony relevant to blacks. The Quaker
doctrine of equality which eliminated the sense of superiority or inferiority,
meant respect and the absence of behavior based on class, racial or social
position. By providing blacks with the empirical theology of the Light
of Truth, or the Light Within, Quakers left us poised between two worlds,
the spiritual world of Light and the materially intimate world of subhuman
treatment. This left blacks with the center of life being Quaker Quietism
regulated and ordered by the Light and human reason, while at the mercy
of the irrational and mechanistic. We were left in a provisional state,
a harmonious state of the metaphysical and not the moral and practical.
We sought expression for truth in terms of a unified God, but we did not
realize that regeneration was not ours to be had. That we could not be
reborn into a higher life.
Quaker worship was persuasive, even plausible, to blacks for whom a godly
connect was of primary importance. We looked at Quakerism through the
lens of freedom and faith, rather than comprehending the nature of societal
limits through the lens of practicality. Comprehending worship involvement
was of primary importance. Religion is the contact point between blacks
and Quakers—not only worship, but other things, like freedom and,
ultimately, the politics of non-violence as an evangelical commitment
in the active war against racism.
They owe us the liberal language of God-talk and the sense of taskcraft.
In confronting the irrational fact of hatred rooted in the engagement
of skin color we need the strong counterweight of the Quaker inward presence
of quiet exercise. We do not need to be, as was George Fox, a “public
Friend.” Quakers owe us an understanding of Fox’s designation
concerning Substance and Shadow, Eternity and Time, and the uplifting
power of Fox’s philosophical view.
We are not owed an interesting dramatization of our plight enacted in
pageantry scenes of brutality and ending in deafening hosannas. Nor are
we owed the genteel personifications of utopian fantasies. No! The rich
reality of more than a perfunctory attention to the decorous visions of
a truly co-operative society, and the impertinent assaults against the
rapier innuendoes saddled upon us is what we are owed. I am irritated
by the vagaries of the impiously idealistic Quakers too committed to bourgeoisie
conventionalities to honor in common the social gospel of our spiritual
ancestors. Our struggles are outfitted with a veritable arsenal of warriors
who refused to subordinate their worship to the tyrannies of their time
outfit our struggles.
I am sobered with the belief that Quakers are not intoxicated with the
behavior of life towards blacks. Just as the existential hero is cured
by truth while suffering the ordeal of the uninitiated, I understand the
conditional nature of debt burden. What Quakers owe blacks is a new infatuation
of ontological awareness. It is a phase, a rush of alertness, a primary
drama of revelation. Perhaps revelation is too much, somehow; too biblical;
too heroic; familiarly grandiose, and therefore disfiguring.
America, the great Rubicon of opportunity, where Quakers were the worship
alchemists whose elixir of survival provided moral and physical salvation
for Africans imprisoned with unfamiliarity’s everywhere in evidence:
people with pale skin; unconquerable words and language; fierce dilemma
of malleable perceptions of anger and joy; complex ideas that mistook
and confused; and tricksters whose slight of hand and deceit revealed
the somber fictions of life. If anything, Quakers owe blacks their unique
qualities of reflective spirituality. By this I mean the listening and
confidentiality one encounters with the contemplative risen soul that
is the preserve of Quaker worship.
Quakers owe us the consummated act of Listening. The kind of listening
that requires one to measure oneself in relation to blues grooves and
the emergent understanding of gospel growls and spiritual grousings as
a source of moral equipoise, not to mention a principled sense of worship.
This is neither the interview listening that generates data, nor the dumbed
down Gerber food renderings for tete-a-tete documentaries of the unintelligible.
It is a kind of interlocutory listening that brings social recognition
and human relationships centered on understanding as a helpmate. In the
variable and complex parameters of listening, Quakers owe us the kind
of listening that can eventuate in fairness of understanding.
Quakers owe blacks their engaged and focused reflection on the demystification
of the racial issue—making it an empathetic issue—and connecting
it to justice. They owe blacks the equity, liberty, and familiarized connection
or sense of affiliation to the action of radicalized justice ministry.
Such a broad collaboration of Quakers, taken not out of guilt but an understanding
of the issues and the affect of Quaker willingness to relocate their nourishing,
can provide a sanctuary for them.
Friends are one of the most visible exponents of idealistic sentiment
about equality of human beings. That’s why they owe us a moral understanding
of religious interest and the transcendent. They clearly understand the
multiple problems that plague us: perpetual poverty of shelter, hunger,
joblessness, powerlessness, and living daily with racism. In an unshowy
manner they owe us the arresting stoicism of their meretricious behavior
in tawdry situations.
What Quakers owe may seem an odd question. An answer requires some diversionary
routes between the embracing by the Society of Friends and the blacks
that betook themselves to the bosom of Quakerism. The owing by Quakers
is a transformative truth that is economic, not physical: Quakers and
blacks share the same degree of unpromising classification. The shifting
axis of direction defines the spatial reality that each enjoys. The goal
of Quaker spirituality never was to capture the heart of blacks with religious
aspirations and the actuality of George Fox and John Woolman. Blacks and
Quakers are related to each other not by any fixed coordinates, but by
the proximity of our layered contexts of worship connections. Blacks hovered
in that space between the indefinite boundaries and dimension of American
culture and the geographic fiction of Africa. We are still trying to reconcile
and transform ourselves into a national distinctiveness.
Quakers have built a reputation for human brotherhood based on acknowledgement
of God’s presence in all people. This wholistic embrace of human
spirituality heralded a religion rooted in the freedom of fulfillment
by willingly accepting a shared hope for all humankind. Amazingly, despite
Quakers reputation for challenging the institutional assumptions about
race, they too demonstrated the white privilege of racism. Quakers owe
blacks the honesty of facing this terrible reality.
They owe blacks the favor of shared friendship, and the avoidance of broken
promises. Blacks, having weathered the blatant attacks of economic, educational,
and national racism, do not need the off-balance accounting used to deceive
believers, and hide the behind-the-scene history of racism. Quaker racism
is and has been benign—but racism nonetheless. Clearly, the space
between reality and rhetoric is considerable. Quakers are not accustomed
to being asked to plead guilty to racism. Some even resent calling any
attention to any past history of Quaker racism.
Quakers owe us the honesty of not refurbishing the unremembered racism
of Philadelphia Quakers and their well-defined experience of refusal to
blacks. Quakers owe blacks the realization that racial change is personal,
not political: one changes ones location, not one’s society. Nonetheless,
in such a case, the internal boundaries and external coordinates hold
special meaning. This is because the conscious boundaries, the old division,
separating the uneasy artificiality of one’s sense of place being
rooted in the curiosity and narrowness of people like themselves is extant.
People still live in the enclosed locality of community and familial boundaries
that make them xenophobic.
Quakers may not have slandered, persecuted or denounced blacks, but there
was a coziness with racism that was certainly within the pivotal degrees
of cooperation with the status quo. Racism is a virus that quietly lurks
in the Society of Friends. Excuse me while I pause a moment to cry for
those who admit to the guilty pleasure of heedless judgment that racism
didn’t exist among Quakers. They are the very ones who owe us methods
of dealing with the stupidities, absurdities, and scandalous abuses that
allowed them to override their intellectual, moral intuition, and logic.
Only someone carrying the burden of senescence would believe the Society
of Friends is free of racism. Perhaps we need a randomized, double-blind
clinical trial to test the efficacy of Friends thinking about racism in
our worship community. Quakers, who currently see themselves beyond the
threat lever of racist, are an immunology naïve population about
the existence of weaponsized prejudice. Help in finding the points on
the compass that direct us to the locus of classification and accessibility
beyond theouter periphery, to which we still belong, and to act as an
index to the space and place where we may have the opportunity to live
beyond the double zone of marginality and cultural borderland, is what
we are owed.
Early Christian opponents of slavery who formed the first anti-slavery
society in Philadelphia in 1775, were unapologetic evangelists who carried
God’s message forbidding the holding of humans as chattel. Quakers
owe blacks the Christian responsibility of a public argument both morally
and spiritually against the senseless assumption that white privilege
is not racist. For well over two hundred fifty years The Religious Society
of Friends has borne witness to the supremacy of God’s commands.
And the transparency of Friends disruptive actions and demands that America
reform its moral conscious may best be noted in the introduction of respect
paid for a penetrating curiosity about the felt pain of blacks.
In 1848 Quakers sheltered fugitive slaves, published an anti-slavery newspaper,
and established a Free Labor Store, which refused to sell products made
by slaves. They were noted for their benevolent attitude toward blacks.
However, though they were not flagrantly oppressive of blacks, they did
not welcome blacks as equals. My point is that the intensity of Quaker
agitation did not act as a guarantor of human recognition. It is certainly
true that Quakerism provided blacks with a model for benevolence, moral
commitment and inspiration. However, race consciousness, always a part
of American culture, was certainly embraced by a significant portion of
the Quaker community. Quakers wanted to “improve” and “elevate”
blacks to the acceptable white level.
I am unsatisfied with such nightmare wisdom as the way to champion a more
racial synthesis in the Society of Friends.
Further Resources:
FGC's Committee on Racism
FGC Quaker Library's Racism page
