Vital Friends: Reflections on the White Privilege Conference

LVM Shelton, a member of Plainfield Meeting in Vermont, is known to many for her work with FGC’s Central Committee and the Committee for Nurturing Ministries. In September 2016, LVM penned a thought-provoking piece for Friends Journal about her experience attending the White Privilege Conference and her work interrupting white supremacy in communities and systems. She writes:

“If I view people and, more metaphorically, the systems and cultures they create, as a disease with no cure but for which there is, step by step, recovery, much of my frustration with hearing the same feeble conversations around racism among Friends repeatedly during the past 20 years immediately deflates. I can better understand the entrenched denials of participation in white supremacy from the thoughtful, gentle, well-meaning people in monthly and yearly meetings I attend. I can sympathize with the protection of supply, the all-or-nothing attitude, self-righteousness, over-intellectualism, and the megalomaniac with an inferiority complex without condoning these dysfunctions. Compassion begins to dominate over exasperation and I can offer both acceptance and strategies for healing. For many of my own thoughts, feelings, and attitudes result from my own colonized mind, heart, and spirit: my addiction to domination. And I believe I am in recovery.”

Read LVM Shelton’s article, “Hope for the White Supremacist Within,” on Friends Journal‘s website.

Do you feel led to work for equity and justice through self and social transformation? Consider attending the White Privilege Conference this April in Kansas City, Missouri.

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