Monday February 17, 2020 

Greetings SAYMA folks, 

I hope this email finds you well. On behalf of the Ad Hoc Committee working to support the work of SAYMA-URJ, I invite you to join us as we work on understanding the work we need to do. Please share this widely with your Monthly Meeting and SAYMA networks. It is a message for all White-privileged Friends at SAYMA and we want to reach as many SAYMA Friends with this message as possible. 

We White Friends have significant internal work to do around race and racism in SAYMA. As a massive big step in the right direction, we are organizing a Yearly Meeting-wide group experience around Layla Saad's book, Me and White Supremacy. We are inviting all White-privileged Friends in SAYMA to participate, but we particularly hope that White Friends in positions of responsibility in SAYMA will fully commit to this work. 

Register Here!!! 

Why this? This is no ordinary book group. I have personally experienced the Me and White Supremacy book first hand when it was in unpublished workbook form, and I profoundly believe that if we commit to working through it together it will change the narrative around race and racism in SAYMA. It will help us White-privileged Friends develop a common understanding around critical racial justice concepts. It will help us, individually, to identify our own blind spots (we all have them), and it will help us, collectively, to recognize the most common patterns that White people fall into, either consciously or unconsciously. 

Why am I only inviting White-privileged Friends to this work? If any Friends of Color choose to join us for any part of this process that participation will be recognized and appreciated for the monumental gift that it is. That said, we are going to be digging deep, bringing the unconscious into the light for us to examine. Although Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) are generally more aware of White People's unconscious world than we are ourselves, it can be very painful for BIPOC to listen as we struggle our way through the mire of a lifetime of whiteness. 

Of all the experiences that I have had in my own journey to become more consistently anti-racist, using Saad’s book with a group of other White-privileged people also committed to this journey, has been the single most transformative thing that I have done. It was incredibly challenging, at times very dark, at times I wanted to give up, but, in the end, it moved me light-years ahead in my understanding of how White Supremacy manifests in my own thoughts and actions. I am ready to revisit it and I really hope that dozens of you will step up to do this work together. 

Another reason for "why this": we, as a Yearly Meeting, are struggling around the issue of racial justice "training". Who should attend, who should run it, who should pay for it, when it should happen, where it should happen... These questions have been circulating for years. We White Quakers need to take responsibility for our own learning, and this will help us do that. We need to go deeper than a one-day or one-weekend workshop will be able to go, and this will help us do that. The only cost involved will be in buying your copy of the book - on Amazon it is $22.18 for a hardcopy and only $8.57 for the Kindle version. You will also need a tablet of paper, notebook, or journal. If you need financial help to get your copy please reach out. Go to the Author’s website if you would like further options to purchase other than Amazon: https://www.meandwhitesupremacybook.com/ 

What this work will look like: The book is divided into 28 "days"/4 "weeks" of journalling queries. Beginning in April, we will be tackling one "week" per month, spreading the work over a 4 month period, to accommodate flexibility in people's schedules. We will divide participants into working groups of no more than 10 people. Each working group will meet monthly via Zoom. The process for sharing on the Zoom calls is basically a modified worship-sharing format that you should all feel comfortable and familiar with. It is our hope that we have enough groups that everyone should be able to fit into a group that suits their schedule. We will also have a private Google Group for participants to communicate in that way between calls. If a Monthly Meeting would like to, additionally, have in-person gatherings we welcome and encourage you to self-organize in this way. 

So, to summarize, your commitment will be for four months: 

• Completing 7 "days" of journalling per month (I would estimate that you will spend an average of 1-2 hours journalling for each "day") 

• Participating in one Zoom call per month (each call will aim to be an hour in length.) 

• Participating in the Google Group as you feel led. 

• Optional in-person gatherings with Friends in your geographical area. 

To sign up please proceed to this survey so that we can sort you all into a group that best matches your schedule: Register Here!!! 

If you are interested in doing this work, but will not be able to begin in April, please register anyways, indicating that on the registration. 

Please Friends, I know that what I am asking isn't easy, nor is it particularly enjoyable, and it may feel like it is too much to take on, with all of the rest of busy life crowding in, but I believe that if we all start pulling together, in the same direction, we may just break through some of the barriers that are holding us back. 

In the Light, 

Shannon Roberts Smith Clerk, Ad Hoc in Support of the work of SAYMA-URJ