American Friends Service Committee

Quakerism and racism: Reclaiming faith from the wreckage of white supremacy

By Greg Elliot (originally posted at afsc.org/showingup)

“What are you going to do about this white God that demands Black and Brown blood?” - Reverend Jennifer Bailey

With the recent rise in hate speech and hate crimes against Muslims, the ongoing white backlash against Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, and the recent non-indictment of the border patrol agents responsible for the murder of Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas, the need for racial justice organizing has never been more urgent. As mosques are burned, as unarmed Black people are murdered by police, and as millions of undocumented migrants are detained and deported, Communities of Color and their white allies, co-conspirators, and comrades are responding with a sense of urgency that is required by these dire times.

Many powerful, inspiring organizations across the country are supporting this work, and one such organization, Showing Up for Racial Justice, or SURJ, has made its priority to mobilize and organize white people for racial justice. SURJ formed in response to a call made by Black activists after the racist backlash against the election of President Barack Obama in 2009, and although membership was small at first, SURJ chapters have grown dramatically after the “not guilty” grand jury verdict of George Zimmerman in 2013.

I was introduced to SURJ by a friend who works at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, or JFREJ, in New York City. JFREJ has been doing powerful racial and economic justice work for decades and has been closely involved with SURJ. SURJ happened to be organizing a one-day “Moral Imagination Retreat” in November to “re-vision” racial justice in predominantly white faith communities, and I was lucky to attend.

This retreat was a first step towards forming a SURJ faith working group that will work in a relationship of accountability with Black and Brown faith leaders to co-create the relationships, networks, resources, and theologies necessary to support this movement. Twenty leaders from various faiths and denominations, including Unitarian Universalists, Jews, Protestants, and several others, gathered to build relationships, share stories of failures and successes, and make plans for next steps.

We were asked several times to assess the current status of racial justice work within our denominations, and experiences were varied. But across the board, we were all aware that we have a lot of work to do. As I reflected on the racial justice work of liberal, unprogrammed Friends, I felt largely disappointed. There are pockets of people doing great work and amazing individuals who carry on despite years of frustration, but as a community, we are far from where we ought to be.

I asked myself, why have white Friends failed to respond adequately to Friends of Color who have continuously asked us take racial justice work seriously, as a matter of necessity, both inside and outside of our meetinghouses?

It was a question that I’ve explored many times before, and I thought that I was comfortable with my answer: liberal, unprogrammed Quakerism has been swallowed up by white, middle/upper class, highly educated, political liberals who maintain white, liberal values at the center of Quakerism and force all those at the margins to either stick it out and fight for change or leave and seek out a more welcoming community elsewhere (both decisions I respect immensely).

One subject that kept coming up during the retreat was theology and the need for theology that can challenge white supremacy and invite people in. This got me thinking about a testimony that liberal, unprogrammed Friends hold sacred, namely our Peace Testimony and our understanding of pacifism as a political and spiritual mandate. “Violence begets violence,” (attributed to Dr. King) is often-cited, but rarely heeded. I would be willing to wager that most, if not all, liberal, unprogrammed Quakers would agree with this statement.

When white Friends allow faith and practice to be corrupted by the values of white dominant culture, our beloved Peace Tesimony is betrayed. White supremacy is a war, a war waged on Black and Brown people around the world to maintain white privilege and dominance with police, military, and weapons. All too often white Friends cast their lot with this system through implicit consent and support – “White silence is violence,” the now famous protest sign reminds us. Even our money funds this war through our tax dollars and our spending habits which fund occupations of Black and Brown communities.

When I listen to Friends of Color, I do not hear anyone who is the least bit confused about this. The “Spirit of the Meeting” of Black and Brown Friends was reached a long time ago on this issue. How can white Friends shake loose this violent white God and reclaim a spiritual mandate to end the bloody system of white supremacy? Will changing our theology help change hearts and minds?

I think so, and I think white Friends must do so to save our souls. Maybe this is what racial justice organizing in predominantly white faith communities looks like – following leadership of communities most impacted, exploring new ways to bring more people into the fold, supporting and lifting up courageous action, building relationships of trust and accountability, and using everything from theology to trainings to toolkits to yard signs to become evangelists for the revolution.

During my short time at the retreat, it became clear that many other denominations are wrestling with these same questions. Before we left, we each made commitments to follow-up, to stay involved, to help organize. This process of discerning and learning together, following the lead of People of Color, will continue on indefinitely.

Reverend Jennifer Bailey, the founder of the Faith Matters Network, a member of SURJ’s accountability council, and one of the main organizers of the retreat, began our time together by asking us this question which has stayed with me ever since: “What are you going to do about this white God that demands Black and Brown blood?” In a way, I see this process as one, long communal exorcism, casting out that false, white God and discovering together what lies beneath, what survived the wreckage, and what we can build from the remains.

From slavery to mass incarceration

Why addressing America’s prison problem means confronting our racist past and present

(Originally published in Quaker Action)

On any given day in the United States, one in 10 Black men in their thirties is in prison or jail. In fact, one out of three Black men of all ages can expect to serve time at some point in his life. That figure is one in six for Latino men and one in 17 for white men.

This racial disparity is hardly a function of crime. Over the past quarter-century, U.S. incarceration rates have nearly doubled, while crime rates have been cut in half.3

Our criminal justice system isn’t broken. This glaring racial inequity is actually a result of how the justice system was designed to work—a system with an undeniable historic connection to slavery that was outlawed a century and a half ago. Any meaningful conversation about ending mass incarceration in the U.S. must include discussing racism in our prisons, our legislation, our courts, our police departments, our schools, our neighborhoods, and in our everyday lives.

How did we get to this place? Although slavery ended in 1865, America came up with plenty of reasons to lock up large numbers of Black people in the years that followed. The legal justification was established in the Black Codes—loitering and vagrancy laws passed after the Civil War to restrict freedom. The moral justification developed as white society promoted racialized stereotypes that related Black bodies to animalistic brutes to be feared, especially by white women.

The not-so-hidden financial justification was the desire to bring Black people back to tobacco and cotton fields. After the end of slavery, prisons became a new path to provide free or cheap labor for plantations. Within a century, that labor was used also for governmental contracts and private industry. Along with the new sharecropping system after the Civil War, the Southern plantation system kept churning out product—all at the expense of Black humanity.

The “war on drugs” and era of mass incarceration

The disproportionality of Blacks in prison grew over the following decades, becoming further entrenched in the 1970s and ’80s. As a backlash to communities struggling for civil and human rights—for themselves and for others—new laws took hold that made it easier to keep Black people in shackles and chains.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” to quell social unrest across the country—feeding a new racially tinged narrative about “inner city” crime for the constituency he called his “silent majority.” The war on drugs fueled a surge in prison populations, which continued to soar with the passage of state-level legislation like the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, and, in the 1980s, tough-on-crime measures, such as “three-strikes” laws and other draconian punishments for drug offenders.

Drug-related crimes represent the single biggest increase in incarceration rates over the past several decades. Statistical analysis show rates of drug use (and selling) to be similar across racial lines, however, Blacks are arrested on drug charges at rates that are three to five times as high as those of white adults.

Structural racism intensifies for people of color at every stage in the criminal justice system. These communities experience an over-policing that white communities—whether poor or not—never encounter. Young Black men are shot dead by police at 21 times the rate of young white men, according to the investigative journalists at ProPublica. And a recent Gallup poll shows that one in four young Black men recalled unfair treatment by police within the past 30 days.

For people of color, arrests often turn into imprisonment, whereas whites may face probation or shorter sentences for committing similar acts. To make matters more tragically comedic, the recent shift to legalize marijuana in several states has created a new class of mostly white entrepreneurs while thousands of young Black men and women remain imprisoned or with criminal records for using or selling the same substance.

This is business as usual in our criminal justice system—an accepted paradigm that encourages mass incarceration of people of color to continue. Though less crude than during and after Reconstruction, American politicians, media, and law enforcement continue to draw on the well-practiced art of stereotyping the “other” to justify discriminatory treatment.

Today, the United States has both the largest number of human beings behind bars (more than 2.4 million in federal, state, county, and other facilities) and also the highest percentage of its population (nearly one out of 100) locked away. Although Black men make up six percent of the population, they now account for nearly half of all prisoners.

After people are released from prison, their punishment continues. They face discrimination in applying for jobs, housing, and public assistance. Many are barred from voting for the rest of their lives.

Opportunity for change

Racial inequity pervades the U.S. criminal justice system, the political arena that governs that system, and the society that allows this injustice to continue. Interrupting that cycle to end mass incarceration requires change in every one of those spaces. And there are a few, but important, opportunities to push for that needed transformation.

Over the past eight years, we’ve seen an ebb in the total number of people incarcerated in the United States. The slight but significant declining trend began not because enlightened political leaders finally understood the devastation that these policies have caused, but because of the great recession of 2007. Economic woes meant that many states could no longer afford the cost of building and maintaining prisons.

This opening has allowed advocates and organizers to seize the part of the public narrative that has now forced and encouraged some mainstream political leaders to publicly wrestle with this issue. On the 2016 presidential campaign trail, we’ve seen politicians on both sides of the aisle calling for an end to the era of mass incarceration—not simply for economic reasons but because of the destruction it has caused, disproportionately for the poor and people of color.

In local communities, organizations like the American Friends Services Committee are providing support to formerly incarcerated people and their families. In the South, AFSC is blessed to work with other organizations, faith-based groups, and individuals committed to improving opportunities for people in and out of prison.

In Baltimore, our Friend of a Friend program works in several prisons in Maryland, providing training to inmates on nonviolent conflict resolution while supporting an environment where they can study the causes and effects of mass incarceration and how they can participate to dismantle this system. After they’re released from prison, Friend of a Friend accompanies them as they transition back into the larger community, connecting them to ongoing community organizing work.

In Atlanta, we have started a restorative justice program that helps young people who’ve been charged with crimes get involved with real community work, such as designing programs to prevent their peers from walking down the same path, as an alternative to having a criminal offense on their record.

Programs like these help, one person at a time. But working toward policy changes that affect thousands remains critical. Advocates across the country continue to chip away at the problem of mass incarceration from different angles, whether calling for decreasing sentences, decriminalizing certain drugs offenses, and alternatives to incarceration programs, to name just a few.

As individuals, communities, and organizations come together to challenge the imprisonment of our brothers, sisters, and neighbors, we can’t ignore the central role that racism plays in our justice system.

In this effort, we must continue to respect the humanity of every person caught up in this modern-day outgrowth of slavery. And we must ensure that the narrative is not one that treats the incarcerated as simply perpetrators, but as survivors of a system designed to control people based on the color of their skin and the need of those with power to withhold it from those without. In this way, we can do more to ensure that we move toward a conclusion in this painful chapter in our nation’s history.

—KAMAU FRANKLIN

Kamau Franklin is AFSC’s regional director in the U.S. South and an activist attorney who has been involved in community organizing for over 20 years. Read Kamau’s bio.  

Black Lives Matter, Bernie Sanders, and the power of an interruption

(originally published at: http://afsc.org/friends/black-lives-matter-bernie-sanders-and-power-interruption)

A white person attending the Bernie Sanders’ rally in Seattle last week probably understood what was happening as an unwelcome, uninvited interruption of Bernie’s attempts to speak on social programs. But in the world of Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford, the two Black Lives Matter activists who took the stage, they weren’t just interrupting Bernie Sanders—they were interrupting white supremacy.

There have been a lot of great articles written on this event, and I encourage you to read as many of them as possible, including Darlene Cunha’s piece for Time, Dara Ling’s post on Vox, or this blog from Jamie Utt.

You can also read Johnson’s own comments on her actions, and watch an interview with her on MSNBC.

Johnson told MSBC: “I think it’s really interesting to note that no one is really engaging with the content of what I said on the stage. I read out a lot of claims about Seattle and Seattle’s racism and our national racism, and yet people are trying to go after my personal character and just derail and derail and derail, and that signals to me that the things that I said were spot on.”

So what did she actually say? Here is an excerpt from her remarks on Aug. 8:

I would like to welcome you to this place called Seattle, which is actually occupied Duwamish land, stolen and hypocritically named after Chief Seattle. We are located in King County, where the silhouette of Martin Luther King reigns high while we spend $210 million dollars building a new jail to imprison Black children. Welcome to Seattle, where our Seattle police department has been under federal consent decree for the past three years and yet has been riddled by use of force, racial profiling, and scandals throughout the year. I want to welcome you, Bernie, to West Lake, where we said “Black Lives Matter” on Black Friday. We shut down West Lake, and we shut down the tree lighting. And we have anointed this land saying, “We will fight for Black lives no matter what it takes.” Welcome to Seattle, where the Seattle School Department suspends Black students at a rate six times higher than their counterparts. Bernie, welcome to Seattle, where we have undergone intense gentrification in the central district, which used to be the only place where we Black people could live legally in Seattle. Welcome. This is what we have to deal with here.

At this point, the shouting from the crowd turns very ugly, but Johnson eventually succeeds in getting the crowd to observe 4 ½ minutes of silence in honor of the one-year anniversary of the murder of Michael Brown.

Rewatching the footage, I couldn’t help but ask myself, has a crowd of tens of thousands of white peopleever listened to the voice of a 24-year-old Black woman who was not performing for them?

With all the discussion over not what she said, but howshe said it, I am reminded of the story of Jesus overturning the tables in the temple during Passover. Were his actions wise? Wasn’t it rude of him to interrupt Passover? If he had wanted to get his point across, shouldn’t he have just asked the temple priests to remove the money changers?

And what about early Quakers who regularly interrupted church services? They would walk into a church uninvited, head straight to the front of the room, take over the podium (the “microphone” of the time), outwardly criticize what the priest was saying, and share their own beliefs.

Sound familiar?

I don’t know about you, but the actions of Johnson and Willaford seem pretty Quaker, at least historically Quaker. It should be noted that Marissa Johnson graduated cum laude in 2013 from Seattle Pacific University, where she studied theology and was inspired by her professor to see “how theology could affect the real world.” Sounds like “Faith and Practice” to me.

But how about what she said? In white Seattle, a welcome to the city would include recommendations for great coffee shops, a visit to the Space Needle, cool neighborhoods for window-shopping, and much, much more. This Buzzfeed list says it all.

In Black Seattle, a welcome would look exactly like what Johnson described: the realities of racist policing, mass incarceration, stolen land, a history of red-lining, and “intense gentrification.”

Recently, I flew into Milwaukee on a work trip. I was looking for a good, reasonably priced gluten-free restaurant and found a Mexican restaurant on my phone. As I parked my car in front, I realized that I was in a pretty cute neighborhood. There were lots of trees, historic buildings, neat shops, a juice bar, a brewery, and many charming houses.

I did not know that I was just blocks from the 53206 zip code, a neighborhood in which 62 percent of men spend time in prison by age 34, and only “one [out] of every 25 job-seeking people” can find full-time employment. I also didn’t know that Wisconsin “has the highest percentage of incarcerated black men among all 50 states, [and] now spends more on prisons than on education.”

I’m guessing 53206 doesn’t make it onto the “Top 10 reasons to visit Milwaukee” list.

The real offense that Johnson and Willaford were guilty of was interrupting white space with Black reality. But the more these two worlds are seen as one, the better, because the white world depends on the invisibility and oppression of the Black world in order to survive. If we white folks are willing to truly see Marissa Johnson’s world and listen to her words, we will surely find ourselves unable to go back to our own world unchanged.

Let’s revisit early Friends. Imagine yourself sitting in a church in Nottingham in 1649when a wild-eyed, red-haired young man named George Fox goes to the front of the church and interrupts the preacher to declare that the Holy Spirit “shall lead…into all truth,” an act for which he is imprisoned.

Would you be angry at him?

Would you ignore what he said?

Or would you be changed forever?