One of the reasons I love Quakers is without doing it perfectly, we try to live by Jesus’ example. I was recently reading a “minute” from New England Yearly Meeting, 2016 that I want to share. From, https://neym.org/news/2016-yearly-meeting-minute-white-supremacy:
“This minute is an important instance of speaking Truth to power. This minute represents the hard truth of Friends of color. The largely white Yearly Meeting is the power that needs to receive this Truth.
We want to grow; we want to become whole. We have received this minute and have been exercised. We want to invite others into the same experience. With our hearts broken open we approved the following minute; uniting with it with both joy and pain. This is the truth God has brought us to at this time. We feel the Love in these words.
We are complicit in white supremacy. We at New England Yearly Meeting have been “colonized” by our white supremacist culture and fall short of our full potential as a gathered body of Quaker Meetings because of this colonization.
We commit to engaging in interrupting white supremacy in ourselves:
- within individuals
- interpersonally,
- in our meetings
- and at all system levels of NEYM
To start this, we ask Permanent Board to explore an external cultural competency audit of New England Yearly Meeting.
We support Friends General Conference, an organization of which we are a part, in its efforts to interrupt white supremacy in its organization.
We commit to support fundraising by the New England Yearly Meeting FGC committee to raise $4,000 from our membership and our monthly meetings by the end of 2016. These funds will be available to FGC towards the cost of an external cultural competency audit if FGC decides to have one conducted. If more than $4,000 is raised, we direct the Permanent Board of NEYM to find use for the additional funds to support the work of interrupting white supremacy.”