Comfort and Discomfort in the Spiritual Home

This week, I read big chunks of Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African-Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice, by Vanessa Julye and Donna McDaniel. This is a huge, carefully-researched history of Quakers' relationship to black people, slavery, racism, abolition, civil rights, education, and more. Julye and McDaniel wrote the book as an antidote to Quakers' partial understanding of our own history; we often point to the fact, for instance, that Quakers stopped owning slaves a good hundred years before the Civil War, without necessarily digging deeply into how complex, fraught, hard-fought, and divisive that decision was. The tone of the book is neutral and factual, the level of detail is impressive bordering on numbing, and it's all in there: everything we got right (freed our slaves! marched on Washingon! Opened a school to meet the needs of black children in Detroit!), everything we got wrong (actively participated in the slave trade! resisted abolition! refused membership requests from exemplary black applicants!). It's a very thorough portrait of a flawed people with a checkered history with regard to race.

The piece that I've been chewing on for a few days, though, is from Vanessa Julye's author's statement, the very first paragraph, in which she writes:

I am one of very few African American Quakers, and I have naturally been drawn into the question of why this is so. I believe that the seeds of this circumstance were planted more than three hundred years ago, that Friends have been plagued by racist attitudes from that time to this day. These attitudes largely account for why our numbers in the Society of Friends have been and continue to be small. (xix)

I've seen this assumption for years: that any organization or institution that is predominantly white is that way because of its racism, or the racism of its members. But I'm not sure. It seems to me that in a society that continues to be as segregated as ours, a specific institution could be segregated for reasons that have little to do with the racist attitudes of its members; in fact, one could argue that Quakerism, for instance, remains predominantly white despite the active anti-racism of many of its members. This is something that I have heard white Quakers talk about with confusion and pain.

In the case of my own meeting, it is easy to imagine outside influences working against racial diversity. For 40 years, the meeting has been located in a city that the census bureau tells me is only 7% black; in a meeting with about 50 members, we would need only 3.5 black people to match our immediate community demographically. Success!

Of course, that's a very partial picture. Our Quaker meeting draws Friends from all over the area, including a city that is 22% black, and the suburb I live in, which is only 4% black. But I wonder if this is part of why it's hard for a Quaker meeting to reflect its area more accurately: most Quaker meetings are the only game in town for Friends. Some people drive half an hour or more to come to worship, and they might not do that if there were another meeting close by. By way of contrast, the ELCA church locator tells me that there are 10 Lutheran churches within 15 miles of my house, and 11 in Lansing proper. How far do people normally go when they're looking for a new church, I wonder? Are there people in Lansing who never find us because when they go church shopping, of the 10 churches in easy travel distance from their home, not one is a Quaker meeting? (And will our racial makeup change now that we've moved from the suburbs to a meetinghouse in Lansing? Will we end up on more people's shopping lists?)

So, on the one hand, I think Julye may be wrong in attributing the overwhelming whiteness of liberal Quakerism primarily to racism within the Religious Society of Friends. It seems to me that societal and structural legacies of racism could be doing the job just fine without much help from us at all.

On the other hand, I wonder how much it takes for a black person who comes to worship to decide it's just not the place for her. I've been thinking a lot about the ideas of comfort and discomfort because sometimes it seems to me that my reasons for taking a break from my meeting are petty and reveal me as a small person: sometimes people say things I disagree with. Or they hurt my feelings.

I have often thought that we place too much emphasis on being comfortable, often couching it in language about "safety." This came up a lot in the years I worked security at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, where many women wanted us to regulate other women's behavior because, they told us, they felt "unsafe" around (pick one): women with certain body modifications; women in leather; women who drink beer and get loud around the campfire at night. For a long time, I was very sympathetic to these complaints, until it dawned on me that "safe" and "comfortable" are not synonyms, and that if someone else's behavior or words make you uncomfortable, that isn't the same as them hurting you or threatening to. And sometimes being made uncomfortable is the first step in growth.

So I have been concerned that, in taking a break from my meeting, I am protecting myself from imaginary threats.

On the other hand...

Some of the things I find hardest about being at my meeting are things I deal with all the time elsewhere. I would like my monthly meeting to be a haven from what is ugly in the world, but it seems like most Quakers don't see some of the ugliness I do, and thoughtlessly recreate it. This means that at my meeting, as much as anyplace else, I get to enjoy hearing women who weigh a hundred pounds less than me complain about how fat they are and how much weight they need to lose. I get to hear moms speak about their children in dismissive, labeling, judgmental ways, or confidently predict the trouble I'm going to have with mine someday. I get to listen to the insights of people who think they understand poverty because they lived on a really tiny stipend while they were in graduate school. I get to hear people who've recently been tourists in third-world countries rave about the spiritual wisdom of the natives there, their deep connection to the earth, their openness and generosity despite their poverty.

And you know what? I get enough of that shit elsewhere. I don't need to come to Quaker meeting for it.

So now I imagine a black person coming to our meeting for the first time. She is likely to be welcomed effusively, as all newcomers are, because we are really nice people at Red Cedar. She may feel there is a slight tinge of "oh, yay, a black person!" in the welcome; she may suspect that, as happy as people are to see her in particular, they are also at least a little happy to think that if she keeps coming, she might improve our demographic profile. She is probably not wrong about that. She has probably experienced this before, and may feel prepared to deal with it. She may like us, and what we do, well enough to come back anyway.

But what happens on the day that tourist talks during Joys and Sorrows about the happy, enlightened, spiritually advanced poor natives he saw on his trip? What happens if she overhears a white woman making fun of the decor in the home of an African-American family she visited recently*? What happens when somebody refers to a stereotype about black people that they think is harmless because it's a positive stereotype?

How much does it take for a black person to decide we're not worth the trouble?

I want to be clear: I do not subscribe to the idea that all white people are automatically racists. I don't feel guilty about either the color of my skin or my middle-class upbringing. I don't think guilt and self-flagellation are productive.

On the other hand: I want to hold myself and my beloved community of Friends to a high standard of awareness, a high standard of behavior, a high standard of speech. We can be 99% racism-free, but our careless assumptions about who is in the room with us, how much they have in common with us, how universal our experience is, how correct our understanding is--these can be enough to tell a newcomer that he does not belong.

We should be challenging everyone who walks through our doors: challenging them spiritually, challenging them to grow into a deeper understanding of God's Truth, challenging them to join with us in the hard work of becoming the people God calls us to be. To do that, we have to be a place where people can become humble, open, and vulnerable, because it is only in that state that new truths can be heard. If people have to guard themselves against us, they will have to be exceptionally strong to simultaneously open themselves to God.

I imagine Julye must be one such exceptionally strong person, to respond to the racism she experiences in the Religious Society of Friends not by leaving but by giving seven years of her life to research and writing a book of truth about our history. She (and her white co-author) see our impoverishment of spirit and understanding, and respond by giving more of themselves to us. This is not something we can expect of every black person, or every working-class or poor person, or every fat person. We are filled with love for each other--I know that I am beloved in my meeting, sometimes very deeply loved by the same people whose behavior I find most hurtful. What we need to understand is: Love isn't enough.

*I don't make up examples or rely on hearsay. If I describe something in my meeting, it is something I have directly witnessed.