As mentioned, New England Yearly Meeting 2020 was focused on social justice with emphasis on anti-racism this year. Several individuals were asked to talk about our work in activism at various meetings for business, and was one of them! I have heard talk of these ministries being recorded and published somewhere, but I think everyone on sessions staff is recovering (as they deserve to). I am putting the words that I spoke here for you to read in the meantime. Most of you know me and can imagine my dramatic public speaking.
Sorry it's so long, but I was asked to speak for 10 minutes (I don't think I took that long? But anyways)...!
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Non-violence is an important value of Quakerism. It always has been. So I feel like it’s an important thing to address today. I want to start by sharing a quote from Coretta Scott King; I want to publicly acknowledge Johnny Williams from Mt Toby Friends Meeting for bringing this to my attention!
In a speech in 1967 she said, “I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.”
Back in 2016, I participated in City Year Boston; an Americorps program. I was placed in a trope-ic underfunded school full of poor people, immigrants, undocumented immigrants and limited resources, and I would describe my role as “extra body placed there to mitigate the chaos and run an after-school program.” For all you Bostonians, I was at the Hennigan K-8 in Jamaica Plain. This experience was rewarding but intense, and I will be drawing from it now to illustrate some of Mrs. King’s points.
Since I was working in a school, it seems fair that I address her point about neglecting school children first. Most of my role as a City Year (a weird noun, but it’s what we used) was to work with a classroom teacher. Unfortunately, I was placed with one of those teachers who really need to retire. I did get the sense that she was a caring, interesting teacher at some point in her career, but by the time I met her, she was barely either of those things. My memory of the first day is that we sat around and introduced ourselves and she passed out one worksheet and then spent the next three hours on her phone. The majority of the year was spent like this; she would acknowledge the class when they showed up, and take attendance. If we were lucky, she would pass out something like a worksheet. Then she would retreat to her desk and sit on her phone and… within one to twenty minutes, my students were all bored and entertaining themselves in non-academic ways. Naturally the noise level would rise, and she would yell at the easy targets - the Black girls and the boys with ADHD - before returning to her phone. If she taught a lesson, it was often full of misinformation. Like one time, she said that the prefix “im” means to stop. So to migrate means to move around, and to immigrate means to stop moving and stay where you are. And she would forget which students didn’t understand English, and get mad at them for not listening. If, of course, she made the time to interact with them.
There were other caring teachers in the building who were good at their jobs, and I tried to follow their example by teaching lessons of my own when I could. But when I tried to advocate for myself and my students, City Year told me I was not in an ideal situation and I should just do small-group sessions with a few students, the administration made it clear that they couldn’t do anything because of her tenured status and the teacher herself made it clear that the real problem was that our students’ mothers were crackheads.
Several mothers actually showed up over the course of the year to investigate the lack of learning. Sometimes they made appointments; sometimes they showed up at the door. None of them seemed remotely high on anything. My teacher abused her power as the white teacher talking to these Latina and Haitian and Somalian moms, downplaying their concerns, telling them their children (who usually functioned as interpreters) were making good progress. And then telling me afterwards that these concerned mothers were just crackheads. Punishing a mother and her children is, as previously stated, violence.
I want to remind you that in 2016, Trump got elected. I imagine this was a troubling time for most of you. I would like you to know that this was a terrifying time for the immigrant families in my school. The day after the election, I remember walking downstairs into the cafeteria to greet students, and being met with chaos. Usually, large groups of children sound like noise. That morning, the noise was full of fear and tears. Not first-day-of-school tears, desperate tears. A few younger children were refusing to let go of their parents, and school staff were floating around presumably trying to reassure people. I remember one of my students waving me over and saying hi. Normally her dad would walk her and her two younger brothers to school. That day, he was sitting on the bench next to a woman I’d never seen before. “Is that your mom?” I asked my student. She said yes. She also said, “Normally she doesn’t have time to come to school, but today she thinks we should be home packing in case we get deported later this week.” I was rattled. How much of this fear was related to families being split up due to deportation? Then, the mother started speaking to my student in Spanish, which I took as my cue to leave them and rejoin the frenzy of students yelling “Ms. Lindo, we lost!” and “Our president is racist now! How could this happen?”.
And in January, almost immediately after inauguration, some of my students’ fears were realized when Trump passed his Muslim ban. While the news cycle blew up with the story of the MIT student from Iran, my Somalian students - and probably many others - were cut off from the family members who had not immigrated. Their stories flew under the radar. Thankfully we didn’t lose any of our students, but I know the issue kept everyone on edge. I am not familiar with our country’s history of deportation from the 60s, but after my witness that year I think that ripping families apart would be a good addition to Mrs. King’s list of systemic violences.
I’ve been thinking about non-violence this summer. “I only support the non-violent protests!” has become a refrain for my liberal white friends here in New England. We have the Civil Rights Movement as a model for how to gently insist on having rights, and it worked reasonably well, so it makes sense to like it. I am including myself in this “we” because I was raised and socialized by white people, and I do think nonviolent protests play an important role in our society!
But I was drawn to this quote from Barrington Dunbar as it appeared on the NEYM instagram page the other day:
“Black people living in the ghettos of American cities… cannot hear Friends who profess the way of love and nonviolence, but yet maintain a destructive silence in obvious situations of social injustice.”
So what do we mean when we say “I only support the non-violent protests”? Do we mean “I am uncomfortable with the images of buildings on fire” or do we mean “I am ready to dismantle systemic violence”?
I know the systemic violence is overwhelming. Mrs. King’s list was long, and I just added to it! I left that City Year feeling utterly discouraged because 22-year-old me could not make up for what my students deserved. But it is empire that wants us to feel discouraged and it is empire that wants us to stop trying because we haven’t done enough yet. It is in our power to stop listening to empire and start listening to each other. We have heard ministry and non-violent activism from Friends among us this week in feeding the hungry, providing for local communities, changing unjust government and so much more. So I ask, what are you willing to do? This is a big question, and it will take time to answer. I encourage us to sit with it and let Spirit and all the resources you have heard this week guide you to find your answer.
