When: Saturday, June 3 from 11:30-3:30 (includes an opening time of connecting over lunch( bring your own and a snack to share). The session may end sooner than 3:30 but we have allowed a full four hours so we are not rushed.
Who: Zenaida Peterson and Ian Bartimole , current Quaker Voluntary Service Fellows with support from the wider QVS group.
What: A time dialogue and interactive activities that will engage participants to learn, explore and unpack questions such as:
- What might be the cultural barriers that keep people of color from entering or staying with Quakerism/FMC?
- What insights does Tema Okun’s piece, “White Supremacy Culture”, offer us re: What is Quaker and what is shaped by or rooted in whiteness/white dominant systems?
Friends for Racial Justice see this session as an opportunity to continue the work pointed to by New England Yearly Meeting’s Minute (Aug, 2016) on racial justice/white supremacy. We are excited by this opportunity to be together and dig into these questions in a spirit of love and tenderness, not blame or guilt. FORJ hopes that exploring these and related questions can open the way for new understanding that inspires and guides us to make changes that support a wider diversity of F/friends among us at FMC, and supports us individually and corporately in taking action for racial justice in the wider Quaker community and local community.
We look forward to seeing any and of you who are intrigued by these questions, and want to learn from and with the QVS fellows and their insights.