Book Guides: Share a list of your favorite books with Friends Learn more Become an Affiliate Refer Friends to Quakerbooks and recieve 7.5% of their sales Learn more Book List: |
"...but who is my neighbor?" (April 2007)
Shortly after I started teaching 2nd grade in a working class neighborhood in Vallejo, California, I was driving to dinner with my teaching partner and her husband. A police car pulled up behind us and trailed the car for our entire journey, staying close and turning on its lights, silently, at least twice. I asked Greg, an African-American university professor, why they were behind us. He said, “Oh, it happens at least once per week to most black men. Getting trailed by the cops is just part of life for me.” The school in which we taught was pretty diverse – I had at least nine distinct cultures in my classroom, Korean, east Indian, Filipino, Mexican, Guatemalan, Anglo-American, African, African-American, Japanese, and Chinese. About a year after having dinner that night, on April 29th, the four policemen who had beaten Rodney King were acquitted and the LA Riots erupted. When I went into my classroom the next morning, I asked my class to gather round the rug, that something very hard had happened and I wanted to talk with them about it. I told them that Caucasian police officers had beaten an African-American man and that many people believed that the police were guilty and unjustified in the beatings. When the police were acquitted, many people’s sense of prevailing unfairness, racism and injustice exploded into mass violence and that the riots, I believed, were expressions of this frustration gone out of control. One by one my seven-year-old students told me stories of their own experiences of racism, of being told to leave stores or being called names on the street. I asked them if they thought the violence would help to make things better and many of them said, “no.” I said that I didn’t believe that people getting hurt would help, but that within that classroom was much of the solution, that continuing to be friends with one another, loving one another, was a way to change the world. Afterwards, an Ethiopian student who was incredibly kind, came up to me, weeping. He said, “Ms. Duncan, my dad thinks that the riots are a good thing.” He was clearly confused by the conflicting messages of his father and his teacher. I said, “Maybe your father believes that if things get bad enough, that will lead to change.” I recently had the privilege of hearing Linda Stout, the author of Bridging the Class Divide speak at Swarthmore. She is the founder of the Piedmont Peace Project, raised Quaker, the daughter of a tenant farmer in North Carolina who is a self-taught activist. She has been a builder of bridges across race, class, and gender and has done significant work to bring activists together to work cooperatively for change. She quite eloquently told her story of empowering people who have never before had a voice to effect change in North Carolina and, more recently, across the country. She told a riveting story about working against the establishment of a prison in a small Louisiana town and presenting an alternative vision for a community college, complete with banners and young people in mortarboards. At the end of the evening, one member of the audience asked if she had ever been changed in an unexpected way by someone different from herself. She said that she had. She has been a part of a cross class group for many years, meeting twice a month and sharing quite deeply including revealing to one another how much money each of them made and how they spent it. She said that a lot of the time the working class participants would give the upper class members of the group time and space to process what they were learning about the poorer members’ experiences, to witness their transformation. Some of the members of the group who had come from poorer backgrounds were changed by the richer members challenge to let go of their fear and pursue their dreams. Linda didn’t have this issue, had been used to pursuing her dreams, but she had some members of the group challenge her for not planning for her retirement. Many of her family members had died young, so she figured she would, as well, and, so, didn’t take good care of herself and hadn’t planned financially to retire. The challenge changed her: she takes better care of herself and has started to save for her retirement. Many of these stories are shared in Linda’s important book about becoming conscious of the barriers erected to cross-class dialogue and cooperation and how to lay them aside in order to create a movement that includes all. Finding Freedom:Writings from Death Row is Jarvis Jay Masters’ eloquent memoir of practicing peace from within the confines of San Quentin’s death row. Masters is a Buddhist and his experience as described in this book is full of powerful spiritual teachings in the midst of chaos and unmitigated violence. From his description of cleaning his cell and making it home on his first night in the prison to his story of thwarting the murder of a prison guard and re-directing the anger of other inmates, this book provides both a vivid picture of life “on the inside” and of living with integrity and loving-kindness in a situation which is continually providing obstacles to such a way of life. I count this book among the most important spiritual autobiographies on my book shelf and it continues to teach me. Each of Us Inevitable is a multi-dimensional collection of keynote addresses at gatherings of Friends for Lesbian and Gay Concerns by gay, lesbian, bi-sexual Friends and allies. The essays focus on the importance of being oneself without apology and an evolving sense of being gay, lesbian, bisexual or an ally within the Religious Society of Friends. There are a number of wonderful, joyful, rich, sad and poignant essays in this inspiring collection focused on the wholeness that comes from fully accepting ourselves and others. Authors include Bill Kreidler, Elizabeth Watson, George Lakey, Becky Birtha, Muriel Bishop Summers, John Calvi, Arlene Kelly, and Dwight Wilson. The essays are consistently vulnerable, open, deeply spiritual and personal. This is a book full of riches. Equality by Deborah Saunders is her invitation to meetings to grow into our testimony and become welcoming communities for people of Color. She tells a moving story of her relationship with a difficult neighbor and listening to her leadings to reach out to this woman, to comfort her and engage with her. Deborah challenges Friends to move beyond our comfort zone and reach out to those who may change our meetings, to be faithful to our leadings to change and to become truly welcoming. “Now, please, please, don’t go home the way you came….We can do it, we have the Light within, the power of the Divine within, that will take away the fear, the anxiety, the mistrust, all the things that are holding us back from doing the work that we know we can do.” The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by E. B. Lewis, is a simple, elegant story book told from the perspective of an African-American girl on one side of a long fence. A white girl, her neighbor, sits on the fence each day during the summer, alone, sometimes smiling at the narrator. Each of the girls’ mothers has told them that they cannot cross the fence because, they say, it isn’t safe. The two girls spy and smile at one another, until one day the narrator talks to the red-haired girl, who points out that nobody has said they can’t sit ON the fence, they just can’t cross it. So the two girls sit long hours conversing through the summer, until the narrator invites the girl over the fence to jump rope. The story ends with the white girl, Annie, saying, “Someday somebody’s going to come along and knock this old fence down.” The narrator says, “Yeah, someday.”
The theme for this year’s FGC Gathering at River Falls – “…but who is my neighbor?” has proven quite evocative. There will be many rich and inviting presentations at the Gathering this year including Marcus Borg speaking to the theme and Cecile Nyiramana, who founded “Women in Dialogue,” a ministry of Rwanda Yearly Meeting, which brings together the widows of genocide victims with the wives of imprisoned suspects, and teaches them to work together in their communities for healing, support and reconciliation. You’re invited to participate in a conversation inspired by the theme at the Gathering’s new blog. I hope to see many of you ‘at the Falls’ in July. In Friendship, |
New Books
The Worship Kit
The Chiru Of High Tibet
Emma's Poem
Friends At The Bar
Hidden On The Mountain
|
