Reparations: A Quaker’s Tool For Integrity

“Reparations is a tool for living in integrity,” Lucy Duncan, one of the co-founders of reparationWorks, says. For Quakers, that involves coming to terms with their predecessors’ role in the slave trade, as well as other White supremacist practices. It’s about making an effort to “really surface that [history] and understand it as integral to who you’ve become… to metabolize the pain of reckoning with that—and also the possibility that comes from doing the healing and walking through it.”

“It’s a spiritual practice,” Lucy’s partner in reparationWorks, Rob Peagler, agrees. “An ethos, a set of actions, a set of values.” From that spiritual work, they hope, Friends will eventually find practical solutions for redressing centuries of racial inequity. “We don’t know what the answer is—we haven’t done it yet!”

2 thoughts on “Reparations: A Quaker’s Tool For Integrity

  1. I support the work toward reparations. It’s pretty clear that the land part is quite complicated. But I don’t know if those working for monetary reparations understand that the money part is very simple because the Constitution gives Congress the power and the responsibility to create US money. As is very obvious with the creation of obscene amounts of money for military spending, Congress can create as much money as it wants and spend it any way it wants. There is no operational impediment to paying monetary reparations to decedents of ethnically cleansed and enslaved people. This video explains briefly: The Basics of Modern Money https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDL4c8fMODk&t=4s For a more thorough understanding please see the 2020 book, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory [i.e., federal monetary operations] and the Birth of the People’s Economy by Stony Brook U, professor of public policy, Stephanie Kelton. Incidentally, understanding federal monetary operations also makes it clear that war tax withholding has no impact on the federal budget or military spending. Economics determines nearly everything in human societies and Friends would be empowered by understanding US monetary operations.

  2. The speaker disrespects the quakers who were not slaveholders and spent their lives convincing their brothers of the error of their ways. And, disrespects those that intentionally violated the constitution in the UGRR. I suggest she read about the history of the Q antislavery movement, starting with the Kite brothers pamphlet on the topic.

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