“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!”
Resources:
- Subscribe to QuakerSpeak so you never miss a video
- See a list of all the videos we’ve produced.
- Read Friends Journal to see how other Friends describe the substance of Quaker spirituality
Transcript:
Lucy
Quakerism started with a vision of reviving primitive Christianity and the belief that we’re trying to live as Christ lived, to see the seed of God in everyone and recognize it. And early Quakers understood themselves as creating heaven on earth. As Quakers evolved they were affected by the larger society, and white supremacy became a lot more part of the faith.
There were definitely prophets among us: Benjamin Lay, Lucretia Mott, John Woolman. But as we move forward, we colonized Pennsylvania, we are responsible for the displacement of many many indigenous people, Lenni Lenape here. William Penn brought slaves from Barbados to Pennsylvania, and I think these were among the first enslaved people that were here.
We have really perpetuated the system, and I think that reparations is a way for us to look back at that history and revive that revolutionary spirit in the faith and return to the sense that we, together with our resources, with our spiritual work, with our labor, with others in deep solidarity, with the people who were most impacted by these things, can create the new Jerusalem now. We are the religious society of Friends of Truth. We need to tell the truth, the full truth about ourselves, and do the repair that that truth calls us to.
I’m Lucy Duncan, my pronouns are she/they. I attend Green Street Monthly Meeting and the Queer Abolitionist Quaker Worship Group. I’m from Philadelphia. I’ve lived here this month, 25 years.
Rob
Rob Peagler, he/him are my pronouns. Grew up in the suburbs of New York and have lived in the Northeast and a little bit in Atlanta, and then in Philly for about 13 years. And I don’t officially consider myself a Quaker, but I spent a lot of time with Quakers.
reparationWorks started out functioning as a consultancy. We led a racial justice capacity building cohort for Quaker Meeting. We helped community organizations do community engagement. Some of the work has always been about supporting the reparationist ecosystem in Philadelphia and connecting it to reparationist beyond.
Lucy and I both share a fellowship with the Truth Telling Project, a national organization that supports learning how to do reparations and understanding reparations better. And so we’ve shifted from à la carte focusing on other people’s problems, to setting our own agenda for being a good movement, player, and fertilizing the ecosystem.
Lucy
I like to quote Dave Ragland, who’s the co-director of the Truth Telling Project, who says that, “Reparations is the midpoint between truth and reconciliation.” It definitely is, resource redistribution, I think that land back and all of that is really elemental. But it’s also deep spiritual repair. It’s really healing on the level of relationships, spirit and resources.
Rob
It’s a practice, it’s a spiritual practice, but it’s like an ethos, a set of actions, a set of values. So, it’s many things. And one really helpful way to think about it, and I feel it’s an experiment that we and the people we’re connecting with are figuring out is how, is reparations a spiritual practice and a lifestyle? I find usefulness and excitement in not knowing what the answer is. One aspect of that is we don’t know what the answer is. We haven’t done it yet. I hadn’t given reparations much thought and didn’t know much about reparations, but the way I was able to make it make sense for me is like, deal with it as a design problem. Like what’s the frame, what’s the approach, what’s the design brief on making the world, what Benjamin Lay, a Quaker, would call the New Jerusalem?
Lucy
People in the United States are haunted by the past, by chattel slavery, by the genocide of indigenous people. That is animating us. It’s animating what we do and how we live. And in order to really turn those ghosts from ghosts who are haunting us and making us behave in ways that we don’t necessarily want to, that we have to go back and reckon with that past.
Rob
I think there’s a very strong invitation to be self satisfied and smug and live in the past for Quakers. From Benjamin Lay being out in front to the Germantown declaration, the idea that like Quakers were reparationists. Like…yeah…yes…and, living in the past, resting on laurels, a culture of politeness and non conflict lets a lot of stuff fester and reparations, again, a great disinfectant and catalyst for burning that off.
Lucy
Reparations as a tool for living in integrity, for living in integrity and not having, you know, like parts of your history that you’re like “we don’t talk about that”, you know? “That’s from the past.” But to really like surface that and understand it as integral to who you’ve become and to grapple with it and metabolize the pain of reckoning with that and also the possibility that comes from doing the healing and walking through it.
Of course, I started to look at my own history and suspected that I had slaveholders in my family. And through reparative genealogy, discovered that a great, great, great great grandfather, Reverend Clement Reed, who was a Presbyterian minister in the deed of his estate, was a record of the things that he was passing along, including furniture. And in and amongst that were the listing of 22 people that he had enslaved.
There’s a period of, you know, understandable, like guilt and shame, but that’s not going to get us anywhere. And so, sitting with that, working through it and to recover from our socialized self, our spiritual selves, because I think that’s elementally what reparations is. We have a socialized self that like breathes in the toxicity of white supremacy and capitalism. And we also have a spiritual self that can be liberated from that societal conditioning and live fully from the spirit.
Rob
Inviting spirit and moving in relationship are necessary and actually moving resources, money and land, is necessary If you are a Quaker, or not a Quaker, and have resources, land or money that you want to flow into healing and repair in Philadelphia and connecting Philadelphia with the national movement, Lucy and I and the people we’re working with are getting more and more focused in that focus is accelerating. All of this spiritual stuff and relationship is great, but we really need to start moving significant resources in order for that healing and repair and credibility and momentum to all keep going.
Discussion Question:
- What are is reparationWorks?
- What is reparations and why are they nessesary?
The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.
Comments on Friendsjournal.org may be used in the Forum of the print magazine and may be edited for length and clarity.