Social Class & Quakers

Things That Have Never Been

2012-01-02T22:26:00.000-06:00

It's been ten months since I've written. I've been back to meeting maybe once since the last time I wrote, which is part of the reason I haven't had anything to write. Most of my focus has been on a local anti-racism conference and an anti-marriage amendment to the Minnesota State constitution. And my family. And many other places where I feel like my gifts and talents are valued and sought after.

A few months ago, friend Su Penn wrote a piece about her leaving her Meeting and it still speaks to me and my condition. I've been hanging onto my Meeting because it's been all I've had, spiritually, all I've known for the better part of the last twenty years. It saved my life and helped me meet the love of my life. I was hoping to find another spiritual community where I felt at home before I left the only real spiritual home I had.

But I won't wait any longer; I need to make room in my life for what is possible. It's time to lay down my membership in the Religious Society of Friends. As such, it's time to lay down this blog for good.

I don't leave Friends bitter or angry, but instead like Su, feel lighter, freer, full of possibility. Maybe you'll see me in worship from time to time.

I'm on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ sometimes. I have a new blog that's just about social class. In case you want to stay in touch.

I'll leave you with these words, from Ranier Maria Rilke.

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.

Welcome and Ministry

2011-02-27T03:06:00.002-06:00

I hear over and over again tales of meetings wanting to be more welcoming and they spend much time at committee meetings or meetings for worship for business discussing how to be more so. They talk about greeters and potlucks and literature and how to be more "Friendly" to those we don't know. But do we talk about worship itself?

One place I find particularly unwelcoming and sometimes hurtful is meeting for worship, and more specifically the ministry given.

During worship, I might hear references to things like GRE or NPR or CPA, none of which I'd heard about before moving to Minnesota at 24. I hear about the trials and tribulations of graduate school, and see nods of understanding but was clueless about until becoming friends with people who had gotten their advanced degrees. Friends find metaphors for ministry in complicated investment tools (which are still beyond my capacity to understand), academic treatises (which only recently have ceased to intimidate me), and even in all the discipline required for doing middle class taxes (I'd always used 1040 EZ, one page, no tracking required).

Beyond using words and metaphors that aren't accessible, sometimes the ministry is hurtful. Recently, a man stood to talk about all the help he'd gotten to get where he was, a retired and published chemistry professor. As he went on to describe a woman he'd helped at his private elite liberal arts college, he stated his utter shock that she was so smart and talented given that she'd transferred from her local community college in northern Minnesota. It made me think that I shouldn't tell him that I'd only recently graduated from Metro State.

Another time, a dentist talked about her "a-ha" moment when she realized how unfair the trade was that she'd done with a man who painted all the walls inside her house. She'd given him partial dentures that took an hour of her time and little effort and didn't realize how much time it took to paint her walls until later when she painted just one room. She seemed to be using the story to "teach" us about economic inequality.*

So I have some suggestions about making our actual worship more welcoming and less hostile to those who are not like us, and welcome your ideas too.

1. Create ways in meeting to address hurtful issues like these when they come up and make them explicit. My meeting has channels to flag ministry that's considered inappropriate in Friends ways (responding in a defensive way to a previous person, speaking right after another, using the platform to advance something overtly political or personal), but considering content seems verboten.

2. Consider very carefully your use of education or finances or middle class professions as metaphors in your own ministry. Is this something a hotel maid can relate to? A day laborer? A dishwasher? Is there another metaphor you can use if not?

3. We can only "preach" what we know, so we must speak from our own experiences. But as you give ministry, ask yourself if you're assuming that your life and your story is universal. See the questions under #2.

4. Now this one is radical. Make it okay to talk about social class in your meeting in an open and honest way, even when you talk about the quality of ministry. Ask hard questions about how welcoming your worship is for poor and working class people of all races and ethnicities.**

What are your thoughts and ideas? Does your meeting talk about worship when they talk about being welcoming? If so, how does it tackle that topic?

*I had to explain to Liz why that one hurt so I'll also explain it here. All I knew before I met middle class people for the first time was hard work, the kind that wore you out every single day so that you had little more energy for anything more than pulling up the footrest of your recliner, the kind that broke your wrist or even killed you if you weren't careful, the kind that required protective gear. I've been among Friends for going on 20 years and I still am surprised and hurt when a middle class person has become the "expert" on economic inequality when they are only now choosing a couple of hours of physical work on the weekend "for fun". My life is easy now, but I did hard low-wage work for the first ten years of my working life and then low-wage office work for the next eight, all by the time I was 33.

**For a bit of disclosure, I haven't been able to have any of this conversation in my own meeting. More on this in an upcoming post, I hope.

A Modern Plea

2010-08-19T00:19:00.001-05:00

Wealth is attended with power, by which bargains and proceedings, contrary to universal righteousness, are supported; and hence oppression, carried on with worldly policy and order, clothes itself with the name of justice and becomes like a seed of discord in the soul. –John Woolman, A Plea for the Poor

I started this essay, originally intended for a Friends Journal¹ special issue on education, not knowing what I was going to write. All I knew was that I felt a “seed of discord” about Friends prep schools, and I had no idea how to convey this sense that in our efforts to provide a good education, we're privileging the already privileged in order to give the same to those we deem worthy of getting it.

So I set out to learn about the social class diversity of Friends schools. Working with education professor Jane Van Galen, I developed a survey about the students who receive financial aid at Friends schools and part way through my research, I had to stop because someone with a measure of power among Friends schools decided they didn't like the questions I was asking and didn't like what I'd written before. And suddenly all the interviews I had scheduled from that date forward were cancelled and people stopped returning my calls. I don't know who it was and I don't know what was said. And that's not the story I want to tell here and now.

I tell you this because what initially looked like a wall turned out to be an opportunity. I don't work in education and didn't go to a Friends school. My college degree is in writing, not sociology. What was I to write about if I don't have "the facts" so many well-educated Friends ask for when I talk about Quaker education? So I pondered and prayed.

In my reflection I thought about the people I got to interview at fifteen schools before I had to stop the research. I found hard-working people with good intentions, people who crave excellence and equality. They reiterated some of what I already understood about Friends education: Quaker college preparatory schools supply a good education to students whose families can pay the tuition, and as many less wealthy students as the schools can afford to subsidize; some of the families receiving financial aid are pulled permanently out of poverty, so staff work hard to find funding for more and more families; Friends schools introduce students, families, and non-Quaker staff and faculty to Quaker worship, simplicity, peace, equality, integrity and community.

In story after story, I heard staff who themselves had become convinced Friends because of their experience of Friends education, and remembered that I count among my friends people who became convinced Friends at Quaker schools.

When I heard stories of the kids who Quaker prep schools helped, I forgot that my limited research was affirming my belief that a lot of the financial aid recipients have other social class privileges that would give them advantages over most other public school students.²

But when I closed my eyes in meeting for worship, I saw an auditorium full of poor and working class families holding lottery tickets hungering for one of the 20 or so spots at a Seed school in Washington, D.C. or Baltimore; I saw the poor and working class kids in sociologist Annette Lareau's "Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life" who wanted to be in the band or play soccer or go to the library but starved for adults in their lives to make that happen; I saw urban Quaker prep schools surrounded by a throng of young people not knowing they need the educational nutrition inside those walls. And I wept. Not metaphorically, not just in my heart. Real live heart-broken tears.

Then I saw a vision of a food shelf as if it were run like we run Quaker prep schools.

It made me ask, if we had a blank slate in today’s society, in a culture that claims it’s a meritocracy but has one of the highest degree of economic status heritability among industrialized countries, would we have schools that give a very good education to kids who were lucky enough to be born into wealthy families, educate those who already have the most access to education? Does that system fit with our sense of the truth about equality?

Thus oppression in the extreme appears terrible, but oppression in more refined appearances remains to be oppression, and where the smallest degree of it is cherished it grows stronger and more extensive: that to labor for a perfect redemption from this spirit of oppression is the great business of the whole family of Christ Jesus in this world. –John Woolman, A Plea for the Poor

Before I ended my research, I got an opportunity to talk with a head of school who helped me see a vision of what’s possible for our schools: Dennis Hoerner at Wellsprings Friends School in Eugene, OR.

This Friends school started in 1994 like most other Quaker schools, as a private college prep institution with traditional entrance requirements and financial aid funded primarily through tuition paid by those who could afford it. Then in 1998, Oregon law changed to allow students struggling in public schools to be referred to any other school, public or private, and that student’s public school funding would follow the student. Within two years, Wellsprings became a school of almost entirely hard-to-teach public school students who are now thriving with the kind of tender attention and honor for which Quakers have such a capacity. William Ravdin, a Friend who became convinced because of his experience at a Quaker school and who has worked in Friends education his whole long life says of Wellsprings, “It is educating children who need to be rebuilt, emotionally and educationally, from the foundation up. Children whose families and schools in many cases have given up on them. Children who have given up on themselves."

Wellsprings Friends School’s only requirement to attend is that the student wants to be at the school.

Wellsprings fell into the work Woolman showed us three centuries ago. How can our other schools work toward a “perfect redemption” as we’re called, intentionally and with God's help? What will a Quaker school that embodied our sense of the truth about equality really look like?

¹I submitted a version of this article to Friends Journal and retracted it a couple of days later, feeling like it wasn't finished. I'm not sure this one is finished, but I'm done with it.

²This statement comes from information I've gotten from a number of resources including Lareau's book that outlines how families where parents have a college education give their kids advantages that working class and poor families don't have, and how those advantages benefit the kids in school and later in life. Other more longitudinal studies have been done including Lewis Terman's "Genetic Studies of Genius" that show how much impact social class has on educational and professional accomplishments, and how IQ isn't an indicator.

My limited research of just 15 Quaker prep schools showed that while the majority of financial aid recipients income was low, an equal majority have very well-educated parents and caregivers. Many are choosing professions that don't pay well, many are artists or non-profit administrators. Few don't have a college degree. And of all the school's websites I visited (all the schools that have at least an 8th grade), all but one have admissions requirements that would favor families that have very educated parents of all incomes.

Given Lareau's work and what I found in my research, I concluded that Friends prep schools are mostly educating those who are already privileged educationally.

hasffs.org

2010-08-19T00:18:00.002-05:00

Welcome to Higher Arky Street Friends Food Shelf, HASFFS, where all* are welcome.

At HASFFS, we pride ourselves in the finest and most healthful fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy and proteins. The farmers we choose to buy from all have a bachelor's degree and most have advanced degrees. They use only organic farming methods and only non-violent techniques of conflict resolution with the people they hire to harvest their foods.

Our staff are even more highly trained than our growers are; some have their Ph.D. in fields like Sustainable Agriculture and Culinary Adventures. They are here not only to answer your most basic questions about food and cooking and healthful eating, they offer courses on Sustainable Understory Growing, Food Emotional Development and Off Grid Cooking.

But first, a few guidelines and a process for admission to our food shelf.

1. We accept applications continually throughout the year except November 15 to January 15, our busiest time of the year. Please fill out the required forms for each member of your family, including your personal chef. Be sure to provide the written references from previous food shelves and/or grocers and/or cooking instructors for everyone 7 and older, including your personal chef or cook, and send it to the address below with the non-refundable $75 application fee per person.

2. We require that children over 2 and under 7 get tested to be sure they are prepared for the rigors of healthy eating. You can find testing sites here, and it generally will cost $300-$500. All others in the family must take the Independent Food Shelf Standardized Entrance Exam, which costs only $89 for each person taking the test. Children under 2 need not be tested, but we do require they get the psychological test when they turn 2 and then when they are 7 take the IFSEE. Personal chefs or cooks are exempted from testing if they are certified or have a degree from an approved culinary institute.

3. Once we've received all required materials and determine that you and your family meet all of our guidelines (we do not have the resources or training to deal with families who do not have a demonstrated interest or practice of eating well for good health), we will schedule a few site visits to your home to observe your eating and cooking practices, as well accompany you two times during your food shopping experiences.

4. Our goal is to ensure a good fit between your family and HASFFS and we will attend to your family's application with great care. After the site visits, we will meet with the admissions committee to determine, in the most worshipful way, whether your family demonstrates the necessary nutritional vigor we expect at the Higher Arky Street Friends Food Shelf, and will notify you within three months of your initial application.

Should you be accepted into the Higher Arky Street Friends Food Shelf, we request the first monthly payment thirty days before your grocery shopping can begin. Fees for food alone is approximately $1,500/month for a family of four. Additional costs you'll need to pay outside of the monthly fee include the cost of food, cookware, china, silverware (yes, real silver only here at HASFFS), table dressings, centerpieces and books for cooking classes, as well as transportation to and from the food shelf, and various fees for field trips to local restaurants, farms and food coops.

We understand that the average family of four in our city pays only about $1,000/month for groceries, but the quality food and cuisine we provide is far more expensive than what the average family can buy. You can't get this kind of bounty at your local free food shelf, or even at the highest end grocery store because they don't offer the kind of values-based cuisine that we can!

Also, we charge those who are able to afford this healthy bounty we offer so that we may make available some measure of financial aid for a few who are not able to afford such, including many middle class families who find our food out-of-reach. To apply for financial aid, go to the Food Shelf and Family Service website to fill out the family financial statement. Have ready all information about your assets before you begin including income; valuations for your: home, second home, third home, fourth home, fifth home, vacation home, boat, RV, private plane, private spaceship, original art and expensive jewelry; savings including retirement accounts and all that you've saved for your family's nourishment in a 589b-33 account; digital photos of your vegetable garden; a list of your available china, silverware, cookware and kitchen appliances.

Higher Arky Street Friends Food Shelf commits over $5,000,000 every year for financial aid, and over 23% of our families receive some assistance! Many of those are the middle class who don't have the resources they need to provide healthy nourishment for their families. While our food shelf doesn't come close to matching the diversity of our neighborhood, we have a diversity statement that comes from a diversity committee appointed by the board and we definitely value diversity in all its forms. Even socio-economic, which we measure only by income and assets because there aren't any other things to measure social class.

If you have any questions or concerns about the application process, financial aid, scheduling a site visit, or want to make a generous donation toward our efforts to bringing only the best to those who deserve it, don't hesitate to contact us at info@hasffs.org. We at Higher Arky Street Friends Food Shelf thank you for visiting.

*By "all" we mean those who practice rigorous good nutrition and healthful eating, and strongly prefer values-based food shopping and cooking experiences. If this is not you, you might find a better fit at one of those free food shelves or warehouse food outlets.

As If Your Life Depended on It

2010-02-22T10:54:00.000-06:00

A while ago, I talked with Liz about a committee charged with a specific task (I'm keeping this non-specific because the issue has since been addressed).

I was upset because the committee and our meeting didn't seem to act on a couple of things I sent the clerk and the committee about the task. I don't remember exactly who said what, but Liz and I came to the conclusion that if I brought my concern to the committee or the meeting, I'd be asked why I didn't do the task myself. My response?

BUT IT'S THEIR JOB!

Then I realized this might be a social class thing.

At my meeting (and at the yearly meeting and in a few other Quaker settings), if you bring a concern or solution to a problem, you're often asked to lead the committee for the concern or implement the solution.

Does this happen in your Quaker circles? Do you ask, "Why aren't they..." and you get, "Why aren't YOU...?"

This, I posit, is an expression of middle class individualism and not Quakerism.

Growing up, I was taught to go directly to a person or group responsible for a task they were supposed to do but weren't doing (or were doing badly). This, I think,comes from a working class culture. When you see something in the workplace that isn't getting done the way it's supposed to be getting done, you help protect the person on the line with you by saying something to them, because you know what it's like to have the boss come down on you, what it will be like if you lose your job. And they would do the same for you.

You're concerned because what he or she does impacts your job, your livelihood. He or she may live in your neighborhood, may be related to you closely or distantly. And you can't do his or her job also because your work won't get done.

If your coworker doesn't respond, you go to his or her family. If that doesn't work, you go to the union. And you never, ever go to the boss.

No, the committee's task isn't impacting my livelihood or isn't threatening my way of life or the lives of people in my meeting. But there's something embedded in me that wants, no NEEDS, that committee to do what it has been charged to do.

Does my worldview have a place in Quakerism? I think so.

Early Friends often let each other know when they weren't faithful, when they outran their Guide. We hesitate to do so and are sometimes offended when others do so because we so value our individual freedoms, our individual leadings and beliefs. They knew their spiritual lives, their corporate lives and Quakerism in general depended on it.

I think they were right. I feel like my spiritual life, the spiritual well-being of my meeting, and Quakerism in general depend on our collective faithfulness, our ability to do what we've been charged to do.

Some Answers

2010-02-19T22:52:00.002-06:00

Su over at Tape Flags and First Thoughts reads voraciously and writes quickly and well. She also has an interest in the issue of social class. In her most recent post, she talks about conservative political scientist Charles Murray's most recent book, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing American Schools Back to Reality.

I'm a slower reader than Su by a number of magnitudes, and I'm not going to read Murray's book anytime soon. Luckily, Su summarized it and pulled out the salient points for her readers. She likes the questions he brings about education (but definitely not his answers). She asks about educating children and specifically modern American educational institutions:

How do we recognize the different abilities of different children? How do we nurture and guide them to the best use of those abilities? How do we de-stigmatize the less academic gifts, so that spending 13 years in our school systems doesn't leave so many kids feeling like failures?

I've had the same questions about both public and private education precisely because separating our education efforts by social class wastes human talent and resources in the same way bottom trawl fishing wastes far more than it reaps. I found a bunch of Quakers who, if what they're saying (and what William Ravdin says about them) is true, are answering her questions in practice.

Wellsprings Friends School in Eugene, Oregon started in 1994 as a more traditional independent (private) high school with tuition and financial aid and fundraisers and a focus on preparing kids for college.

But a few years ago, Oregon law changed everything. Suddenly, kids who didn't fare well in Oregon public schools could be referred to the school of their choice, public or private. Within two years, Wellsprings became a school of almost entirely hard-to-teach public school students.

The same students, in the Wellsprings environment, are thriving.

No, they don't all go to college. In fact, most don't. Just like the rest of the public school students in Eugene, Oregon. Head of school Dennis Hoerner says that the school demographics closely match those of the public schools from which they draw.

"Maybe one or two graduates go to a four-year college, about half go to community college, and the others look for work or get into apprenticeship programs," said Hoerner

The school's goal?

To support that student in whatever they want to do, and to help them find that.

Wellsprings help students find and nurture their interests and gifts. Hoerner said teachers place kids into community college classes or vocational classes outside of Wellsprings, as well as connect them with people who are already doing the work the student wants to do.

"We open all of them to the prospect of a community college, which is a stepping stone," he said.

I'm not the only one impressed with Wellsprings. William Ravdin, a Friend who has worked in Friends education for most of his very long life, wrote a lovely article for Friends Bulletin (now called Western Friend) about his visit to Wellsprings. He says that Wellsprings shows us a new direction for Quaker education.

"It is educating children who need to be rebuilt, emotionally and educationally, from the foundation up. Children whose families and schools in many cases have given up on them. Children who have given up on themselves," Ravdin writes of Wellsprings.

Knowing that receiving public funding might limit the school's ability to talk about Quakerism, I asked Hoerner about religious education. He said they'd never considered themselves a sectarian school, even before the funding change. But they do something like worship.

"We have a weekly 'Silent Meeting', which parallels 'meeting for worship' at other Friends schools but is not presented as either "worship" or something particular to Quakers. Rather, while we do explain that link, we also refer to the role of silence/meditation in other traditions as well, both religious and non-religious."

I'm guessing that Ravdin would take issue with that because he found Quakerism in a Quaker school. His headmaster, after he expressed some misgivings about the faith in which he was being raised, gave him Thomas Kelly's A Testament of Devotion. After reading it, Ravdin became a convinced Friend. He was eleven years old.

I personally am easier with limiting religious education than others. I don't understand why, if we're educating everyone and not just those who "deserve" a fine education, we need to be producing Quakers. Our work should speak for itself and I think in time Wellsprings will see many fruits of the Spirit.

Finally, the tuition is $7,000 for students who aren't referred to the school. That's a lot of money, but 1/5th of what the most expensive Quaker prep school in the country costs. Just a reminder, they're educating and graduating kids who were unable to stay in public schools. For $7,000 each year. Amazing.

In case you can't already tell, I'm enamored. The school even has a blog where both students and faculty write and post pictures and video. If you do nothing else, check out pictures of the science class before they dissected squid. You can even follow them on twitter.

I think Liz and I will be making a donation to Wellsprings this year.

Urgent Question for My Readers

2010-01-26T16:21:00.000-06:00

Is there anyone who reads my blog who is attending the Friends Council on Education diversity summit on education and class at Pendle Hill February 8-9? I can't go because I'm not affiliated with a Friends school, but would love to talk with people who are going, both before and after, for an article I'm writing for Friends Journal.

If so, please contact me directly at njeanneburns at gmail and you know the rest dot com.

This Person Speaks My Mind

2009-12-22T13:08:00.000-06:00

Today I listened to Ray Suarez talking about immigration and social class and education. He speaks my mind.

You can hear the hour-long program here.

Generosity Rant

2009-12-13T21:24:00.000-06:00

Warning: This rant about generosity isn't very generous.

A funk has been building in me.

On Facebook an "event" has been going around Quaker circles called "Hug a Quaker Day" on December 15th. I've felt cranky about this and am feeling bad and un-generous about being cranky.

But here's the deal.

Quakers already give and get more than enough hugs. What about people who actually don't have enough hugs?

I think this comes from my desire to be generous to people who don't have what they need to live. Including hugs. And also including money and goods.

I've been reading lately about how patterns of giving in the US actually perpetuate and reinforce existing social class structures. Social scientists have found that most modern giving benefits the elite and few others, and the little that goes to the most in need are safe because they don't challenge the status quo. Finally, the majority of philanthropy that gives to the most in need also gives opportunities for people, including those they serve, to socialize with the elite. But it actually reinforces the status of the elite. (Disentangling Class from Philanthropy: The Double-edged Sword of Alternate Giving, from Critical Sociology 33, 2007, in case you want to read the whole article about alternative foundations).

It got me thinking about mine and Liz's giving, but also my meeting's giving, which looks like this:

National

American Friends Service Committee $2,360
Friends Committee on National Legislation $2,360
Friends General Conference $2,360
Friends World Committee on Consultation $375
Right Sharing of World Resources $325
Friends Journal $1,135

Local

Friends for a Non-Violent World $5,700
Friends School of Minnesota $4,225
Northern Yearly Meeting $5,615

Local non-Quaker

Loaves & Fishes $1,200
St. Paul Council of Churches $200 (required dues)

Undesignated

$250 for special requests

Here's how our giving breaks down as I do the math.

Organizations that serve mostly already-privileged Quakers and others who are also privileged (FGC, FWCC, Friends Journal, FSMN, NYM, Council of Churches): $13,910
Organizations that serve Quakers in our quest to serve others (AFSC, FCNL, FNVW) $10,420
Organizations that try to serve poor and working class people (Loaves and Fishes): $1,200
Organizations that try to change the system that keeps poor people poor (RSWR): $325

Our meeting also gives $3,400 to individuals, but $2,100 of that is for Quaker travel and registration expenses, mostly to events sponsored by organizations that serve Quakers like FGC and NYM.

You might argue that Quakers do a lot of volunteering and making of social change, so giving to ourselves is somewhat justified. But I don't understand how justified it is if this kind of giving only reinforces the social class structure. I can't find evidence that Quakers are vigorously working to break down class barriers.

In the spirit of full disclosure, our personal giving breaks down like this:

18% goes toward organizations that serve us or other privileged people (like public radio and Friends General Conference).
37% goes toward helping middle class people help those in need (like Women's Foundation of Minnesota and Philanthrofund)
17% goes toward helping poor and working class people but without changing the systems that keep them oppressed (like the food shelf and Metropolitan State University)
27% goes toward changing the systems that keep poor and working class people oppressed (like Right Sharing of World Resources and the Women's Prison Book Project).

What does your personal and Quaker meeting philanthropy look like in these categories? What are you doing in your personal philanthropy to change the system that keeps people oppressed?

Do What You've Been Told Kids

2009-11-21T16:20:00.004-06:00

Nat over at maphead has been blogging about more than maps of late. He's been pondering why our meeting has been having such a hard time making a statement about wearing scented hygiene products or perfume in our building. He posits that it's because our faith community has a hard time giving itself over to the will of God. "It is a deep and systemic distrust of mediation of any kind," he says.

I have another theory related to his.

My experience of middle class people is that they don't like being told what to do. At least when I try to lead something, I'm called bossy. On the other hand, among working class people I can easily slip into and out of leadership and people follow easily and with little or no resistance.

Conversely, a middle class upbringing trains people to manage others and be a leader. I've said so before on this blog.

I think the "deep and systemic distrust of mediation" comes not from history but from social class training.

My experience of being taught to be managed is typical of working class people even today. New York Quaker Patrick Finn wrote a book called "Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working Class Children in their Own Self Interest". His book's website has an exercise that illustrates how elite schools teach the same material a different way in working class and elite schools. It shows how working class kids are taught to think about knowledge and understanding differently from middle and owning class kids.

I'm not suggesting that the middle class way of learning is bad--I actually think everyone needs to have equal access to that kind of education.

I am saying that there might be something middle class Quakers need to learn from Quakers who are culturally working class about the joy of letting someone else (God) manage our corporate spiritual lives.

For once, I have a kind of advantage in the Quaker way of doing things. I find comfort in seeking and following the will of God because it was what I was taught to do in the working class schools I attended: do what you've been told, kids.

As God Made Us

2009-11-08T18:56:00.000-06:00

Below is an essay I wrote after being asked to write something about Quakers & social class for the New York Yearly Meeting's newsletter Spark. Their November issue is all about Quakers, class and money, and given your interest in that subject, is for sure worth a read. You can find it here. I may do a short study group based on these articles this fall in the Twin Cities.

On another note, I went to an anti-racism conference this past weekend and have a lot to chew on and write about. It'll come out slowly in the coming weeks. It'll be slow because I've submitted a query to Friends Journal for their 2010 special issue on Friends and Education. Bob Dockhorn told me that they would be interested in both of my suggestions for articles, and that I should submit them. Now it's time to write them. One will be easy for me to write and the other will take time and energy and focus that I don't generally have when I write a blog post. This means I may blog even less frequently than I already do. But we'll see. Maybe it'll bring up stuff to pass by you all very wise people.

In the meantime, here's my article. Don't skip the others, please.

As God Made Us

In other communities of which we are a part, we choose to be in relationship with the members of the community, or choose to be a part of the community itself, in order to share in the community’s identity. In the covenant community, we choose to be in relationship with God, and God gives us to one another and to the community.—From Essays on the Quaker Vision of Gospel Order by Lloyd Lee Wilson

I’ve had Quakers say to me that you need to be educated to be a Quaker. Someone else said that because working-class people can’t handle process, they of course wouldn’t fit in at meeting. Another chalked up our cultural uniformity to Quakerism’s appealing to only a very narrow demographic. If any of these were true, Quakerism wouldn’t be for me, because I grew up working class, the daughter of a woman who grew up in abject poverty. I was doing shift work, overnight at the time, when I found Quakerism. I had only a high school diploma. I’m a member of a meeting, but sometimes I wonder if I belong among Friends.

On my way to Friends General Conference’s summer gathering this past summer, I stopped in eastern Kentucky where my mother grew up and where a bunch of my extended family still live. I got to spend a brief bit of time with Debbie, one of my cousins, for the first time in about three decades. She’s a few months older than I, almost 43 at this writing, and she has four kids and a few young grandchildren.

As we stood on her mother’s modest cement porch, the sun sank behind the hills and hollers and we talked. Her nieces and nephews joined and left the conversation, and one reminded Debbie about having used a paddle to punish her. Debbie turned to me and said she believes in corporal punishment. She and her niece went back and forth about whether Debbie’s paddle had holes in it, and I slapped at mosquitoes on my legs. I didn’t see someone to be admonished, but instead felt God’s love and compassion for her. I realized then I could never take her to Quaker meeting, not because of her belief in corporal punishment but because I wouldn’t want to inflict Quakers on her, this person who is as God made her, who deserves love and compassion first and foremost.

At the Gathering in Virginia, I sat with a Friend and told this story. When I said that I felt God’s love for her, this Friend took a breath, stiffened his jaw, and suggested I take some time to tell Debbie why corporal punishment isn’t in God’s plan.

I’ve seen that stiffened jaw or heard that sharp intake of breath from other Quakers, but directed toward me, usually when I’ve been loud, direct, honest, or crude. I’ve seen the stern look when I brought processed food to potluck, when I came to meeting dressed up, when I said I watched television. I’ve internalized some of those judgments and tried to look, act, and dress like the lefty liberal middle- and owning-class people that typify liberal Quakers. And I mostly pass, except when I don’t and am again reminded that I haven’t fully understood how to act middle class. I know there isn’t anyone standing at the door of our meetings with a test to make sure everyone passes, there isn’t a conscious effort to keep out people who don’t match our idea of Quaker. But I feel like I am being tested all the time to make sure I fit in.

For a while I’ve believed my lack of understanding of middle- and-owning class ways to be evidence of my lack of intelligence. But Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book Outliers describes the supposedly smartest man in the United States, Chris Langan, who scores so high on IQ tests it’s not measurable. He got through high school by showing up only for the tests, and acing them. But he has done manual labor most of his life because he grew up poor and never learned how to navigate the cultural barriers between him and a college education. I’m not as smart as Langan, and I think I’ve figured out a few social-class rules. Therefore, it’s not my brain getting between me and Quakerism. It’s culture.

So this brings up the question Do I have to be middle or owning class to be Quaker?

I still remember the first time I walked into Meeting. It was the last time my community met at their location before beginning the process of expanding the building. We met outside on listing folding chairs. The group was small because many were off to Northern Yearly Meeting, which met on Labor Day weekend at the time. Puffy white clouds shaded us as I sat on the edge of the circle under the crisp blue sky. I closed my eyes and could immediately feel God’s presence. I fended off sleep after a long night’s work, but felt like I’d come home. I’d been seeking a faith community since I was twelve, visiting churches both with and without my parents, never quite communing with God the way everyone around me seemed to be doing. In the quiet at Quaker meeting, I heard God say Stay. And I did.

This form of worship, of silent waiting, of letting go of my best ideas of how the world should be, of releasing my anxieties and grief and disappointments, of opening myself to what God wants for my life, what God wants for my meeting, of finding it within me to be obedient to God’s will, is what keeps me coming. I can’t find this anywhere else. So shouldn’t the test, if there were one, be about how one communes with God, with or without ritual?

My cousin Debbie and I are getting to know each other after all this time. I plan to visit to do some research about a novel I’m working on. Maybe I’ll ask her to come to meeting when I’m there. Maybe I’ll witness to her the impact my mother’s belt had on me beyond the welts. Or maybe we’ll make chicken and dumplings like our mamaw did, with lard and flour and a boiled bird, and talk about each of our connections to God. That’s where I’ll find equality in the gospel order, not in our shared values or identity.

Gratitude

2009-10-26T00:39:00.001-05:00

I just finished a training for trainers (through Training for Change, an organization started by George Lakey) and learned a lot about leading workshops, especially where my growing edge is and how to grow my skill.

The 20-person group was somewhat diverse and filled with very passionate people working for social change. The workshop is actually called "Training for Social Action Trainers." The majority of the group could have walked into a Quaker meeting, and most Friends would not have thought they were out of place.

This fine group of people were respectful about gender and race, giving lots of room to people of color, and acknowledging the fact that we were overwhelmingly female. It was the first time I was in a workshop where men did not act like they owned the room, and where people of color got lots of floor time. But there was no mention of social class except when I brought it up (which wasn't often).

We had a diversity evening, but all that seemed to be discussed openly was race, as if diversity was code for race. We did one exercise about being mainstream and outside the mainstream, and then another where small groups did skits to demonstrate aspects of the mainstream to the rest of the workshop participants, who had to figure out what we were trying to portray about the mainstream. I strongly encouraged my group to do a skit specifically around social class, and we did so. Others tried to do things around gender and race. The list we made as we talked about what was trying to be portrayed was all about social class.

No one, including me, named it as such, though.

I kept myself from saying as much as I would have liked around social class because I knew we were there this weekend to learn workshop leader skills, not hash out issues of oppression. Even my workshop "buddy" Demetria (assigned the beginning of the weekend) noticed that I was censoring myself a lot.

It was hard being in a room of very bright, passionate, well-intentioned people who mostly have no conscious clue about social class. It made me feel profoundly grateful for all of you, people who read my blog, people who want to be an ally, the growing group of people from my meeting who support me.

When I started on this social class journey, I thought I would find a river of people moving toward economic and class justice. I thought I'd find people farther along the journey willing to be a light, and people who are in the same place I am, and people behind me, pushing me forward.

I thought I'd find a community similar to the one when I realized the depth to which the patriarchy had impacted my life. I thought I'd find a built-in, ready-made group of people to socialize with and commiserate with like I'd found when I came out of the closet as lesbian.

But it's lonely out here.

I can't hang out with working class people because I'm too brainy. I listen to NPR and watch PBS. I like films in foreign languages with subtitles. I don't end sentences with prepositions. I can't hang out with people who grew up poor or working class but are now middle class because I have some traits they've learned to disdain, and because I'm challenging the system that bestowed privilege onto them. And when I'm in a room full of aware and passionate activists who see race clearly but don't see social class, I see how truly solitary I am.

I realized this weekend that you're my river, pushing me forward. You're my community of support. You're helping me carry this light to the world.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Quakers & The New Yorker EDITED!

2009-10-10T23:19:00.004-05:00

There have been two instances recently when Quakers were mentioned in The New Yorker.

First there was an article about Carrie Fisher in The Talk of the Town where it mentioned she dated one of the producers of Star Wars, a Quaker named Gary Kurtz. I've wondered for a long time about whether my attraction to Quakerism is connected to my love of Star Wars and its "theology", so I did a little research. Turns out Kurtz had some influence on the series. In an interview here, the author implies as such:

"Mark had said to me that there was a lot of agonizing going on between Gary Kurtz and Lucas over the amount of violence that was in the film. And I think, as I remember correctly, what Hamill was saying was that there was a lot of Quaker influence. Now I don't know whether Lucas was a Quaker or whether it was Gary Kurtz , but there was a spiritual basis for this film and they were concerned that the non-violence message that they were trying to get across was going to be compromised by a lot of the shoot 'em ups that were going on. The reason why I mention this was I think these guys were really very unusual in what they were trying to do with their motion picture making. I think they really had a vision of the world which was pure. They wanted to present some kind of legend looking ahead into the future. It really was some reflection of good vs. evil, not seeing it very simply as good being interior and evil being exterior. We all as human beings are wrestling with it inside ourselves. Like the relationship between Skywalker and Vader. The thing that I really did feel was that there was, going back to what I said earlier, the way in which they handled people in that production, they looked after their people very, very well. To me that's the essence of great leadership and creative ability. I give them full credit. Definitely they were talking about a spiritual dimension and trying to come up with a non-violent message."

I don't think it was the non-violence message that came across to me, but the sense that there's something that connects us all, and if we only quiet our minds and hearts, we can hear it...

Yeah, I know. What does that have to do with social class?

It doesn't. But the next mention does.

In the September 28th issue, Briefly Noted mentions a biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Penn State professor Lori D. Ginzberg. The book apparently makes connections between Cady Stanton, and modern feminism's problems with social class and race.

An abolitionist more out of political convenience than conviction, she not only abandoned the movement for black male suffrage after the Civil War to focus on white women’s suffrage but increasingly made vitriolic attacks on immigrants, the working class, and African-Americans in her writing and speeches. The consequences of Stanton’s racism and élitism were “deep and hurtful,” Ginzberg says, and she attributes the continuing difficulty of incorporating race and class differences into gender politics, in large part, to Stanton’s mixed legacy.

Ginzberg writes about two issues that impact me personally, sexism and classism, and therefore I am most passionate about. I can't wait to read this one. I just hope it's not too heady for me. I found the last New Yorker Briefly Noted book about Quakers too academic and inaccessible

EDIT NOTE: This was a big mistake--Cady Stanton wasn't Quaker!!! Why didn't any of you tell me this? I'd assumed that she was. Mistakenly. Sorry for that.

Social Class Rule #2, and an Apology of Sorts

2009-09-20T23:48:00.001-05:00

I've said I'd talk about making social class rules explicit. Here's the second one.

Middle and owning class people make the rules, and when working class or poor people don't follow the rules, there are dire consequences

I'll give you a secular example first. Take the connection between teen pregnancy and poverty.

This statement is accepted as true by most people, rich and poor alike:

"Teen motherhood is a great way into poverty."

It's not a rule, but a statement of fact. Friends from high school and cousins who were themselves teen mothers have admitted this fact to me, and described how hard it is to be barely out of childhood and raising a child.

This statement is an example of a rule made by middle and owning class people:

"You must wait to have children until and unless you and the proposed other parent are truly, emotionally, socially, and financially ready to care for them."

It can take a lot of privilege to wait until you're deemed ready to have kids according to this rule, stated to me recently by a middle class Quaker. And the consequences of breaking the rule are dire, even though they don't have to be (if we had true economic justice). But this blog isn't about social policy, per se.

What does any of this have to do with Quakers?

We like our rules, and the consequences can lead people to leave meeting thinking Quakerism isn't right for them (at best) or make people feel bad about who they are or where they come from (at worst). As I see that on the page, it doesn't seem so dire. But it is to me.

I believe that God speaks to us in the best way we can hear God's message. For some that's through Catholicism, some that's through Wicca, some that's through the Quaker practice. If we're even unintentionally turning away a whole class of people because they're not like us, I believe we're acting directly against what God would have us do not just for our meetings ("diversity" and all) but for each lost soul searching for a spiritual home who might find one with us.

I admit, having grown up working class, I liked all the rules at first. Don't watch TV. Don't drink unfiltered water. Don't dress up for meeting. Now though, I see not boundaries but brick walls, impenetrable but through a narrow door that fits only a certain kind of person. It breaks my heart every time I get an email, which I do about once a month, from someone who says they left because they felt so much the class outsider. I struggle mightily with staying.

But I do because God said so and still says so every time I sit in the silence.

Stay.

***

The apology, of sorts:

I'm sorry I can't say things the way you can or want to hear it. But I don't know how. Really. And I can promise you it's a social class thing. I've tried over the last couple of years to learn how to say things so you can hear them, but to little if any avail. The only place where I seem to have the grace (most of the time) to be clear and understood is when I'm running a group. But I'm beginning to accept this about myself, and I'm stopping trying to have you hear me. You will or you won't. You'll get it or not. You'll be offended or not. It's okay. I'll still publish your comments, even when you disagree with me, if you're respectful and reasonable and not anonymous. Conflict is just fine as long as you're not calling me names or belittling me (or anyone else for that matter). I'll say what I'm led to say and hopefully learn from what you have to offer, even if it's to sharpen my own understanding.

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

2009-08-26T18:03:00.001-05:00

My friend Michael Bischoff recommended I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and I did.

I'm a very slow reader--it usually takes me weeks to get through a 250 page book. It takes me a whole week (reading an hour or sometimes two a day) to get through most of The New Yorker.

But I devoured Outliers in under five days.

Michael said that Gladwell was saying some things I've been saying on this here blog, so I gave it a chance. Michael was right.

In a chapter called "Marita's Bargain," he writes: We are so caught up in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world allowed only one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a society that provides opportunity for all.

One seemingly disparate chapter at a time, Gladwell debunks the myth of the self-made person, and exposes all of the ways the most successful people have had advantages of one sort or another, including himself (in the last chapter) and lays bare the ways the least successful people have had disadvantages. It's a hopeful letter to us all.

Read this well-written book. When you get a chance, chime in here with your thoughts.

What implications does this book have for Quaker education? What new Light can this add to our Meetings?

Quakers and Alcohol

2009-08-19T18:50:00.004-05:00

A F/friend recently posted on facebook that she'd seen another Quaker at a liquor store and thought it'd been a scandal. When I asked who it was, she said she didn't want to tell tales out of school.

Then I thought I didn't want to be a part of a faith community where it was a scandal to be seen in a liquor store. So I thought I'd ask you all what you think about it.

Is this issue one of social class?

At the entrance to the neighborhood were I grew up, there was a liquor store (we called it a "beer garden") where if you did well in school, you could get a free soda by showing them your report card. It stood right next to a deli and a soft serve ice cream spot. You could get free stuff at those other two places too with good grades.

Not My Job. Yours Either.

2009-08-12T00:04:00.008-05:00

College teaches people to manage others.

I know, you thought you learned about organic chemistry or Dante or building a homemade hookah when you went to college (if you did; if you didn't, you might have, like I did, thought it taught people to be smarter than you).

At a regional Quaker event, one Friend told of a story about her nephew who'd recently graduated from Macalester College, an elite (though not Ivy League) liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota. (My meeting, located within a block of this fine institution, gets a lot of visitors from this school, and more than a few stick around long enough to call themselves Friends). While this Friend's nephew was in college, he earned spending money by working for the buildings and grounds department. After he graduated, the head of that department passed away unexpectedly, and this fresh-faced young man, a newly printed and signed and notarized college degree in hand, was asked to apply for the dead man's job supervising sixty full-time-equivalent employees.

Unsure of himself, he protested to his mother. Without missing a beat his mother reassured him.

"If any of those sixty people were qualified for the job, they would have been asked to apply for the job. They asked you instead."

I'm not going to go into all the lies involved in that sentence (and won't post comments about that either, because this blog post isn't about that sentence...this story is meant to point out that indeed, college graduates are most qualified to manage others according to a social class rule I have yet to clearly articulate but this story demonstrates).

What does any of this have to do with Quakerism?

We have a disproportionate representation of college graduates at our Meetings (as compared to the general population where 25% of American adults have college degrees), and therefore, a disproportionate number of managers: people who believe they are the most qualified to manager others.

The first problem we run into is that there aren't enough people in Meeting who don't mind being managed, people who either by disposition or education prefer to take direction. This can look like distrust of committees.

I'm not writing about that.

The second problem we run into is that this model of the managed and the managers is that it is supposed to run counter to our testimony of equality.

I'm not writing about that either.

I am, on the other hand, writing about God.

Tonight, I had an IM conversation with a F/friend about her First Day School class (at an anonymous Meeting). Someone I'll call B (not her real initial). B approached my friend and said she had a leading to work with her FDS group. My friend felt uncomfortable for a number of reasons, mostly personal, but brought up issues about flexibility, appropriateness, and a good fit with the teaching team.

These are all good questions to ask if you're hiring a teacher or teacher's aid. I bet many of you ask these same questions when talking about First Day School issues.

But I know B to be well-led, and very good at discerning her leadings. I'm sometimes uncomfortable around B too, but if she came to me saying she felt led to do something with me, I would take it at face value.

Even if I didn't know anything about B, though, she said the word "leading," and that says to me that it's not my job to consider questions of appropriateness or flexibility or compatibility just yet. It's first time for me to listen, to her and to God. Maybe even it's time for me to gather with a few Friends for some discernment so that my heart may also be open to this Friend's leading, or at least my part in it. (Yes, there are times when those -ability questions should come first, especially when working with children, but I would argue that those instances are rarer than we think).

I think that because we are, in the aggregate, so very well educated, we default to relying on well-made, sound arguments and reasoning. We want to be seen as good managers, so we consider the well-being of everyone around us. And we forget about obedience to God.

Perhaps because of my working class upbringing, I find great comfort in hearing from the ultimate Manager about my life's work (when I can let go of the message I heard when I was in college recently). I can really say, "It's not my job to figure out what the big picture is." Just like my elementary and middle school and high school teachers told me.

Despite what your mother might have told you, you're not qualified to manage God's will for you or for your Meeting, either.

Quakers & Education: The Few, The Proud, The Quakers

2009-07-12T21:30:00.001-05:00

Have you heard enough about Quaker education from me yet? If so, I promise, this is new light. And when I say "light" I don't mean the domesticated lovely light that most Quakers talk about where everything is happy and good and peaceful. I'm talking about the light that might compel us to change, might show us the errors of our ways, light that might sting a little or a lot.

I've written about education before here and here and here. Then, I just had a general sense that the way Quakers do private school education is wrong. Now I see the truth so clearly it hurts, and it's bursting to get out.

We are sinners. Not in the fire & brimstone way, or the hell in a hand basket way, but in the Julian of Norwich way, where our sin is not a condemnation or reason for shame, but an opportunity for redemption.

Quaker K-12 education supports and reinforces racism and classism in the U.S.

Please keep in mind that I'm not talking about individual teachers or schools or students, but structures and systems. As I said in this post, individuals can do lots of things breaking the rules of society, but little of that, if any, actually changes the rules.

Our class society depends on a few assumptions about the world, and a few rules that we need to follow in order to support those assumptions.

1. There's a natural hierarchy to our class structure, and only the most deserving are on top (or near the top) of that structure.
2. There must always be a class of poor people in order to keep wages low for the working class.
3. The working class must do the majority of the physical labor, and their wages must be low.
4. The middle class must manage and educate the working class and poor, and keep them in their place.
5. The owning class gets to set the rules and/or live outside the rules.
6. Only the hardest working and naturally brightest of the poor and working classes deserve to move up in the class structure.
7. Dark-skinned people are at the bottom of the ladder because they are the least hard working and the least naturally bright people in the U.S.

Quaker K-12 schools in particular are supposed to help people climb those ladders, are supposed to break those myths down because of our testimony of equality. And they do, for some people.

Like Andre Robert Lee, an African American man who grew up in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia. He got a "golden ticket" in the form of a scholarship to Germantown Friends School. His film, The Prep School Negro, explores issues of race and class in his life and in the lives of other African Americans today in Quaker prep schools. He talks about his painful cultural separation from his family when attended GFS. He also talks about how hard it was for him to be at in the same class with the son of the man who owned the factory that employed his mother. The tuition was more than his classmate's father paid Andre's mother to work in the factory. Andre lied to his classmates about his mother's work. "Peace worker," he'd say when she was paid by the piece of clothing she produced. In the film, I saw his pain but I also saw his sister's pain of being left behind. Why wasn't Robin given a golden ticket too?

We workshopped (a movie term to view and give feedback for) the film at the Gathering this year at the film's first public workshop. The next day, George Lakey made some connections in the social class workshop between the movie and the social class structure in the U.S. that made it clear to me that some of the arguments people have made for private Quaker education, and Quaker education itself, support racism and classism.

When I've tried to have conversations with people before (and I also tried to do so at Gathering), they've given me several reasons why Quaker K-12 education should stay the same (but perhaps be more diverse).

[Aside: I'll address other arguments for Quaker K-12 education to stay the same in subsequent posts, and I won't publish on this post comments that address other arguments.]

One primary argument is that Quaker schools give out a lot of scholarship money. I've always countered this argument with the fact that tuitions in the tens of thousands gives lots of middle class families access to scholarships, and not just poor people. But my argument was missing the main reason for social class and racial oppression: the concept that only certain people are worthy of this kind of elite education. Only the best and brightest get plucked from the ghetto to attend our elite schools. Quaker schools require applications and essays, from which they choose only the best and brightest. The GFS website says that they give "no distinction made in the admissions process between applicants who apply for financial aid and those who do not." That seems to indicate a sense of equality.

But as one Friend pointed out at a listening session hosted by FGC's committee on racism, that equality isn't the same for everyone. She was in a group where each person was given the same amount of time to speak, but one Friend, who spoke very slowly because of a disability, pointed out that for her equality would mean the same number of words rather than the same amount of time.

By choosing Andre and not his sister Robin, GFS unwittingly supported the classist assumption that there's a group of people who "deserve" for one reason or another, an elite education, and a group who don't. Equality in education would not mean that we educate rich people in order to give 25% of our students some scholarship (or loans). It would mean that Andre Lee would have been educated alongside his sister.

It would look like the Seed Schools in Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD.

Some say that only the smartest and most motivated kids could survive such a rigorous education (another group also thinks that only the best belong with them: The U.S. Marines), but the Seed Schools, both public residential schools, disprove this racist and classist assumption. If they can send nearly every graduate to college (including schools like Princeton), then why can't we? Or, a better question, why aren't we? The Seed Academy schools don't pick and choose, they don't require an application or essay or financial aid disclosure--they use a lottery to choose from all the people who want to attend. Then they educate everyone, mostly poor African American 6-12th graders. And just in case you think that only the most motivated parents put their children into the Seed Academy lottery, Thomas Friedman proves you wrong when he talks of crack-addicted mothers begging the school to take her kids. Everyone wants better for their children, but only some have access to "better." If you yourself didn't go to college, how will you know how to coach your kid on writing an entrance essay?

The video on the Baltimore Seed School web page says of the school kids about to enter, “It’s their turn for them to become all that God meant them to be.” Isn't that what Quaker schools are hoping to do?

Remember that list above, the hierarchy of our class society? At the heart of the social class structure is this belief that the system works to bring the deserving to the top and keep those who don't deserve status at the bottom. We all know in our heart of hearts that this isn't true, don't we? We all know that our human resources are wasted when people of one class go to the top just because of their class, and people in another class stay at the bottom because of their class or their race.

Now, for the redemption part I promised.

At Gathering, I talked with Irene McHenry from Friends Council on Education and she says that Quaker schools do more for each dollar than most schools. If that's the case, we could be educating K-12 students differently. Maybe we could even improve on Seed.

But this requires a serious change.

What if Quaker schools educated anyone who wanted an education, not just a few, and not just those deemed by society as "worthy?"

I'd love it if every Quaker school administrator read my post and saw the light. That's not going to happen, so I'm going to ask you to help shed light where you can.

How is what I've said sitting with you? What speaks to you? What gives you new light? What new light do you have to offer?

If you're convinced and want to know how you can help, here are a few things I'd suggest:

1. When your K-12 Quaker school asks you for money, make a donation to the Seed Foundation. Let your school know why you're doing so.

2. Write a piece for your blog (or a guest piece for this blog) on your understanding about this issue of racism and classism in Quaker schools.

3. Talk with your friends about this issue.

4. Host a discussion group.

5. Ask your Meeting to consider the issues I've raised.

6. Print out this blog post for others to read. Forward it to your friends. Post it on your facebook page.

7. Start a Quaker charter school that educates everyone who needs an education.

Finally:

8. Hold me in the Light as I continue to write on this subject. There is more to be said.

The Rules of the Game

2009-07-07T09:00:00.001-05:00

In George Lakey's workshop on Quakers & Social Class we play a game that very roughly estimates the social class structure in the United States. There, the rules and goals are set out before the participants at the beginning. I've participated in this game once, led it twice, and observed it once, and I've noticed this one thing about it the game:

Lots of Quakers do things that break the rules, but no one (save me) wanted to change the rules.

Yes, my sample size is small. But I was surprised that starting a coop or creating a collective, or trying individually to play by different rules didn't change anything at all about the game or its rules.

When I played, at the point at which the power rested in the hands of a few, I blocked the door to keep them from going out to make the decisions on how the game ends. I didn't understand why their Quaker value of equality wasn't kicking in, didn't understand why they just accepted the rules as they'd been given to us.

At the time, I was immersed in the experience and couldn't be this articulate about it. I just had strong feelings of anger and hurt and confusion because I couldn't square what we say we believe in as a people of faith, and our obedience to a random set of rules.

I still can't square my experience of the game with our stated testimony of equality.

It's a poker chip trading game called Star Power with three simple rules.

1. The goal is to get as many points as possible.
2. You must be shaking hands until you've agreed on a trade.
3. All trades must be unequal.

At the end of three rounds, the sub-group with the most points gets to go outside the room to decide what happens next, how the game should end. When I played the game, I tried to convince people to change the rules, but few if any seemed to want the same.

My observations about how I've seen Quakers engage with this game matters to me because the game is an approximation of the social class structure in the U.S. If our instincts don't lead us to try to change the rules in this game, we won't be led to change the rules in our society that support and perpetuate an oppressive classist system.

I still want to change social class rules because as Quakers, if we believe in equality, we not only should break the rules in our own lives, we should be trying to change the rules. We like to think of ourselves as rule changers. Unfortunately, we're only upsetting the power structure sometimes. I can't honestly think of any rule changing behavior right now (though I can think of social class rule breaking folks).

I'm not changing the rules either. But I thought I could start here, in this little blog, by making social class rules explicit, especially among Friends. I'll start with this rule, which I am breaking among Friends:

Do not try to inhabit a role outside of your social class

I went to college in 2004, at 37 years old, at a four-year school that is primarily for working class people. There, both instructors and other students saw my leadership capacity; they and I nurtured my gifts. In the years I spent among Friends though, this capacity of me was never seen, acknowledged or nurtured. This is because people like me, who grew up working class, and people who grew up poor, are not supposed to act like managers, to be leaders.

The acts of writing this blog and giving workshops on social class is breaking this rule.

Being an expert, a teacher, is hard to do at times. I hear in my head, "Who do you think you are? What do you know? They're the ones with the fancy degrees. They're the ones whose parents read to them. They're the ones who were groomed to be standing up here, telling you some truth about the world. You're supposed to be sitting, learning from them."

Early in the week at Gathering, our suite-mate who also grew up working class described reaching for something more than she was expected to do feels like reaching through a heavy, wet blanket. This feels true to me.

Every time a person living in poverty (not situational poverty, or chosen poverty) strives for a union job, every time a working class person reaches for the middle class by going to college, we're breaking this rule.

So how are you breaking social class rules? How are you trying to change the rules of the game? What is your meeting doing to change the rules as well as break them? Does God want Quakers to support this classist system?

Ministry Not Given

2009-05-17T22:32:00.004-05:00

For the second week in a row, I've had a bit of ministry to share at MfW and I haven't given it. I had a nudge to post this morning's bit here.

I am not connected to you because I like you.
But I do.
I am not connected to you because I share your political views.
But I do.
I am not connected to you because I like your cooking.
But I do.

I am connected to you because you are tied
to the divine
to God
to Spirit
to the Unknown

Through this strong rope, I can love you
even when my human heart fails.

Because you disappoint me.
Like I do.
Because you get angry with me.
Like I do.
Because you sting when I hurt you.
Like I do.

When my human heart fails
your golden cord to God reminds me
to love you.

I love you.
I do.

No, Really, I AM a Bad Quaker

2009-03-12T15:22:00.002-05:00

I haven't gotten many comments about my last post about being a bad Quaker, but I did get this one email:

from Tmorphew@aol.com
date Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 2:38 PM
subject bad Quaker

You are right, you are a bad Quaker! Don't quite see how that is something to brag about. Troy

***

So I feel a need to point out to people that there's nothing on my list that's essential to Quakerism and its practice.

This is exactly the kind of response I used to think said something about me. But instead, I now know it's much more a reflection of the shallowness of much of modern Quakerism. We welcome anyone, but we don't welcome people who don't fit our unspoken cultural norms. If you're a witch, it's fine. But be sure to only smoke secretly. You can be an atheist, but don't, no matter what, be a republican.

The Quakerism I love is about coming together and stripping away all that is not God so we can better feel God's influence in our lives.

I wrote this for Laughing Waters Friends Worship Group some time ago, and it still reflects my feelings about our practice:

Waiting on God in the manner of Friends

2 Corinthians 3:17-18
17Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (NIV)

Friends worship by waiting on God in silence. We believe that when we unveil our faces and hearts, we will be better able to hear God’s will for us as individuals and collectively. We create a virtual desert by removing all around us and within us that interferes with our ability to hear God, be nourished by God, and do what God asks of us.

As such, we gather in a circle in silence, quieting our hearts and minds to ready ourselves to be transformed, to become more like God. Meeting places are spare if possible, and do not have a pulpit or stage, an altar or baptismal font.

By removing all that might distract us from God, we feel we can better hear God’s voice speaking to us individually and corporately and be therefore lifted up and strengthened.

But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not be faint. —Isaiah 40:31

***

Can someone please tell me what part of the above requires that I read dry, inaccessible seventeenth century writing? Or that I not love when strawberry, vodka, pepper, and balsamic vinegar combine to give me a new taste experience that reminds me that my limited experience is just that, limited? Or that I shouldn't love my redneck family unconditionally?

These unspoken social norms actually limit us as a religious society. Only when we come together, reveal our true selves in God's light can we grow. If we're all the same, then what's the point?

I really appreciated Friend Su Penn's comment on Facebook recently about her own badness. I would hope it, too, would reflect me and all of us:

I do not yet know how to bring these differences, which I believe should be explored, into the Light in a loving and plain-spoken way. But because I am actually an excellent Quaker, I am willing to make efforts, make mistakes, to await new revelation and Way opening, to continue to love my meeting and the Friends in it, to stay in my seat when I just want to walk out and never come back.

Thanks, Su, for reminding me to stay in my seat even when it hurts. And for reminding me that staying and revealing our "badness" is exactly what will make us all excellent Quakers.

Bad Quaker

2009-03-09T22:43:00.004-05:00

Recently, Brent Bill wrote a blog post about being a bad Quaker, then formed a group on Facebook. The FB group gained membership very quickly. Peggy Sanger Parsons posted on the group her top ten reasons why she's a bad Quaker. So I thought I'd do the same.

The Top Ten Reasons I'm a Bad Quaker

10. I swear. I mean the dirty word kind, not the hand on the Bible kind. And not the dagnabbit kind, but the holy fucking shit kind. I do so a LOT.
9. I love dressing up in sparkly dresses, high heels, makeup, hairspray, the whole deal. The only way I feel like I can do so and be accepted as "good" by Quakers is to dress up for Halloween. I keep a stash of makeup for that one day a year.
8. I secretly pretend to play the lottery. When it gets big, I pick some numbers and secretly check them. I've never "won" but I play this way because I don't know how I'd explain it away to my Quaker friends if I actually won.
7. I like rap and hip-hop music. Even songs that use the word bitch in it.
6. I really like drinking with my friends (small f...don't have any Friends who like to go out to get a drink from time-to-time). Sangria mostly, but my sister-in-law introduced me to my new favorite: Mike's Hard Lemonade. And I love fancy one-of-a-kind drinks like the one I had in Florida (again, following my sister-in-law's lead) with vodka, strawberry, pepper and balsamic vinegar. That was fucking good.
5. If I had enough money, I'd hire someone to cook, clean and do laundry for me. I'd also own a fur coat. I'd play the lottery, just for the hell of it.
4. I love my redneck family and jokes about rednecks make me sad and embarrassed.
3. I adore sparkly diamond jewelry. I have a ginormous diamond dinner ring that my grandmother found in a box of costume jewelry she bought at a charity auction. I'd wear it all the time if I didn't think Quakers would look askance at me.
2. I don't care about Quaker history. Not one bit. I haven't read George Fox's journal or John Woolman's journal. And don't ever intend to read these things (though I sometimes read about these things gladly, in 21st century English by 21st century authors and bloggers.)
1. I hate committee work and I love being a committee of one.

As I started this list, I thought I'd write to be funny. Now as I write this list, I feel sad because I realize that sometimes all you need to do to be a good Quaker is to be solidly middle class.

Caviar, Coupons and College (A Working Title)

2009-03-06T18:48:00.004-06:00

Class Matters has extended its deadline for submitting to their anthology, tentatively named Caviar, Coupons and College, to June 1st.

I, for one, am glad because the essay I started really fizzled out. Won't you consider writing something too? I'd be happy to edit your work if you want.

From their website:

CAVIAR, COUPONS AND COLLEGE:

STORIES ACROSS THE CLASS SPECTRUM (working title)

· When was the first time you realized what class you grew up in?

· What were some of the strengths you got from your class experience? What were some of the limitations?

· What stereotypes about your class were or weren't true for you? What class stereotypes did you most worry about embodying?

· Is there class tension between you and family members, friends, co-workers, or community?

· Tell us about an "a-ha" moment in the development of your class consciousness.

SHARE YOUR CLASS STORY

Class Action, a national non-profit working for economic justice and to "inspire action to end classim," is putting together an anthology of personal stories from across the class spectrum, and is calling for submissions in the hope of furthering our collective dialogue about class. We especially encourage voices from groups that have been marginalized.

Submissions should be from 1,000 to 2,500 words, and include a brief one paragraph biography about you, the author.

Please email submissions to Pete Redington at predington @ classism.org or send them to Class Action, P.O. Box 350, Hadley, MA 01035

Include your submission in the body of the email, and write "anthology submission" in the subject line.

Submissions will be accepted through June 1, 2009.

To download a Word flyer to distribute, click here.

Why

2009-02-20T14:02:00.004-06:00

Please watch all nine minutes of this video.

This is why white working class people need to care about racism. This is why white working class people have more in common with African Americans than with the few privileged white people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and John McCain.

And it's also why people who care about racism CANNOT ignore issues of social class.

With that, watch the whole hour-long lecture here, because every minute is worth your time if YOU care about race and class.

A Bit of Grace

2009-02-13T16:30:00.001-06:00

I was in Florida to do what I can to help my mother recover from surgery. She was an unwilling participant in this help at times. It was frustrating. I felt defeated over and over again. She's a bit socially phobic (I think because of social class issues) so she's isolated, too.

One of my goals, though, has been to connect her with a church community. She grew up in the Church of the Nazarene (I was baptized in that church, and went there as a young child), so I sought out a church of that order near her. The closest one to her has services only in Creole, so we had to choose between two that are forty minutes away. My mother chose the larger one.

I tried to take her last Sunday, but her social phobia got in the way (which is my and my brother's diagnosis of her problems, not hers).

Wednesday, I had her out and about at a doctor's appointment, so I took her to dinner, then to church.

The worship was looser than I remember it being as a child. The pastor led it in an informal workshop-like manner first playing a game asking people to see what they notice in a Dick Van Dyke television show introduction. Of course no one saw that the door had six panels, that there were three pieces of furniture in the whole thing, that the door knob was oval. Then he showed another video, asking us to pay attention to the details.

It was a movie about a high school football team. One young man is goofing off and the coach challenges him to something called a "death crawl," where another of his teammates lay on his back while he crawls down field on all-fours, without having his knees touch the ground. The coach usually asks the team to do ten yards, but the kid bets he could do twenty. The coach says he could do 50.

Then coach asks him three times to give him his best. First the kid grunts his assent. Second he looks more serious when saying he would. The third time he says, "I'll give it my best coach."

Then the coach wraps a bandanna around the kid's eyes to blindfold him.

As the kid makes his grunting way down the field, the coach is over him, telling him he can do it. His teammates taunt him, telling him he can't do it, but eventaully, they are impressed and start to follow him silently down field. At one point the kid says he must be at the fifty-yard line and the coach tells him to keep going.

Until he collapses.

The coach takes off the blindfold and tells the kid to look up.

"You're in the endzone."

He'd crawled 100 yards with 160 pounds on his back.

The pastor then asked the eighteen or so in the room what they saw. Several talked about themselves being an inspiration to "unbelievers." Some took heart at perseverance or remembered someone who stood by their side during a rough time.

I saw the blindfold.

I struggle mightily with the unknown. I wanted to know the outcome of my bone marrow transplant in 1994. I wanted to know whether I would do okay in school when I went back to get my degree. I want to know if I'm going to get published. I want to know what to do to help my mother get better. I want to know what to do next with my leading to do work around social class. And I get anxious.

But as I sat in that church's classroom, I realized that the kid in the movie saw the field and thought his best distance would be twenty yards. When he was blindfolded, he wasn't limited by his human sight, by his assumptions, by his own ideas about what he could do himself. I realized that the veil is a bit of God's grace.

And I now know the veil has given me the opportunity to live up to the Light I've been given.

Last spring, I felt veiled by God because I forgot (as in, had no awareness of whatsoever) that being in and among Friends can be very painful for me around class issues, that I feel powerless and alone. So I signed up for Gathering and proposed an interest group around social class.

It was painful to be among Friends at times. And it was grace-filled. If I hadn't been veiled, I might not have gone to Gathering, and wouldn't have proposed a workshop.

I came away from Gathering with a leading, and I don't know where it's going or what my work will look like beyond a couple of opportunities right ahead of me. Now I don't have to know more than that because God will get me where I need to be, to God's goal line and not my own.

I didn't succeed in getting my mom connected to a church community. This time. Maybe next time or the time after that or the time after that. Or never. Maybe the attempt is enough. I don't know what God has in mind, and now I don't need to know. My only job now is to live up to the Light I've been given.

Welcome

2009-02-05T10:11:00.002-06:00

In my last post, I asked us to imagine what it would be like to be with people unlike us.

Then LizOpp sent me this article and I cried.

I hope all my readers had a chance to read Lorcan's article.

I took my mother to church last night, and though these people were very different than those in a typical Quaker Meeting, I felt welcomed. I wasn't with them long enough to know if they'd welcome all of me (including my sexuality), but I had no question that I'd have a place there if I wanted it.

Trading Places

2009-01-30T21:42:00.000-06:00

My mother, one of seven children of an Appalachian coal miner, a woman who wore steel toe boots to work, a woman who lives off of not very much money because she can't work and doesn't have a retirement account outside of social security, sent me food shopping today. She listed some very specific things.

Zesta saltines
Hillshire Farms turkey (not honey)
Peter Pan peanut butter with no sugar
Bounty paper towels (one sheet, with print)
Charmin ultra strong mega rolls
Diet Sierra Mist (if it's on sale)
Diet Sunkist (if it's on sale)

I'm wandering around Publix knowing that she likes very specific brands, knowing not to look for something cheaper or "healthier", not even for something new to try.

Here's what I heard in my head as I sought through the unfamiliar aisles:

Why won't she try another brand that's cheaper? How about natural peanut butter or I wonder if the local Whole Foods has one of those machines to make your own peanut butter from peanuts like our new coop has? Why not unbleached paper towels? I wonder of that thick Charmin really breaks down in the sewer?

These are all things I learned from middle and owning class lefty liberals. And it struck me that it used to be the other way around:

Poor people ate brown bread and the money classes else ate white bread.

Now the liberal left well-to-do grow their own food (or pay someone to do so), make their own Christmas wrapping paper, use canvas bags when they shop, and eat brown bread.

The poor and working class eat white bread.

My mother, I think, likes name brand products because anything less makes her think she's poor once again. She grew up wearing homemade clothes, eating food she helped grow, doing any shopping that they got to do with reusable bags, buying an unbranded product because it was cheaper.

She's quite fond of telling people about her specific tastes and I can't help but wonder how someone like her would be received at a liberal Quaker Meeting (I say liberal because that's the group of Quakers I'm most familiar with). I know what we'd like to think about how we'd receive someone like her.

But imagine you're at my mother's church, where the women wear pantyhose and perfume and on Easter wear fancy hats to services. The men carry National Rifle Association cards in their wallets. They serve Jell-o and Spam and corn dogs at their church potlucks.

How do you think you'd* be received and welcomed? How would you like to be received and welcomed?**

*"You" means any lefty liberal.

**Many thanks to Red Cedar Friends who reminded me a couple of weeks ago that we all want to be welcomed as whole human beings, wherever we go.

Little Boxes and Coincidence

2009-01-10T16:44:00.004-06:00

Last night, a couple of friends and I went to an art opening and one of the pictures showed rows upon rows of big houses. This made me think of the song "Little Boxes" which I've heard a lot lately because I'm watching the TV show Weeds on DVD. So I said so.

One of my companions quoted Tom Lehrer and said Little Boxes was the "most sanctimonious song ever written."

I didn't say this, but what I wanted to say was, "It's almost the Quaker anthem."

The lyrics seem quaint until you hear that all the people who build houses out in the suburbs all come out "just the same." It is derisive and sanctimonious.

More than once I've been at a Quaker sing and someone suggests Little Boxes. Smiles spread through the room like The Wave at the Metrodome and we sing loudly and look around as if we were saying to each other, "What in the world are those people thinking, why would they choose to march in lock-step with each other in the suburbs." And unspoken, because we'd never say such a thing, "Idiots."

The irony is that a similar song could be written about us. It would talk about our non-profit jobs and our service work and our organic gardens and our MA or MS or PhD degrees.

And our sanctimony.

On another note, I gave a workshop this morning on Quakers and social class for fifteen willing adults. (And I think it went well. More on this later?) At the end, I handed out copies of an article I referenced before by Betsy Leondar-Wright.

This afternoon, my partner Liz was on Facebook and said, "Hey, Jeanne? That article you handed out, is it by someone named Betsy Leondar-Wright?"

Yeah, it is.

Turns out, Liz was really good friends with Betsy's sister growing up.

It's a teeny, tiny little world on Facebook!

Call for Writing for an Anthology

2008-12-06T16:58:00.004-06:00

For all of you interested in social class, Class Action is putting together an anthology on social class called Caviar, Coupons and College: Stories Across the Class Spectrum. They're looking for personal essays from 1,000 to 2,500 words, and their deadline is February 28, 2009. Please email your submission with a one-paragraph biography about you, the author to predington@classism.org.

No matter your current or past class status, won't you consider submitting? I am.

Guest Post: A Start at the Kingdom by Eric Evans

2008-11-15T19:56:00.003-06:00

Recently, Eric Evans and I had a conversation in Facebook about my post on military recruiters, and he offered up this Bible verse, which made me pay attention to what he had to say:

Ezekiel 13:8-12
8 " 'Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Because of your false words and lying visions, I am against you, declares the Sovereign LORD. 9 My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations. They will not belong to the council of my people or be listed in the records of the house of Israel, nor will they enter the land of Israel. Then you will know that I am the Sovereign LORD.10 " 'Because they lead my people astray, saying, "Peace," when there is no peace, and because, when a flimsy wall is built, they cover it with whitewash, 11 therefore tell those who cover it with whitewash that it is going to fall. Rain will come in torrents, and I will send hailstones hurtling down, and violent winds will burst forth. 12 When the wall collapses, will people not ask you, "Where is the whitewash you covered it with?"

So with Eric's permission, I edited some of his words and offer them up to you for something to think about.

A Start at the Kingdom

One of the hardest things about looking at class is my own anger and my own internalized classism. I was surprised by my anger during the Gathering interest group on Quakers and social class. Despite thinking I had dealt with and was done with my feelings, those old memories about being made fun of in school because of wearing cheap clothing, etc., popped right up. Sometimes anger and the internalized hurt makes it hard to listen and not to form judgments in my mind about what I perceive to be another’s life experience.

“That middle-class Quaker with a college education could never truly understand where I’m coming from...”

At the same time, I know I also carry plenty of class issues of my own. Living in a working class Italian neighborhood in Philadelphia, I confront this everyday.

“Why do they have to be so loud/ignorant/rude?”

I find myself making unconscious snap-judgments about people in my neighborhood all the time, based mainly on my own upbringing in an Evangelical family with rural, mid-Western expectations of what a “good” family and “good” values look like.

So there’s a piece of real humility in this for me – acknowledging how both the hurt and my own hidden classism can keep me from always seeing clearly or relating to others out of a place of love.

I imagine this is the same for others, as well as a fear of being judged. I’ve noticed among Quakers that we’ll often try to rationalize the ways in which we’ve “done without” or experienced hardship so that we can put ourselves on the “safe side” of classism, racism, etc. But acknowledging how very hard it is for each of us, poor or owning class, to look at our own stuff seems like a good start.

How does fear of being judged keep us from being able to understand the experiences of others?

I often hear Quakers talk about “choices” – we get to choose where & how we want to live, where we want to go to school, even what we will do without. If someone seems to be “failing” according to our societal standards, they usually “didn’t make good choices”.

How do we consider what it would be like to grow up without a sense of choices or alternatives? Or to live without a sense of options available to us? What vision of the Kingdom of Heaven do we offer that’s different from our own comfortable lives?

Miscellany

2008-09-22T22:39:00.002-05:00

Another post not specifically about Quakerism, and some things not solely about class, but things I thought might interest those who read this blog.

1. A blog post about white privilege as it's revealed in the presidential race. I found it to be amazing and well-written. And sometimes, he's also talking about class (and sometimes he's not seeing his own class biases). And how class and race are perceived in this country as opposing forces when they're not.

2. A follow-up blog post about white privilege by the same writer. Also well-written and insightful. I especially like this bit as it applies to the conversation on class among Friends:

Talking about white privilege [or any privilege] is about responsibility, not guilt [or shame for that matter].

3. Finally, a Quaker going to a Quaker college talking about class and race, but not to or about Quakers (intentionally, anyway). Check her out. She's smart and a good writer.

Military Recruiting

2008-09-04T10:06:00.008-05:00

Facebook is more fun than you can know.

Today, Zach Alexander posted on Facebook a CNN article that featured a Quaker who is working to keep military recruiters out of Wilkes County North Carolina high schools. This sentence struck me:

"The students need to know there are alternatives to the military," said Ferrell, a Quaker. "But they're not getting the other side."

And it got me wondering what "other side" all the middle and owning class Quakers are offering poor and working class high school students, like Josh McGrady, 20, (also from the CNN article):He was working at a Wal-Mart after spending parts of three years at a community college. His bills -- including student loans -- were piling up. His father worked at a window-and-door factory for 30 years, but McGrady says he didn't want that life. "You could be laid off at any moment."

Tired of struggling, he walked into the Wilkesboro Army recruiting office. His mother, an elementary school teacher, and father support his decision. But his sister, a bank supervisor, tried to talk him out of it. Three soldiers from the county have been killed in Iraq.

"She's worried I'm going to get blown up," McGrady said. He paused for a moment. "I'm a little nervous, too, but there's not much else here."
So I checked out Quaker House to see what they have to say about military recruiting.

Lies, they say. Corruption too. They even explain how we can help, by running around proclaiming the truth.

As Quakers, we rely a lot on revealing The Truth as a means for change. Woolman did it, why can't we?

Because now, like then, economics is getting in our way. And I think our class privilege might be preventing us from seeing it.

McGrady needs a job that pays enough so he can live, and his options are limited. He went to public school and grew up in a working class family.

Like me.

I didn't know college was an option until 10th grade. Even then, I didn't think my possibilities included most middle and upper class jobs like engineering or medicine.

The Army is telling McGrady that they'll pay for his college degree if he wants to go, take classes while he's in the army, comprehensive health care and generous time off, and generous compensation.

Does it matter that the Army is lying? That some of their recruiters are corrupt?

Sure. But what are we offering recruits other than the truth?

The Truth might be enough for middle and owning class kids, but it's not enough if you live on the edge of poverty, or you're one paycheck away from welfare or getting a good education means making it all the way through twelfth grade or getting an AA from your local community college where your mother works nights as a janitor so you get to go there for free.

And it's those folks whom the military recruiters are targeting.

What could we do, in addition to exposing the military for what it is?

Create a fund to give scholarships and job training to CO's and 18-year-olds who have to choose between poverty and military service. Help those same folks with their resumes and interview skills. Provide scholarship search assistance. Connect them with social services and help close loopholes to keep those on the borderline of poverty from falling farther. Make sure they have access to decent health care.

Finally, we have a number of fine institutions of higher learning that could provide scholarship for CO's and those young people who feel they have no other choice.

This is a lot to ask for. But I'm hoping it'll give you all something to chew on.

And I'm hoping that maybe some of you are already doing some of this work. Anyone?

Quaker Learnin'

2008-08-14T20:35:00.009-05:00

I've been busy lately: mentoring a twelve-year-old girl in writing, taking a writing class (intermediate fiction), resuscitating my writing group, reading on class and race issues. So I'm only now catching up on Quaker blogs. The first one I read? Will T's post on not only laying down our burdens but taking up those that God asks us to take up.

His post is speaking to my condition. And it got me thinking about how Friends talk about education.

He writes:Do we like to stay at the level of Quakerism 101? Are we reluctant to move on the higher level courses? Where is Quakerism 322 or 453? Where are the graduate courses? In our meetings do we even acknowledge the advanced curricula in the school of Christ?
We all, not just Will T, talk about Quaker education in terms of college level classes (Quakerism 101, Quakerism 201) and speak of curricula and syllabi (both words I heard for the first time in college). And culturally, doesn't it sound like fun to consider taking a college course-like class on Quakerism?

But how do Quaker courses named after and run like college courses come across to those who haven't gone to college (and won't go to college)? How does talking about Quaker education and conducting Quakerism classes in this way keep us from following the will of God, from taking up the yoke we've been given?

***

On another note, I came home from Gathering with a growing sense that I'm supposed to be doing more work around social class with Friends. I'm about to write a letter to Meeting to ask for a clearness committee to test the leading. I'd appreciate your thoughts and prayers as I move forward.

10,000!

2008-07-26T17:35:00.002-05:00

Woo hoo! Sometime today, before 4:30 Central Daylight Savings Time, my site meter registered 10,000 visitors!

While you're here, don a party hat to celebrate with me.

And one question I've had ever since I put a site meter on my blog in September 2007:

Who the heck lives in far northern Canada and is reading my blog? Can you give me a shout in the comments? Please?

Books for First Day School Classes Around Social Class

2008-07-24T15:18:00.002-05:00

Jane over at Education & Class has posted an item about kids' books that highlight the issue of social class. A few folks post recommendations, but she also links to another blogger that has a full list.

I haven't read these books *yet* but I hope to sometime. If you are responsible for a First Day School program (or are responsible for a library at a Friends school), you might want to consider reviewing the selections.

Do you all have any recommendations about kids' books that highlight social class and also Quaker values?

Quaker Education

2008-07-22T01:00:00.003-05:00

I didn't get a Quaker education but I'm surrounded by people who did. My friend Pam who went to a Quaker high school. My partner Liz who went to a Quaker college. My friend Jane who sent her daughters to a local Quaker school. An ex-girlfriend Kate who went to a Quaker high school. My friends Nils and Peg who went to a very elite Quaker school outside Philadelphia. I know lots and lots of young Friends who have chosen or are choosing Quaker colleges.

I love all these people. And I think they all deserve the best in life, including a very fine education. But I just don't know how to square the Quaker value of equality with our stalwart support of an elite education accessible to only a few.

I think middle and owning class folks sometimes think that poor and working class people don't value education because they just don't want to or sometimes we think it's the culture of poverty. But I read a Thomas Friedman New York Times article in May that described a crack-addicted, strung-out mother coming to a Seed school in Baltimore to beg for her child to be let into the lottery that selects a mere 80 students from over 300 who apply. That image alone shatters any myth you might have about desire.

So if there are far more families who want a good education for their kids than there are spots at good schools, why aren't Friends opening their schools up to these kids? There's a Friends school in Baltimore, in fact, that could very well stop educating those who already have access to an elite education and accept the other 220 kids who want to go to Baltimore's Seed school.

Couldn't they?

I know, I know, gosh, how in the world will your child learn Quaker values if you can't send them to a Quaker school? And how in the world will would we pay for such an elite education if all that elite money went to other schools?

Last fall, George School in Newtown, PA (where my dear friends Nils and Peg went, and met) received a gift (the thirteenth largest of 2007 to a private school according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy) of $128.5 million from alumna Barbara Dodd Anderson. When the news first came out, I mentioned it in a blog post and got an anonymous comment from someone who said she worked at George School (I don't publish anonymous comments). She was defensive and insisted that the school gave out a lot of scholarship money and would eventually increase that amount with Anderson's gift.

Indeed, they give some financial aid to 45% of their student body. At first blush this sounds impressive. But please remember that many lefty folks choose work in helping professions, which lowers their income far below their earning potential. Some even choose to live below the poverty line for reasons of conscience. And George School gives out scholarships to families that make up to $200,000/year.

Those needy students will be helped tremendously by the first donation from Anderson that is going to help build a LEED-certified library, to be named for her granddaughter.

I don't mean to pick on George School alone--every Quaker school, K-12 or college, acts mostly like every other private school in the country in every way about who they educate.

So why should Quaker schools be any different?

Because we believe that there is that of God in everyone, that we are all equal in God's eyes. Because we used to be so certain of this truth, we were willing to be persecuted, tortured and executed for preaching it. Because if Jesus were alive today, he wouldn't be hanging with most of the folks you'd find in most Quaker schools in North America. I think he'd be turning over a lot of tables.

And if you think that a quality education for poor or working class people can't be done, just take a gander over at Berea College in Kentucky, the first southern college founded as an interracial school, with the belief that "God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth."

They also provide a four-year full-tuition scholarship to every admitted student.

We can do better, can't we?

Comfort

2008-07-16T13:44:00.003-05:00

Nobody gets up on a soapbox and shouts about the comfort of his sofa and chairs. He just invites other people to sit in them.--Adam Gopnik, from "The Back of the World: The troubling genius of G.K. Chesterton" in The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, 2008

How are we comforted by having most of the people in our Meetings look, act, talk, eat and have professions like we do? What of our comforts keep others away? Is God calling us to be comfortable?

I love comfort. Big cushy chairs. Salty mashed potatoes. Public radio.

The other night, we got together from other folks on our block to plan our annual National Night Out festivities at an ice cream social. Our neighborhood is historically working class but some of young professional families have moved here. Some people are living in the homes their grandparents built because they inherited them and don't have mortgages outside of equity loans.

Among the many things we do, we always have door prizes, free stuff from local businesses. And there are enough things for everyone. But we also have to ask local businesses for stuff. One person said she didn't know anyone and was afraid to ask for donations. I started to tell a story about how I recently coached someone who said the same thing and he ended up having several options when we were done including having a particular public radio personality do the outgoing message on your answering machine and lunch and movie with a local well-respected movie reviewer.

As I told the story, I realized that this crowd wouldn't be nearly as excited about those donations as I was (and as my consultee was for his event). And I was uncomfortable.

These folks wanted free beer and smokes.

I can hear your sudden intake of breath, and see you squirming in your seats. No, you don't drink. Or smoke for that matter.

Nor do I. Though when I'm around my non-Quaker friends, I do drink. Not to get drunk. Usually.

So how would I feel if I were at an event with a couple of people who looked their noses down on me for drinking alcohol, or for getting tipsy, I asked myself.

Would I want to hang out with them? Go to their houses of worship? Consider taking up their beliefs?

The people on the block have looked to us to take up leadership of the NNO planning because we've showed initiative on the block. I started a pick-up recycling program on my block for plastics that the city doesn't currently recycle (but that I take to a place that does recycle them). Liz prompted our neighbor to put together Tuesday's planning meeting.

If we do become block leaders, I think we have a real opportunity, but I'm going to be uncomfortable, like I was Tuesday night. We could live into the belief we say we hold about believing there is that of God in everyone. We could live our testimony of equality. Even folks who smoke and drink and vote Republican and love Rush Limbaugh.

No, that's not shouting from a soap box, but maybe it's better outreach than we've ever done before.

Stickiness

2008-07-07T09:48:00.005-05:00

One query posed by a Gathering interest group member that resonated with me and still sticks to me:

When we label something as Quakerly or unQuakerly, are we talking about something that is essential to our faith or are we confusing Quakerly with cultural appropriateness? How do we tell the difference? How do we see and acknowledge those things which are basic to Quakerism and let cultural trappings melt away?

Quakers & Social Class Interest Group at Gathering

2008-07-05T12:49:00.005-05:00

I'm having a hard time finding the words to talk about my experience leading the Quakers and Social Class interest group at Gathering this year. In part, I don't have the words because it felt like when I give ministry during worship--later descriptions of ministry never have the power they had during meeting. So as I try to describe my experience, it doesn't feel as weighty as Wednesday night.

I felt led and covered in grace. I had a nudge to go to the space early and that gave me access to an otherwise locked building. I didn't want anyone to come into the room after we started and no one did. Until I got a nudge to stand up and go into the hall during the small-group discussions, that is. I could turn the late comer away and give her the handouts I brought. I didn't know what queries I would offer up for worship sharing but got a nudge during worship to ask folks what questions they'd have for themselves or that they'd bring back to their Meetings after the step-forward exercise we did.

Here's what we did:

I made some introductory remarks about me, why I was offering the interest group, social class in general (what it is, and what it's not) and what we'd be doing. We did a modified version of the step-forward exercise I posted on my blog in October. We split up in small groups to discuss our reactions to the exercise and came back together for worship sharing.

See? As I write this, it sounds so boring. But I promise you it wasn't. People reported to me that it gave folks a lot to think about and a lot to consider. Several friends told me they heard people they don't know raving about the experience.

I know this sounds like tooting my own horn, but I am so pleased because I felt well-used (in that same way I feel well-used when I am faithful giving ministry). And because I've never done anything like this before. It's easy for me to get hooked and get my buttons pushed during group processes but standing before the interest group felt easier than any group I've experienced. I felt such deep care and love for each person in the room the whole two hours.

The last time I felt that kind of grace for that amount of time or with that many people was when I was in the hospital in 1994 for my bone marrow transplant.

People asked what I'd be doing next and if I'd turn it into a workshop or if I was coming back to the Gathering.

I can honestly say that I don't know. I'll ask God what's next.

In the meantime, I'll continue to blog here and I will go to George Lakey's workshop on Quakers and Social Class. I'll also, hopefully, get to an FGC small conference on diversity in March announced at the summer Gathering.

Some Gleanings from Yearly Meeting

2008-06-12T14:00:00.004-05:00

I went to Northern Yearly Meeting this year mostly to see a dear friend I haven't seen in far too long. When I got there, I found out that I could sign-up then to do an interest group. So I did.

I'm doing an interest group around Quakers and Social Class at this year's FGC summer Gathering, but I've never done such a thing. So I appreciated the opportunity to try it out at NYM.

I based the exercise we did on the meme I posted in November inspired by exercises developed by Will Barratt at Indiana State University. I turned the blog post back into a step-forward exercise as it was intended by Will and changed it a bit based on feedback and comments from the blogosphere (literally thousands of people blogged about it) as well as the demographic I thought would be at the interest group.

There were eight of us, four of whom had taken George Lakey's workshop on Quakers and Social Class before, and my partner, who'd heard a lot about the workshop. One of the remaining three had done a lot of thinking about class, and another had tried to get into George's workshop after having gone to his interest group at Gathering in 2005. The final person was there because he'd been in a workshop right before on spending money and thought it would be an interesting follow-up to be in the social class interest group.

The participants and I thought it went well, though I faltered a bit. I interpreted the wandering gazes at the beginning as boredom but I could have been wrong. And I planned how to start and run the interest group but forgot to plan how to end it!

I won't quote the brilliant interest group attenders here because I couldn't possibly do them justice, so I'll just tell you what I came to understand about myself and Quakers from my experience of the interest group.

1. Some people have questioned whether midwest Friends are quite as affluent and privileged and class-homogeneous as Philadelphia Friends. If the interest group is any indication, we are similar to east coast Friends. Most were within three or four steps from each other and and most took a majority of the steps.

2. When Friends reflected on their experience, they immediately talked about those less advantaged than "us," meaning Friends. I've said this before in one way or another: Friends are very good at helping other people but not so good at befriending those with less status, let alone inviting those people into our Meetings. And now I have direct experience to go with my opinion!

3. Someone pointed out that all groups, churches especially, need to be homogeneous around one thing or another: culture or faith. And since midwest Friends accept a wide range of beliefs, from nontheism to wicca to strict christianity, then midwest Friends need to be culturally homogeneous to stay together. This bothers me because while I have financial privilege and educational privilege, I haven't yet been able to have much social privilege. I haven't adjusted well to middle class culture and so I am often in pain when I'm among Friends.

4. Another Friend lamented the fact that many young Friends go to our Yearly Meeting because it's often the one place they don't "feel so weird." She wants young Friends to be excited about our Faith, and not our style of dress or political beliefs. I do too because I want to worship the way Friends worship but don't fit in very well culturally. And I want Friends to be very open to lots of other social classes, not just in ideal but in practice. I think that until we deal with social class, we won't be able to address racism within our ranks as fully as we need to.

5. Someone wondered aloud if the Religious Society of Friends should be laid down so we can start over. I was put-off by this at first because, I think, I couldn't imagine wanting to do that or Friends being open to such a thing. But, in retrospect, this might be the only way to overcome our unspoken insistence on cultural affinity. Unless you all have some suggestions?

At NYM, I also experienced being talked-at a lot. I would ask a Friend how they were doing and they would tell me their stories, then walk away, without asking me how I was doing. I wondered if this was a social class indicator and talked with another f/Friend about it a couple weeks later. During that conversation, another Friend walked up to us and demonstrated that behavior for us. She was wearing an Obama t-shirt and I asked if she was at the Xcel Center the previous Tuesday. She said yes and then started to tell me all about it, assuming I wasn't there. I listened. When she was finished, she walked away. My f/Friend thought about it and posed the question to herself, wondering if it's about social class or something else.

Talking at people and then walking away may be something other than social class. But I never experienced that behavior at my primarily working-class college. There, conversations were all give and take, talk and listen, seek compassion and give compassion.

***

On another note, I've been pretty silent of late. Obama's speech on race has really affected me in the way that deep Ministry can affect me--I want to act loving in the way he described when he said:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

I've failed miserably at this in the past, and want to do better. I hope you all can forgive me for not being as loving as I could have been. Thank you for being as patient with me and kind to me as you can while I heal my wounds around class.

***

On yet another class-related note, George Lakey will be leading his workshop on Quakers & social class at Ben Lomond Quaker Center in March 2009. I will be there. Will you?

Class Privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack

2008-05-17T12:04:00.004-05:00

If you've read Peggy McIntosh's White Privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack, you'll know what the title of this post refers to. If not, it's a list of privileges that white folks have in U.S. culture. Google it if you want--I'd prefer to protect McIntosh's copyright.

The lovely woman over at Education & Social Class has posted a parallel list from a social class perspective created by the wonderful folks over at Class Action.

I won't post the whole list here--you'll have to go to Jayne's site for that (and I'd strongly suggest you do so, and add your own suggestions there). If you have additions, please send them to privilege at classism dot org. Here are my additions and questions.

Suggested Additions to Class Privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack

a. My ignorance of cultural references, intellectual concepts or academic knowledge are not attributed to my social class.

b. My favorite foods are often served in expensive restaurants where I live.

c. My cultural habits and likes are viewed as appropriate and healthy and are not attributed to my social class by my peers when they deem my habits and likes as unhealthy or inappropriate.

d. The way I talk at home (my grammar and pronunciation and diction) is considered business standard.

There should be an addition about technology, but I couldn't come up with a statement that was exclusive because of social class, other than being always up-to-date technologically. Some not-so-middle-class people I know are up-to-date. Does anyone have a suggestion about a technology indication of class?

On Jayne's blog, I also posted a question about #18 on the list. Can anyone answer this question? Here's what I said:

About #18, that one is very interesting. It doesn’t necessarily get at your social class, but at the social class of your friends relative to you. I *do* worry about whether my friends can afford the things I can afford–I live an owning class life and almost none of my friends can match that. But I grew up working class–does someone who grew up owning class or middle class not worry if they have friends with different means?

Let Jayne know what your suggestions are!

Fun Little Thingy (and I promise, not a meme)

2008-04-10T22:57:00.004-05:00

My partner forwarded to me a blog called Stuff White People Like, which is a satirical look on one person's experience of being white.

I actually think it's more of a satirical look at being a lefty middle class person, regardless of race (or mostly so), more than a commentary on race, even though race and class are closely correlated.

For instance, when I look at the Full List of Stuff White People Like, I count 36 of the 95 things that I like. Is that because I'm white? Or is it because I have some lefty middle class values? I know a few people of color who would count more in their Like column.

And just in case you're curious about what 36 I count, I list them here: #94 Free Healthcare, #90 Dinner Parties, #87 Outdoor Performance Clothes, #83 Bad Memories of High School, #82 Hating Corporations (which comes from seeing The Corporation at another love, #3 Film Festivals), #76 Bottles of Water, #75 Threatening to Move to Canada (well, it's not technically a Like because I don't *want* to move to Canada; it's just an expression of my frustration about the current administration, so maybe its that I LIKE TO THREATEN TO MOVE TO CANADA WHEN THE PRESIDENT IS AN IDIOT), #64 Recycling, #61 Bicycles (who doesn't like bikes, exactly?), #60 Toyota Prius, #59 Natural Medicine, #57 Juno (for which I now feel strangely guilty, as if I missed something about this movie and its whiteness), #54 Kitchen Gadgets (and, as an aside, other household things like making your own laundry soap...by which, I think, my mother would be horrified because her mother, the wife of a coal miner in Kentucky, probably made their laundry soap; my mother would see it as a step backward and probably ask why I would do such a thing. I don't know if I'd have an answer for her), #51 Living By the Water, #48 Whole Foods and Grocery Coops (and where else, exactly, would I find Crystal deoderant?), #47 Art Degrees (I can't deny this one since I just got one), #46 The Sunday New York Times (not the crossword puzzle though), #44 Public Radio, #41 Indie Music, #40 Apple Products (like the computer on which I write this post), #39 Netflix, #37 Renovations, #36 Breakfast Places (and who in the world doesn't like a good breakfast place???), #29 80's Night, #25 David Sedaris, #21 Writer's Workshops (heyyyyyyyyy, I take that one personally), #19 Traveling, #18 Awareness, #17 Hating Their Parents, #13 Tea (Casablanca from Mariage Freres in France, slightly sweetened Oregon chai, white-tip early grey), #12 Non-Profit Organizations, #8 Barack Obama, #7 Diversity, #6 Organic Food, #5 Farmers Markets, and, drum roll please, #3 Film Festivals (like, check my other blog at FilmFestGirl.)

This is the first post that I've done that isn't specifically Quaker, though anything lefty liberal, by default, appeals to liberal Friends.

So my count is 36. What's yours? You can post your score in the comments if you want (but please keep commenting light--this is humor folks).

Assets

2008-03-12T12:45:00.003-05:00

In a couple of places in the Quaker blogosphere, some people have suggested that Quaker theology should be a block to poor and working class people. The questions and answers (and the implications of the questions and answers) around this topic have been very hurtful and have made me ask why Friends don't see the assets that poor and working class people might bring to our Meetings.

So here I'll suggest some assets that poor and working class people bring to Quakerism.

Spiritual Assets

Individualism is very strong among at least Liberal Friends in part because the middle and owning classes value individualism more than community (where poor and working class people generally value community over individualism). I see this individualism sometimes in people's struggle with doing what they hear God telling them to do.

I read one example of this (and I picked this randomly, not to pick on anyone in particular or to criticize...it's just an example of something I've heard lots from Friends, and it's without judgment) on Friendly Mama's blog a while ago:

I want to open myself to God's will for me. I hide behind my own self; my day-to-day life based on my will and my desires. I want to learn to be trustworthy for God, to be faithful, to mind the Light, to submit.

This isn't a unique perspective among Liberal Quakers. I've heard Friends talk about their reluctance to follow God's will for as long as I've been among Friends (since 1991). I've always felt like I was supposed to feel this way, but this hasn't been my experience.

When I feel God's will, I feel like I want to follow it, like it's my only choice. When I've spoken in Meeting, I have felt God lift me up and speak through me, and it's a pleasure and relief. I feel the same pleasure and relief when I've done a good job. I feel God's pleasure with me when I've been faithful, and I crave that sense of satisfaction.

And it's what I'd been taught to do by my working class K-12 education and my working class family and my working class friends and my working class neighbors.

Obey. Do a good job. Do a job right. Do it quickly.

So, since Friends struggle so mightily to obey, is there something that working class and poor people have to offer Friends?

(And, as an aside, for some science behind my claim that middle and owning class people are more individualistic-focused, I read this New York Times article about MIT students--only 17% of whom come from households that make under $45,000/year--participating in a study about the compulsion to "leave options open," that found that students resisted closing doors when it was the most beneficial thing to do.)

A more class-diverse Meeting can bring a life and vitality that some Friends find lacking in their Meetings.

Johan recently said it more eloquently than I could when he wrote:

I remember one very dear Friends fellowship that was pretty homogenous but yearned for diversity; half a block away was an Elim Fellowship pentecostal church where there was ACTUAL diversity--racial, social, class, temperament, language. Spiritual power does NOT necessarily mean emotional contortions, but it does mean crossing a threshold of conversion and self-abandonment not typically found among the self-satisfied or terminally autonomous.

Working class and poor people are generally more emotionally expressive than middle and owning class people, and, as Johan says, this can be a theological asset.

This asset, I think, will be harder to see and even harder to accept, because plain speech and direct communication is frowned upon among middle class and owning class people (and, therefore, Friends). This is a cultural difference between middle and owning class people and working class and poor people; until we recognize and acknowledge it, we won't do anything about it. This isn't because we don't want to change, but because comfort encourages inertia.

So, what of plain speech, Friends?

Community Assets

Poor and working class values can help the Meeting community. We are hard workers, we bring the perspective of the not-so-privileged to committee work and MfWfB, and we can refocus conversation away from process and toward tasks.

That last bit, about process and tasks, needs a little explanation. Many Friends acknowledge that we can talk too much about something. Sometimes, we talk about talking about issues.

I know for me personally, and other working class Friends with whom I've talked, over processing something can be frustrating. But one thing I learned in the Quakers & Social Class workshop at Gathering was that when my gifts of being task-focused were acknowledged and valued, it was easy for me to stay in the process.

I think Quakers over value process. I think I (and other working class and poor people) over value tasks. We could be a good balance to each other.

In that same vein, valuing all the assets that working class and poor people bring could be one step toward helping our communities be more diverse. This means appreciating fellowship committee as much as we appreciate ministry & nurture. Not everyone has the gift of structure and organization.

Meeting & Individual Vitality

Finally, if our Meetings become more class-diverse, we, as individuals, will grow close to God's ideal for ourselves. As Tai from the Friends of Color blog said:

I find truth in opposites. I believe that when we are faced with someone who is culturally "opposite" from us, we learn. And it's not the kind of Barney purple dinosaur learn, it's the, this fucking hurts because I'm growing learning.

And if our Meetings become more class-diverse, our Meetings might grow. Martin, quoting statistics about a decline in both Liberal and Evangelical Friends' Meetings except where the Yearly Meeting is dually affiliated with both FGC and FUM, recently said on his blog:

Could it be that serious theological wrestling and complicated spiritual identities create healthier religious bodies than monocultural groupings?

What Quaker doesn't want their Meeting to grow and doesn't want to grow personally?

Some Thoughts From 2007 Summer Workshop On Quakers and Class

2008-02-20T23:23:00.002-06:00

I was going through my email and found these things that came from the summer 2007 FGC Gathering workshop on Quakers and Social Class with George Lakey. At the very end of the week we shared on our thoughts about promoting class diversity in our Meetings and questions we may need to ask ourselves about our class diversity.

The workshop participants agreed that these things could be shared. And here I offer them in their rawness (and I use that word because that's what this list feels to me, raw, like a newborn, like a seed burst open ready to sprout).

PROMOTING QUAKER CLASS RELATIONS

This is the thinking of the workshop on Social Class and Quakers held at FGC Gathering, 2007.

-Welcome diversity of foods at events
-Get your Meeting to identify its own culture in specific terms
-Support leadership and the risks leaders must take to support growth and change in the Society of Friends
-Bring class awareness to problem-solving
-Ensure that transportation, childcare, and location of Meetinghouse are accessible to working class and poor people
-Accept the likelihood that we are clueless regarding how middle class and owning class Friends come across, and make a decision to become aware and curious, including curious about how life looks to working class and poor people
-Invite emotion at appropriate times, being aware that suppressing emotion is often (usually?) a class characteristic and an imposition of class-based conditioning on the group
-Support plain speaking, an old Quaker practice that has lately been trumped by middle class niceness/politeness
-Bring to worship our need to heal from our woundedness from class society
-Be aware of the role of entitlement when some Friends speak frequently and at length, filling the space that might be left open to Friends from working class backgrounds.

QUESTIONS THAT MAY HELP US GROW
IN BETTERING QUAKER CLASS RELATIONS

This is the thinking of the workshop on Social Class and Quakers held at FGC Gathering, 2007.

-How can we welcome all classes to our Meetings?
-How can we become more aware of our own class backgrounds, with the assumptions that we take for granted?
-What's the culture of our Meeting, in specific terms?
-How can we increase the safety of the cultural mainstream of our Meeting and the margins as well, and put them in dialogue with each other?
-How did emotions get sorted into "positive emotions to express" and "negative emotions to express" in Meeting for Worship? What could we learn from taking a fresh look at that?
-How can we appreciate and embrace conflict and its gifts, including the bluntness and anger that often come with conflict?

An Attempt at a Definition Part 1: Questions

2008-02-11T00:22:00.000-06:00

Pam's comment on my previous blog post said

Also, we haven't yet defined "working class" and probably simply can't in any meaningful, consistenlty useful way.

So here's my first attempt at a definition of class. This isn't Quaker-specific, so I'll be inviting bloggers outside of the Quaker blogosphere to participate in the discussion. I welcome everyone's insights, additions, subtractions, criticisms, and praise.

I've been thinking about Pam's comment and wondering if I can't at least try to define class in a way that makes sense.

I have come to understand gender to exist on several continuum along several axes: sex (the physical sex with which you were born or assigned at birth or discovered at puberty), gender identity (the gender with which you identify internally, or you internally experience), gender expression (the gender with which you present to the world at large), and sexual orientation.

What if class were also expressed along continuum on several axes? What would the axes be? Can they be as simple as the gender model?

Off the top of my head, I thought of several continuum:

Education, income, cultural values & norms, and family of origin class status

Then I began to wonder how these things should be weighted. Certainly the first three would definitely be impacted by your family of origin's class status. So then should family of origin class status even be included or should it just inform the other three? Should income have equal weight with education and cultural values, or is there another measure by which we can judge economic class status (like spending, for instance, which was written about in a recent New York Times article)? Some have suggested that education shouldn't have as much weight as income because a high income can get you an education but an education doesn't automatically confer high income on a degree recipient. What about cultural values & norms being more highly valued than income because social capital can get you things (like jobs and material items) that money can't?

Part of the problem with using the gender model is that while each of the four continuum inform the others, I don't think that's true for gender to the extent my categories inform each other.

I think the three axes could be weighted equally. I also like the idea that one axis is based on consumer spending and ownership rather than income. I would add savings, investments and retirement to that value. So, for instance, you might go up a notch if you own your home outright, but down a little if you have less than 50% equity. You would go up a notch for each car you *could* afford to own (here I'm thinking of people like my partner and I who choose to share a car rather than own two). And "could" afford would assume a full-time income at your income-earning potential(because, again, I'm thinking of people who choose to live below the poverty line in order to protest war taxes). We could prioritize spending. For instance, you get more upward movement by spending money on dental care or a computer than say buying a pop-up tent you can hitch to your car.

I also like the spending model because it's what so many people talked about when they took the "What Privilege Do You Have" meme. Some said, Yes, I went to summer camp but it was sponsored by the Y and my parents didn't have to pay anything, or Yes, I went to private school but I went on scholarship because I was raised by my single dad who worked two jobs to keep a roof over our head. It became about how much parents paid for those things, rather than the things themselves and the privilege they conferred.

So what do you think?

Answers, Answers

2008-02-01T15:00:00.000-06:00

When we ask questions like the ones I talked about in my Questions, Questions post, we reveal our biases. This is even more true when we answer the questions.

I'm taking these answers from blog to which I link in my Questions, Questions post, and since I can't directly link to the parts of the comments I want you to see, I'll quote them here for you:

But by the time working class/degreeless adults walk through our meetingroom doors, they've likely been exposed to the more black-and-white thinking all their life that somehow works for them as adults. And without an education or role-modeling that teaches them to think beyond short-term, tangible results, won't they be lost in the abstract critical thinking and philosphizing that goes on during fellowship hour? from LizOpp

Really? Working class/degreeless adults in Meeting need education from privileged folks like you? Working class/degreeless adults need to learn a better way to be and only privileged people know what that better way is?

One mistake middle and owning class Friends make when relating with poor and working class people is paternalism, which, according to dictionary.com is defined as "the system, principle, or practice of managing or governing individuals, businesses, nations, etc., in the manner of a father dealing benevolently and often intrusively with his children."

It's good to be benevolent, isn't it? But don't we know that benevolence can go too far? Like, say, telling a working class or poor person that the middle class way of doing things is better.

One of the hallmarks of Quaker theology (as I understand it) is the ability to live in the moment and the Presence, even if that means dealing with the tensions of not having answers or not knowing. Most educatiors would say that living in such ambiguity is a sophisticated place developmentally. from Omar P.

My first response to reading this was "So then what in the world drew so many poor people to early Quakerism? What in the world drew unsophisticated me? Free coffee and cookies after Meeting?"

Is Omar really saying that God should only be accessible to the intellectual elite?

Nope. it's paternalism again. But his answer also reveals an intellectual arrogance that keeps poor and working class people away. The Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church and the Episcopal Church and the Baptist Church all accept different levels of engagement, from going to church and doing as the minister or priest says, to intellectual book groups. In those churches, God is accessible to everyone.

It's still very hard for me to "live in the moment and the Presence," but when I do and can, it's more rewarding than any other church service I've ever attended. I had to learn to do it, but I did it on my own terms and in my own way. If I'd read Omar's post when I first came to Meeting, I would have left because I was not intellectually as advanced as him (and most people in Meeting). I worry that other working class or poor people will read his statement and unnecessarily choose not to go to Meeting. I worry that other Friends are saying similar statements because it's so appealing to acquiesce to an academic authority.

Most Friends to whom I've talked says it's hard for them to acquiesce to God's will. Giving in to the will of an authority is something many working class people understand because it's what the system has taught us to do. Why isn't this talked about as a Quaker theological asset, as something working class people have to teach privileged Friends whose entitlement gives them the idea they get to pick and choose what's convenient for their lives?

When you receive a messege, run it through your mind a few times. Can you use a simpler word? Can you drop, or at least quickly explain, an obscure reference? Would a child understand it? Or at least a teenager? from Jim

Jim grew up working class so I was at first confused by his comment. Then I went to his web page and saw that he has a PhD in mathematics. He seems to have acclimated well into middle class life (and now that he's retired at 36, an owning class life). Then I realized he might have meant what he said.

What's that definition of paternalism again? Something about managing children?

Poor and working class people aren't children. I know some working class people who are better read and more articulate than some middle class people I know. So please don't talk down to them or anyone. You can, however, not assume that everyone in the room knows everything you do. Especially if you're well-educated.

***
I shared a much shorter version of this post with one Friend (no, not my partner) and she called it rude. According to dictionary.com, one definition of "rude" is "without culture, learning, or refinement."

Hmmmm. I guess I have some learnin' and refinin' and culturin' to do.

(And if you're not getting the irony, find a clued-in middle or owning class person to explain it to you).

Questions, questions

2008-01-28T13:00:00.000-06:00

On a couple of blogs, Friends have begun to ask some questions that seem to be looking for Truth about why Friends are so class homogeneous. But I think a look at the questions might reveal an better answer than their questions might garner.

Here's one example from Susanne K:1. Is there something about Quaker theology that makes it more appealing to the kind of people who get college degrees? Is there something about Quaker theology that makes it unappealing to the kind of people who don’t get college degrees? If so, why?

2. Or is it something about current liberal Quaker culture? If so, why?

3. Or is it something to do with current liberal Quaker practice? If so, why?

4. Or do you think it is just a coincidence? If so, why?

5. Optional: Are you a college graduate? Do/es one or both of your parents have a college degree?

Question 1: No. No. No. No. I was working class (a third shift worker in fact) when I first came to Meeting. I didn't have a college degree. I was living paycheck-to-paycheck in a tiny three-room apartment (one room, the room I used as a bedroom, was unheated). And yet, waiting worship and continuing revelation spoke to me. I felt I could get closer to God at Meeting than I could anywhere else; and I'd been a seeker for over ten years before I found Friends.

Quakerism spoke to Joe Franko, who grew up poor. It spoke to George Lakey, who grew up working class. The fact is, George Fox and almost all of the early Quaker adherents were poor. The theology spoke to them.

So there is no theological or practical block to Quakerism because of your class background or income.

Question 2: See my blog.

Question 3: See my answer to Question 1.

Questions 1-5: Does anyone else get the feeling they're being tested? Maybe it's only me because I've never tested well.

The questions really should be: What is it about liberal Quaker culture is keeping poor and working class people away? AND how do we change that culture? (Not SHOULD we)

I don't mean to be picking on Susanne. Recently, The Friendly Funnel asked a similar question (and got some similar responses).

I also don't mean to say they shouldn't have asked their questions. Perhaps now, though, when my readers hear another Friend ask that similar questions, they will let the person know that their questions have bias, and perhaps show them their mistaken assumptions. I know when I see questions like this again in the Quaker blogosphere, my comment will be a link this post.

Friends of Color Blog

2008-01-26T17:30:00.000-06:00

Hey, check out the new Friends of Color Blog at http://friendsofcolor.blogspot.com/

"What does this have to do with Quakers and social class," you ask?

Racism and classism support one another.

Don't believe me about this?

Watch the movie Crash and ask yourself which of those characters you can see in Quaker Meeting. And be honest. Really honest with yourself. Make this assessment throughout the film--when you first meet a character, and, well, later.

This was started by Allison and she's invited me to be a part of it. I'm not a person of color but I am an ally. I hope to recruit other well-known Friends of color to write on the blog.

Guest Post: Friend Joe Franko

2008-01-22T00:30:00.000-06:00

Joe and I are on a Quaker listserve together and I posted something about class with a link to this blog. He visited and left this comment on my What Privilege Do You Have? post, and I thought I'd add it here as a guest post because I want there to be a variety of Quaker voices on my blog as well as mine.

He raises an interesting question about how to talk to Friends about class because I've faced similar reactions. Joe is very good at listening and has a big heart. He's also not as pissed off as I am; or, at least he doesn't come across as angry as I appear. I'm currently considering offering an interest group on class at FGC's summer Gathering on social class, but I'm not sure what to do or how to do it. I don't want to be the one to do it, but it keeps getting thrown up in my face (more on this in a later post). And I don't know how to talk about it without pissing people off. Even one Friend who says she grew up working class gets really really pissed at me when I talk about my own experiences and suggest they might apply to other working class people.

But enough from me and about me. Here's Joe's comment:

Gee, Jeanne. Read your post on the listserver and then followed the link here. Looked at the class game and found I could say yes to only 2 things on the list. Brought back lots of memories of growing up on welfare, having the police come to the house on a regular basis because of the domestic violence, and visiting my mother in the state psychiatric institute.

Now that I'm an all-growed-up college professor it's hard to look back and remember how tough it was to grow up poor and gay. And I don't know about you, but I still wonder sometimes if it isn't all about to come crashing down on my head. When I buy groceries, I still think with some relief that at least I can last another month. I can still clearly recall what was in the commidity foods welfare package each month. It's totally ridiculous considering how much money I make now, but I find it difficult not to wonder when I'll wind up in jail or on the streets.

I guess I come from a working-class family, but even that term is deceptive. My father worked when he could. He was an unskilled laborer who could neither read or write (he used to take me around on job interviews to fill out his applications, hiding me in the car so no one would know). His union took as much advantage of him as his employer. Both saw him as simply someone to make money from.

I think the hardest thing about being a Quaker now is the class thing. I am certainly in sync with the spirituality, but Quakers still don't understand me when I try to talk with them about their sense of entitlement. It was the most difficult thing about being a regional director for the AFSC. That sense of entitlement used to drive me up the wall. Even some of my deepest friendships in Quakerdom don't understand me when I attempt to talk about it.

When I do try to talk about it I find Friends getting defensive or guilty and totally missing the point. They shouldn't have to defend themselves or feel guilty, but to seek to have an honest discussion of class privilege. I try desperately to not send out accusations or guilt trips, but I still haven't found a way to do it.

Anyway, thanks for this blog. Now that I know it's here, I'll check in often.

Joe Franko

Keys to What Kingdom?

2008-01-17T12:15:00.000-06:00

Recently, almost simultaneously, Martin K and I asked essentially the same question (or, rather, made the same criticism) asking how Meeting would deal with a poor or working class person who wanted to worship with us.

Another blogger sent me this Unitarian Universalist article by Doug Muder, which, I think, explains one reason why both Martin and I (and I hope others) see the ironic contradiction a "tattooed ex-con" or gum-smacking ghetto-girl in Meeting would be.

In Muder's article, you can pretty much replace "UU" and "Unitarians" and "Unitarianism" with "Quaker" and "Quakers" and "Quakerism," and you have an interesting criticism of our faith.

He suggests that the reason his churches (and, therefore, our Meetings) are so homogeneous is about message & ministry. But I can't help but wonder if our ministry comes first from our culture, from our interactions outside of Meeting for Worship.

For me, the block is cultural, the things said and done in social interactions. In October, I blogged about one such social interaction. But I've had others since.

One Friend recently asked a group of Friends how to deal with someone who swears a lot. She said she'd had a conversation with this person, but the swearing person didn't seem to understand that swearing a lot was "inappropriate" outside of work as well as at work.

This Friend implied that she knew better than the swearing person about how to act.

I grew up working class (and haven't assimilated well into middle and owning class culture) and am well-versed in the myriad and pleasurable uses of 'vulgar' language. I've since learned that it's not proper at middle class jobs, but I still say FUCK to express pain or to be evocative or to be sexually suggestive.

To say the least, Friends don't like this part of me so much. When I swear, Friends at best look uncomfortable, and at worst admonish me for doing so.

I had an angry response to the perplexed Friend. But another (Su Penn) put what I said into middle/owning class speak by suggesting that "one way to approach that discomfort [of being around someone who swears a lot] is to think of it as a problem of translation rather than a problem of appropriateness."

Amen sister.

I can think of all sorts of things Friends would deem as "inappropriate." Dress (low-cut tops, muscle shirts), language (non-standard grammar, swearing, Jesus talk), food at potluck (fast food, processed food, non-organic food), conservative views (pro-life, Republican), spending habits (owning an SUV, subscribing to cable), to name just a few (and I bet you can add to this list).

And one might be able to argue that some of these things are particularly Quaker, but most of them aren't.

Even for the values that are particularly Quaker, how is acting like you hold the keys to virtue and proper etiquette a Quaker way of conveying these beliefs? Will those keys get you into God's kingdom?

I think of the profound act of compassion George Fox had for William Penn when he said, "Wear thy sword as long as thy canst."

So I'll try to live into this: Wear thy classism as long as thy canst.

"What Privilege Do You Have" Post Goes Viral

2008-01-13T14:50:00.001-06:00

On the road, I kept getting email notices of people posting responses on my What Privilege Do You Have post, 127 comments so far. I had no idea this meme had spread so wildly (just Google privilege meme to see how many hundreds of people who have posted it on their blogs).

My post has also produced some particularly angry responses including this one from an Atlantic Monthly blogger.

I haven't had the time or energy to read all the responses, but my favorite class blogger has read many of them, and posted her thoughtful response here. Check it out.

Many thanks again to Will Barratt for letting me modify his exercise and letting me post it on my blog.

This conversation about class is so important.

Post Script: Another very thoughtful response to the privilege meme here.

Hiatus Until Mid-to-Late-January

2007-12-22T19:10:00.000-06:00

I haven't posted in a while because I've been busy GRADUATING from college, and now I'm on a celebratory vacation, so I'll be on hiatus for a few weeks. You'll see me here again in mid- or late-January.

I hope everyone has a lovely holiday, however they spend it, and a happy New Year.

Blessings all,

Jeanne

Book Review Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams by Alfred Lubrano

2007-12-07T14:52:00.000-06:00

There aren't good books out there about being a working class Quaker, but this book comes close to my own experience, so I thought I would review it here. If you would like to understand what a working class person might experience in Quaker Meeting, read this book.

Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams

Author and journalist Alfred Lubrano grew up a bricklayer's son, but his father wanted him to go to college. His book, Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, opens up with a description of both son and father Lubrano at Columbia University, Alfred inside a classroom and his father laying bricks outside at another building.

This image sets up the main conflict that working class folks face when we transition to and live in a middle (or owning) class world. He calls people like me "straddlers," as in we're straddling both worlds.

Like me, Lubrano was bookish as a child, and never quite fit-in entirely with his solidly working class Brooklyn friends. In his experience going to Columbia University and becoming a journalist, he never quite fit-in to middle class corporate culture.

In true journalistic style, Lubrano not only writes about his own experience in Limbo, he interviews dozens of other "straddlers," who are aware of the class conflict in their lives.

Lubrano writes about family, work and love conflict, some of which a working class person might experience in very middle and owning class Quaker Meeting. He doesn't only write about conflict, but he holds up people and situations as examples of well-integrated lives.

I just wish I could be one of those people right now!

I'm plowing through the book, and read aloud from it to Liz quite a bit. I find it affirming of my experience. If you read it, would you let me know in the comments?

Alfred Lubrano has a blog on the Philadelphia Inquirer's website here. You can also read a piece he wrote about being a class straddler here.

Post Script: When I told George Lakey I'd read Limbo, he added his enthusiastic response to it as well. He told me: I wrote a long letter to Lubrano after reading [Limbo], telling him about my laughing and crying through it...
Me, too George. Me too.

Post Post Script: I'd posted on her that George Lakey would be doing a class workshop at Ben Lomond Quaker Center in March. He is, but March 2009. Look for more info here late next year! And, he won't be doing his class workshop at Gathering this year; I, on the other hand, will be holding an interest group.

What Privilege Do You Have? Part II

2007-11-25T12:15:00.000-06:00

After my 'Privilege' blog post, dozens of you posted your own results of the 'step forward' activity either on your blog, my comments, or over on Liz's site. A few Friends saw fit to 'defend' their steps, and one Friend called the exercise an "'I'm more priveleged and thus more guilty than you are' game."

It wasn't intended as a guilt-game, but I can see how it might have been interpreted that way. And as I've read each response (which is one reason it's taken me so long to post Part II), I have seen such deep compassion and caring that I can't see it as a competition. Like the story of parents who scrimped and saved so that they could own a small home. And the parents who insisted their children be well-read and speak proper English because they had been immigrants. Or the families who wanted more for their children than they had, so took the kids to museums on a regular basis. Or the family who had original art from their grandmother. As I've read each post, people have become their stories, and not their 'score.' I hope you've had a chance to read all the responses. If you haven't, it might be a good daily practice to read one response.

And a good first step to a more open and accepting Religious Society of Friends.

I recently had a phone conversation with Robin M. over at What Canst Thou Say? and she shared some wisdom with me that I will share with you here because I found it true for myself.

She said when she has more than two steps to get something done, it often goes undone for longer than it needs to. I think 'refunds' offered by corporations when you buy expensive electronics play to this very human tendency. I recently bought MS Word for my new computer and Microsoft is offering free software updates in 2008. All I have to do is copy my receipt, cut out the bar code, address and stamp an envelope, and put it in the mail. You can guess whether I've done that yet or not.

Robin also pointed out that dealing with class within the RSoF is similar because it's going to take more than two steps to become more diverse. There isn't one thing (or even two) that we can do to be more open to working class and poor people. It's going to take many steps.

And hearing each other's class story and history is one (which is one step beyond telling our own story, isn't it).

Now that some of us have taken this one step, I have a question for us as a Religious Society.

We can, through the work of the Spirit, live out God’s reign on earth. All Friends seek to live out of the love expressed in the Sermon on the Mount… When understood as wholeness, spiritual maturity, soundness, completion, or even obedience, perfection starts to become more accessible to me. Other Friends who find the terms perfection and holiness difficult are more apt to speak of discipleship, obedience, baptism with the Holy Spirit, or the ‘Lordship of Jesus Christ’. For a few, spiritual formation or inner healing are the most expressive terms for perfection. ‘Teleos’, the Biblical word for perfection, means ‘end goal’ and suggests an orientation more than a fixed state of being.

From A Certain Kind of Perfection, an anthology organized by Margery Post Abbott

I think it's fair to say that all Friends seek to live out the kind of love Jesus spoke about. And it's also fair to say that we're all in process, we're all heading toward that love. And that few, if any, of us have arrived.

I haven't.

So then certainly our understanding of social class is a similar process. But to where are we oriented? A belief in the equality of all human beings? A form of Jesus's love? A political belief in socialism? A belief in an all-inclusive Faith?

And if you did the privilege exercise (on your blog, in my comments, in your own mind), where were you oriented? Where do you want to be oriented? Where *should* we, as a Religious Society, be oriented?

Class and Race in the RSOF

2007-11-18T18:00:00.000-06:00

I promise I will still get back to Part II of "What Privilege Do You Have," but I read this New York Times article about race and class and had to share it with you.

Of late I've been wondering about the connection between class and race in the Religious Society of Friends, but since I'm white, I don't feel like I have any authority on the matter.

After reading this New York Times article though, I realized that I have a question to put forth.

If you are black, do you need to also be middle class to be accepted at all in the Religious Society of Friends?

In my storytelling class, a woman told a story about her life in the inner city. She called herself a 'ghetto girl.' She wore big hoop earrings, a tight belly shirt, short skirt, and stilettos. She had an urban accent.

I couldn't help but wonder what Friends would think if she walked into Meeting. How would she feel among Friends? And what would Jesus think about how we treated her and how she felt around us?

(And I posted this before I read Martin's blog here, but if you've read this far, you'll be interested in reading what he has to say about it all).

What Privilege Do You Have?

2007-11-02T12:15:00.001-05:00

I saw a blog game on a couple of Quaker blogs (this one and this one), so I thought I'd offer a similar game with a spin on class based. It's based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Indiana State University that I found on this Yahoo group around class on college campuses. The exercise developers hold the copyright but have given me permission to post it here and ask that if you participate in this blog game, you acknowledge their copyright.

If you post this in your blog, please leave a comment on this post.

Father went to college (for a year until he enlisted in the Army Air Corps for WW II)
Father finished college
Mother went to college
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children's books by a parent
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs*
Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs*
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp
Had a private tutor before you turned 18
Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them (a 1976 pea-green Plymouth Valiant they bought at a state auction for $500 in 1985)
There was original art in your house when you were a child
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18 (for one year when I had a paper route and could pay the bill)
You and your family lived in a single family house (after I turned 6)
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home (see above)
You had your own room as a child (only after my parents converted an unheated porch into a bedroom for my brother when we became too old to share a room, and not during the year my grandmother lived with us)
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
Had your own TV in your room in High School
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

*These two are edited because Christine pointed out that the previous wording didn't clearly delineate between people who had their tuition paid for them and people who worked for their college expenses.

In the group exercise which was originally designed for college students, staff and faculty, everyone stands in a line and steps forward if any of these things are true for them.

If we were all in a big room, I would have taken 5 steps forward. How about you? How many would you have taken? How many steps will your kids have taken by the time they're 18 (or how many did they take before they turned 18)?

Notice that each of these are things that were given to you or provided for you rather than things you necessarily earned yourself. The exercise instructions note that just because you've taken a lot of steps doesn't mean that you haven't worked hard to get where you are. But perhaps consider the things you've had handed to you that others didn't have.

For instance, if I'd not been given a car, I don't think I would have been able to go to college the first time around because there was no way I could afford to stay on campus (or near campus--I lived with my parents my first year).

To participate in this blog game, copy and paste the above list into your blog, and bold the items that are true for you. If you don't have a blog, feel free to post your responses in the comments. Once enough people participate in this little game, I'll do a Part II post about what all this has to do with Friends. (And you can, in your blog post, ponder what it means to Friends).

A God-Sized Wedge

2007-10-28T13:31:00.000-05:00

I went to a F/friend's birthday party last weekend at the meeting house. The first person who talked to me was a young Friend (perhaps 15) and he said, "Where did you graduate from college?" This young person assumed that because I was an adult at a Quaker meeting, I have a college education. It colored my whole night. I withdrew. I was upset and crabby.

It makes me wonder what God is saying to me right now.

I am living my passion, and trying to live up to my Light. If I could do anything I wanted in the world, I would write. All the time. But my working class upbringing cuts against this effort. On a cellular level, I feel guilty just writing. Yet when I write, I blossom in ways I never thought I could. And people are moved by my writing.

Just not Quakers.

Before going back to school, I really thought I was a bad Quaker. I didn't say the right things in the right way. Being at school has taught me that I'm not a bad person or stupid. It's taught me that, in fact, I'm quite bright and what I have to say and do is valuable.

When Friends read my blog, they want to argue with me. They want me to hear how their experiences are exactly like mine when they're not (because they did not grow up working class). They want to use my experience to invalidate me. Supportive people email me privately but few post public comments.

In September, I blogged about Friends and education and where that fits in our testimonies. Someone at my school read my post (perhaps because I linked to my school's website) and it's spread through the campus like a virus. I've gotten a dozen emails from people about my blog. Several people I've never met want to meet and talk about class, including the president of the university. A sociology professor I've never had sent me an op-ed he wrote that affirms my experience of class.

And once again, school is providing affirmation and an outlet for my passion. Quakerism sure does look like it's providing a big fat wall. That or God's putting a wedge between me and Quakerism.

A God-sized wedge.

Class & Cool Whip Contempt

2007-10-18T23:14:00.000-05:00

Tonight Liz and I went to see a presentation by Ahmad Hijazi from Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, a village in Israel working toward a vision of peace. At one point, he talked about changing the paradigm of oppressor/oppressed to oppressor/obeyer (as in, allowing that the oppressed has some agency) and it spoke to my condition.

During dinner before the presentation, we were talking about pumpkin pie, which I love, and I told Liz that I love pumpkin pie with real vanilla ice cream. Then I remembered enjoying the Cool Whip my mother put on on pumpkin pie. She kept hers in the freezer and I'd eat it right out of the ice box, frozen like ice cream made from marshmallows. So light and sweet.

But at some point in my adult life, I learned that there was something wrong with me if I liked Cool Whip. So I began to disdain it as inferior to things like whipped cream and 'real' ice cream.

My mother and society taught me to hold in high esteem middle class culture and to scorn working class culture. And I bought into the system heart, mind and soul.

Agent. Obeyer.

When I came to Friends, I was ready, willing, and able to learn so much more disdain than I'd ever learned.

Here's a sampling of what I specifically learned from Friends to hold in contempt:

Not having at least an undergraduate degree
Not trying to get at least an undergraduate degree
Shopping at Wal-Mart or Sam's Club
Eating non-organic foods
Drinking tap-water
Drinking alcohol
Buying or wearing clothes made in sweat-shops
Driving a car that guzzles gas and emits pollution
Bringing fried chicken to potluck
Watching television
Joining the military
Buying books from Amazon.com instead of a local bookstore
Dressing up for Quaker events
Wearing deodorant with aluminum
Being angry
Telling the truth to someone's face
Cursing
Speaking with 'broken' grammar
Writing with same

Now before you get all your undies in a bunch and think that I'm criticizing these beliefs, I'm not. I, in fact, drive a Prius and bike when I can. I wear natural deodorant. I'm getting a BA. I correct people when they say 'further' but they mean 'farther'.

Some might say a selection of the values above are specifically Quaker or come out of our testimonies. But I bet if you show this list to a Unitarian or any other lefty, they'd agree with it as a list of things to disdain; Unitarians and the left in general are also pretty middle- and owning-class homogeneous.

What exactly are we saying to a newcomer if we scowl at them when they ask if we watched the most recent Survivor episode? Or if we sneer when they invite us to a bar for a drink? Or if we tease someone who has dressed up for Meeting?

Perhaps it's our scorn for some of these things (and not the practice of simplifying our lives or making our lives match our values) that keeps our Meetings class-homogeneous.

I'd like to unlearn my scorn and learn how to value the gifts and culture of my working class upbringing. Essentially, I'd like to stop obeying.

I just don't know if I'll try Cool Whip again.

Guest Post: Bill Samuel

2007-10-11T11:09:00.000-05:00

Bill Samuel added this in comments to my last post on education and I felt it important and relevant enough to post on its own (after getting permission from him). In part, I wanted to highlight his post because my next posts will be about my experience of class and culture in Meeting.

You can read more about Bill here and here.

From Bill Samuel:

The class homogeneity seems most acute among liberal unprogrammed Friends. Other varieties of Friends seem more diverse.

I remember one year when I visited the yearly meeting sessions of Evangelical Friends Church-Eastern Region. The Friends Action Board (their social concerns group) reported on a new Federal program to allow churches more involvement in training for those on public assistance. The differences between my home yearly meeting and Eastern Region were very evident when they presented it as a way to help people within their churches. In my or other liberal YMs, it would have been presented as a way to help "them" not us.

I have a theory that the class homogeneity among liberal Friends is related to their lack of a clear spiritual center. It has been my experience among Christ-centered Friends and other Christ-centered churches that class is less of an issue, because the uniting factor is Jesus Christ. Without a clear, explicit uniting factor other than something like class, a group tends to gravitate towards becoming a club more united by socioeconomic and cultural factors.

And in fact many are seeking that their meetings be such a club. When I have engaged in conversations with liberal Friends about the issues of lacking racial, educational and economic diversity, most of the time eventually something along the lines of "if have many of them come into the meeting, it will change the character of the meeting" comes out with the clear assumption that such change would be bad.

I belonged to a meeting that was in an area which had undergone significant demographic change since it started, but the meeting had not. There was a newspaper article which highlighted the issue for me. It focused on a couple of other churches in the same area. They had seen the change, done work to understand the needs of the people coming in, and changed to be a welcoming and helpful place for the new population. Both the other churches and Friends recognized changing the demographics in the congregation would mean deeper changes. The other churches embraced change; Friends rejected it.

Education Continued

2007-10-05T14:30:00.004-05:00

Wow, this seems to have struck a cord with folks. Some good questions are being brought up. And some not-so-good questions too.

I want to hold up something quakermom said in my comments because I want to make sure folks see that I'm not the only one seeing these issues.

I have been thinking a lot about class in my meeting. We're in a university town, and there are many professors in our meeting. In addition, people seem to very uncritically value academic achievement and to buy into standard views of academic standards. i remember when one of the kids in our meeting was accepted to Smith, her mother announced it during Joys and Sorrows, and there was an audible, "Oooh, Smith" through the room. Things like that make me very uncomfortable--do we value less the young man who hasn't gone to college but is apprenticing in carpentry instead? I don't think, if asked, anyone would say so--but we act like we do, and I wonder how that affects our kids.

We're also in the process of building our meetinghouse, and this has brought issues of money and affluence into view. The number of families who have been able to give $10,000 or more to the meeting for our building has staggered me.

Even though I am a good fit for the meeting in terms of my own class background, current family income, and academic history, I am becoming less and less comfortable in it, in large part because of the way these issues seem largely unacknowledged and unexamined. I've been brining some of them into the light as way opens; we'll see what happens.

She asks how valuing one kind of education over another affects kids in the Meeting. And that question makes sense. She's a parent and blogs about being a Quaker parent.

I wonder, though, how it affects the adults in our Meeting who haven't/can't/don't meet such a standard of 'excellence'. I wonder how it portrays our values in contrast with what we say our values are. I wonder what the working-class first, second or third-time attender thought when everyone went "oooh." Did they keep coming?

I can tell you how it affects me. I feel shame. Embarassment. I feel like I'm not good enough. I want to hide.

Hysterywitch said:

I am therefore uncomfortable with the notion that the choice to work in a creative or intellectual field is an indication of classism.

I'm not saying that working in a creative or intellectual field is classist. I'm in school to get my BA in creative writing and intend to work in a creative field. And I don't think that act is inherently classist. I am, however, able to use my current financial privilege to do so. I don't know if I'd be able to do it if I didn't have such privilege. All I'm doing is acknowledging this privilege.

In fact, that's all these posts are asking Friends to do. Look at our individual and collective privilege. Let's make it transparent so that we can be in congruence with what we say we believe, that everyone is equal.

Let's not ooh and ahh over one young Friend's acceptance into Smith without ooh-ing and ahh-ing over another Friend's choice to learn a trade or go to a less elite institution. Let's not assume that every Friend we come into contact with has a college education, or even wants one.

Last but not least, lets figure out how to dismantle this system that favors the financially privileged.

Finally, Thee Hannah wrote:

Which begs the question: If you feel isolated at meeting because of your working-class background, what are you doing to educate the rest of us?

Hmmmm. That sure sounds like you're expecting me to undo a system I didn't create and a system that oppresses me but not you.

I'm writing this blog which is being read by lots and lots of people. But I'm just one person and one person has never been able change an oppressive system without allies.

So what are you doing to educate other Quakers who have privilege? How are you going to be an ally?

Education

2007-09-24T23:50:00.000-05:00

I'm finishing up my senior year at Metropolitan State University and am thrilled to be getting my undergraduate degree at 40 (well, I'll be 40 by the time I walk across the stage on December 18th).

Over the past three years, when I would tell Friends that I'm in school, they would ask if I was getting my master's degree or Ph.D.

I learned to say, "I'm at school getting my undergraduate degree."

Even then, some Friends would ask if it was my second degree. And now they're asking about graduate school.

I'm realizing that as someone who grew up working class, I was trained to do tasks efficiently and right. Activities that don't lead to a product that is discrete, finite and, in the end, worth money aren't worthwhile.

As a writer, this puts me in great conflict with my upbringing. And the conflict, for me, is almost on a cellular level.

Ask me to write something for the joy of writing. Or write a novel that has no chance in hell to be published and purchased. Then I will feel a deep aversion that borders on disgust. I'm not choosing this consciously. I would like nothing more than to write for the joy of it. I do it in school because my writing at least gets read by classmates and instructors. And I have fun. But only because it's finite, discrete and worth a grade.

Friends are befuddled when I describe this feeling. Yet when I talk to other students who grew up working class, they can relate. One friend who grew up working class is getting her degree in creative writing but her goal is to become a magazine writer. She, too, can't imagine writing for fun. Another friend went on to get her degree in library science because she needed to do something that involves a steady income. Even though she doesn't need the money because her husband supports her.

I read about a humongous gift made to a Quaker school out east and then I read this New York Times op-ed about elite universities serving "less as vehicles of upward mobility than as transmitters of privilege from generation to generation" and this New York Times article about public universities charging more for majors that lead to more lucrative careers.

Metropolitan State University is not an elite institution. It is, in fact, just the opposite in some respects. We're the most diverse four-year school in Minnesota, with over 26% people of color. Our most popular majors are: Business Administration, Accounting, Criminal Justice, Nursing and Law Enforcement. We are primarily working adults (working class adults) trying to get a bachelor's degrees to better compete in the workforce.

I'm aware that I'm getting a huge leg up with my degree: knowledge and a piece of paper saying I've jumped through hoops. I can play ball in the majors now. Or at least act like I can play. Just like I did before I got my degree. Only now I feel entitled to be in the game.

I'm also aware of what I'm not getting.

I'm doing my senior thesis on writer Kathleen Norris. She went to a private high school, then Bennington College in Vermont. One of her professors got her a job at the Academy of American Poets where she met the literary elite. These connections got her first book of poetry published before she was 25.

The only connection I have is an alumni knows someone who works at a place where lots of trade magazines are published. Every year I've gotten an email, along with all the other writing majors, inviting me to apply for an internship out in Minnetonka.

So, all this makes me wonder where education fits into the Quaker testimonies. We say that all are equal. But we send our children to fine institutions without thought to the privilege we've given them or the privilege that gets denied another. Or we are ignorant of the privilege we've gotten ourselves.

And I wonder what I will do with my privilege once I have it.

No, Not a Rant

2007-08-21T14:04:00.000-05:00

Many many many kudos, love and yippees to Pam for her response to Friend Alan Paxton's response on A Tentative Quaker's blog post on class and Quakerism. You should thank her too. I'd been composing a rant and gave that up when I read her response. My rant is no longer needed in the face of her common sense.

And it made me realize that ranting isn't what I want this blog to be. Even though the description is "questions, musings and rantings" on class and Quakerism.

I do want to say one thing about Alan Paxton's response which implies that some aspects of working class and poor culture are inconsistent with Quakerism. I think that if he had suggested that some aspects of African American or Hispanic or Arabic culture were inconsistent with Quakerism, there would have been an uproar across the Quaker blogosphere that would have lasted for weeks and perhaps leaped into the Friends Journal.

So what does the relative silence on Alan Paxton's post say about Friends and social class?

I'm also excited that Pam started a google group around class and Quakerism. I've joined and hope to make some pages and stuff there soon.

On a more personal note, I've been to Quaker events three times since Gathering and two of those times, I've wept, feeling my sense of isolation very deeply. I see people and think of interactions we've had in the past and see some class oppression. I see class-influenced interactions as I watch people. My tenderness and anger makes me scared to go to anything Quaker. I wish I lived in a place like Philadelphia where I had my choice of Meetings and could go somewhere and worship anonymously so perhaps I won't at least see history.

Blessings,

Jeanne

Just Do It

2007-08-20T16:00:00.000-05:00

I am very task-oriented and I always thought that was just a personal tendency or preference. It is and it's not.

While I'm task-oriented, I hate doing tasks for very long. I think if I worked in a shirtwaist factory in 1910, I would not have been mentally stable. But I've been taught to do tasks as I'm told to do them, and to do them right. I've been taught that doing tasks is how I can contribute to and be valued by the world. So I do it because I don't know any other way.

A couple of weeks ago, when I found out that a dear F/friend's mother had died, I offered to organize a Nightingales-type sing for her(Nightingales is a Northern Yearly Meeting subgroup that meets to sing four to five times a year around the region). I, along with my partner Liz (who actually had the idea to do so), made sure the community knew about the sing, reserved a room in the Meeting House and made sure there was the right kind and quantity of food. We set up the room and arranged for folks to clean up. We turned off the lights at the end of the night. We just did it.

Today, I got a call from another F/friend who said that a beloved member of our community was in the hospital. She was asking me questions about whether a Nightingales-type sing could be arranged for this woman, one of the founders of Nightingales.

I was confused. I wondered why she didn't just do it. Or ask directly if I would be willing to organize such a thing.

"I wanted to make sure there were enough people interested in a sing."

By the time she could reach enough people to be sure there were enough interested, the woman would be out of the hospital, I ungenerously thought.

Quakers sometimes get caught up in talking about doing things (or worse yet, talking about talking about doing things), rather than doing them. This used to frustrate me to no end; and I used to think that my frustration made me a bad Quaker.

Before, I would have tried to stuff my frustration or offer to take on the task. This time I said, "When I organized [previous F/friend whose mother had died]'s sing, I just did it. Asked the email list people to send out an announcement, reserved the room. It didn't matter whether three or thirty people showed. [Woman in hospital] is a beloved member of this community. Enough people will come to sing with her."

She got defensive, but I assured her that I wasn't being critical, that I was just speaking plainly.

So I struggled with several things around class in this exchange.

1. Emotional honesty. One thing I learned in George's workshop is that working class folks are more emotionally honest and open, especially with anger. This is in stark contrast to middle/owning class folks who have been trained from childhood to keep emotions in check because emotions disrupt the work day (or assembly line or checkout line). I'm sure this F/friend heard frustration in my voice and that's why she got defensive. So how do I be who I am authentically and be effective at interacting with middle/owning class Friends?

2. Plain speaking/directness. Middle/owning class mores (and therefore also Quaker mores) say that truth shouldn't be spoken directly. Friends might have suggested that I couch my statements like this: "Maybe you could think about what things need to be done in order to organize such a sing. I could offer some suggestions based on my experience with the last sing if you would like." Ugh. Even as I write this, my "BS Meter" goes off and I feel tired. And I've tried doing things like this, and have been unsuccessful. Friends still see me, and how plainly I speak, as difficult.

3. My frustration with process. I used to be ashamed of this frustration in Quaker circles. But I'm starting to understand that I shouldn't be ashamed. I just don't know what to do with the frustration. I know sometimes process is important. Maybe she was thinking about getting "buy-in" from people so she would know that her work wasn't being done in vain. But why didn't I want to get "buy-in" from Friends when I organized the first sing? I don't think it was because I didn't care about whether my work was in vain. I think it was because I knew I was showing my love for this F/friend by organizing the sing and that if it were only me and that F/friend, it would be enough.

I don't know anymore if my frustration makes me a bad Quaker. Maybe it's the other way around: middle/owning class Quakerism makes me a frustrated Friend.

It's All Pam's Fault

2007-08-19T13:06:00.000-05:00

Yep, it's Pam's fault that I am starting a blog, in case you want to know.

Well, maybe it isn't Pam's fault, but Rich's fault. Or maybe I can blame this blog on George.

Okay, okay, I'll take responsibility. I'm starting this blog because I took George Lakey's workshop, Quakers and Social Class, at the 2007 Friends General Conference Gathering in River Falls, Wisconsin.

The workshop changed my life and I'm finding that I need to talk with others about my experience. I also want to share some of my new awarenesses around class and Quakers.

When I was in my late-teens and early twenties, I discovered feminism. Before then, I knew that men and women were supposed to be equal, and that women and men should be able to do the same kinds of work. But I hadn't known how deeply the patriarchy had affected my life. Things like how I dressed and how I expressed my sexuality.

Similarly, during that one week in July, I began to learn more deeply how class oppression has impacted my life. Like exactly what my elementary, middle and high school education taught me: to do tasks right. Middle class and owning class folks get an education that teaches them to manage people who do tasks. They learn process.

All of a sudden, the choices I made in my life around work made sense. The choices I wanted to make after graduating college this December make sense. And now I have to look at these choices in a new light.

I have always felt like I don't belong in middle class work settings. And I thought that meant there was something wrong with me, that I had some unknown flaw that kept me out of middle class social circles. I feel like I've tried to reach for more middle class jobs and friends, but that every time I've tried, I've had my hand metaphorically slapped away.

But what does any of this stuff have to do with Quakers?

Quakers are middle and owning class primarily. And I've felt like a terribly odd duck among Friends. I now know that some of this has to do with class.

This blog will be a personal and intimate view into finding my way with my new class glasses. If you're looking for theory about Quakers and class, Martin Kelly has a really interesting and apt view of Quakers and how we got to be so white and middle- and owning-class (and why we stay that way) in his comment to a Brooklyn Quaker post. I'm quoting Martin directly here because I couldn't figure out how to link to it directly:
"My working theory is that East Coast Quakerism became an ethnic group as much as a faith and that the last fifty years has seen us become a kind of self-selecting demographic sub-culture. You can see the phenomenon measuring all sorts of identity divisions: not just class but race and education. Most liberal Friends now are convinced, which means we haven't inherited this class structure.

I have to think that if we really believed what we say we believe we'd be reaching out more. We have all sorts of unwritten norms that have nothing to do with faith. If we cared less about our cultural sensitivies and more about sharing the good news (which is the same good news if you're a transit worker or university professor) then we'd see our meetinghouses fill up.

But how many East Coast Friends would really be that comfortable seeing a darker, more working class meeting that now has five times the membership and doesn't feel like the cozy oasis where we "recharge" ourselves for the coming week?"

If you want to talk about this theory or how to change it, go talk to Martin, Pam, Rich. Don't get me wrong. I think it's important to change Quaker culture to be "darker, more working class" than it is. Because I think Jesus's vision of his church was not as homogeneous as North American Quakers are.

But I'm clear right now that the only way I can tackle class and Quakers is to understand how to interact with middle and owning class folks, how to make new choices that respect the gifts I bring as someone who was raised working class, and how to discover and nurture my innate gifts that were stifled by class oppression.

This blog will explore my forays and foibles as I find my new way among Friends.