what quakers & quaker meetings can do to foster racial justice

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Berkeley Friends Meeting
Minute on Engagement to Uproot and Dismantle Racism (.pdf)

Berkeley Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends acknowledges the centrality, depth, and pervasiveness of systemic racism in the United States. Continuing revelations of history, experience, and conscience challenge Friends to live up to the Light, increasing awareness of how we, our communities, and our institutions perpetuate the structure of racism. We must help one another discern what Spirit calls us to do individually and collectively. We must work towards “a positive peace which is the presence of justice”, as Martin Luther King Jr. said in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”.

We utterly reject racism in all its manifestations. People are suffering and dying daily as a result of systemic racial bias within and across institutions and economic structures, which reproduces inequity and discrimination for people of color and unearned advantage for others. We call upon ourselves as Friends to illuminate, uproot, and dismantle white privilege because it is used to maintain white dominance.

Systemic racism creates a barrier to living fully into our deepest Quaker values as reflected in all of our testimonies. We seek to bring about a truly inclusive, compassionate, welcoming Religious Society of Friends through which our individual lives speak to our collective belonging to one another and the world. We commit to the anti-racist work of healing and transforming to make foundational change in ourselves, our Meeting and the world. We commit equally to the work of dismantling the political and economic structures of racism and to valuing the real beauty in human difference.

Approved 4/11/2021
Berkeley, California

This minute is gratefully adapted from the Minute on Engagement to Uproot and Dismantle Racism adopted by Strawberry Creek Monthly Meeting.

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