It’s so bizarre that some of the people most rocking the old do-no-wrong Quaker mythologies today are non-Quaker political conservatives. Exhibit A has to be Christian nationalist Abby Abildness’s obsession with William Penn but this week The Washington Post profiled “anti-woke” dingbat Kali Fontanilla (non paywalled link).
She told her students how Quakers formed some of the first anti-slavery organizations in American history. How Quakers boycotted sugar, cotton and other goods produced through slave labor. She spoke about how Quakers lacked official clergy and advocated spiritual equality for men and women.
She did not mention that 19th-century slaveholding Quakers sometimes offered financial compensation to the enslaved people they freed. Or that, in 2022, British Quakers committed to make reparations for their past involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism.
Asked about this, Kali said in an interview that she knows not all Quakers were perfect, and that some owned slaves, but that her lesson was meant to give a contrast and a balance to the “overemphasis” on reparations coming from the left. She also noted that some Quakers have become “very left-leaning now.”
So does this mean we’ve retconned the Underground Railroad as a right-leaning enterprise? Perhaps. I think intentionally confusing political terms like left and right and playing dumb about history of U.S. political parties changing positions is part of the so called “anti-woke” agenda. It also an attempt to delegitimize modern-day Friends who might a) know their history (surprise!, there were eighteenth century Friends advocating reparations) and b) have well-informed and contrary opinions.
I’m glad the article does actually push back at some of the Fontanilla’s half-truths but it’s bad journalism to put the counter arguments near the end of the article where casual readers might miss them.
It’s even worse journalism to not have bothered to interview a Quaker historian. When profiling someone spewing inaccurate information, it’s common journalistic practice to let them go on for the first three or so paragraphs — enough time for them to incriminate themselves — and then bring in some experts to provide a series of quotes that will take down the preceding nonsense. Just a few minutes on the phone with a legit historian of early Quaker slaveholding and abolition — and some better pacing — would have made this a far better article. The mainstream press really needs to commit to practice aggressively fact-based reporting, even on throw-away profile articles like this, even if it risks being called woke.
As I’ve said many times before, there’s a lot of lot of things to be proud of in Quaker history but we’ve also gotten a lot of things wrong. Our positions on issues like slavery, native relations, and prison reform all have had mixed results. In the past it was common for Friends to over-emphasize and over-mythologize the good, as these modern-day non-Quakers continue to do. Nowadays some Friends over-emphasize the bad history, which also has its problems. I think it’s important to embrace both so we can understand how our traditions have led us to past discernments that were radically liberatory and also how our process has backfired on a number of issues.
Friends Journal 