Friends discuss equality and inclusion within Quakerism
‘What are the costs of refusing to examine terms and language use that we know offends?’
Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) staff member Edwina Peart spoke more about diversity, inclusion and equality in the Society of Friends at a Woodbrooke event last month.
Reflecting on her recent article in Friends Quarterly, BYM’s inclusion and diversity coordinator discussed the challenges of unifying the equality agenda within Quakerism. ‘What are the costs of refusing to examine terms and language use that we know offends?’ she asks.
In her article in Friends Quarterly, she wrote about how, undertaking her role, she ‘gradually detected resistance’ within the Society, including towards ‘a survey intending to establish a baseline for how diverse we actually are’. She also noticed ‘assumptions about how black people prefer to worship, the class divide in and across Meetings, the relationship between sex and gender, and the power behind whose story is told’. There were also ‘reports, minutes and data on earlier attempts to chart diversity and build a more inclusive faith. Solutions were proposed but apparently not adopted’.
Moving forward, she wrote, ‘it’s vital that we unify the equality agenda’. This involves building a narrative that ‘that doesn’t segment various manifestations of discrimination and injustice into discrete categories, because this tends to rank and prioritise inequalities. They are all linked’.
The event on 23 March was hosted by Woodbrooke.
