Tower and Town, May 2021

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Clergy Letter: A Quaker View

I was prompted to write this article by taking part in a Quaker webinar on the legacy of slavery prompted by a series of discussions that has been held since Black Lives Matter protests began. Throughout the last year there have been a lot of programmes on Black history which have stimulated more thought. I began to realise that underlying our whole society and institutions there was such a lot to learn from the fact that the wealth that enabled the industrial revolution was based on the slave trade and our empire, and the exploitation of the slaves that ran the sugar plantations, tobacco and rum industries. At the time, many people thought slavery was justified but they never addressed what it might have been like to be a slave.

We Quakers have a testimony to Equality and Truth. It is an aspiration rather than commandment but we are constantly reminded to reflect on it.

We are encouraged to look at the sense of equality of all people, not ignoring the huge diversity and variety of humanity, but recognising the worth, the value, the sacredness of mankind and respecting people's humanness, whether men or women, rich or poor, white or black, gay or straight, sinners or devout. George Fox summed it up for us saying 'there is that of God in everyone'. In a letter from prison in 1656 he wrote:

'Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in everyone.'

Although Quakers are often mentioned as important in the abolition of slavery, they also were slave owners and had to fight within their own communities to overcome it. Slaves had no control over their lives, they were in the charge of others.

As we begin to unlock from Covid restrictions there are many things on which we need to think, and reflect and take action to address; particularly the inequalities that exist in our society and why those ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented in the poorer areas of our society. We as a society need to reflect deeply and address the inconvenient truths that underlie the structure of our society. The poor have become poorer, the rich have become richer - so much for 'Levelling Up'.

Rachel Rosedale