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.