Last month I attended two presentations by the new AFSC Director of Quaker Engagement, Brian Blackmore, at Durham and Chapel Hill Meetings here in North Carolina.

Blackmore, just a year in the job, is the successor to Lucy Duncan, a longtime AFSC staffer who was unceremoniously fired in early 2022 when she tried to start a staff uprising to stop a major internal reorganization.

The reorganization, however,  appears to be well underway. The same faces are at the top of the “Leadership Team” ladder, though many new faces and job titles are on the second and third rungs.  Blackmore is a new face, with an old title.

In the reorganization, “Quaker Engagement” was internally described in the category of public relations and promotion.

And sure enough, Blackmore’s presentations were essentially sales pitches.  They were accompanied by a slide show, much of which I collected via screenshots. His main ask was this:

In plain speech, “What can you do for AFSC?”

Like a good salesman, he had a batch of shiny objects to show: posters, brochures, and bright red tee shirts to give away. Early on, he sought to build rapport with a seemingly abstract query to discuss briefly:

As soon as I read it, the thing didn’t smell right: the statement seemed more like a backhanded bow to the tide of support for the Hamas attack, on so many campuses and other “intellectual” centers, but in a Fox News “Just asking questions” wrapper.

I also wondered about its provenance: Galtung (1930-2024) was a Norwegian scholar who practically invented what is now the international academic field of peace research; I haven’t read his work, but would he have tossed off such a flippant bit of cliche radicalism??

It turned out, this uneasiness was well-founded. The next day I cranked up the search engines, and found plenty of Galtung quotes, but no sign of him saying that.

Still, arguments from silence aren’t decisive. After all, his official website says Galtung published more than 150 books and 1500 scholarly papers. I scanned a few, and like much scholarly research (including mine), they were replete with quotes from other academics [credited: no professorial plagiarist he]. In all that print, there were  many opportunities to say what Blackmore attributed to him, or to quote it from someone else. But it didn’t show up.

So I suspected it was most likely neither. It was the Fair Wendy who found it, after carefully typing just the quote itself into the search line.

And there it was — but the author’s name was NOT Galtung. Instead, it was Paolo Freire:

Paolo Freire (1921-1997) was a progressive Brazilian educational theorist and activist. The quote is from his most famous book, published in 1968,  Pedagogy of the Oppressed. His biographers note that Freire wrote Pedagogy while in exile from Brazil, which was under a hostile military dictatorship.

In those years, his writings often referred favorably to Marx, Castro, Guevara, Fanon, Mao and other revolutionaries. But they argue that after the military government was

liberalized and replaced by civilian rule, Freire returned to Brazil in 1980, as an internationally-known educational reformer, and his views moderated. In his later work,  biographers argue that “Freire’s take on the role of armed struggle has taken a developmental mode. He has moved from a reformist to a revolutionary to a more critical stance. In other words, there is a movement of the overcoming of violence.”

According to his widow and a close coworker,  Friere “… never spoke, nor was he ever an advocate, of violence or of the taking of power through the force of arms. He was always, from a young age, reflecting on education and engaging in political action mediated by an educational practice that can be transformative.”

Still another biographer, Brian McLaren, asserts Freire’s views were much closer to those of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez, than the advocates of revolutionary violence.

But this post is not meant to debate the political views of Paolo Freire, or the need for better homework at AFSC. Nor, for that matter, about the views of Galtung [BTW it’s Johan Galtung, not Johanne, as misspelled on the slide]. Rather it left me wondering what the point of this exercise was; maybe it was a way to glide past the hazards of a debate about Israel/Hamas and Gaza?  (We’ll come back to that in a few minutes.)

Certainly Blackmore wanted to focus on other AFSC programs he hoped we’d sign up for: There was a pledge to think twice before calling the police; webinars about migration to watch; a “North Star” document to endorse (dealing with abolishing prisons and the police); a campaign in Atlanta aiming to stop the building of “Cop City,” a large police training facility near there. And we should all call Congress about the long overdue farm bill.

There were a few more, but my attention wandered. I began to notice that  the time for the session was almost up, while two questions that I was waiting to hear had been left hanging unspoken, like invisible elephants in the room. Actually, I’ve been waiting in vain for years to hear those questions asked by someone from AFSC. . . .

What are they?

Nope; not this one. Heard it often. And —

. . . Not this one either:

Okay, no more suspense: here are the Unasked Questions:

That’s right. I’ve been waiting to hear one or both of those questions from AFSC for decades. And why?

In the Durham talk, Brian explained why: he noted that during its first 40 or so years, AFSC was made up mostly of Quakers, it worked alongside Quakers, consulted often with Quakers, and it helped especially young  and new Quakers learn the practice of hands-on Quaker witness and service. There was back and forth.

“But then,” he said, “we stopped.” Stopped hiring Quakers, working with young Quakers, consulting Quakers. All that old stuff was dumped, and replaced with something called “engagement.”

Which seems to mean shoveling a whole lot of extra stuff onto our already pretty packed agendas, doing an occasional dog and pony show with no more than five minutes for “discussion” and maybe handing out a few tee shirts? And don’t think we didn’t notice the “Donor Liaison” fundraiser with Brian at Durham;  AFSC still wants the hefty checks it collects here.

Well, any reader of Paolo Freire should know that’s the road to a failed relationship, not to mention a failed revolution. His whole career was built around promoting change that grew out of, and stays authentic by continued dialogue and concrete cooperation among equals.

One other reason it’s a failure is because, at least here, in Durham and Chapel Hill, not asking those questions means AFSC doesn’t keep up with a lot of important Quaker stuff that’s going on.

I mean, Carolina may be flyover country to some folks, but anybody who lives here and is conscious can see that we’re smack dab in the middle of many of the most intense challenges confronting our larger society and the world.

Look around: we’ve got fascists running a major party race to consolidate an authoritarian state government, this year. We’ve got industrial farm animal waste output that’s the worst in the nation: 150 million tons of toxic polluting poop produced every single day. We’re also host to many of the most secret units and biggest bases of the U. S. war machine.

Oh — and did somebody mention racism? (Actually, I don’t recall Brian bringing it up); we have the legacy of 350 years of it to cope with, and I think we had accomplished a lot; but oh Lord, the pushback tide is rising again.

There’s more too, but that’s a start. So when somebody comes from AFSC far away and talks to us like their programs are relief supplies for peasants who haven’t a clue and are stuck on the couch, well, for some of us anyway, it’s a pretty tough sell.

Because we’ve not only got a boatload of problems, but we’re already pretty busy taking them on. Plus we think we’ve learned a thing or two, and even know how to form our own action committees. (In fact, Quakers been doing that in Carolina for 340 years, by the way.) One might even say, we’re overloaded.

And we also understand about organizational colonialism. (Freire was big on exposing and, pardon the expression, dismantling that.) Hmmm, colonize rhymes with patronize, and that is something with which I just don’t sympathize, and would rather like to exorcise.

And there’s one more thing: Gaza.

Blackmore mentioned it several times, even had a moment of silence for the victims. He also had several items to show & tell: a call to start study groups for an AFSC  book of Palestinian writing and poetry; endorse AFSC’s minute on the war, and sign on to a nascent campaign of boycotts & sanctions aimed at Israeli apartheid policies.

Brian didn’t give a lot of detail, but this one sounded like BDS 2.0., calling on endorsers to boycott Israel and firms who do business with it.

There was more: weekly action calls for various protest efforts.
To the extent that these initiatives are aimed at building pressure for a ceasefire and release of hostages & prisoners, and opening gates for major relief efforts, and accountability for war crimes, I’m for them.

But again, there was something missing from this part of the presentations. Something small, but big: one word: HAMAS.

I think Brian spoke the word once at Durham, in passing, but neither Wendy nor I heard it at all in Chapel Hill.

That’s not okay with me. All the AFSC protest initiatives described here were aimed at Israel. Yes, lots of Israeli policies & practices need drastic revision. But for me that’s only one side of this awful war, and it is a grave error to thus ignore the other side, namely Hamas, its Holocaust-echoing charter, and the frightening rise of antisemitism. If I ever carry a sign, it will look something like this:

The framing of this conflict as Israel = The Oppressor, Hamas = the innocent Oppressed — I don’t buy it. (I also part company with Freire here, as he did much to popularize this Manichean  Marxist outlook during his radical period.)

But, do I have a plan to fix this mutually destructive cycle of carnage?

No. But in my ignorance, I am in a large, distinguished company. This bloody cycle seems to have defeated the most dedicated efforts of some of the best and wisest of the last several generations. What more can I do but mind the Light, put one foot in front of the other, and “Let my Yea be Yea, and my Nay be Nay.”

And in light of this latter mandate, that tilt in AFSC’s stance is obvious, overwhelming, and unworthy of its history and heritage.

Only one of Brian Blackmore’s slides escaped that twisted frame: the one that recalled a headline about the Quaker delegation, including Rufus Jones, sailing to Nazi Germany to plead for release of Jewish prisoners. I have read that they had more success with the press than with those who were building the gas ovens; but their mission still took courage and faith.

When AFSC finds its way out of this morass, I for one will be ready to hear that story, slides and all.

Ready. Even without a tee shirt giveaway.