This post could be confused as Advanced Quaker Gossip™, so it is with some reluctance that I add my thoughts to it. Long-time writer Chuck Fager has dissected the matter well in his current post. I only need to add some local color to what he has already put down in words.
Why does it bother me so much about this issue, you say? It’s because Sharon Smith is, the subject of this post, as you will see, the epitome of a right-wing cultural stereotype, an angry black woman with radical politics demanding her way. I can even now see the reports on Fox News designed to make conservative viewers shake their heads. Tucker Carlson’s thoughts can’t be far away.
Quoting Fager:
Smith has several targets in SAYMA for this week’s session, seemingly a kind of makeup list. To start with, she demanded that the YM Planning Committee dis-invite Harold Weaver, their keynote plenary speaker. Weaver is a Black new England Friend, who is on Smith’s very long list of Black Friends she has quarreled with and lumps together as a gaggle of “desperate and despicable” hacks. (Their main infraction: differing from her diktats.)
Fortunately, however, the SAYMA Committee stuck to its choice and Weaver spoke. Smith also blasted a Tuesday workshop; it regrouped and took place on schedule.
Quakers are very decentralized. That’s part of the problem. SAYMA (South Appalachian Yearly Meeting and Association) is a grouping of monthly Meetings, where one Worships every First Day (Sunday). A yearly meeting is denoted as such because it conducts its formal business every year. A monthly meeting conducts its business every month. This is part of the problem. Getting everyone on board and managing Sharon Smith’s unruly behavior has been challenging. Some of us pity her. Some of us (myself included) believe that her disruptive conduct means we must “read her out”, regardless of how ill she may be, the Quaker term we use to formally disown someone. This is a controversial act, one very rarely enacted, particularly in this day and age, but in this situation, I think it is fully warranted.
All of us, as Friends, find Sharon to be a challenge to our personal theology, that is, to see that of God in everyone. Our founder, George Fox, commanded as much. And much like the Golden Rule, it is a supreme personal challenge and is not easily lived up to, as none of us are perfect beings. But as for Sharon, enough is enough.
This is what I see potentially happening if her behavior continues. I attended a Quaker Meeting on the East Coast where SIX separate Worships were held because people could not get along with each other. Sharon’s behavior has caused significant schism within SAYMA and divided us. Many, if not most people would not tolerate her conduct, particularly not the outside world that does not hold itself to such exacting standards to be better, Godly people. And, as I noted above, we have bent over backwards and given her the benefit of the doubt for years. Quakers have short fuses with politics, but sometimes exhaustingly long fuses with people.
This was not the first time Smith tried to torpedo a full SAYMA plenary: in 2016, she disrupted and completely derailed the plenary appearance of Vanessa Julye, a black staffer for Friends General Conference.
As these items suggest, SAYMA has been burdened with a succession of extraordinarily feeble officers, who have repeatedly failed to preserve any semblance of its good order in the face of Smith’s recurring threats and bullying. This is even more dismaying in the Zoom era, when effective relief is but a Mute/Remove Button away. She has also disrupted and shut down other workshops which SAYMA had approved but she disliked, even threatening physical violence.
As one basis for her vehement objections, Smith claims Indian as well as Black ancestry — not only ancestry, but rank and authority as an Indian elder, beyond and over that of any other among the many Indian tribal groups in the Southeast. But she indignantly refuses to offer any evidence for those claims, condemning such requests (like all opposition) as nothing but proof of white Quaker racism. This despite the fact that inquiries last year among NC Indian groups failed to turn up anyone who had heard of her, or the repeatedly declared exalted status.
Yet another cultural stereotype. In short, this woman is toxic, and her continued presence amongst us makes us more and more unhealthy. I am unwilling to enable her behavior any longer, though I recognize I know I will have supporters and detractors in making this post. In the end, someone’s going to have to make a judgement call, even through the Quaker decision making process is often slower than molasses.
To return to Fager:
However, a Friend from Amesbury, Massachusetts, Kathleen Wooten, also reported to Friends Journal in October 2014, that despite many diligent efforts, she had been unable to find any trace of this “meeting”, or evidence of it ever having met at all. In response, Smith shrugged off Wooten’s report, yet all but admitted her Cape Cod “Cuffee Meeting” had been a fiction.
Fast forward to 2021: after almost two years, I have seen no evidence that Smith’s Southeastern Cuffee “revival” is any more real. In her enemies list post Smith said the new Cuffee attenders were “POC who wish to worship in the manner of Friends without having to deal with Quaker racism (i. e., SAYMA)” — no “dealings,” that is, except that their “clerk” was and is determined to grab a big chunk of SAYMA’s “white racist” money.
I’ll speak plainly here: this whole scheme sounds like a grift. A shakedown. A scam. No SAYMA officer with fiduciary responsibility should go anywhere near it. There are many other racial equity groups which SAYMA could support which follow sound and honest financial practices, and don’t deliver their requests wrapped in harangues, threats and abuse.
At last year’s budget session, when Smith’s same $10,000 demand was presented, it was met with a very loud chorus of “No!” from the Zoom assembly.
What I also object to strongly is the very real specter of people of color using white people and their guilt complexes in manipulative fashion. These complexes are the product of white people meaning to do right, finally, with the very best of intentions, intending to make amends for centuries of generational trauma. Smith’s approach is itself a cynical playbook ripped straight out of Rush Limbaugh. And, in my humble opinion, we must say “Stop!”, even if it is a challenge to do so. Let’s call a spade a spade. We are being used by someone with malevolent intentions.
Fager concludes:
One wonders what the answer will be this time. In earlier posts, we reported that many individual Friends spoke of being so disheartened by this seemingly endless ordeal, that not a few were thinking of leaving SAYMA or Quakerism entirely, in the wake of it. A year later, I’m hearing more such echoes.
I wish I didn’t believe them.
But I do.