A Conversation with Gil George | Part 1
Gil grew up among refugees fleeing genocide and civil war. His parents had bought a rundown mansion on the far edge of New York City to welcome refugees. He lived between two housing projects, so the neighborhood school had its own wars.
In this interview he talks about "the trauma of belonging" these refugees faced. He points out that some people's sense of belonging may be fragile, and the undertones of what is said can be more painful. With help from Walter Brueggemann's Spirituality of the Psalms, he takes what he learned from his experiences, and applies it to Sierra-Cascades.
Gil is a member of West Hills Friends. This is Part I of the interview.
Judy Maurer
First, how would you introduce yourself?
Gil George
Oh, I usually just say, I'm Gil George. Probably my primary role in life is silly daddy.
Judy Maurer
Silly daddy?
Gil George
Ya. I currently work for Friends World Committee for Consultation, Section of the Americas as their operations manager. And I'm a member of West Hills Friends in Portland, Oregon.
Judy Maurer
When you were assistant clerk, you talked about having grown up in Philadelphia?
Gil George
New York and Philadelphia
Judy Maurer
Tell me about that?
Gil George
The neighborhood I grew up in in Queens was probably one of the most diverse chunks of real estate in the globe. If you drew a 10 block circle around the house I lived in, you would find at least 17 different cultures and each in enough number that you couldn't pigeonhole. In our neighborhood, there was an Ethiopian community, a Nigerian community, a Haitian community, a Dominican community, a Puerto Rican community, Cuban community, Ecuadorian community. And I could go on and on. There were folks from all over, you know—there was a significant Liberian population. Also Vietnamese and Cambodian and Laotian.
Judy Maurer
And why did it end up like that? Were they first generation immigrants?
Gil George
Mostly yes. So I lived in Far Rockaway, Queens, which is just across the bay from Kennedy Airport. And I got to know this because my parents bought a 15-room, kind of rundown mansion. We did refugee resettlement out of our house. So I have lived with folks from over 27 different countries throughout my life.
Judy Maurer
Wow. And was that part of an organization?
Gil George
There were a lot of folks in my parents' church who felt that call. Our church became a center of refugee resettlement in New York City. Our worship services were in three languages -usually it was English and either Tigrinya or Amharic for Ethiopians, or Cambodian or Vietnamese.
Judy Maurer
Really? Worship was in all of those languages? How did that work?
Gil George
We'd sing the same songs, just in different languages. So we would have the overhead projector and we would have the English and the Ethiopian and the either Vietnamese or Cambodian. And so we all sang the same song together in different languages.
Judy Maurer
That's kind of metaphorical, in a way.
Gil George
Yeah. Part of why I have the skill I have at fitting in wherever I go, is because I grew up in a house where I literally walked from one culture to another, just by changing rooms. I go up on the third floor and I'm in Guyana. I go across the hall from the Guyanese room, and I'm in Colombia. I go downstairs, I'm in Ethiopia. I go down to the basement and I'm in Jamaica.
Judy Maurer
And then when you are with your parents, you were?
Gil George
My parents are Heinz 57. I'm Irish, Welsh, German and Sicilian. So I developed the ability to culturally read a room, almost the instant I step into it.
Judy Maurer
I bet. That's really interesting.
Gil George
We talk about missionary kids being third culture kids. Well, I kind of jokingly call myself a reverse missionary kid. I didn't have to go anywhere. Everybody came to me.
Judy Maurer
A third culture kid. I'm not sure I remember what that is?
Gil George
The first is the kid’s parents’ culture, and then the culture they live in, and the third is the culture the family creates at home. They don't feel like they belong either in their home culture or in the culture where they were planted. And that has definitely been something that has followed me for most of my life, where I fit in on an external level, because I've developed that adaptation skill, but the dark side of that adaptation skill is that it's an adaptation skill. And I don't necessarily always feel like I belong where I'm at.
Judy Maurer
That sounds lonely.
Gil George
Yes. It can be very lonely.
Judy Maurer
I can imagine. My parents were urban New Englanders and I grew up in rural Arizona. I'd go to a very conservative Maricopa County public school and then walk into liberal New England at home. So three of us four siblings married dual nationals. So what was your school like?
Gil George
School was a very diverse place. The schools I went to for most of my life were pretty rough. I lived at the midway point between two housing projects in New York because at the time, Far Rockaway was kind of the human dumping ground of New York City.
We were at the very edge of the city. The peninsula Far Rockaway is four square miles. In that four square miles were about 250,000 people. And a vast majority of those 250,000 people were living in the projects, which were housing developments—you know, tall buildings that were not necessarily in the greatest of repair and where New York City warehoused their poor.
Judy Maurer
They're not designed for community, as I remember.
Gil George
No. I lived right between the Redfern projects and the Arverne projects. I witnessed a murder when I was 12. Because I was like, halfway between the two projects. So, you know, if there was a fight going on, that would be my neighborhood and it overflowed into the schools I went to. There were a lot of fights. When you have that level of background trauma in a public school, it shows up in hard ways.
Judy Maurer
Like, how?
Gil George
Well you know—the bullying, the fights. There was some ethnic violence that occurred, because you had folks who were coming here fleeing civil wars. This was in the 80s. So you were at the height of the crack epidemic and you had a bunch of Ethiopians who are coming, fleeing the famine that followed their civil war. You had a bunch of Cambodians who were fleeing Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. And you had Vietnamese folks who were fleeing their violence. You had folks who were coming from Liberia fleeing that civil war.
So you have all of these folks with a high level of background trauma, all dumped together in the same four-square mile plot of land, so it could be a bit of a pressure cooker. It was also when the Howard Beach incident happened—a group of white teenagers chased a couple of black guys out into a freeway.
Gil George
And that created, like, major racial tensions, and me being in the neighborhood I was in... There were times I was riding the bus to school, and a bunch of people would see me on the bus and I would see this group of people approaching the bus chanting “Howard Beach” and the bus driver would floor it.
Judy Maurer
Oh, my. To protect you? To protect himself?
Gil George
Any or all of the above.
Judy Maurer
How old were you?
Gil George
I was like, 11, 12, 13. Right in there.
Judy Maurer
Wow. That's a really rough growing up.
Gil George
Yeah. And then we moved to Philly. And if you thought New York had some racial tensions, you ain't seen nothing until you saw Philly.
Judy Maurer
Really? The City of Brotherly Love?
Gil George
The City of Brotherly Shove. Philly made New York look like a model of peace and harmony. I mean, in Philly, the different kinds of white people hated each other.
Judy Maurer
Oh, that's true. Yeah, that's Boston.
Gil George
It's like everybody hated everybody. It was more based on neighborhood really, than skin color or ethnicity in a lot of ways.
Judy Maurer
Was it socio-economic, kinda?
Gil George
Oh, yeah.
Judy Maurer
Tell me about that.
Gil George
So when I first moved to Philly, my parents put me in a private school. Mainly because when we were on our way to tour the neighborhood school, the SWAT team was going in.
Judy Maurer
That would do it! You turned out really well, though.
Gil George
I actually ended up getting kicked out of that private school. Because it was in a PCA Church, which is the Presbyterian Church of America. After being around them for a while, my dad called them the “Pure Caucasian Association.”
Judy Maurer
Your dad must have been a really interesting person. But go on.
Gil George
Oh, yes. Definitely very conservative, very Calvinistic in their outlook. Yeah, I did not fit in well, especially coming from New York and being the outspoken person that I was...
Judy Maurer
Oh, you were outspoken? In that milieu you were outspoken?
Gil George
Oh, yeah. Well, let's just say my extroverted personality has not changed that much over the years. My wife bought me a keychain after we were married a couple of years. The keychain said, “Everyone is entitled to my opinion.”
Judy Maurer
When you were on the Coordinating Committee, I didn't think of you that way
Gil George
I have grown...
Judy Maurer
I appreciated you as somebody who was really helpful at cutting through..
Gil George
That's part of my upbringing and my training
Judy Maurer
..and very attuned to trauma.
Gil George
Yes, very attuned to trauma, but also very attuned to what's actually going on in the room, versus what's being said. Yes, you know, there you learn to read between the lines, and to hear kind of what people mean, beyond what they say.
Judy Maurer
Oh, yes, you would have had to develop that skill. That was really helpful on Coordinating, too.
Gil George
Thank you.
Gil George
And one of the things that I've seen is, especially for folks that are displaced who are in another space, they talk in code, because they don't want to offend the host nation that they're in. And so these patterns of communication develop. And what's really interesting is there's a guy, Dan Smith-Christopher, who has been looking at [the Old Testament] since we have so many displaced people, and we know that a lot of the Old Testament was written by displaced peoples…
Judy Maurer
Oh, that's a good point.
Gil George
… so, what are the things that are being said underneath that are encoded—kind of like the Christians didn't call Rome "Rome" when they were talking smack. They called them Babylon
Judy Maurer
Revelation?
Gil George
Yup. So, if you look at it that way, it's a very common human thing, especially for oppressed people groups when they're expressing themselves, to speak more in code. During my time on Coordinating Committee I felt like as a yearly meeting it had undergone trauma, especially trauma around belonging.
Judy Maurer
Yes. Oh, good point. Very good point.
Gil George
You know, it's not even a conscious thing. We're speaking in code for fear of the loss that we just experienced happening again.
Judy Maurer
Oh, expand on this. This is great.
Gil George
You know, I had my own trauma out of it, as did others, but some folks had compounded trauma, especially our LGBTQ Friends.
Judy Maurer
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Gil George
They were experiencing this well before the rest of us experienced it.
One of the things I have really tried to do in my leadership is to try to listen beyond the surface—to really be paying attention to what belonging messages we're sending by the choices of words, the choices of people, the choices of which voices get heard at quarterly gathering, at other gatherings. When I was approached by Nominating originally, it was about being co-clerk. I didn't feel like having me as a white guy in a main leadership role was what the yearly meeting really needed. And I think keeping the tone of our leadership as female, and that we could be led by LGBTQ persons in the "highest" position of visible leadership, like that was really important. Yeah, like visual for the health of our meeting.
Judy Maurer
Also, I find it really helpful—that perspective.
Gil George
Yeah. Really helpful. I personally enjoy being like the number two person, right.
Judy Maurer
Yeah, I do, too. It is its own gift, in a way. Can you give an example of the code, or how the way we speak in code sometimes displaces people? That's fascinating.
Gil George
So when I think about some of the interactions my family had with refugees, and in the ways they talked about their past experiences were done in ways not—I'm not going to say that minimized what they experienced—but were not wanting to overwhelm the nice people who took them in. And I didn't really notice that until I saw it shatter.
There was a woman who had just had a rather rough day and was having a conversation with my mother. She just completely broke down and started talking about when she was separated from her family in the middle of a battle. And how going back the next day after the battle, she was looking for family members, flipping bodies over. And those kinds of conversations didn't really happen often—that was the exception. I was about 12 or 13, somewhere in there. Part of it is they wanted to protect the nice people from it all, but I also think that they didn't want to be rejected by their new place for being broken.
You might remember a lot of my push during my time as assistant clerk was really to be cautious around the stories and the folks who looked like they were doing just fine; they may not have been doing just fine. It was like my experience from living with refugees and others who face significant belonging trauma. They may have a sense of wanting to protect what feels like a fragile sense of belonging. We're not going to hear about the depth of the wounds, because they don't want to speak about it. They don't want it to appear like they can't handle being in community with us because they can't afford to lose more.
Judy Maurer
Belonging Trauma. That's a really interesting phrase. I hadn't heard it before.
Gil George
I just made it up!
Judy Maurer
It's very timely, because we did talk about that—just now, just in our last meeting of Coordinating. How we subtly push people out or say, "we are we and you are other."
Gil George
Yep.
Judy Maurer
In all sorts of ways. Is that the kind of thing...?
Gil George
Yeah, I'm talking about that a little bit. But also for folks whose sense of belonging is more fragile. They're going to be much more cautious and not as forthcoming as somebody who doesn't have that same fragility to their sense of belonging.
Judy Maurer
And that fragility—they come by it naturally. So how, how did you make sense of that at 11 years old, or 12 years old?
Gil George
Oh, I didn't. That's the kind of thing that takes a long time to make any kind of sense out of.
Judy Maurer
I bet.
Gil George
And you know, I'll be frank. It still doesn't make sense to me. In some ways, I hope it never does.
Because I don't want mass genocide to ever make sense. Some of the people who I've lived with have been targets of genocidal regimes.
Judy Maurer
I went to a Latino Mennonite church for a while and there were refugees from genocide. And the pastor had tried to protect people from genocide in Guatemala and in some ways failed. And when he tried to talk about it, he couldn't. He just couldn't.
Gil George
Yep.
Judy Maurer
So, do you have advice for us about our sense of belonging, and our belonging trauma that some people feel more acutely than others in Sierra-Cascades?
Gil George
I think the greatest salve we have is gentleness—to really be gentle with each other. And realize that there are many things that may never be spoken that are impacting what goes on in our monthly meetings, in our yearly meeting, in our business gatherings. There's a whole lot of subtext that we need to keep in mind. And to really consider, what are the ways we can be gentle with each other? When is conflict naturally going to arise? How do we say, “we may be in conflict, but we still belong to each other?”
Judy Maurer
That's a good point.
Gil George
I mean, we wouldn't be in conflict if it wasn't important to us.
Sierra Cascades has an opportunity to model what loving conflict can look like. Where we can have disagreements about things like faith and practice, and still sit down at the table together, and eat and laugh and hug our kids and be in some ways, the family for each other, that we may not necessarily have had—even if we don't quite get where somebody else is coming from on something.
Judy Maurer
Yes. I remember Mike Huber talking about how we're "a community of communities." Some of the communities are different from each other. Oh, and what does a loving conflict look like?
Gil George
To me, a loving conflict means, first of all, acknowledging the conflict exists.
Because if the conflict is brushed over, that's not lovingly engaging in it. That's avoidance. I have worked in the business world. I'm currently the operations manager for a nonprofit. I've been a minister. Nothing destroys any kind of organization more quickly than avoided conflict.
Judy Maurer
Yes. Quakers are very good at avoided conflict.
Gil George
Oh, Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren—I've been part of all three peace churches. All three fall into that pacifist aggressive mentality.
Judy Maurer
Yeah. (much laughter)
Gil George
And in a lot of ways, the ways we avoid conflict end up doing more damage than engaging in the conflict would.
Judy Maurer
Yes. It takes courage, though, to engage in the conflict.
Gil George
Yeah, and I do think that one of the more important roles of leaders in the Quaker community is holding folks to account for the ways we engage in conflict, and carrying the organization through the conflict.
Judy Maurer
Oh, that's very intriguing. Want to join Coordinating again?
Gil George
That is one of the key roles of leadership—is helping the organization navigate conflict. Because conflict is a step into a new space. You don't need leadership if you're just walking the same path every day. You need leadership when you're going somewhere you haven't been before.
If you're just walking the same path, you need managers… They are very important. Like, there's a lot of stuff at Sierra Cascades, that would not happen if we did not have folks who had those managerial gifts. But when it comes time to navigate the uncharted paths of conflict, we need leaders. We need leaders who are not just leading people through the conflict, but leading people in loving the people they're in conflict with.
Judy Maurer
Yes. And being sure that the loving is obvious to the loved person.
Gil George
Exactly. That is to me a key role—especially in a community like ours, that has the history that we have. We haven't had much in the way of models for how to walk through conflict well.
We have a lot of examples of how not to do it! And yes, we can learn from that. But what would it look like for some of the conflicts that are currently going through Sierra-Cascades? We have meetings right now, that are literally in existential crisis.
Judy Maurer
We do.
Gil George
What, does it look like for us as Sierra Cascades to say, “you are not alone. You've got Sierra Cascades with you. And you know, what, you? We're here for you. And we know you're experiencing conflict, and we're here to love you through that conflict. I spoke at two meetings recently. My own being one of them. And I gave very similar messages at each of them. I was talking about -- I don't know if you're familiar with Walter Brueggemann's commentary on the Psalms..
Judy Maurer
I love Walter Brueggemann's commentary on the Psalms.
Gil George 38:19
He talks about orientation, disorientation and reorientation. One of the things I'm talking about is how the transition from disorientation to re-orientation can actually be more fraught for a community than the disorientation itself.
Judy Maurer
Talk to me as if I had never read Brueggemann's book.
Gil George
Okay, he's talking specifically about the Psalms. "God is great! He's the Creator! He's awesome! We love God! Nothing goes wrong when you're following God!” That's the psalms of orientation.
The psalms of disorientation are what happens when that runs into a brick wall. And those psalms have a very different tone. It's like, "Okay, God, where are you? What the heck are you doing? If you're really there, could you please get off your hindquarters and do something?"
Judy Maurer
Yes. I'm poured out like water, my heart is melted.. [Psalm 22]
Gil George
Exactly. And then you have the Psalms of re-orientation, which are like, "okay, the storms of life have passed, and looking back, I can see where God was present. And I can see how God was present in a way I couldn't while I was going through it all.”
A lot of our meetings and our yearly meeting are going through that rough process between disorientation and reorientation. Some of us are all the way in re-orientation. Some of us are still really disoriented.
How do we sit next to each other faithfully and mourn with those who are mourning and rejoice with those who are rejoicing?
Judy Maurer
Another one of my favorite scriptures. [Romans 12: 15]
That not's very American, by the way.
Gil George
How do we hold that tension in a way that that tension is dynamic, rather than destructive? Because it's a tension. It is a big tension. And like any other tension, if it is not stewarded well, it can become destructive.
But if it is stewarded well, it can be a source of energy and power.
Judy Maurer
Yes. What is stewarding it well, do you think?
Gil George
One, it involves those of us who are in slightly more privileged positions, to be upfront about our rejoicing, to be upfront about our mourning, but also to recognize that there are voices that are not being heard that need to be. And to use our positions of privilege, or if you want to call them, in “named authoritative roles” to lift up the voices of those who feel like they're not being heard.
Or to truly be present to each other. Not trying to fix, not trying to push somebody into wholeness, not trying to hold others back. As soon as we start trying to push people to process faster, or to pull people back to process slower, we run right into Newton's third law of motion. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
If you tell me to hurry up and get over it, my heels are gonna get dug in.
Judy Maurer
That's right. Besides, it's not up to us, anyway. We are responsible for our own processing.
Gil George
Exactly. And part of that is just not trying to make other people feel better, but allowing them to feel exactly as they are.
And to not say, "hey, you need to be feeling better by now." Because we don't know the fullness of the burden that somebody else carries. And what we need to say is NOT "it's all part of God's plan," or "things will work out for the better."
Be like, "No, I'm here. I love you." And that's all we need to say. "I'm here, I love you." And if we notice that there's some dishes that need to be done, maybe doing some dishes, or some laundry or something else.
I mean, what would it look like if the rest of us and Sierra-Cascades said, "Hey, okay, we noticed that we've got a couple of meetings that are struggling right now. What would it look like if we had like, two or three people from each of our meetings, joining them—pretty well joining them—over zoom? On a weekly basis; and that's like, part of our ministry, it's just joining them and being present. You know, not necessarily speaking, other than like, Hey, it's good to see you. I just wanted to pop in because I've been thinking about you.
Judy Maurer
Yeah, my difficulty with that is then I would have to not be at my own meeting, which is my place of comfort and all that.
Gil George
Yeah. But to say, Okay, who are our friends among us who are that kind of traveling minister?
Judy Maurer
That is a good point.
Gil George
You know, and really start thinking about how we may be a series of different communities, but we are not without our connections.
Maybe it looks like saying, "Hey, we've got a little room in our budget this month, maybe we need to send a couple 100 bucks over to, you know, meeting X, so that they don't feel like they're trying to do it all themselves."
Judy Maurer
Yes. Now, this is where at least the conflict rubs a bit is where the church is trying to run itself as an organization. So then you have decisions to make, and it's hard because one person wants to do one thing, and another person wants to do another. And people's ability to not take it personally differ—when someone disagrees with them.
Gil George
That's the point where those of us who have leadership gifts are called to step in and say, "it seems to me like you're taking this in a way it may not be intended."
And to say, “I hear how you're interpreting it, and I don't think that's how they intended it. And maybe it would be better not to have a big discussion in the room in front of everybody. Maybe if you want me to go with you, maybe we can have a conversation with that person, so that they can understand the impact their words had. And maybe we can come to a good resolution together.”
This way, they're not facing it alone but we're not letting a conflict fester either.
Because the longer you let these kinds of things sit, the longer you keep something brushed under the rug, the worse the rug smells.
Judy Maurer
(laughs) We have some pretty smelly rugs around.
Gil George
Because there's no way you're going to not have conflict when you've got a bunch of humans together. But if our starting place is that everybody in the room has access to the voice of God, then maybe in conflict, we need to say, "Okay, where is God speaking through each of us who is engaged in this conflict?”
Because my experience with conflict over decisions, be they important or not as important, is that a long term solution is usually not found in one side or the other, but in pieces from both sides. It's very easy to forget in the heat of the moment, especially if we have a lot of emotional investment—especially if we feel like the rejection of our ideas is the rejection of ourselves.
Judy Maurer
Yes. That's kind of human, too.
Gil George
Yeah. Part of the difficult role of leadership in a yearly meeting like ours, is reminding folks that we are not our ideas. People can love us and not love every idea that we have.
Judy Maurer
Exactly. I have to be reminded of that.
Gil George
I think all of us have to be reminded of that!
One of the poems that I wrote recently, I talk a little bit about some of my frustrations with people not picking up on something that is so blindingly obvious to me. I think all of us have experienced that at one time. And I'm sure I've been the source of that in others, one time or another.
It’s important to remember—I put it in terms of my family: if you want to get a really good understanding of a mental health thing, you want to talk to my wife, because that's her training. She's an LCSW [Licensed Clinical Social Worker].
She actually has experience—she's a clinical supervisor at her work. My ideas on mental health are influenced by hers, but I'm by no means anywhere near an expert like she is. And I'm sure that some of the stuff that's come out of my mouth has caused her to want to roll her eyes back so far, she could see the back of her own skull.
Judy Maurer
You are the first husband ever to have that effect on his wife.
Gil George
Oh, ya. Riiiiiight.... If your computer's broken down, you don't want to bring it to my wife. You want to come to me, because that's my area of expertise. And I think we forget that part of why God calls us together is to remind us that we don't have the whole picture. And that it's actually impossible for any one of us to have the whole pic.
Judy Maurer
That's right. Or even half the picture.
Gil George
Yeah, that is deeply anti American culture, because we are trained, absolutely, that we have to be able to do 100% of everything for ourselves. And if not, we're failures.
Judy Maurer
That's right. We're independent.
Gil George
And let's be honest, independence is a myth. There's no human being who's ever existed that can truly be claimed to be an independent human. We are all dependent on others.
Judy Maurer
Is that something you learned from your refugee house?
Gil George
Very much so. And also I got to see what happens when that web of interdependence breaks down in a society.
Judy Maurer
Oh. What happens?
Gil George
Well, look at Rwanda and Burundi. Look at Ethiopia. Look at Russia and Ukraine. Look at just about anywhere in our globe right now that is experiencing conflict and strife. We forget at our peril.
Judy Maurer
Do you think it's breaking down in the US? Or have we never had it?
Gil George
Yeah, I think we've had a lovely illusion that has been well supported for a long time. But if you look at the fringes of our society, you will see that it's always been an illusion. And, you know, the last time the illusion broke down, we had a civil war. And the more we move towards independence and wanting to do everything for ourselves, with no assistance from anybody else, the more we push each other away, and cut each other off. And, you know, it's like, the harder we grasp at the illusion, the quicker it dispels
Judy Maurer
The illusion is the illusion of independence?
Gil George
I think the illusion of independence, the illusion of not needing people who are different than us. Because if we don't have people who are different from us around us, then we are in danger of losing sight of our own limitations.
Judy Maurer
Are you saying we can imagine that we have all these talents that really we don't have?
Gil George
Yeah. Or because we are in our little enclave of similarity, our tool set becomes focused entirely on what's inside that small realm. And as soon as anything from outside shatters that realm, we are thrown into what feels like an existential crisis.
Judy Maurer
Why do you think that happens?
Gil George
Because we've narrowed our world down to a tiny space and said, "This is the real world." And everything outside of it's not really real. And when you get a whole bunch of little pockets of people who are saying that we're the real ones here
Judy Maurer
The real Americans. The real Quakers.
Gil George
Yes, insert proper noun here. When we say we're the real ones of a subcategory, there is a very subtle undertone that is extraordinarily dangerous. It's the undertone that we are the real humans. That's the danger. When we get to the point where we're the only real ones, everybody else are the fake ones, we don't have to value them. They don't really bear the image of God. They're not really human.
Judy Maurer
Is that an example of what you were talking about where people say one thing and they mean another?
Gil George
That's part of it. Yeah. Folks who experienced that rejection of their humanity are going to be extremely sensitive to the undertones.
Judy Maurer
Good point. So what do we do about the undertones?
Gil George
I think like with anything else, darkness only exists where the light doesn't shine. And so we gotta bring all this stuff out into the light.
Judy Maurer
That's right. One of the things I worry most about, partly because of where I grew up, is our use of language at a very highly educated level. And we're saying to people even when we make announcements "if you haven’t been to college and can't understand this easily, you'll never belong here."
Gil George
Yep.
Judy Maurer
And that's an undertone. And we end up wanting diversity, but there's just a swath of society that we inhabit. And that's all.
Gil George
Yes. And that's a problem in our nation as well.
Judy Maurer
Well, that's true.
Gil George
There are a few different dangers there. One is the danger of not acknowledging who we really are.
Judy Maurer
How do you mean?
Gil George
If you did a demographic look at Sierra-Cascades Yearly Meeting, an overwhelming majority of us are middle to upper middle class white folks. We need to own that. But we also need to not try to be something we're not. Yes, we absolutely do need to break down the class barriers. But we need to acknowledge the fact that most of us reside in a specific class. And speak the language of that class and find comfort in the language of that class.
Judy Maurer
Preach it, brother!
Gil George
We need to start with that acknowledgement, like “this is who we are, in a very real way, outside of a very few outliers.” This is who we are.
And we need to be very careful because there's a temptation to say that who we are is wrong, or invalid, or bad. Every culture and I mean, every culture, be it white middle class, be it street culture, be it whatever, every culture is a conglomeration of two things—the image and likeness of God in a group of people, and the ways we as groups of people suck at listening to that voice and loving that image.
Judy Maurer
I'm gonna get that embroidered.