Rebirth of a Nation: Reparations and Remaking America AND Hypocrisy, Racism, and Self-Interest on the Path to Reparations: Quaker Complicity with Slavery (1657–1776) and White Supremacy

By Joel Edward Goza. William B. Eerdmans, 2024. 383 pages. $34.99/hardcover or eBook.

By Mary Watkins. Pendle Hill Pamphlets (number 489), 2024. 38 pages. $8.50/paperback or eBook.

Times of crisis and chaos such as ours can bring about rebirth and reparation. Two recent publications have arrived to prepare Friends for that struggle. Both are written by White university scholars who have taught in prisons and been community activists. Both chastise lost opportunities for our country and our faith communities to deal with racial justice, and both point to galvanizing possibilities ahead.

In his foreword to Rebirth of a Nation, William J. Barber II vouches that Joel Goza is an idealist, a pragmatist, and up to the task. Goza draws a compelling line from the Founding Fathers onward, showing the devastation White supremacy has inflicted on our nation. Divided into three eras—from shackles to lynchings to prisons and poverty—the first 12 chapters of history are dense with data, documents, and stories, and they build toward the final five chapters, which confirm the necessity and viability of reparations.

We learn that a photo of Emmett Till, the Black teen murdered by Mississippi racists in 1955 after being accused of harassing a White woman, hung above Goza’s desk as he wrote this book: “I desired my work to take shape under his gaze.” Goza is asking us, as did Till’s mother, to “open the casket” of her mangled, lynched son: look at the facts, not what we thought we knew of our history. This is hard. Goza writes, “We cannot change our past but we can reckon with it. And that reckoning can be reparative.”

Goza’s history documents repeatedly and thoroughly how those in power intentionally created a social structure based upon White supremacy. He explores the intent and the extent to which Thomas Jefferson embedded inequality in the Constitution and Abraham Lincoln protected the Union at the cost of the enslaved but not the slaveowners. He probes the lynching era through Thomas Dixon’s popular novels and Madison Grant’s pseudo-scientific eugenics. The work of Dixon, with the support of the Southern Christian church, was the basis of the film The Birth of a Nation; the work of Grant became Hitler’s “bible.” Throughout these works, the nonsense myths of Black hypersexuality, inferior intelligence, criminality, and dependency are laid and solidified, ready to be brought forth to attack the Civil Rights Movement.

Goza is scathing in exposing the way the backlash to Civil Rights was organized and executed. During the 1950s, General Electric and its CEO, Jack Welch, groomed President Ronald Reagan to persuade America’s working class to “support the political and economic interests of America’s largest corporations.” Regan claimed to be anti-segregation and antiracist: “personally,” that is, but politically he was in favor of individual and property rights, allowing for restrictive covenants in housing. And so, “colorblindness” came of age.

I watched Reagan on GE Theater on TV with my family, hearing his jokes about government planning as he artfully simplified away the complex: he was “the Great Communicator,” and I did not know what was happening. But Black folks saw right through it. From Jackie Robinson to Marian Wright Edelman, Goza cites how the Black community spoke up for democracy. They foresaw the Southern Strategy and the War on Poverty turned into the War on Drugs. They predicted how the enormous tax cuts for the rich would concentrate wealth and destroy what was left of American democracy. Goza writes: “By embracing Ronald Reagan, mainstream America rejected Martin Luther King Jr. and continued its crimes against Black and Brown people with a clean conscience.”

Rebirth of a Nation lays bare the foundation of White supremacy that must be acknowledged as the task for reparations begins. And though repentance seems minor in relation to repayment and repair, it is core to the current attacks on critical race theory and DEI and needs to be defended now: this is why this book is so important. But Goza does not stop there; he delves into repayment numbers and repair approaches that knock down the hollow roadblocks that claim reparations can’t be done. For instance, inheritance taxes can be reimplemented to a pre-Reaganomics level in order to provide a major chunk of the $14.3 trillion and growing price tag for 400 years of White supremacy. Goza points out that our racialized economic system was engineered to create massive wealth; it can be re-engineered to create equity.

Mary Watkins in her Pendle Hill pamphlet Hypocrisy, Racism, and Self-Interest on the Path to Reparations probes the beginnings of slavery and Quakerism in the new world (first in Barbados, then in Philadelphia) and ends with suggestions for Quakers and their meetings to move forward. It is a brief yet significant bookend for Rebirth of a Nation—and also for Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship by Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye (2009).

Watkins traces her forebears to Barbados and Virginia, where, like thousands of Quakers, they used enslaved labor to create wealth, holding the Golden Rule in one hand and brutal slavery in the other. In 1700, there were thousands of Quakers on the island and five meetings; only four Quaker families were not enslavers. George Fox wrote to and advised Friends that the enslaved in their condition could benefit from the Gospel; that they might have their own meetings; that they should be treated tenderly; and that after long service, they should not go away “empty handed.” He did not advise they should be freed. Having separate meetings brought on the wrath of Anglicans in Barbados, as they blamed these gatherings for slave rebellions. Wanting to keep favor with those in power, Fox replied that Quakers abhor rebellion, and he urged the enslaved to be faithful to God and their masters. That slavery became known as a Christian institution weakened the early development of abolition.

Watkins does not tell a happy story about other inconsistencies in Penn’s kingdom of God on earth, where speaking against slavery was speaking against one’s own economic interests. Until the 1750s, most Quaker leaders were enslavers, so abolitionists like Benjamin Lay were removed from membership, and Ralph Sandelford was persecuted to an early death. A century after the Quaker Germantown antislavery protest, as the tide turned in the Society of Friends and in the rest of the country, the enslaved were freed, but the paternalism Quakers had brought to the abolition movement remained.

That Quakers were free from White supremacy is a false narrative that Watkins wants acknowledged, so the Society can foster an honest history and an antiracist future. She points to the leadership of Green Street Meeting in Philadelphia, Pa., which has set aside $50,000 per year for ten years to stabilize Black home ownership; this grew into $11 million in Black housing wealth. She also lists seven lessons for meetings to counter complacency, hypocrisy, and greed. Among them are the following: “Gradualism is an unfit approach when transformative change is needed in present”; “Attention must be given to whether anti-racist action is being pursued, not just rhetoric.”

With a whole heart, I recommend both publications for individual Friends, study groups, meetings, and their libraries. Rebirth of a Nation is an important book that belongs beside Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project as a retelling of what has gotten America to where we are today, politically and economically. The country will be rebuilding, sooner or later, and Rebirth and Hypocrisy will aid Quakers to be at the forefront of moving toward a more perfect Union and more Peaceable Kingdom.

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Michele Sands is a retired librarian who worships with Upper Susquehanna Quarterly on Zoom and with Collington Worship Group at the Kendal-affiliated retirement community where she lives in Bowie, Md.