Beyond the Backlash: A Quaker Perspective on DEI with Niyonu Spann

Download the transcript and discussion questions.

Discussion Questions

1. Niyonu describes her ideal ally as “the one that sees that it’s their own life, it’s their own grandchildren, it’s their own family at risk of not having the joyous way of living.” How does this perspective challenge conventional ideas of allyship, and in what ways might this approach transform how we engage with social justice work?
2. Using musical improvisation as a metaphor, Niyonu suggests that responding to “dissonant” perspectives requires presence and heart-response rather than rejection. How might Quaker practices of deep listening and discernment help communities navigate differences in our increasingly polarized society? How do we discern between “different” and “evil”?

Opening

Niyonu: And then  in terms of an allyship, for me the ultimate ally is the one who sees that its their liberation that they’re fighting for. I am less and less interested in white folks who just want to stand behind me and say amen to what I’m doing. But in terms of ally , like who I want next to me, I want the one that sees that it’s their own life, it’s their own grandchildren, it’s their own family at risk of not having the joyous way of living that I think is ordained for us.

Jon: I’m Jon Watts. Today we have our final offseason episode. This has been an extended offseason, as we’ve been searching for our new podcast producer. I’m happy to say that we found them, and we’ll introduce you to them at the beginning of June, when they’ll launch a month-long miniseries exploring the most pressing stories of this moment.

But today, I want to talk with you about diversity. As you likely already know, here in the United States, diversity initiatives are under attack by the current government, and equity and inclusion have been thrown in there as some sort of amalgamated culture-war boogeyman. 

Quakers of course hold as one of our fundamental principles that we believe in “seeing that of God in everyone.” Many Quaker worship services function on this principle. We don’t know who is going to be the minister today. God could speak through any one of us, and they may not use the same spiritual or cultural language that I might.

So what do Quakers have to say at a moment when diversity is under attack? I thought for this topic that I might talk with one of the preeminent Quaker leaders in our thinking about diversity, Niyonu Spann. I first met Niyonu when I was a resident student at the Pendle Hill Quaker retreat center, and she was the Dean. That was way back in 2008, It was a life-changing experience for me and Niyonu’s leadership was a big part of my experience there, especially as a young person trying to navigate a community where I was one of the only members of my generation.

For many years, Niyonu has led the Beyond Diversity 101 workshops, which she founded after a decade of work as a diversity trainer. Niyonu is also a singer-songwriter, and if you stick around to the end of the episode, she shares the song that is speaking to her the most in these times.

I visited Niyonu at 4 Circles Beyond. This is the Quaker high school that she is helping to create in Chester, PA. When it is finished, it will be the first Quaker highschool in a predominantly black city and Niyonu’s vision is that it will be tuition free to community members. 

Part 1: Niyonu’s Journey to Quakerism

Jon: So, Niyonu, I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about how you became a Quaker.

Niyonu: Yeah. You know, it’s so funny. You can look back and see this trail which, in my case anyway, seems very clear. As a young kid, I always had a pull to Spirit and to spiritual understanding. As I was in a black Baptist church, as a young kid and baptized there, I was the one going up to, you know, Reverend Mapsen after and going, “but… so how does this… how could that be if this is? Right, so how do the people that live in such and such country that have never heard of Jesus, like why are they going to Hell?” You know, I would just like try to make sense. So, you know, and at the same time had this real pull to truth and integrity and, you know, the language then is a Christ-centered life. I really want it to be a prayerful, you know, Christ-centered person. 

And then I went off to college and, you know, got exposed to some stuff in theology that I didn’t know existed, and who sat around and decided what books would go into the Bible and all of that. And that then arose a whole bunch of other questions.

And there I got exposed to this notion that you needed to be baptized by the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues if you were going to be truly saved. So I went down that path. I had some amazing spiritual experiences and a different, like fiery relationship with the Holy Spirit. I came to the end of my college days, and I had met a little earlier, but ended up marrying Dwight Wilson and learning something about these people called Quakers.

And, you know, with already the bubbling questions in my spirit around my Christian faith, and then sitting in silence and, you know, I already had the orientation to spirit of a very personal relationship. So it just felt like the silence just deepened that. And I definitely went through, I wouldn’t call it, you know, “the dark night of the soul”, that it wasn’t torturous, but it was definitely, I had the structure of my religious life fall apart and really questioning this notion of salvation, this notion of the way, the only way, you know, that Jesus was the only way. And went through probably two or three years of real dis-ease in that. And those structures just fell away for me. And I was able to, on the other side of that, really find a joyous expansion of relationship with spirit. And I felt very much at home in Quaker worship, in communal entering. Felt right at home and feels still to me. Absolutely right.

Part 2: DEI

Jon: Niyonu is well known for her work challenging conventional approaches to diversity training. She pushes beyond surface level inclusion, asking us to explore how our thriving is inextricably connected to each other’s.

Niyonu: At its essence, which is what I’m most interested in, creating spaces for us to explore, you know, diversity just is, right? So in many ways, the D, the diversity, is just acknowledging, acting on the knowing of difference. So to me, that is what diversity is. 

And then you have the equity, which calls on us to paying attention to how power has operated and is operating, how use of self in relationship to diversity, and use of, you know, self as an individual, but then self as a group. So how can we tell the truth about how we as Quakers have interacted with and engaged diversity? Difference? How have we used our power? How are we using our power? What do we see and what don’t we see? And what is troubling to see and to acknowledge when it comes to difference plus power, how we’ve used ourselves. 

And then, you know, the I, which is around inclusion, I would love to see us explore that a little more than we do, because I think a lot of times we think of inclusion as similar to hospitality in some way. Like, do we greet people at the door? Do we translate our pamphlets into Spanish? You know, like, and those are all aspects of inclusion. But there’s a level of inclusion, of diversity, of difference that I think can feel really threatening when we really get to it.

It reminds me of when I was at Pendle Hill, when I was dean at Pendle Hill, and there was an older Quaker woman who was very well known and respected in Quakerdom and I think probably gave money and whatnot. And she was visiting for the first time, and we were having, I don’t know, I think we had like a community meeting or something, and there was some drumming and singing and this and that. And when I sat with her, she said, “I see, you know, it seems like Pendle Hill is being Africanized”. 

And it was, it was, it’s funny that I’m not finding words, because that’s exactly what it felt like at the time. It was like, I was like, from her vantage point, that’s what that community meeting felt like. It was partly because I was in front of the room. It was partly because people were expressing and dancing and doing things that they would not have been doing when she was at Pendle Hill.

But that’s, that point, like what we’re seeing in those moments of difference meeting itself

is where I would love our conversations in a really honest way and what feels to be threatened in those moments, like what feels like we may be losing. 

And then in terms of, you know, allyship, for me, the ultimate ally is the one who sees that it’s their liberation that they’re fighting for. Like, I am less and less interested in white folks who just want to stand behind me and, you know, say amen to what I’m doing. I don’t mind a little bit of dollars being thrown toward the school that we’re creating and stuff like that, you know, some of that reparative work. But in terms of an ally, like who I want next to me, I want the one that sees that it’s their own life, it’s their own grandchildren, it’s their own family at risk of not having the joyous way of living that I think is ordained for us.

Jon: After the break, I talk with Niyonu about how to apply this wisdom practically, about how to be a good ally, and the distinction between diverse perspectives and straight out lies. Also, I asked her as a musician, what is most resonating with her right now… I think you’ll want to stick around to hear what she shared.

2025 Friends General Conference Young Adult and Youth Gathering

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Trayce: I’m Trayce, an adult Friend from Tucson, AZ, and I’m one of the YAY Gathering co-clerks

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Part 3: Allyship and Discernment

Jon: Welcome back. So Niyonu has been doing this work long enough to know that allyship and reconciliation can be easy to talk about in theory, and can be difficult and even sometimes painful to work out in practice. It takes a willingness to sit with discomfort, and the ability to improvise.

Niyonu: My musical sense really gives me a framework for understanding this. You know, you can play a chord and it can be pleasing to the ear and, you know, we learn that the one or the root of a key that we come back to or “doe” is the resting place, you know, and we’ll learn that a chord is, you know, is that one thing and three and five and that that makes a chord. And then we learn that there are certain notes that don’t fit in that chord, right, that they’re dissonant and the ear will hear that as, “Oh, that doesn’t fit”.

And I feel like what our work is is very similar to particularly in jazz. You will hear that note at first as dissonant, but you move with it. You shape around it. You go deeper into, “Okay, why is that note there?” And something begins to shift around the notion of not belonging potentially. If you can go there, not all people can go there easily, but it is the call of improvised, in the moment, present musicianship to be with that and then figure, okay, do I slightly shift one of the notes that I was playing before so then all of a sudden that dissonant note now has a place? How do we respond?

But that requires presence. I think it requires a heart response. It requires knowing that you are me, like even the most dissonant person right now, and we can think of several in this moment. And to the extent that I believe that I could never be you in a million years, I could never be you, that will have something to do with my capacity to move beyond what I call Diversity 101, which is what that is about. It’s going Beyond Diversity 101. 

So yeah, that musical analogy for me is very real. It is very real. And it takes our creative selves to be able to respond to what appears to not fit. And it takes radical truth telling to absolutely decide that we’re rejecting something. And I do hold space for totally rejecting as well. So it’s not about finding harmony with everything. Let me just say, that’s not my ultimate message here. 

Jon: Yeah, there’s so much there that I resonate with. I don’t know if you remember in my time at Pendle Hill, I had just come out of a music theory program at Guilford. And the very last class I took there was music of the world where we were learning about Indian scales and gamelans and scales that didn’t sound right to my ears would sound beautiful to other cultures. And so I was really into playing with atonal stuff. 

Niyonu: I remember, indeed. It’s not a thing you forget.

Jon: Yeah, and so I imagine there’s a piano in the barn of Pendle Hill and you had your office above that and it’s right next to the worship space and there would be times, especially late at night, but sometimes in the middle of the day where I would go on these long rambles,

including long periods of disharmony, of notes that did not feel like they worked together to our ears, but being willing to sit in that and find the places where there is resonance between these two notes and discomfort here and what if I change one thing. So yeah, we could do the entire interview about that analogy.

Niyonu: We could. We absolutely could. We absolutely could. And I think that part of what is important in that description that you gave and what you were up to is based in the truth of the cultural differences and what was pleasing to the being in other cultures, which is very different than lies, which is what I feel like we’re having to discern now and which is different in terms of harmonizing with lies, with false expression. And the thing about our information age is that those that are really skilled at taking words or concepts that have meant something, you know, spiritual or wholesome and then using those words to convey untruths, but where you get really mixed up, you know, I’ll go to Google a word like, let’s say, “co-creation”. And it’s been usurped in all kinds of capitalistic ways. Now there’s products that are called and I’m like, “Oh my God”, this is like one of my words that is so, so it’s man, what is called for in terms of discernment with us right now is ultimate.

And part of why I feel like Quaker, Quakers, Quakerism, part of the gift that we have to bring is in the practice of listening and discerning. There is no aspect of Quakerism to me that is more important in the world than the practice of discernment, whether it is in how we do clearness committees, if it’s or if it is in how we hold business meetings. The challenge is whether we are living and worshiping in these ways. I’ve been to clearness committees many times where I thought we were going to really listen to the person that is seeking clearness in a worshipful way and really assist and support discernment. And folks are just giving their opinions in the kind of mental, rational way that I’m like, oh, okay, we’re not really doing this. So that’s our big challenge, live up to the light that we have really been given. 

Part 4: Music

Jon: So I asked Niyonu, as I often do when I’m talking with a talented musician, what song is most resonating with her right now. She said this is what came to her the day after the election.

Niyonu:

I ain’t got no tears this time. I ain’t got no tears. 

No more time to be in shock. Let me make it clear. 

Listen deep, our ancestors are trying to lead us on. 

They say, don’t you buy the okie doke. 

You know right from wrong. You know right from wrong.

I ain’t got no tears this time. I ain’t got no tears. 

No more time to compromise. Move through all our fears.

Face the ugly evidence. It’s just how it appears.

They’re holding on to stolen goods, 

The sacred we hold dear. The sacred we hold dear.

I ain’t got no tears this time hearing that they won. 

The call has been made evident. Our work has just begun.

We were never meant to settle for the middle ground. 

We’re meant to stop oppression now.

We’re meant to stop the bombs. Meant to stop the bombs. 

Empire is powerful. They’ve tightened up the reins.

The path to liberation ain’t about how they will change. 

Time to hold each other strong. There’s nothing that we lack.

It’s time to stand in fiery love and leave no kin folk back. 

Leave no kinfolk back. Leave no kinfolk back.

I ain’t got no tears this time. I ain’t got no tears. 

No more time for holding back with measured declarations.

Listen deep. Our ancestors are trying to lead us on. 

They say don’t you buy the okey-doke. It’s your turn to be strong.

It’s your turn to be strong. It’s your turn to be strong.

Jon: Thank you for listening and thank you to today’s guest, Niyonu Spann. You can find out more about Niyonu’s work through the link in our show notes.

Go to QuakerPodcast.com for discussion questions and a transcript of this episode. And while you’re there, please leave a comment with your thoughts about this episode. 

This episode was hosted by me, Jon Watts. I also wrote and produced the music. Zack Jackson produced and edited this episode. 

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Hosted by Jon Watts.

Produced by Zack Jackson

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

Mixed and mastered by Zack Jackson.

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)

Referenced in this episode:

• Niyonu Spann – http://niyonuspann.com/
• 4 Circles Beyond – https://www.4circlesbeyond.org/
• Beyond Diversity 101 – https://www.bd101.org/