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White Australia Policy
Most us take a multicultural, multiracial reality in our stride – a normal and welcome part of life. It is a very recent development. For a Faith that arrived in Australia when the White Australia policy was the law, it inevitably raised questions for some of the newly enrolled Baha’is. How were they to square their religious beliefs – with the expectations of the society around them? And maybe with their own unexamined prejudices about their fellow human beings? The period in question unfolded mostly during the time that Shoghi Effendi led the Baha’i Faith. And at a general level, the likely answer was clear enough. Baha’u’llah came to establish the…
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Louis Gregory – Service to the Oneness of Humanity
Slavery was not a tale read from dusty history books for Louis Gregory. It was a close family memory. Louis Gregory was born in 1874. Both Louis’ parents had been freed from slavery by the civil war. His grandmother on his mother’s side, was an African transported to America as a slave in the Atlantic slave trade, and his grandfather was her white master. When Louis was four his father died. At age 7, Louis Gregory witnessed the murder of his African American grandfather by the Ku Klux Klan, because of his grandfather’s success as a blacksmith. At age 17 Louis lost his mother, who died in child birth. From these difficult beginnings, his life began…
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We are One – Overcoming Racism: Part 2
As introduced in yesterday’s article, racism is entirely incompatible with Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings. Close your eyes to racial differences, and welcome all with the light of oneness.[1] As Westerners began to join the Baha’i Faith early in the 1900s, it was clear that racism would need to be addressed, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Bahá’u’lláh’s eldest son, set out to do so. Indeed ‘Abdu’l-Bahá began this work from the earliest visits of Western pilgrims who came to see him in the early 1900s to learn about Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings. In 1911 he invited Louis Gregory, an African American lawyer, to visit him. The pilgrimage not only had a profoundly transformative spiritual impact on Gregory but provided opportunities for ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to stress…
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We are One – Overcoming Racism: Part 1
While Bahá’u’lláh, a persecuted prisoner of the Ottoman Sultan, was promulgating his universal teachings of the oneness of humanity, wholly different and toxic doctrines were taking hold in Western thought. Racism was emerging as scientific and intellectual orthodoxy and was to reach its horrific nadir in the holocaust of World War II. Europeans held dominance over their fellow human beings as colonial powers – a dominance often misused. A strict racial segregation and hierarchy was the reality of race relations in America. The flowering of European material culture seduced many in the West with the false idea of inherent “white” superiority. Racism is entirely at odds with Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings and the intent and meaning…
