The Most Vital and Challenging Issue: Shoghi Effendi on Race

In 1939, with Europe sliding toward war and the American republic still living under the shadow of segregation, Shoghi Effendi addressed a long letter to the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada. It was published as *The Advent of Divine Justice.* In it he set out the qualities the American Bahá’í community would need in order to fulfil the role ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had laid upon it.

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At the centre of the letter, in the section *Freedom from Racial Prejudice,* the Guardian named what he considered the most urgent single issue facing the friends in their own land. The problem would not, he wrote, be solved by the goodwill of one race alone. Both white and Black believers had a part. But the white believers had a particular and difficult work.

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> Let the white make a supreme effort in their resolve to > contribute their share to the solution of this problem, to > abandon once for all their usually inherent and at times > subconscious sense of superiority.

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Shoghi Effendi did not soften the diagnosis. The sense of superiority, he wrote, is *usually inherent* and *at times subconscious.* It cannot be exorcised by the assertion that one does not feel it. It must be hunted down, again and again, in the small habits of choice and speech and association by which a community organizes itself.

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He then turned the wheel further. Not only must prejudice be removed; positive action must follow. In every Bahá’í gathering and election in which a choice between candidates is finely balanced,

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> Priority should unhesitatingly be accorded the party representing > the minority, and this for no other reason except to stimulate > and encourage it.

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The instruction was deliberately costly. The Guardian was warning the community that the natural drift of any majority is to preserve its own advantage; that the response of the Faith must be the deliberate and visible inversion of that drift. Without this — without the *love, patience, and persistent effort* he called for from both races — he warned that the country itself would face *dangerous consequences.*

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The American friends took the letter as their charter. The work named in 1939 has occupied the community ever since.

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*Paraphrased from The Advent of Divine Justice (Shoghi Effendi, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1939); see original for full text.*

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