Wrestling with the “fallacious doctrine of racial superiority”: The Discursive Construction of “Race” in American Bahá'í Periodicals

Abstract

American Bahá'í periodicals have said much about race and racial prejudice. This thesis brings to light the variations of that discourse to provide insight on how American Bahá'ís understood these concepts in relation to the burgeoning religious faith and societal changes. The data comes from four American Bahá'í periodicals: Bahai Bulletin (1908-1909), Star of the West (1910-1935), World Unity Magazine (1927-1935), and World Order (1935-1949, 1966-1990, 1993-2007). By employing a social constructionist approach, findings indicate substantial variation in how race and racial prejudice was conceived and deployed. Before World War II, there was concentrated focus on “race amity,” individual prejudice, the nature of “race”, and a highly variant reliance on, or dismissal of, science as a proper mode of understanding both race and prejudice. In the wake of the war, amplified emphasis on spirituality as the sole solution to racial conflict, coupled with apocalyptic warnings about American racial hostilities after the Civil Rights movement, were both met with an increased focus on “culture,” “color-blindness,” and debates over how to engage the “the most challenging issue” of racial prejudice. By the 1990s and 2000s, there emerged a bifurcated focus on individual Bahá'í heroes of the past alongside attention to institutional and structural racism, which culminated in discussion of racial integration in the U.S. These findings indicate the need for additional study of this discourse as a mine rich in social and historical insights about the strategies, relationships, and emphases placed on religion, science, individuals, structure, and more in the development of American Bahá'í religious life and its discursive articulation.