 Thank you all for coming to the plenary panel on reflections on race, exploring the relationship between justice and oneness. My name is Maria Masciani. I'm a professor of sociology at California State University Fullerton, which is just up the road. And I want to take a moment to introduce my fellow panelists. I'm going to start directly to my right. We have Dr. Jaleh Boyd. She is CEO of Jaleh Solutions, a consulting firm that provides human trafficking intervention designed to governmental, non-governmental, community-based and corporate organizations. I'm keeping these very brief, I could say, much more. And then we have Nana Babulman, who is from the Navajo Reservation in Northern Arizona. She's worked closely with the junior youth program there and has been working at the Native American Baha'i Institute as a program coordinator. And finally we have Dr. Robin Chandler, who is a professor of sociology at Northeastern University in Boston. And she works in international development as a specialist in gender and cultural competency. And so the way the panel is going to work is I'm going to give a little brief kind of synopsis and then pass it over to Dr. Chandler. But the topic of today's panel is, of course, timely. We know that racism is America's most challenging issue. We heard such a powerful synopsis of this by Dr. Benjamin just a short while ago. And we know that this deep spiritual disorder has been apparent for centuries, but is no less apparent today. In their February 25th letter of this year, our beloved NSA affirmed both the critical nature of this moment and the necessity for bold action on our part to address the historic opportunity of this moment. They also discussed how racism subjects millions of Americans to systemic injustices in many facets of their life, preventing them from making their full contributions to society. They also emphasized that no one is immune from this disorder, none of us. And that we're all members of this society and to some degree suffer the effects of its maladies. So given this critical time, this panel hopes to grapple and explore a framework to identify, understand, overcome the issues of racism at the level of the individual, the community, and the institution from four, I think, different perspectives which I hope are fruitful for you. So at this time I'm going to hand it over to Dr. Chandler. Thank you. Makaya Walls, the 12-year-old California girl, shot on Wednesday inside her home. The highway of tears were of the 18 young indigenous women murdered and disappeared along the trans-Canada highway in British Columbia. And Mariam Mizikhani, the 40-year-old prize-winning Iranian-American mathematician who died of breast cancer in July. I'd like us to think about them for a moment and get inspired by the sacrifices that have been made as the old world order collapses. Who knows, but Makaya might have been the future research scientist whose independent investigation of truth might have uncovered a cure for cancer redeeming Mizikhani's death, or she might have been a social policy advocate for violence against women. They're not beheirs, but they are signs of the social collapse of an obsolescent civilization and deaths that are preventable. How we frame knowledge who decides what knowledge is and how it is deployed is an ongoing intellectual struggle in academia and in the Baha'i faith and unresolved tension between white and brown people in the streets of our country and in everyday society. So what is truth? How do we blend our lived histories in this country with our spiritual identity as Baha'is? So for example, did you know that 62 Americans were lynched in 1912 the year the master came to America? He knew, or that in the same year the Four Mothers Society from the Cherokee, the Creek, the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw tribes in Oklahoma testified in Congress against the allotment of tribal lands that had historically been communal, that were about to be allotted to individual members of tribes. Indigenous people had watched white people closely. Their individualism, their greed, their colonialist rhetoric and broken treaties, and they knew that white people thought that Indians were a vanishing race and black people were intellectually backward animals. They knew what would ensue with individual native landowners and the divide and conquer mentality of white exploitation, white mythologies of manifest destiny that a diverse people who had occupied this land for 40,000 years would be bought off one by one. So the women warriors went to Washington. With both indigenous and Native American people and African American people formally enslaved African Americans, the struggle was always about the land and their humanity. We Baha'is are engaging in a battle for the spiritual reclamation of humanity's future before we lose everything. Developing our spiritual identity as American Baha'is means facing the truth about a segregated class obsessed country wallowing in excessive materialism. While we may be deeply concerned about privileging the facts of Baha'i history and the attempt to exterminate the Baha'i faith in Iran, our citizenship in this country is spiritual, not material. Nobody wants to be black or brown because it has been associated with degradation and shame. If you are an American citizen in this room now, whether white, Persian, black, native, Latinx, mixed like me or whatever, and you are a Baha'i, you are obligated to independently investigate truth, the truth of U.S. history, not the disinformation campaigns of white supremacy that the twin manifestations wiped away with their pen and their practice, their pen and their practice, for ensigning our card to follow Abdu Baha'i's revolutionary tactics for dismantling racism and prejudice everywhere he went. We see an urgency in his actions, a fear that we might miss this opportunity, but a big hearted conviction that American Baha'is would control the conversation about race and lead all nations spiritually. What a frighteningly beautiful identity for us. In the vernacular traditions of American hip-hop, we're going to drop some science on you friends. In my case, some new language, spiritual technology, conscientious spirituality, spiritual engineering, spiritual citizenship, and from the House of Justice, a welcoming partnership. We've been told to build a divine civilization, and for 6,000 years we've proven we can build material civilizations, but not one previous revelation has been able to sustain a spiritually-based civilization, and now is the time. Once you hear the presentations of these three enterprising and learned practitioners working in different sectors, you will see practitioners of social action research. A theory is an idea. They translate that which has been written into reality and action. Hopefully this panel models an intergenerational conversation between Gen Xers and Boomers that absolutely must unfold in the American Baha'i community if we hope to lead all nations spiritually. After the panel, we're going to wrap up some comments that everyone has made, so I will see you later. So I've been engaged in finding a way, most recently, for the grassroots to understand and identify at the heart level. So I ask all of you to have a moment of acknowledgement of the historical understanding of where we have come as human beings, and just a moment of recognition of the ancient ones and our ancestors to which we are all descendants of such labor and work and Herculean efforts that we are called to in our generation. Speaking at the heart level, we need to recognize to develop the spiritual capacities. And I've been taught as a young person on the reservation for my elders that there are these inner spiritual capacities. There are five. Some of them are thought, memory, comprehension, and the one is the common faculty that ties with our outer five senses. The blessings of this process that Baha'u'llah has brought is a process to remove veils and superstition and irrational thought. And a historically significant population that is addressing at the heart level the spiritual nature of our humanness, the human reality that we are spiritual beings. And when we come together with this foundation of understanding, we can ourselves begin addressing at the level of oppression we are all oppressed. And I think of Baha'u'llah himself refers to himself as the wronged one. Behold with the hand of the oppressor Hathroth, he said. And on his behalf, like Jesus Christ, he consented to be bound in chains so that all of humanity may be released from that bondage. Baha'u'llah has brought an understanding of faith and reason. And in our particular community, we are learning to develop in the light of Baha'u'llah's revelation the inner qualities and strengthen those that have been resilient over the generations in the face of oppression. Faith and reason are attributes of the human soul, which can best be understood to help us with knowledge and to discern truth from falsehood. In our little communities, we are addressing this question, how to address and overcome the injustices of society using faith and reason in light of our own culture and what do we do away with that is superstitious. And that is one of the beauties of Baha'u'llah's revelation. The purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among men. Baha'u'llah is saying, if you want justice, you have to have unity. Here at the level of thought, this gathering, this weekend, we are looking at the unity of thought. I think that's all I'll say for now. I first want to thank Ruha for that great talk. Thank you, Kelsey and Ray. That was amazing. And I'm so, so grateful to my sisters up here. I'm really honored to be among these women. Really amazing. So I'm a slavery scholar and I'm a freedom fighter. And my work focuses primarily on the relationships between the exploiters and the exploited and also on the motivations that drive both of these groups of people into contact with each other, into situations of exploitation with each other. And my research into these motivations examines three types of capital, economic capital, cultural capital and social capital and my findings are that it's this third thing, it's social capital. That's the primary motivator of anyone who ends up in an exploitative relationship. And so in other words, enslavers and the enslaved, traffickers and the trafficked, each becomes vulnerable to entering into exploitation, in pursuit of social capital. So the interesting thing about social capital is that it's worth relies entirely on what we decide to value as a society. So if we decide that the most violent people should be the most powerful, then so it is. Or if we decide that lighter skin is more attractive or more pleasant, then darker skin, so it is. If we decide that European contributions are more valuable than African or that the masculine is more valuable than the feminine or whatever it is, then so it is. That's what we've decided and whether or not we've set those things into place, whether or not we've set those values, we all participate in perpetuating and reifying those values. So here we are in the society and maybe we don't realize how we perpetuate them and maybe we're not understanding but the fact is that we all are. Each of us, every single person in this room has taken part in perpetuating these values that we hold as a society. And I know that I do. For example, although I have 20 years of experience in anti-trafficking work, I recently spent an enormous amount of my time and resources in pursuit of a PhD and I didn't really learn anything from the institution I went to. I didn't. I learned a lot from my own independent research and that was valuable but I could have done that on my own time, honestly. But I spent all of this time and all of these resources in pursuit of something that I decided to value, that I decided was more important or that something that gave me credibility when it really didn't. It's really just kind of like a random collection of letters at the end of my name. And I accepted it. I accepted that that narrative was true and I put time and energy behind making sure that it continued. But we also have the power to shift those values and we're doing it right now. We're witnessing these enormous shifts in how we define success, how we acknowledge beauty and how we distribute power. We're shifting thought and we're shifting practice around what is valuable, whose lives matter and how information and knowledge are acquired and shared. But in order to do this effectively, we have to unlearn and we have to uncondition ourselves in a lot of really scary ways. Has anybody here ever tried poison? Anything that's poisonous to you? Sugar, right? I mean me too. Coffee, alcohol, you know, whatever, cigarettes, did I say cigarettes? Sugar? Peanuts? Yeah, I mean you know how it feels. You try it and your body has a violent reaction. You cough, you spit it out, you know, your body rejects it. But then you train yourself bit by bit to take it, don't you? And you keep doing that until it gets good to you. And it gets good to you until it doesn't. And then it reminds you that it's poison. And this is what white supremacy is in our society, it's poison. And the first time, I don't know, some of you might remember the first time you encountered it as a child and maybe you didn't, but you rejected it. Roundly. Thank you. And then you took, you kept taking it in bit by bit. And then every now and then you find yourself rejecting it. But white supremacy, this philosophy that we value so highly in our society is holding all of us back. Whether we're participating in this philosophy as an oppressor or as an oppressed, none of us are surviving it. I might be dying from it through homicide. My white mother might be dying from it through suicide, but none of us are coming out alive. None of us are able to contribute as our greatest selves to this society as long as we're subscribing to this poisonous philosophy. And the antidote to white supremacy is justice, right? So when we get a little bit of this antidote, we start to go through a detoxification process. And anyone who's done a deliberate detox can tell you how ugly it is, right? There's diarrhea and there's vomiting and there's pimples and rashes and weird places and it sucks. Breath smells really bad all the time. But that stuff has to come out, right? That poison has to come out. And the more poison that you have been conditioned to accept, the deeper you are into how good that poison's been to you, the uglier that detoxification process is going to need to be. And people of color have some advantage here. Because I know that I am not innately violent and I know that I'm not innately hypersexual. And I know that I'm not innately inferior. I know that I am not born to receive pity or disdain. I know these things deeply within myself. So although every depiction of black girls and black women in the media is poisonous, I already have an antidote in me and I'm therefore not subject to that specific spoonful of toxicity, but I'm subject to a lot of other spoonfuls. And I take those in bit by bit. And I'm in constant need of detoxification. And those spoons just keep coming at us nonstop. In this society, we don't get a break from the brainwashing. So we have to actively be vigilant. We have to be brave in identifying and challenging and rejecting poison wherever we see it. When someone tells us that we have taken up the spoons and are handing them out ourselves to other people, we have to be courageous in our humility. We have to be brave in our self-reflection. And we have to be willing to be uncomfortable if we're going to get cured. So as we continue to invite the presence of justice, then we get closer to establishing peace. Thank you. So I'm going to try to be as short and sweet, but telling a professor to talk for 10 to 15 minutes is torturous. So I'll do my best to do this topic justice in such a short time, but building off the wonderful contributions of my panelists, we're told by the House of Justice that the transformation now required must occur simultaneously within human consciousness and within the structures of social institutions. So today I would like to share with you some sociological insights on institutionalized racism, particularly in the criminal justice system, which is where my research lies, and how raising consciousness and actively challenging current assumptions, both material and spiritual assumptions, and working through a conceptual framework of oneness and justice allow us to break patterns of racial oppression in our structures and work towards solutions. So I remember last year at ABS, Dr. Arbab so eloquently discussed how we shouldn't just assess the defects in our current structures and institutions, but also the defects in the knowledge systems, the assumptions, the thoughts that underpin our institutions, that help build and sustain them. And this is something I often think about in my own research. And so I hope today to briefly highlight how some thoughts, some of my thoughts on the important role that perception, belief, discourse play in perpetuating injustice and oppression and the ways we all may be taking part in it. And the challenges we face in discerning truth from falsehood and seeing through our own eyes and not through the eyes of self-interested others are characteristic of the faculty or virtue of justice. So with that said, our U.S. criminal justice system, this probably isn't news to most of you, holds 2.3 million people in federal, state, and local prisons, jails, and detention facilities. This is the largest incarceration rate in the world. We have an additional 4.8 million people in this country on probation or parole. So that's over 7 million people under the control of the criminal justice system. What does this have to do with race? Well, there's wide racial disparities in the prison population. Black and Latino Americans make up 32% of our U.S. population, but they make up 56% of the incarcerated population in 2015. But it's not enough to know statistics. It's how we interpret those statistics, how we interpret these patterns that's important. So I want to discuss two assumptions or logics that sociologists find have been internalized in the United States and shape the way we read our realities and patterns, like the one I mentioned, and two, help perpetuate racial injustice and oppression within our social structures. So we can think of these as filters before our eyes and our minds that affect how we see the world. So when we see an event or a larger pattern, like, let's say, poverty or high incarceration rates among particular populations, this information gets filtered through these assumptions that help us decide why these patterns exist. And if these assumptions are myths or false, they lead to false diagnostics of racial inequality. And so I think it'll be more evident as I discuss them, and I think they go hand-in-hand with what Dr. Benjamin talked about. And they underlie this notion of colorblind racism. And so the first assumption or myth is this notion of equal opportunity in the United States. I'm sure we've all heard it. This idea that everybody has more or less the same opportunities to succeed. If you work hard enough, you can get ahead. These notions of individualism and choices, when in reality opportunities are highly skewed by race, class and gender. This assumption deflects blame onto individuals. Those who don't get ahead didn't work hard enough. The second assumption falls under this notion of minimization of racism. This assumption that after the civil rights legislation, discrimination somehow disappeared. It's no longer a central factor affecting the life chances of minorities. It's better now than it was in the past. I'm sure we've heard that. Or the fact that incidences of racial discrimination are isolated events. It sees racism as overt and individual, when in reality racism has become much more latent and institutionalized. And so there's many more, but for the sake of time we'll focus on these two assumptions. They've become the foundation of the American dream. They're taught in our schools. They're perpetrated in the news and movies and other forms of media. They've become the logic and common sense through which so many Americans, so many of us, see our social realities. So then how do these perpetuate racial oppression in our social structures? And I'm going to use the example of the criminal justice system, but this exists in all of our institutions, including education, labor market. We might hear the statistics I just gave earlier about racial disparities in our criminal justice system and under the assumption of equal opportunity make an erroneous and dangerous conclusion that if our system is fair, everyone has the same opportunities, then a larger number of African Americans and Latinos in our prison system simply means they must be more criminal. But this ignores many, many facts. In terms of violent and property offenses, there are higher rates among black and Latino populations, but research finds that higher crime rates are explained by socioeconomic status and poverty, not race. This is where a firm and factual understanding of how opportunities in our country are not equal and skewed by race in class is important, because we don't fall into the trap of attributing crime rates to the characters of communities or culture, but rather to structural conditions of those communities. The lack of educational opportunities, job opportunities, the hyper-surveillance of law enforcement, so understanding the roots of a problem are structural rather than individual or cultural. This also ignores racially discriminatory policies built into our laws and customs, for example drug enforcement policies. The fact that African Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates. I repeat, African Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates and yet African Americans are imprisoned for drug charges almost six times more than whites. So let's move to another example. Under the assumption that minimizes racism, one might see the recent examples of police brutality that have been going on from the beginning of time but are now on video, and see the murders of unarmed black, Latino and Native men and women as isolated events, the result of bad apples, right, as Dr. Benjamin discussed. But again, this assumption does not get to the root of the issue. It does not align with facts or research that consistently show racial biases, both explicit and implicit in the criminal justice system, are not isolated events, but woven through the whole system, its players, its policies. We know for example that African Americans are more likely to get stopped and searched even though statistically police are more likely to find contraband on whites. African Americans are more likely to experience force or deadly force during an arrest. We know that after an arrest African Americans are more likely to get convicted, more likely to receive harsher sentencing, again for committing the same offense as a white American. So given these trends under false assumptions, one might say, okay, fine, the system seems broken. It does need some fixing. But then this presumes that the system was unbroken or void of racial features at its birth. This is a massive fallacy about the structural makeup of our criminal justice system because if we look at historical trends of the system, we see it's not broken but designed from its birth to disadvantage, to subdue and to control certain non-white minority populations in this country, namely African Americans as well as Latinos and Native Americans. From slave codes to black codes to immigration laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act, from Jim Crow laws to tough on crime laws to the war on drugs, the criminal justice system is functioning in fact exactly as it was designed to do. So as we see, the assumptions we have about our society, if false, allow us to rationalize systems of oppression. They prevent us from getting to the roots of the issues and lead us to misdiagnosed racism and help sustain them with the best intentions and without being overtly racist. What about solutions? Sociologists and criminologists recognize the assumptions I just mentioned, but they still face challenges and barriers in formulating solutions because their assumption about the relationship between the individual, institutions and communities don't recognize the spiritual nature of human beings. They have the knowledge. They challenge the assumptions about our material social reality, but they lack spiritual insight. And so I want to spend the last little bit of my time talking about how beliefs and assumptions based in a Baha'i conceptual framework that recognize the spiritual nature of humanity revolutionize how we can start to see the possible solutions to these issues. First, within my field, and I sit at a lot of tables where people try to come up with a lot of different solutions, a lot of these solutions, they function under a very individualistic and materialistic framework of human nature. There's a lot of time spent thinking about how to incentivize people to care because the assumption is that human beings are not intrinsically altruistic or selfless, that they need to be convinced that repeals and reforms in our criminal justice system will directly benefit them, often economically, that society functions in this zero-sum model that there are limited resources, so helping others will somehow hurt others. Especially since many of our prison systems, for example, are privatized, which means they're for profit, right? So the answer to shareholders, each prisoner is seen as a potential profit. Think about that. Our prisons are for profit. So shutting down prisons, cutting down the prison population, this would economically hurt others. The entire institution of justice also functions under a theoretical conception of justice as punitive or distributive, so it's focused on punishment or distribution of resources. Again, this is a very materialistic perspective of justice. But the Baha'i conceptual framework offers something quite different. For example, a Baha'i conception of human nature recognizes that human beings are inherently noble, that latent spiritual capacities like altruism and love and justice, they already exist in all people and can be cultivated through conscious effort. This notion that justice is a latent capacity of the human soul that can be fostered and developed is revolutionary. It brings so much hope to the field of social justice work, where there's a lot of hopelessness, where people don't know how to change hearts. The conception of oneness also challenges current assumptions about humanity. Baha'u'llah says oneness is to behold the human race as one soul and one body. This metaphor of humanity as one human body emphasizes that humanity is interdependent. The afflictions of one part of the human body affect the entire human body. So the oppression of one in our world is the oppression of all. If humanity truly understood the suffering of one, the suffering of all, then the racial oppression we see would surely vanish, no one would allow it. If we were allowed to feel that, right? We know that this conception of oneness has to redefine the relationships between individuals, institutions and communities, and slowly we're learning in our laboratories what this harmonious relationship between these three protagonists could look like in our neighborhoods and in our clusters all over the world through our framework for action. So from a Baha'i conception, we also know that true oneness is only possible when society is organized around an authentic and true conception of justice. The principle of justice we know ranks as one of the most significant principles of the Baha'i Revelation, and the advancement of civilization is contingent on its application in every sphere of existence. Baha'u'llah tells us, as Nanaba mentions, that the purpose of justice is the appearance of unity among men. The purpose of justice is to serve as an instrument for unity. Does our current justice system serve as an instrument for unity? Is this even close to how we conceive justice in our society, or is justice seen more as crime and punishment and even deeper than that about control and inequality and power? So then how can our systems be restructured over time to yield true justice? This is what we as a Baha'i community are striving to learn and put Baha'u'llah's Revelation into action. So as I close, I know I'm way over. At this time of great turmoil in this beautiful struggle, it's more important than ever to first develop our capacities for justice so that we can distinguish truth from falsehood, and we are surrounded by a lot of falsehoods. Because after all, Baha'u'llah tells us justice is the revealer of the secrets of the world of being. Justice is the revealer of secrets. Second, to check our assumptions at the door, to educate ourselves on facts and truths of our social reality, of the history of our country, of the history of our issues, and to raise consciousness and to act to act to act. It's not enough to know, we have to act in unifying and constructive ways. And finally to recognize that some of the oppressive forces all around us don't simply exist because of a tyrannical few, but rather they're the result of the numerous small self-interested assumptions, thoughts, actions of many that accumulate over generations in our social structures and perpetuate injustice and oppression. And we must be actively working against it. Thank you. So did you get all of that? We're a culture of learning. The Baha'i world community is a learning machine. And if we're not learning and testing our theories and trying new ways of doing things and accepting the fact that we will regularly fail, we will never grow and we will never be able to build the divine civilization. It's as simple as that. Now, would people agree with me that there's great distrust among the races? Does anybody disagree with that? If you do, stand up so we can see who you are. So restoring that trust is the job of every Baha'i. I don't care where you came from. I don't care if you were born here. I don't care how old you are. I don't care if you're laying in a sick bed. Your job as a Baha'i is to restore the trust of humanity around racism. As simple and as complicated as that. Everything that has happened in America since the human rights era, which I call the 19th century, from the Declaration of the Bob to the passing of Baha'u'llah is not accidental. It is providential. Why else would history enslave and move 12 plus million people from Africa to Native American soil and attempt to ethnically cleanse the land and labor in a combined genocide, the likes of which there is no rival in global history? It all happened here. And we're still reaping the legacy of that. The travesties of U.S. history, friends in part, explain racial inequality, racial segregation, poverty, loss, and class stratification. And every junior youth should be armed with this framing of the true knowledge of American history, for it is the spiritual armor that they will need as clothing for their intellect as they attempt to teach the Baha'i faith to their peers and communities of color. Every junior youth, we're being asked to move mountains. I appreciate this. To go from aspirational thoughts, our principles, to inspirational action. And so we have to find out what theories, what methods that we've derived from our work around the world, including this country, we can use to help us develop. Fact, African American and Latina mothers and some others now must warn their sons about being moving targets for violence, a violence that triggered the same energy, negative energy, fear, and rage, as sojourner Truth, who had to stand by and watch three of her five children be sold off into slavery two centuries before. It's the same dark energy that's functioning in our society that is a democracy. The Native American community must feel powerless to prevent and control a youth suicide rate that is the highest in the world because of legacies of colonialism and underdevelopment. So the systematic underdevelopment of black people, brown people, and Asian people in this country and abroad is the story. That's the narrative, and that's the page that every Baha'i has to get on. Nobody made this up. You were given, as has been mentioned, I was given a pablum of truths that is selective. You've all perhaps heard that quote that I shared the other night at our meeting with the Office of Public Affairs, until lions have their historians. The story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. It's not funny because people of color are a hunted people. We have been hunted. I get hunted all the time in academia. Do you think that it's been a piece of cake being a brown woman in one of the largest private urban universities in the country? I'm obviously not a white man. And that demographic dominates academia. So somebody like me gets denied promotion to full professor, gets denied grants, gets denied opportunities for advancement. Why? Because I will speak out for you if you're a white male and you're being denied tenure and promotion for a reason that's not legitimate. Because Abdu Baha said I should do that. He said that my interests come secondary to establishing the patterns of behavior and the values that we must have in place in order to build the divine civilization that we're not even going to see. But we're building kind of the ingredients for the cement that will go into the building and the scaffolding that another generation of people will build. So it's kind of like we're on a piece of property with a really old house. And you're kind of faced with the dilemma of whether or not you should put a lot of money into this house, the falling civilization. And in the walls is knob and tube wiring, the roof leaks, this cracks in the basement. The pipes into the house are leaded. There's lead paint in the walls. And your decision is whether or not to restore the house or take it down. Fortunately for us as Baha has been mentioned, we don't have to take the house down as Rua mentioned. The house is falling on itself. So to be on social media, yacking about all of the horrible things that are happening in the old civilization that's collapsing is a waste of our precious time. Because we're builders. We're spiritual builders. So I just want to say that because we need you to get off of the machines and all hands on deck here. I'm going to tell you a little bit about Shoghi Effendi's methodology for anti-racism. Someone said I shouldn't say the word anti-racism. Are you on board with that? Shoghi Effendi's methodology for anti-racism, I call the seven deadly tests. Because if you have read the advent of divine justice and I don't want to know if you haven't read it, because if you're in this country, wherever you were born, Persian or white and you have not read that book, you are not a Baha'i. I will take the heat for that. Because Shoghi Effendi has said there are four things that white people have to do. There are three things that black people have to do and stop wasting time about who's got to do it first. Just do it. The number is irrelevant. What you have to do is irrelevant. Be your part. Because this is the beginning of the divine civilization. It really does begin with us. It's this simple and this hard. It's not out there to be done by other people. I'm going to talk just briefly, I probably got no time left, about some projects that we've been doing in Boston. We call them CAR. It means conversations about race. And I would like you to all take very seriously the possibility of replicating this and duplicating this in your villages and your cities. How big or small in your villages and in your neighborhoods. Conversations about race, we started in August of 2016 and capped it out at a talk at Greenacre in March 2017. We came together once a month and we talked about race built around, this was the model, the letters from the House of Justice in the NSA, second the social discourse material that we've been given by the House, and my work in something I call games people play. And Ru had touched on those a little bit, but I've actually codified more of them than you can possibly imagine. It's sort of like the exercise that I gave the friends in conversations about race when there was some confusion about what a microaggression was. And I said, well, here's your task. Go see the movie Hidden Figures and count the microaggressions. Now, my math is not as good as my daughter, Nuri's, that some of you know. And so I said, Nuri, I want you to count the microaggressions because I'll trust you're counting. I don't trust anybody else's. So she came back and she said, Mom, there's over 60. And I said, terrific. So imagine you're a person of color who's trying to be a world-class scientist and you have to deal with over 60 microaggressions on a daily basis just to be able to do your work. So the belly aching I've been hearing from a lot of people about what's wrong with so and so and so and so needs to change, needs to stop. And we need to look at exactly what the Guardian has said and do that. If we do nothing else, the world will change. What we can do with the car model is replicate it everywhere. We will work with you and show you how we did it. We're most likely going to repeat it. Is Sam Davis here in the audience? There you go. All right, Sam and I and Lately Tophig were co-facilitators because as a boomer and a person of color, I'm real tired of having this conversation because I've been in Baha'i for 50 years and we're still talking about it. So we worked as co-facilitators with these three pieces and God bless them. The extraordinary friends from Green Acaba High School came down every month at night in the dark to be with us and it was really wonderful. It meant that the conversation is still on the table and Baha'is will control the conversation about race and racism. We have to. We cannot let this world do that. So I'm going to close with a couple of projects that I will tell you about later afterwards but I want to close with a quote from Abdu Baha about what he called heavenly training. Wherever the mention of Baha'u'llah rises up, that is the paradise of Abha. Wherever pure, severed, and illumined souls are found, that is the paradise of Abha. Tehran is the paradise of Baha'u'llah for souls are found there. You cannot call human. They are angels. In reality, the Baha'i friends in that city are the heavenly host. Whenever I think of them, I am happy. The blessed perfection suffered innumerable ordeals and calamities but during his lifetime he trained in all regions many souls who were peerless. The purpose of the appearance of the manifestation of God is the training of the people. That is the only result of their mission, the real outcome. The outcome of the whole life of Jesus was the training of eleven disciples and two women. Why did he suffer troubles or deals and calamities for the training of these few followers? That was the result of his life. The product of the life of Christ was not the churches but the illumined souls of those who believed in him. Afterward they spread his teachings. It is my hope that you all may become the product of the life of Baha'u'llah and outcomes of his heavenly training. When the people ask you, what has Baha'u'llah accomplished? You say to them, he has created these. He has trained us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. There's a phrase in the Navajo culture. It's a prayer that we live every day walking in beauty. Beauty is a concept in the Navajo way of life that is all around us. So this phrase, ah, al-sau, huajon, jeneh, it is the outcome of generations of overcoming the insistent self for spiritual people. And it means, it means the Creator's great love embraces me. It is said, jeneh it is said, it has been said and it's still being said by the Blessed Beauty. Justice is in this day bewailing its plight and equity grown beneath the yoke of oppression. This concept of beauty before me, beauty behind me, to every side to which we are exposed, there is beauty. And in our community's efforts to raise consciousness and conscious effort to be thinking about a freedom of conscience, half of the world's population still lives under laws which restrict the right to freely adopt and change one's religion or beliefs. The human being is not only an economic and social structure, but also noble with a free will and a conscience that makes possible the search for meaning and the search for truth. Without the freedom to pursue this fundamental human quest, neither dignity nor justice is possible. I was from February 4, 2009. One of my favorite quotes now is by an African-American Baha'i. His name was Louis Gregory. And he says, thralldom, slavery, rests as heavily upon the oppressor as upon the oppressed. And we've been thinking about how, how do we restore beauty? How does this happen? We cannot bring love and unity to pass merely by talking about it. Knowledge is not enough. Wealth, science, education are good. We know. But we must also work and study to bring about the maturity, the fruit of knowledge. Abdul Baha'i says, knowledge is the first step. Resolve the second. Action, action, action is fulfillment is the third step. And our community have been creating spaces to talk about this important social discourse about race. And we've been thinking about these questions. Knowledge, the only knowledge we bring to humanity as Baha'is is the oneness of mankind. So when we bring social discourse to our community, we believe this discussion brings oneness. They all have an equal part to play. Every voice is valuable to the child. We don't want to change people. We add and we grow. This is the knowledge that our community is bringing. We ask, and I'm here to participate, experts to address us. And we share the fundamental oneness of religion. Be brave, bold, courageous in humility are some things that I've been hearing. Be willing to deliberately go outside of our comfort zone to embrace the downtrodden, to give them a voice, to even simply ask, what are your thoughts? Is a tremendous change at the heart level in our native communities. And again, in closing with beauty behind us, restoring beauty, to give the disempowered masses a voice that they themselves can free us from the yoke of oppression. And knowing each race has a particular contribution to make. And there are no shortcuts. No formulas, says the House of Justice. Only as effort is made to draw on insights from his revelation to tap into the accumulating knowledge of the human race. To apply his teachings intellectually to the life of humanity. And to consult on the questions that arise, will the necessary learning occur and capacity be developed. Hojongonashado. Shitsijin Hojongonashado. With beauty before me, we walk. With beauty behind us, we walk. Hojongonashaklin. It has been restored with beauty. Hojongonashaklin. Hojongonashaklin. Hojongonashaklin is the prayer of the Native peoples for all of us. It has been restored with beauty. So when the people ask you, what has Bahá'u'lláh accomplished? What is the response? He has trained us. When the people ask you, what has Bahá'u'lláh accomplished? He has trained us. Boom. Thank you everyone. This concludes our panel and we look forward to continuing the conversation with those that have any questions or comments afterwards. Thank you again. And off to lunch.