This is not the launch of a formal series. It’s the beginning of a dialogue that may unfold, meander, double back, and—God willing—deepen over time. The catalyst today is a remarkable Supreme Court decision, Pitchford v. Cain (2026), and the way it exposes our confusion about race, justice, and what it means to be “colorblind.”
I want to look at that case through two lenses: Jesus’ warning about hypocrisy, and Bahá’u’lláh’s demand that we learn to see with our own eyes. And over all of this, I want to hold up a single, sharp sentence from ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá as a plumb line for our current racial discourse.
Speaking about whites and blacks in the United States, He said:
“In fact numerous points of partnership and agreement exist between the two races;
whereas the one point of distinction is that of color.
Shall this, the least of all distinctions, be allowed to separate you as races and individuals?”
— ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, “Fourth Annual Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” Chicago, 1 May 1912
That is not poetry; it is a hierarchy. There are “numerous points of partnership and agreement.” There is one point of distinction: color. And in the sight of God, that one is “the least of all distinctions.”
We live in a culture that has—in many places—turned this on its head. Under the influence of what now travels under the banner of Critical Race Theory, you will often hear that “colorblindness is racism,” that race must be foregrounded in nearly every analysis, and that any attempt to de‑center it is itself a form of harm.
Let’s grant, without defensiveness, what is true in that critique. Claims of “I don’t see color” have often been used as a shield against the painful work of self‑examination. When “colorblindness” means “I refuse to see your suffering, or my complicity,” it is exactly the hypocrisy Jesus condemned when He asked:
“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye,
but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye;
and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye;
and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
— Matthew 7:3–5, KJV
There is a very real “colorblindness” that is nothing but a refusal to see the beam.
But many contemporary voices go far beyond this necessary warning. In practice, CRT‑style frameworks often elevate race from “the least of all distinctions” to the master category: the lens through which we must pre‑interpret motives, institutions, Scripture, even each other’s sentences. They insist that claims to universal reason or shared human identity are masks for power, and that the first question about any utterance is, “From what racial location does this come?”
Whatever the sincerity of those who say this—and I do not doubt their sincerity—that move is spiritually catastrophic. It is the exact inversion of ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá’s hierarchy. It enthrones what he demotes. It makes the most accidental thing about us—the amount of melanin in our skin—the most decisive.
And it has a devastating practical consequence: it creates a culture in which some voices are platformed and others de‑platformed not on the strength of their arguments or the purity of their intention, but on their location in a racialized taxonomy.
That is why I am being explicit about my rejection of this framework.
In my trilogy, I have already done what our age endlessly demands: I have not hidden “where I’m coming from.” I have written candidly about my ancestry, my family, my wounds, my faith. I have given you enough of my story that you can, in Bahá’u’lláh’s words, “see with [your] own eyes and not through the eyes of others” when you encounter my work.
But I did that so you could know me as a human soul before God, not so you could file me as “white,” “male,” “heterosexual,” “cis‑gender,” and then decide in advance which boxes disqualify me from a full voice in discussions of justice.
So I will be clear:
- I decline to describe myself as “cisgender.” That term is part of a conceptual apparatus I do not accept, for reasons that also flow from Revelation.
- I reject the idea that what I write here can be dismissed as “mansplaining” simply because it issues from a male body.
- I will not pre‑apologize for my skin before I am “allowed” to speak about racism.
My accountability is to a different vocabulary of judgment:
“The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me,
and neglect it not that I may confide in thee.
By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others,
and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor.
Ponder this in thy heart; how it behoveth thee to be.
Verily justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving‑kindness. Set it then before thine eyes.”
— Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words, Arabic no. 2
Justice, in this definition, requires that each of us:
- Learn to see “with [our] own eyes and not through the eyes of others”—which includes not outsourcing our moral vision to any ideology, whether on the right or the left.
- Learn to “know of [our] own knowledge,” not merely repeat the slogans or frameworks of our neighbors.
- Ponder in our own hearts “how it behoveth [us] to be,” which includes the painful recognition of our own beams before we go mote‑hunting in others.
From this perspective, a truly just public square requires something very concrete and very radical: that “each and every one of us must have a completely equal voice, to share our perspective, seen through our own eyes, without being discounted, sidelined, and, in effect, canceled” by any grid of predetermined categories.
That is not a demand for equal truth in all perspectives. Some are more faithful to reality than others. It is a demand for equal standing to be heard before the tribunal of Justice that belongs to God, not to our factions.
And this, in a very literal way, is the heart of the case in Pitchford v. Cain.
Consider what happened there. A young black defendant sat in a Mississippi courtroom, on trial for his life. During jury selection, the prosecutor used peremptory strikes to remove four of the five black potential jurors. When defense counsel challenged this under Batson v. Kentucky, the trial judge did something fatally revealing: he accepted the prosecutor’s “race‑neutral” explanations at face value and shut down the process before step three—the moment where hidden motive must be tested—could occur.
In plain language: certain citizens, who had been summoned to exercise one of the highest forms of civic speech we possess—jury service—were literally de‑platformed. Taken off the platform of the jury box. Silenced, in favor of others whose voices were treated as more acceptable. And the system that allowed this to happen congratulated itself on being “race‑neutral.”
Why, in that courtroom, did some voices count and others not? Why were four black citizens removed, and eleven white citizens and one black citizen left to decide whether another black man would live or die?
You do not need Critical Race Theory to feel the weight of that question. You need only Jesus’ warning about beams and motes, and Bahá’u’lláh’s ruthless definition of justice.
Had the trial judge been faithful to that standard, he would have forced himself to stop seeing “through the eyes of others”—prosecutorial habit, local custom, unspoken fears—and to look directly at the pattern before him:
- Were there white jurors who shared the traits cited to justify striking those black jurors, but whom the prosecutor did not strike?
- Was “lateness,” or “family members with criminal convictions,” or “youth and singleness” really the operative concern—or a rationalization for an unexamined discomfort with black citizens judging a black defendant and a white victim?
Step three of Batson exists precisely for this kind of comparison. It is the legal system’s imperfect attempt to do the spiritual work Jesus demands: to test whether the “mote” we claim to see in another’s eye is, in fact, a projection of our own beam.
When the Mississippi trial court refused to walk that third step, it wasn’t merely committing a technical error. It was enacting a very old human pattern: clinging to the comfort of “race‑neutral” language while its actions treated some children of Adam as less trustworthy than others.
Now, I want to be fair even here. The prosecutor and the judge were almost certainly not cartoon villains. They were human beings doing what seemed normal in their context. In their own minds, they were, very likely, sincere. Which makes them just like you and me.
That is why the cheap moves of our current culture wars won’t help us here. It is too easy for some to say, “There was no racism—Batson has been followed, the reasons were race‑neutral, move along.” It is too easy for others to say, “See? This is structural white supremacy; all that matters is race,” and then treat every white actor in the story as morally illegitimate from the start.
Both responses allow us to avert our eyes from the thing Jesus and Bahá’u’lláh insist we must look at: the beam in our own eye; the way we use categories—including racial categories—to decide whose voice we will hear.
This is where, in my view, CRT both helps and fails.
It is right to warn that claims of colorblindness can be instruments of denial. It is right to insist that we examine patterns, not just isolated acts. It is right to say that many beams are shared beams, embedded in institutions, not merely lodged in solitary hearts.
But it is wrong—fatally wrong—to respond by declaring that “colorblindness is racism,” and then constructing a moral order in which race becomes the first and last word about who may speak. That response does not cure hypocrisy; it institutionalizes a new form of it.
When I am told that my thoughts on racism can be dismissed because I am male, or because I am read as white, or because I will not adopt the label “cis‑gender,” I am being invited into a game that Revelation has already ruled out of bounds. I am being asked to accept a world in which some motes are considered decisive, and some beams are declared sacred. I cannot do that in good conscience.
Nor do I expect you to accept my arguments here because of who I am—or in spite of who I am. My hope is that you will test them against the words I have quoted, and against your own conscience:
- Is “color the least of all distinctions” in the way you think, or the greatest?
- When you speak of “justice,” are you more concerned with the motes in your neighbor’s eye, or the beam in your own?
- When you decide which voices to trust, are you seeing with your own eyes, or through the eyes of others?
I have written all this not as a verdict, but as an invitation to an examination—first of myself, and then of the systems we inhabit together. Pitchford v. Cain will be one of many cases cited in treatises and forgotten by most. But the pattern it reveals is as old as religion: our tendency to profess Justice while quietly arranging the room so that some people’s testimony never makes it onto the record.
If we are going to talk about racism, we need a space where every soul can bring their experience and their understanding, “seen through [their] own eyes,” without being pre-canceled by labels. We need to be able to say to each other, with a seriousness that goes beyond slogans: “I will listen to you—not because I agree with you, not because you check the right boxes, but because you are a fellow child of Adam, and color is, in the sight of God, the least of all distinctions.”
From there, we may still disagree sharply. We may still discover that some of our beams run in opposite directions. But we will at least be disagreeing as God sees us: not as abstractions, but as souls.
I’ve laid out my starting point. How does this land for you? Where do you feel resistance, and where do you feel resonance, when you hold ‘Abdu’l‑Bahá’s “least of all distinctions” and Bahá’u’lláh’s Hidden Word on Justice up against our current language about race?
