"Whiteness": A Note from "Essays in Bayānī Polital Ontology"

 

 

 

Our own historical dispute with the Liberal Bahā’īs (i.e. Juan R. I. Cole, Alison and Steve Marshall, et al.)—all white, Anglo-European, middle-class, ontologically First World, lineal and geneological heirs and beneficiaries of Anglo-European colonial settler regimes—essentially crystallizes this problem in miniature. Their interpretive posture is not merely a difference of historical judgment but an expression of a liberal ontology in which legitimacy is retroactively conferred by institutional success, bureaucratic continuity, and global reach. Within this framework, the triumph of the Haifan Bahā’ī administrative order becomes proof of its truth, while the violent suppression and juridical erasure of the Bayānī dispensation is reclassified as evidence of its failure—the irony here is compounded by the fact that people such as Juan R. I. Cole, Alison and Steve Marshall, etc., were themselves targeted victims of the brutalism of the Haifan Bahā’ī administrative order’s uncompromising bureaucratic mentality. But what presents itself as neutral historiography in their written works is already normatively saturated: survival is treated as verification, defeat as refutation. The result is not history written from evidence alone, but history disciplined by an unexamined commitment to Western liberal criteria of validity—criteria that quietly equate power with truth and administration with revelation.

To us, this constitutes the ontology of whiteness itself—not as a biological or moral category, but as a regime of being that universalizes its own historical conditions as neutral criteria of truth. Whiteness here names an ontological position from which power appears as legitimacy, endurance as validation, and institutional continuity as evidence of rightness. It is an ontology that forgets its own situatedness by presenting its standards—procedural regularity, administrative success, global recognition—as self-evident measures rather than historically contingent achievements secured through asymmetrical force and global violence. In short, it is no more and no less than an ideological tautology of white Anglo-European imperial supremacy and dominance. Within this frame, what survives is assumed to deserve survival, and what is extinguished is presumed to have extinguished itself. Revelation that interrupts rather than consolidates, that exposes rather than stabilizes, is thus rendered unintelligible except as failure, deviance, or pathology. In this sense, the “failed messiah” trope around the Bāb and the Bayān is not merely a category error; it is the ontological reflex by which whiteness secures its authority over the meaning of history itself. Our experience over a lifetime of being in the West has proven to us, by empirical observation rather than mere philosophical abstraction, that whiteness largely understands itself as the bearer of rights without reciprocal exposure to obligation even (and especially) when it speaks the language of rights about others. Rights appear as inherent, pre-political, and self-justifying, while duties are externalized—assigned to institutions, procedures, or abstract norms rather than borne as existential responsibility. This asymmetry produces a subjectivity that experiences constraint as injustice but power as neutrality, entitlement as natural but accountability as intrusion. Within such an ontology, the invocation of rights does not function as a claim within a shared moral order, but as a shield against interruption, judgment, or reversal.

What is decisive here is that this posture presents itself as universal while remaining structurally particular. Whiteness does not experience its rights as historically conferred or contingently secured, but as the default condition of legitimate existence. As a result, those who appear primarily as obligated—regulated, scrutinized, managed, or required to justify themselves—are tacitly positioned as ontologically secondary. Rights become unevenly distributed not merely at the level of law, but at the level of being itself. This helps explain why appeals to justice that do not conform to liberal procedural grammar are dismissed as irrational, excessive, or dangerous: they threaten a world in which rights circulate without cost, and power is exercised without being named as such. In this sense, the ontology of whiteness is not defined by overt domination alone, but by the quiet expectation that the world should remain intelligible, navigable, and answerable on its own terms, and no one else’s. When that expectation is disrupted—by revelation, by rupture, by claims that do not seek permission from existing institutions, nay by truth itself—it is experienced not as a demand for justice, but as an illegitimate disturbance. The refusal to recognize obligation alongside right is thus not incidental; it is the condition that allows power to persist while continuing to believe in its own innocence.

To reiterate, within the ontology of whiteness where rights are experienced as inherent, pre-political, and self-justifying, duties are displaced onto institutions, procedures, or abstract norms. Constraint is felt as injustice, but power is felt as neutrality; entitlement appears natural, whereas accountability is perceived as intrusion. Within this frame, the language of rights no longer functions as a claim within a shared moral order, but as a shield against interruption, judgment, or reversal. What presents itself as universal is in fact structurally particular: a subject-position that presumes the world should already be arranged to recognize it without demand. But from a Bayānī standpoint, this asymmetry marks a fundamental ontological error. The Bayān does not recognize rights detached from responsibility; it grounds being itself in taklīf—answerability to truth prior to entitlement, obligation prior to claim. Existence is not a possession to be secured, but a trust to be borne, and manifestation is inseparable from responsibility. Where liberal ontology begins with the self as rights-holder and negotiates duties afterward, the Bayān begins with exposure, judgment, and ontological accountability, from which any legitimate claim must arise. What liberalism experiences as oppression—the demand to answer, to submit, to be judged—is, in Bayānī terms, the very condition of truth. The refusal of obligation alongside right is therefore not merely an ethical failure but an ontological foreclosure: a world that insists on entitlement without answerability cannot recognize revelation, only manage disruption while engaging in repression masquerading as rights.