Discrimination

Around half of adults across the world hold antisemitic beliefs and deny the historic facts of the Holocaust. This is according to the latest edition of the largest global study of anti-Jewish attitudes by the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based advocacy group.

The study surveyed more than 58,000 adults from 103 countries and territories representing 94% of the world’s adult population. It found that 46% of them—which when extrapolated to the global population would equal an estimated 2.2 billion people—display antisemitic attitudes. A fifth of the respondents haven’t heard of the Holocaust, during which six million Jews were killed, while 21% believe it has either been exaggerated by historians or it never happened.

According to the survey, the level of antisemitism in the global adult population has more than doubled since it was launched in 2014. The report is the latest among a number of surveys charting a steep rise in antisemitism across the globe.

Bonnie Crawford was in danger of missing a connecting flight for a board meeting last week when a United Airlines customer-service rep saved the day. She got rebooked on a pricey nonstop flight in business class. For free.

You’re probably thinking, “No airline ever does that for me.” Crawford isn’t just any frequent flier. She has United’s invitation-only Global Services status.

It’s a semi-secret, status-on-steroids level that big spenders strive for every year. American and Delta have souped-up statuses, too, with similarly haughty names: ConciergeKey and Delta 360°. The airlines don’t like to talk about what it takes to snag an invite, how many people have such status, or even the perks. Even the high rollers themselves don’t know for sure.

Get into these exclusive clubs and you get customer service on speed dial, flight rebooking before you even know there’s trouble, lounge access, and priority for upgrades. Not to mention bragging rights and swag. People even post unboxing videos of their invites on YouTube.

Anyone with this super status needn’t fret about the value of airline loyalty or the devaluation of frequent-flier points.

Crawford was invited to Global Services for 2017 and was hooked. “It was the first taste of this magic, elusive, absolutely incredible status,’’ she says. She wasn’t invited again until this year and fears she won’t be invited back next year due to fewer costly international flights in her new job.

Possible Preaching Angles:

You can approach this illustration from two angles: 1) Boasting; Pride – This shows the negative side of human nature that loves to boast about their favored position and humble-brag about their status. This status is gained by merit. 2) Advocate; Grace; Invitation; Rights - The positive angle is that we have an Advocate who gifted us a special relationship with the Father (Eph. 3:12; Heb. 4:14-16). This status is all due to God’s grace.

More than a century ago, 110 Black soldiers were convicted of murder, mutiny, and other crimes at three military trials held at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Nineteen were hanged, including 13 on a single day, December 11, 1917, in the largest mass execution of American soldiers by the Army.

The soldiers’ families spent decades fighting to show that the men had been betrayed by the military. In November of 2023, they won a measure of justice when the Army secretary, Christine E. Wormuth, overturned the convictions and acknowledged that the soldiers “were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials.”

In January 2024, several descendants of the soldiers gathered at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery as the Department of Veterans Affairs dedicated new headstones for 17 of the executed servicemen.

The new headstones acknowledge each soldier’s rank, unit, and home state—a simple honor accorded to every other veteran buried in the cemetery. They replaced the previous headstones that noted only their name and date of death.

Jason Holt, whose uncle, Pfc. Thomas C. Hawkins, was among the first 13 soldiers hanged in 1917, said at the ceremony, “Can you balance the scales by what we’re doing? I don’t know. But it’s an attempt. It’s an attempt to make things right.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

We all long for justice, for the day when things will finally be made right. In this life, justice happens slowly, haphazardly, and sometimes not at all. But when Jesus returns, all things will be made right.

In Raymond Arsenault’s biography of John Lewis, he recounts Lewis’s mentors and their shared vision of “the Beloved Community.” Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lewis often spoke of “the Beloved Community,” which was “a philosophical theory and a call to service.”

At the successful conclusion of the yearlong boycott in December 1956, King quoted the Book of Matthew and urged the boycotters to “inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.” “Love your enemies,” he recited, “bless them that curse you, pray for them who despitefully use you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven.” “We must remember,” King continued, “… that a boycott is not an end within itself; it is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority. But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.”

Placing the goals of nonviolent direct action on such a high moral plane could be inspiring, drawing Lewis and many people of faith into the movement. But as the historian Mills Thornton has noted, King’s frequent allusions to the “beloved community” as a reachable promised land sometimes had the opposite effect, prompting more practical listeners to “dismiss it as a pipe dream.”

Suzanne Gaskins is a psychologist with a background working with indigenous children in Mexico. She wanted to test their capacity for delayed gratification, so she administered what’s called The Marshmallow Test. She offered each child the choice of eating one marshmallow immediately, or waiting while she left the room for the promise of two marshmallows.

Because she’s been studying the children in this community for years and knows them generally to be proficient and high functioning, she expected many of them to be waiting when she came back. But of the six children she tested, four of them simply left the room.

Puzzled by those results, Gaskins administered a host of sixteen different tests designed to measure executive function. Even though children in this community are self-motivated and can often dress, bathe themselves, and help with chores by three years of age, about half of them failed these tests.

This led Gaskins to examine the cultural bias embedded in those traditional tests and to rethink their efficacy. When she followed up with the children who took the marshmallow test, she found that many of them simply left the room because they had other things to do than sit around waiting for a marshmallow.

“I was very surprised at my own lack of insight,” Gaskins said. “I did not recognize the bias built into the test until I sat in the room with the kids and it became obvious what was wrong.”

Lucía Alcalá assisted Gaskins in administering these tests. She said, “Just because children in different communities perform differently in our tasks, doesn’t mean there’s something wrong and we need to fix it. As U.S. scholars we feel we have to fix everyone. … People don’t need us to save them and fix them.”

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Texas company RealPage, alleging that the company violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by enabling property owners to illegally collude, preventing competition in the rental market to artificially inflate their profits. According to reporting from the nonprofit ProPublica, RealPage’s software enables landlords to share confidential data so they can charge similar rates on rental properties.

Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter said, “RealPage has built a business out of frustrating the natural forces of vigorous competition. The time has come to stop this illegal conduct.”

Kanter compared the system to drug cartels and went on to say, “We learned that the modern machinery of algorithms and AI can be even more effective than the smoke-filled rooms of the past. You don't need a Ph.D. to know that algorithms can make coordination among competitors easier.”

Officials at the DOJ say the lawsuit is the culmination of over two years of investigation into RealPage. This included analysis of internet documents and communications and also consultation with programmers who could break down how the computer code interacts with the proprietary data.

The lawsuit is part of an ongoing effort from federal, state, and local officials to mitigate the lack of affordable housing in American cities. It’s also part of a broader push to scrutinize similar information-sharing systems that might enable antitrust violations in other industries.

“Training a machine to break the law is still breaking the law,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.

Possible Preaching Angle:

When people use dishonest means to boost profits, it is not just illegal, it dishonors the Lord, who cares for the poor.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” That opening line from Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes has resonated with generations of African Americans over many decades because of the legacy of racism in America, and its soul-crushing propensity to dangle the specter of opportunity while keeping it perpetually out of reach.

Ed Dwight knew this reality firsthand. In 1962, Dwight was the first black man to be selected for an American astronaut training program. He spent years preparing, training, and running experiments at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Nevertheless, because of internal resistance to his inclusion into the program, Dwight was never selected for a NASA mission.

“Just like every other Black kid, you don’t get something, and you convince yourself it wasn’t that important anyway,” said Charles Bolden Jr., one of Dwight’s friends and a former NASA administrator.

After his military career concluded, Dwight eventually put it all behind him. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Denver and eventually became an accomplished artist, with 129 memorial sculptures and over 18,000 pieces in gallery exhibits across the United States.

So, when he was invited to participate in a commercial space flight earlier this year, Dwight initially demurred. “I’m a really busy guy,” said Dwight. “It didn’t make a lot of difference to me at the time.”

But a group of current and former black astronauts intervened, and reminded him of the years he spent training to fill a role he was never allowed to consummate. Because of them, Dwight changed his mind.

And by the time Dwight achieved spaceflight on the Blue Origin vessel, he broke another historic barrier. At 90 years old, Ed Dwight became the oldest person to fly in space, surpassing the previous record holder, former Star Trek star William Shatner.

One of the men who convinced Dwight to take the flight was Victor Glover, Jr. “While he was off the planet, I was weeping. It was tears of joy and resolution,” said Glover. He’d met Dwight in 2007, after receiving one of Dwight’s sculptures at an award presentation. Only later did Glover learn Dwight’s own personal history of unfulfilled longing within NASA.

“I was in the presence of greatness and didn’t even know it,” Glover said. “Sixty years he sat with this and navigated it with dignity and grace and class, and that is impactful to me.”

Blue Origin honored Dwight by naming his seat on the mission after his NASA call sign: Justice.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God does not forget about the sacrifices that his servants make in the process of living faithfully. Do not lose heart, for God is in the business of making wrong things right again.

In the spring of 2000, a unique library was established in Copenhagen, Denmark. It's called the Menneskebiblioteket, which is Danish for, “The Human Library."

The library is, in the true sense of the word, a library of people. Readers can borrow human beings serving as open books and have conversations they would not normally have access to. Every human book from their bookshelf, represents a group in society that is often subjected to prejudice, stigmatization, or discrimination because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status, ethnic origin, and so on.

Instead of checking out a book, you can have a conversation with someone who will share their story of being deaf, blind, autistic, houseless, sexually abused, or bipolar. The mission of the Human Library? To break down stereotypes and prejudices by fostering dialogue. Yes, you can ask these human books questions!

Their motto: "Unjudge someone."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Isn't that what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount? "Do not judge, or you too will be judged." Instead of focusing on the speck of sawdust in someone else's eye, Jesus told us to “take the plank out of our own eye” (Matt. 7:1-5).

For years, Jalon Hall was touted as a bright spot for Google’s reputation for diversity. Hall is an African American deaf woman, and had been highlighted on the company’s official social media channels. On LinkedIn, Google praised Hall and said she was “helping expand opportunities for black deaf professionals,” and on Instagram she was hailed as “making life at Google more inclusive.”

But for Hall, those platitudes were only words, and were not backed up with actions. Hall recently filed a lawsuit against Google for failing to provide the accommodations they promised her, and for creating a hostile work environment by characterizing her complaints according to racialized stereotypes.

In an interview Hall said, “Google is using me to make them look inclusive for the deaf community and the overall disability community. In reality, they need to do better. I’m standing in the gap for those often pushed aside.”

Hall says when she was hired as a content moderator in 2020, the company promised to provide interpreters to help her review content as part of YouTube’s child safety regulations, but the company refused. And a manager in another division called her an “aggressive black deaf woman” and advised her to “keep her mouth shut and take a sales role.”

Hall says she filed three HR complaints before she sued, and wants to remain at Google to help promote a better work environment for others.

I’ve noticed along the way of life that some people are much better at seeing people than others are. In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators.

Diminishers … make others feel insignificant. They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.

Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times—so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.

Illuminators are a joy to be around. A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him [gave you] a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.

The northeast Portland location of Pho Gabo, a family-owned Vietnamese restaurant, was forced to close after the restaurant received an anonymous complaint about the smell of the food. The closure prompted swift condemnation from five state representatives of Vietnamese descent in the Portland area.

In response, Portland city commissioner Carmen Rubio instructed the Bureau of Development Services to pause investigating any more odor complaints until the city’s regulations can be evaluated.

The problem stems from the fact that, as currently written, if an inspector travels to the location and can smell anything food-related, they’re required to write it up. The city’s enforcement structure privileges the complaint of one anonymous person over the legion of satisfied customers patronizing the restaurant, which has been in that location for over three decades.

Five Vietnamese American state representatives issued a joint statement: “We believe that, as currently written and enforced, the city’s odor code is discriminatory and not objective by any known standards. We stand ready to work with Commissioner Rubio and ensure that city code is fair and reasonable, and ultimately the city of Portland retains the vibrant food culture celebrating our diverse community.”

A statement from an organization advocating for Asians and Pacific Islanders read, “Long used as a tactic for displacing and removing Asian communities, olfactory racism has deep roots in this country dating back hundreds of years. With this closure, our community is losing a vital small business and reinforcing harmful stereotypes and tropes around Asians, our food, culture, and right to belong.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Selfish behavior can potentially generate great loss for a community; generosity and humility, however, can multiply the blessings within a community.

In 1939, Lloyd Dong and his family were having difficulty finding a place to live. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1884 and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 were part of a series of racially exclusive laws and ordinances designed to prevent Chinese immigrants like the Dongs from being able to successfully settle down. But the Dongs did eventually find a place, thanks to Emma and Gus Thompson, two Black entrepreneurs who first rented and then eventually sold a house in Coronado, California to the family.

That act of kindness helped the Dongs become a part of American society. Now, generations later, the Dongs want to honor the Thompsons by donating $5 million of the proceeds of the sale of that property to a scholarship fund for Black students. Lloyd Dong, Jr. said, “Without them, we would not have the education and everything else.”

Ron and his wife Janice are both retired educators who understand the value of education, which is why they’re also working to have the Black Resource Center at San Diego State University named after the Thompsons. Janice said, “It may enable some kids to go and flourish in college that might not have been able to otherwise.”

The Thompsons initial gesture of hospitality seems even more miraculous when you consider the context. Emma and Gus Thompson originally traveled to Coronado from Kentucky to work at a local hotel, and built their house in 1895, before many of the restrictive racial housing covenants were enacted. The Thompson’s property in Coronado originally featured a residence and a small boarding house on the upper floor of a barn, intentionally created to house vulnerable people with no other place to go.

Jo Von McCalester, a professor at Howard University, said, “It was just something understood that marginalized people in San Diego had to rely very heavily on one another. One family’s sacrifice can shape the lives of so many.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

When we pass on the generosity that we’ve received from others, we model the generous love of God who lavishes on all without regard for status, heritage, or bloodline.

In his book Forgive, Tim Keller tells the story of a friend of his who was a PhD student at Yale. Keller’s friend once told him that modern people think about slavery and say, “How could people have ever accepted such a monstrosity?” Keller continues:

My friend said, “That’s not the way historians think. They ask: considering the fact it was universally believed by all societies that we had the right to attack an enslaved, weaker people, and since everybody had always done it, the real historical question is, why did it occur to anybody that it was wrong? Whoever first had that idea?”

My friend then answered his own question, pointing out that the first voices in the fourth, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries who called for the abolition of slavery were all Christians. And the Christian, who called for this justice, believed there was a God of love, who demanded that we love our neighbors—all our neighbors—as ourselves.

Abraham Lincoln biographer Jon Meacham notes, “There was no evident political gain to be had for Lincoln [to be anti-slavery]; quite the opposite. So why did he … state so clearly that slavery was unjust?”

Someone close to Lincoln pointed to the following story:

One morning in … the city [Lincoln] passed a slave auction. A vigorous and comely [young woman] was being sold. She underwent a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they pinched her flesh and made her trot up and down the room like a horse, to show how she moved, and in order, as the auctioneer said, that “bidders might satisfy themselves” whether the article they were offering to buy was sound or not.

The whole thing was so revolting that Lincoln moved away from the scene with a deep feeling of “unconquerable hate.” Bidding his companions follow him he said, “By God, boys, let's get away from this.”

Meacham concludes, “That experience formed one element of Lincoln's reaction, if not the main one. ‘The slavery question offered bothered me as far back as 1836 to 1840’, Lincoln said in 1858. ‘I was troubled and grieved over it.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, are we today troubled and grieved by the injustice of the world?

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a pastor in Birmingham, Ala., in the 1950s, was called by the historian Andrew Manis “one of the least known but most impactful figures in the civil rights movement.” He was, by his own estimate, arrested in peaceful protests some 30 to 40 times. His house was bombed with his whole family inside one Christmas Eve. His church was subjected to three different bombing attempts

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act and lawyers sought injunctive relief to force Arkansas to integrate Central High in Little Rock. On that very day, Shuttlesworth organized the integration of Phillips High School in Birmingham, driving his own two children to the school to enroll them.

He was met by a white mob that beat him with baseball bats, chains, and brass knuckles. As he was beginning to lose consciousness, Shuttlesworth recounts that “something” said to him: “You can’t die here. Get up. I have a job for you to do.” In the hospital later that day, a reporter asked Shuttlesworth what he was working for in Birmingham. He responded: “For the day when the man who beat me and my family with chains at Phillips High School can sit down with us as a friend.”

In his book Adrift, Scott Galloway details how America is losing its strong middle class:

In 1965, the chiefs of America's largest 350 companies by revenue made 21 times the average compensation of their industries’ workers. In 2020, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio shot up to 351 times that of their workers. Since 1960, corporate profits have gone up 85 times; employee wages have gone up only 38 times. Between 1979 and 2013, the bottom 99% of Americans saw their wages go up about 18%. The top 1% of Americans saw their wages go up 140%.

The result is that kindergartners with good grades from poor families are less likely to graduate from high school, graduate from college, or earn a higher wage than their affluent peers with bad grades. At 38 colleges, including five of the Ivies, there are more students from the top 1% of the U.S. income scale than from the bottom 60%.

The Supreme Court recently outlawed most racial preferences in college admissions. However, a new study from Ivy League researchers indicates another form of affirmative action that tends to dominate exclusive institutions of higher learning: preference for wealth.

The Harvard study involved the eight Ivy League schools, plus four other highly-selective schools. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, the data show that children from families in the top one percent of income ranking were 34 percent more likely to be admitted into these schools than the average applicant. Those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to be accepted.

Study researchers said, “The conclusion from this study is the Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students. ... Are these highly selective private colleges in America taking kids from very high-income, influential families and basically channeling them to remain at the top in the next generation?”

The study indicates that legacy admissions, or students given preferences because of alumni parents, is a large driver of outcomes that prioritize the wealthy over other similarly deserving students. So, too, are admission slots for certain sports like rowing, fencing, lacrosse, or equestrian, that tend to be populated by the wealthy because of high participation costs and upper-class cultural values.

The one notable exception is M.I.T., which is known for not offering admissions preferences to either legacy applicants or athletes. Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions at M.I.T. said, “I think the most important thing here is talent is distributed equally but opportunity is not. Our admissions process is designed to account for the different opportunities students have based on their income. It’s really incumbent upon our process to tease out the difference between talent and privilege.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

If God doesn't treat the rich or poor or different racial groups favorably, then we shouldn't either.

Dr. Lisa Iezzoni is a professor of medicine at Harvard. She has done research for 25 years with people who have disabilities, to find out, “What is it like for you to go to a doctor?” She kept hearing stories about doctors’ offices “you can’t get into. Doctors who don’t treat you with respect. Care that is way below standard.”

So, she decided to then ask doctors, “What is it like for you to treat someone with disabilities?” She promised the doctors, “You’ll be anonymous,” and the focus groups were on video, so the doctors couldn’t see that Dr. Iezzoni, who has multiple sclerosis, was sitting in a wheelchair.

The result? Some doctors said their office scales could not accommodate wheelchairs, so they had told patients to go to a supermarket, a grain elevator, a cattle processing plant, or a zoo to be weighed. Some would tell a new patient, “Sorry, the practice is closed.” One specialist said disabled patients take too much time, and they’re a “disruption to clinic flow."

Possible Preaching Angle:

How differently Jesus approaches a person with disabilities (John 9)! He was approachable, empathetic, and affirming.

When Bernard Robins saw the three officers eyeing him from their department cruiser, it was a familiar look. He’d been stopped by police multiple times before as a teen and young adult, but previously chalked up those encounters to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was also familiar because he’d logged plenty of time in a cruiser himself, as a member of the LA Police Department.

So, he conducted himself as he always does in these scenarios – he kept things polite, kept his hands in plain view, and informed the officers that he also wore the badge. None of that mattered to these officers, who still handcuffed Robins, despite no wrongdoing on his part.

Off duty that day, Robins had been spending time in pursuit of his passion, filmmaking. Having just come from a shoot for a film he’d written, Robins was chatting with a lighting tech that he knew. Police eventually detained Robins because they suspected the tech of criminal activity, but failed to release him even after he supplied them with identification confirming his status as an officer.

Robins says that after returning to work, his supervisor and many of his colleagues were generally supportive. Nevertheless, he wondered if his fellow officers would have his back out in the field, particularly after he discovered rumors that he was gang affiliated, a charge he vehemently denies. Robins eventually sued the department, accusing members of a gang unit of racially profiling him.

Robins said the incident shook his faith in policing, causing him to reconsider whether he could still participate in the organization he’d been so excited to join just three years prior. During his mandated sessions with a police psychologist before his return, Robins had been encouraged to just put on the uniform and see how it felt. It was the same unform that he’d previously been proud to wear. Robins said, “All I did was put the uniform on, but it just felt too uncomfortable.” And after that, he told his supervisor that he was done.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes taking a stand for what is right involves relinquishing power and position. It also means telling the truth, even when it comes at a cost to one's career prospects.

In 2020 Christian leader John Perkins interviewed the lawyer, Bryan Stevenson. Perkins, the son of a sharecropper, was born in poverty in Mississippi. Stevenson was born two years after Perkins’ conversion to Christ, in a poor, black, rural community in Delaware. Stevenson eventually graduated from Harvard law school and founded the Equal Justice initiative. He represents people who have been sentenced to death on flimsy evidence or without proper representation.

Stevenson told Perkins the story of his first visit to death row. As a law student intern, he’d been sent to tell a prisoner that he was not at risk of execution in the coming year. Stevenson felt unprepared. The prisoner had chains around his ankles, wrists, and waist. Stevenson delivered his message. The man expressed profound release. They talked for hours. But then two prison guards burst in.

Angry that the visit had taken so long, the guards reapplied their inmates’ chains. Stevenson pleaded with the officers to stop. He told them it was his fault they overrun their time. But the prisoner told Stevenson not to worry. Then he planted his feet, threw back his head and sang:

I’m pressing on the upward way,

New heights I’m gaining every day;

Still praying as I am onward bound,

Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.

Everybody stopped, Stevenson said, “The guards recovered, and they started pushing this man down the hallway. You could hear the chains clanking, but you could hear this man singing about higher ground. And in that moment God called me. That was the moment I knew I wanted to help condemned people get to higher ground.”