Sikh American women hear cheers and whispers

Monday was bittersweet for Sikh American women.

On Monday, Manpreet Monica Singh became the first Sikh American female judge in the United States. The Houston born judge was sworn in as a Harris County, Texas, judge. Her father immigrated to the United States in the early 1970s.

Sikh Book cover

100 Questions and Answers About Sikhs

The same day in Alabama, Harmeet Dhillon sent a mass email addressing questions about her Sikh faith raised in her bid to become Republican National Committee Chair. The Alabama GOP cast a vote of no confidence in chair Ronna McDaniel. Dhillon is the leading alternative, and she is Sikh.

Dhillon supporters say that a whisper campaign is challenging her ability to champion Judeo-Christian values. McDaniel is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Dhillon’s email said that “religious liberty to be so foundational that it is the very first item referenced in the very first amendment of our Bill of Rights.”

According to NBC News, Chris Horn, who finished third for Alabama secretary of state in 2022, said some party members had discussed Dhillon’s faith but that this was not driven by religious bigotry. He criticized her for not explaining more about Sikhism in Monday’s email.

Horn and others interested in knowing more bout Sikhi can find it in “100 Questions and Answers About Sikh Americans.”

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Lansing City Pulse reviews “The Black Church” guide

We appreciate Bill Castanier’s article in Lansing City Pulse on our most recent Bias Busters guide, “100 Questions and Answers About the Black Church: The Social and Spiritual Movement of a People.”
We encountered so many good questions that people in the search wanted us to answer. We hope these answers help open up conversations all over between church members and people who have natural curiosity and just need a good starting point.

The guide explains why and how Black Churches were created, how they became the centers of community life, the true meaning of sanctuary in the Black community, the reasons behind different kinds of praise and contemporary issues about its relationship to the Black Lives Matter Movement, women’s roles and the church’s cultural contributions.

You can find “100 Questions and Answers About the Black Church” on Amazon and other online booksellers.

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118th Congress does not resemble U.S. religiously

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The Pew Research Center finds that the 2023-2024 Congress is not following population trends to be a less Christian and less religiously affiliated nation.

The 2023-2024 Congress is not reflecting changes in a country that is growing less Christian and less likely to affiliate with organized religions. The Pew Research Center’s Faith on the Hill report shows that while the proportion of Christians has fallen from 78% to 63% since Pew started tracking this in 2007, Congress is 88% Christian.

The number of unaffiliated Christians in Congress is one, compared to 29% of the population.

Pew reported that 99% of congressional Republicans and 76% of Democrats say they are Christians. Democrats are less likely to identify as Protestants and more likely to say they re Catholic.

Bias Buster coming soon: “100 Questions and Answers About the Religiously Unaffiliated.” Watch for it on Amazon.

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Do Mormons allow polygamy?

No. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it is properly called, has not allowed plural marriages for more than 130 years. But the stereotype persists.

100 Questions and Answers About Latter-day SaintsThis happens for several reasons. According to the Bias Busters guide “100 Questions and Answers About Latter-day Saints,” reasons include history, confusion over names, pop culture and incomplete media reports.

Historically, some church leaders, including founder Joseph Smith and leader Brigham Young, did practice polygamy. According to Bias Busters, “This was based on his study of plural marriages of biblical patriarchs including Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses.”

At the time, most church members did not engage in polygamy. Again, according to Bias Busters, “about three-quarters of adult church members did not. Two-thirds of the plural marriages were between one man and two women.” The church rejected polygamy in 1890. The practice had been legal in the United States until 1882.

Name appropriation has contributed to the confusion. Unrelated groups in the United States, Canada and Mexico have tried to protect polygamy as a religious right by hijacking the name of the church. According to Bias Busters, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has disavowed several groups that have called themselves fundamentalist sects. This includes the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is separate and considered to be its own religion.” The church has sued some groups for using variations of its name and excommunicates members who practice polygamy.

And then there are misunderstanding arising in pop culture and the news media. Shows like “Sister Wives” have featured polygamist families without explaining they are not church-affiliated.

In its style guide for journalists, the church asks, “When referring to people or organizations that practice polygamy, it should be stated that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is not affiliated with polygamous groups.”

In 2022, a cult leader jailed in Arizona was charged with having more than 20 wives. In the second paragraph of their articles, ABC News and CBS, working off an Associated Press story, described Samuel Bateman as “a former member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.” In the 14th paragraph, the articles reported, “Polygamy is a legacy of the early teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the mainstream church abandoned the practice in 1890 and now strictly prohibits it.”

The Salt Lake Tribune, The Washington Post and the New Your Post did not include the distinction between Bateman’s former cult and the church at all.

You can find “100 Questions and Answers About the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” on Amazon and other online booksellers.

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Coming soon: 100 Questions and Answers About Sikh Americans

Book cover

100 Questions and Answers About Sikhs

Although Sikhs have been in the United States for well more than 100 years, they are still largely unknown and misunderstood.

This is just the kind of group the Bias Busters classes at Michigan State University like to work with.

We can help inform people and help Sikhs get their own story out. One of the issues for them is that, when they do make news, it is usually not for anything they have done or really, anything about them, but about things people do TO them.

We are out to change that.

Watch for news on this new Bias Busters 100-question guide.

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This Giving Tuesday, be a Bias Busters ally

Group of 16 students

Michigan State students who created “100 Questions and Answers About African Americans”

Be a Bias Busters ally on Giving Tuesday, Nov. 30. The same kind of effort that sent Michigan State student authors to the Chaldean Cultural Center wants to send students to Amish Country in 2022. Please join us as a crowd-funding ally by contributing or sharing the crowd-funding campaign with YOUR network. Let’s make a difference together and give more students this eye-opening experience. Thank you!

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Pretty Progressive recommends 2 Bias Busters guides

We’re happy to see that Pretty Progressive has recommended two Bias Busters guides to teachers whose students are learning about LGBT issues.

The first of these guides to be published was about gender identity. Then, three members of thatg class formed an independent study team to create the sexual orientation guide.

It was one of our most creative endeavors. The three were Caitlin Taylor, Alexis Stark and Rebecca Fadler.

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Indigenous injustices’ bitter legacy

Two stories about Indigenous people came crossed each other recently. One informs the other.

One story, out of Canada, told of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of children who died years ago at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Across Canada, such schools stripped First Nation children of their language and heritage. In the worst cases, children were abused and died. But in other cases, they grew up with damage that they carried with them. And that leads us to the second story.

In the United States, Native News Online reported that the National Congress of American Indians issued a statement saying it “has repeatedly called for transparency and accountability for the historical and generational trauma caused by Native American boarding schools in the United States.”

And that takes us close to the related story and Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary. Still in her first month as secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Haaland targeted the high number of missing or murdered Indigenous women.

The statistics stagger.

Mother Jones reported that “Murder is the sixth leading cause of death for Alaska Native and American Indian women under the age of 45. For AI/AN women younger than 19 years old, murder climbs to the fourth leading cause of death.”

Mother Jones cited the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, writing, “Native women are 10 times more likely to be murdered and more than half experience sexual violence in some form. The National Crime Information Center notes that of the 5,712 reports in 2016, only 116 cases were logged in the US Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database.”

The problem is not just one of the disconnect between tribal and U.S. criminal justice systems.

The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center 10 years ago linked the problem to long-running problems and wrote, “Prostitution is a sexually exploitive, often violent economic option most often entered into by those with a lengthy history of sexual, racial and economic victimization. Prostitution is only now beginning to be understood as violence against women and children. It has rarely been included in discussions of sexual violence against Native women. It is crucial to understand the sexual exploitation of Native women in prostitution today in its historical context of colonial violence against nations.”

Learn more in “100 Questions, 500 Nations: A Guide to Native America.” It is available from Amazon.

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Exploiting the Holocaust

Since comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Georgia) has been receiving a barrage of criticism.

PortraitThe Associated Press reported that Taylor-Greene “excoriated safety protocols adopted by House Democrats, including a requirement that masks be worn on the House floor. She also called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ‘mentally ill’ and suggested that the rules were comparable to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.”

Taylor-Greene went further, the AP wrote, saying, “You know, we can look back in a time and history where people were told to wear a gold star. And they were definitely treated like second-class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”

Fellow Republicans have objected. House leader Kevin McCarthy, (R-California) was quoted as saying “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. … The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.”

When an actual punishment was not forthcoming, CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote, “Greene’s apparent escape from serious consequences for her rhetoric cheapens one of history’s worst crimes.”

People have largely learned that the Holocaust was an event without equal. Invoking the Holocaust to elevate criticism of other events such as mask-wearing is seen as such an over-reach that it trivializes the Holocaust. That is where such strong reactions come from.

From the Bias Busters guide “100 Questions About American Jews:” “The Holocaust took place between 1933 and 1945, although the worst part began in 1939. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, based on research at Yad Vashem, Nazis killed Jews from more than 20 countries in the Holocaust. Most were killed in Europe, particularly Poland, Germany, Ukraine, Lithuania, Hungary, Austria and France. In some countries 90 percent of the Jewish population was killed. All six death camps were in Poland.

… It is estimated that 6 million or more Jews were killed during the Holocaust. An exact number is difficult to know. Reasons for that include the length of the Holocaust and inconsistency and gaps in records. Research is still going on.

“100 Questions and Answers About American Jews” is available from Amazon.

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Remembering Tulsa race massacre

The 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre of May 31-June 1, 1921 is being revisited after a century of having been largely buried.

The very few remaining survivors help make that happen because, for a little while longer, are direct connections to the massacre.

According to the Associated Press, “More than 35 city blocks were leveled, an estimated 191 businesses were destroyed, and roughly 10,000 Black residents were displaced from the neighborhood where they’d lived, learned, played, worked and prospered.

“Although the state declared the massacre death toll to be only 36 people, most historians and experts who have studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300. Victims were buried in unmarked graves that, to this day, are being sought for proper burial.”

As we lose people whose testimony affirms the story, there is concern that it can be buried again. That is the power of witnessing and of 100-year anniversaries.

National Public Radio reviews three documentaries about the Tulsa massacre.

They are:

“100 Questions and Answers About African Americans” is available from Amazon or the Front Edge Publishing bookstore.

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