SUMMARY: More than 8,000 Starbucks stores closed down Tuesday so that more than 180,000 employees could get anti-bias training aimed at reducing discrimination and unconscious stereotypes. How much can education help us overcome implicit bias? Yamiche Alcindor reports and Judy Woodruff learns more from Amrita Chakrabarti Myers of Indiana University and Patricia Devine of the University of Wisconsin.
SUMMARY: The NAACP issued a travel advisory about the state of Missouri for women, minorities and LGBT people, asking those travelers to use “extreme caution.” The NAACP's first statewide alert comes after Missouri passed a law that the organization says permits legal discrimination. President Rod Chapel Jr. of the Missouri NAACP joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss how and why the advisory came about.
SUMMARY: It's the story of a real-life murder trial and the so-called Zoot Suit Riots, set amid rampant discrimination in 1940s Los Angeles. A play called "Zoot Suit" was a cultural phenomenon in the 1970s and '80s, launching the careers of many Chicano actors. Now it's in revival at the theater where it all began. Jeffrey Brown reports talks to writer and director Luis Valdez.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): It is a deeply American story, a Mexican-American story, “Zoot Suit” the play, set in Los Angeles in the 1940s, amid rampant discrimination, a real-life murder trial and the so-called Zoot Suit Riots.
ACTOR: The grand jury has just indicted you all for the same identical crime, not just you four, the whole entire 38th Street Gang.
JEFFREY BROWN: And “Zoot Suit,” the cultural phenomenon, reaching from its premiere in 1978 at L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum, to Broadway, to a 1981 film, and now, 38 years later, to a revival at the theater where it began.
Its writer and director, then and now, is Luis Valdez.
LUIS VALDEZ, Writer/Director, “Zoot Suit”: I believe in entertainment. I love entertainment, you know? But I love it with a purpose. I want people to come out of here thinking about what they saw, and perhaps reassessing what's happening in their own lives with their families.
And, more than anything I hope that people leave here with hope and inspiration.
JEFFREY BROWN: Valdez received a National Medal of the Arts from President Obama in 2015 for — quote — “illuminating the human spirit in the face of social injustice.”
He spent his early years in a family of migrant workers.
Is it correct what I read, that you were 6 when you first discovered your love of theater in a camp?
LUIS VALDEZ: In a camp, labor camp, I got hooked, yes. I auditioned, and I won my first role. Unfortunately, the week of the show, we were evicted from the labor camp where we were staying, and I was never in the play. So, that left a big gap, a big hole in my chest, you know?
SUMMARY: How can we relieve anti-Muslim discrimination? Haroon Moghul says that adding a Muslim character to a certain science fiction franchise (Star Wars) might go a long way in changing perceptions (Islamophobia) and offering a vision of a more united future.
SUMMARY: The Supreme Court offered two decisions today. The justices ruled in favor of a young Muslim woman who was rejected from working at Abercrombie & Fitch because she wears a hijab. The court also overturned the conviction of a man who had posted threatening language against his ex-wife on Facebook. Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss those cases.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The often divided Supreme Court was mostly united today on two high-profile decisions, one involving workplace discrimination and the other about threats made online.
Jeffrey Brown has that story.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): Both cases ended in lopsided decisions from the high court. In one, justices ruled in favor of a young Muslim woman who was rejected from working at the clothing store Abercrombie & Fitch because she wears a hijab, or headscarf. In the other, the court overturned the conviction of a man who had posted threatening language against his ex-wife on Facebook.
With us now, as always, to discuss the cases is Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal.
Welcome back, Marcia.
Let’s start with the headscarf case. Right?
MARCIA COYLE, The National Law Journal: OK.
JEFFREY BROWN: Remind us of the facts of this case.
MARCIA COYLE: All right.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Abercrombie & Fitch on behalf of Samantha Elauf, claiming that the company violated Title VII, our nation’s major job bias law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs and practices.
Ms. Elauf, as you said, had applied for a job in the company’s Tulsa, Oklahoma, store wearing the headscarf. She didn’t say it was for religious reasons, but the hiring manager believed that was the case, sought guidance from a superior on whether that headscarf violated the company’s dress code, what it called the look policy.
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): The case involved a teacher with part-time religious duties at a Lutheran Church-run school who claimed employment discrimination after she was fired.
Today, the justices in a unanimous ruling said her church employer is protected from such lawsuits. It was the first time the high court has upheld the so-called ministerial exception to anti-discrimination laws.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now, let's talk about the other decision today. This was over whether corporations have a right of personal privacy. This was the AT&T case. What was at issue and what was decided?
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MARCIA COYLE, "The National Law Journal": Well, Chief -- first of all, Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion.
And, in his sometimes humorous analysis, he said that personal -- he rejected AT&T's argument that personal, because it has the root word person, and the Freedom of Information Act defines person to include corporations, that that means corporations have personal privacy rights.
He said that, while adjectives typically modify their root nouns, that's not always the case. For example, crabbed mean -- could mean handwriting that you can't read, but it really -- crab is a crustacean or a type of apple, and corny has nothing to do with corn.
So, he said when we talk in common language about personal privacy, personal correspondence, personal interest, personal influence, we're really not talking about corporations. We're talking about human beings.
And personal privacy, he said, evokes human concerns, not entities' concerns like AT&T. And he had a kicker to his decision, sort of clever.
(LAUGHTER)
MARCIA COYLE: But think about it closely. He said, we trust that AT&T will not take it personally, meaning the decision.
(LAUGHTER)
