Prejudice is one of the oldest sins, and one of the most stubborn. It can hide in laws, in clubs, in churches and in jokes. The gospel insists that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female" (Galatians 3:28).
These five stories about racism and prejudice, retold in our own words, show how contempt takes root and how a single act of respect or courage can begin to pull it out. Each ends with a takeaway for sermons or group discussion.
Stories in this collection:
- The Priest Who Tipped His Hat: How Desmond Tutu Found His Calling
- Groucho Marx and the Restricted Swimming Pool
- The Hillbilly Preacher Who Opened the Doors
- The Obedience Experiments: How Ordinary People Hurt Others
- A Cruel Joke in a Sicilian Courtroom
The Priest Who Tipped His Hat: How Desmond Tutu Found His Calling
Almost everyone has heard of Desmond Tutu, the South African archbishop who became one of the great voices against apartheid. Far fewer people know the name Trevor Huddleston. Yet without Huddleston, there might never have been an Archbishop Tutu.
Asked in an interview to name a defining moment in his life, Tutu described a day when he was a young boy, walking down a street with his mother. A tall white man in a black cassock and hat came towards them.
Under the customs of segregated South Africa, when a Black person and a white person met on a narrow pavement, the Black person was expected to step off into the gutter to let the white person pass, often with a nod of deference. But that day, before Tutu and his mother could step aside, the white man stepped off the pavement himself. And as they passed, he raised his hat to Tutu's mother in a gesture of respect.
The young Tutu was astonished. He had never seen a white man show such courtesy to a Black woman, let alone to a domestic worker like his mother.
The man was Trevor Huddleston, an English Anglican priest working in the townships of Johannesburg, who was bitterly opposed to apartheid. When Tutu's mother explained that he had done it because he was a man of God, the boy found his calling. He later said that when he learned Huddleston was an Anglican priest, he decided that he too wanted to be an Anglican priest, and above all a man of God.
Huddleston went on to become a friend and mentor to Tutu. When Tutu was ill with tuberculosis as a teenager, Huddleston visited him again and again. And his conviction that every human being is made in the image of God became one of the driving forces behind Tutu's lifelong opposition to apartheid.
One small act of respect on a Johannesburg street helped shape the faith of a man who would one day help change a nation.
Takeaway: One small act of respect can overturn years of contempt in a child's heart. Treating every person as made in God's image is itself a powerful sermon.
Source: Desmond Tutu's own accounts in interviews, including with the BBC.
Groucho Marx and the Restricted Swimming Pool
A popular anecdote, told in several versions; some details are disputed.
The comedian Groucho Marx was one of the most famous entertainers in America. As the story is usually told, one day one of his children was turned away from the swimming pool of an exclusive Los Angeles club, where she had gone with friends.
The reason, Groucho discovered, was that the club was "restricted", a polite word in those days for refusing Jewish members and guests. The Marx family was Jewish.
Groucho is said to have responded with a letter to the club. Since his wife was not Jewish, he asked, might his child at least be allowed into the pool up to her waist?
The story is often linked with another of Groucho's most famous lines: that he did not want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. That remark seems to have come from a different occasion, when he resigned from a show-business club, but both have become part of the legend of a man who used humour to expose the absurdity of prejudice.
Takeaway: Humour exposed the absurdity of prejudice better than any argument. Rules that exclude people because of who they are cannot survive honest scrutiny.
Source: Widely repeated anecdote; exact details vary.
The Hillbilly Preacher Who Opened the Doors
A story often told in sermons about the American South. We have not been able to confirm the names or details, so it is best treated as an illustration.
In the 1950s, churches across the American South were sharply segregated, with separate congregations for Black and white Christians. According to the story, a small Baptist church in South Carolina appointed a new preacher. He had little formal education, but he understood the gospel. His method of preparing sermons would have horrified most pastors.
For his first sermon, the story goes, he simply let his Bible fall open, put his finger on the page and began to preach on the words it landed on. They were Paul's words to the Galatians: in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.
In a segregated church in the Deep South, the application seemed obvious, at least to the preacher. There should not be Black churches and white churches, he said. There should simply be churches, made up of Black and white believers together.
The deacons did not appreciate the message, and they demanded that he preach something else. The preacher did do something different: he dismissed the deacons and went on preaching about racial unity.
Many people left. His already small congregation shrank until, by some accounts, only a handful of people were left. But then it began to grow again, little by little, until it included people of every race.
One regular member, the story says, was a university lecturer in English literature who drove a long way every Sunday to hear this uneducated preacher. When someone asked him why, he said it was because that man preached the gospel.
Takeaway: Faithful preaching sometimes empties a church before it fills it. The gospel always tears down the walls we build between races.
Source: Reported in Tony Campolo, You Can Make a Difference.
The Obedience Experiments: How Ordinary People Hurt Others
In 1961, a young assistant professor at Yale University named Stanley Milgram began one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology. He wanted to see how far ordinary people would go in obeying an instruction to inflict pain on another human being.
Volunteers from the public were recruited for what they were told was a study of memory and learning. Each volunteer met another participant, and the two were assigned roles: one would be the teacher, the other the learner. In fact, the learner was an actor working with the researchers, and the volunteer was always the teacher.
The learner was strapped into a chair in another room and apparently wired to a shock generator. The teacher was told to ask a series of questions and, each time the learner gave a wrong answer, to give him an electric shock, starting at fifteen volts and increasing the voltage with every mistake. The switches on the machine were labelled up to 450 volts, with the higher levels marked with warnings such as "Danger: Severe Shock". No real shocks were given, but the teacher did not know that.
As the voltage rose, the teacher heard the learner groan, protest, scream and eventually fall silent. Whenever a teacher hesitated, a researcher in a grey lab coat calmly told them to continue.
Before the experiment, experts had predicted that only a tiny minority of people would go all the way. To Milgram's astonishment, in one of the best-known versions of the experiment about two-thirds of participants continued to the highest level on the machine, despite their visible distress.
What do the experiments show? They have been widely debated, and some researchers have questioned aspects of how they were carried out and interpreted. The social psychologists Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett argued that they reveal above all the power of situation: people often act as they do because of where they are and the pressures around them, not simply because of who they are. To refuse, the participants had to step outside the whole situation and challenge the authority running it.
The same forces have helped ordinary people take part in prejudice, discrimination and even atrocities. We like to think we would never do such things. Milgram's experiments warn us not to be so sure.
Takeaway: Racism and cruelty are rarely the work of monsters alone. They thrive when ordinary people go along with what the system expects. Christians are called to be the ones who refuse.
Source: Stanley Milgram's obedience studies (1961–1962); Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation.
A Cruel Joke in a Sicilian Courtroom
A real case reported in the international press in 2000. Because the hoax relied on crude slang, we describe the names rather than translating them literally.
In February 2000, newspapers reported an astonishing hoax in a courtroom in Sicily. Its ringleader was said to be a judge, who decided to stage a fake court hearing purely in order to laugh at a female prosecutor who had come from mainland Italy.
A date was set and the hearing was announced. Everyone in the courtroom was in on the joke except the young prosecutor, Iolanda Apostolico. The whole point was to make fun of her behind her back while she argued what she believed was a genuine case.
To deepen her humiliation, the judge gave everyone involved names taken from crude Sicilian slang. The names meant things like testicles, castrated and idiot. So throughout the hearing, as the prosecutor earnestly addressed the court, she was unknowingly calling the judge, the defence lawyer and a court officer by these vulgar insults, while those around her tried not to laugh.
Her first clue that something was wrong came when a colleague discreetly showed her a note warning that they were making fun of her in court. When she got home, she told her boyfriend, Claudio, about her strange day. He was a university lecturer in Rome, and he understood the Sicilian slang.
Once she realised what had happened, she felt deeply embarrassed and humiliated. According to the reports, the next day Claudio went to the court, walked up to the judge's bench, spat at the judge and left a note signed with his name.
Astonishingly, the judge brought charges against him. Claudio argued that he had been defending his girlfriend's honour, but he was convicted and given a suspended sentence. The judge, newspapers reported, was himself facing disciplinary proceedings.
The story is about more than a cruel joke. It shows how prejudice, whether against women, outsiders or people from another region, can take hold even among those whose job is to uphold justice, and how much damage a group can do when everyone goes along with the joke.
Takeaway: Prejudice, whether against women, a region or a race, often hides behind "just a joke". Contempt dressed as humour still wounds, and the people laughing share in it.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February 2000.
Final thoughts
A priest's raised hat, a comedian's reply, a stubborn preacher, a laboratory and a courtroom. Each story shows how prejudice works and how it can be resisted. The gospel calls us to see every person as an image-bearer of God.
For further reading, Sopranu reviews Schindler's List and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk.
Which of these stories could help your church talk honestly about prejudice?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
Comments
Post a Comment