discrimination

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — The Trump administration has announced that it will impose travel bans on officials it claims are responsible for discrimination against whites and other minority groups in South Africa.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday he would revoke U.S. visas or reject visa applications from foreign nationals found to be responsible for, or complicit in, enacting or enforcing laws and policies that allow for uncompensated land seizures, race-based discrimination and the incitement of violence against minority ethnic and racial groups in South Africa.

“The United States will not allow such behavior to go unchecked,” Rubio said in a statement. “These actions directly undermine peace, economic stability, and the rule of law, and they are incompatible with the pillars of America’s foreign policy.”

The South African government has strongly rejected U.S. allegations of discrimination against whites, calling the claims made by the administration since President Trump returned to office last year baseless and a result of misinformation.

It’s the latest U.S. move to sanction South Africa

Rubio did not identify any officials who would be targeted with the travel restrictions, though a lobby group for minority whites in South Africa has previously called for the U.S. to sanction officials of the African National Congress party, the party of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and the largest in South Africa’s Parliament.

It’s the latest move by the Trump administration to sanction South Africa over its claims that whites, and especially the Afrikaner group, are being discriminated against by their Black-led government. Afrikaners are descended from mainly Dutch and French colonial settlers who first came to South Africa in the 17th century. They were at the heart of South Africa’s previous apartheid system of racial segregation.

There are approximately 4.5 million white people in South Africa’s population of 62 million, which also includes whites with British or other heritage.

The Trump administration casts South Africa as anti-white

The U.S. has cited a contentious South African law that allows for the expropriation of unused private land without compensation in some circumstances, affirmative action policies that advance opportunities for Blacks and others, and a small number of violent crimes against white farmers as evidence of a larger anti-white stance in South Africa.

The Trump administration has also strongly criticized South Africa’s move to accuse U.S. ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, in a highly emotive case at the United Nations’ top court. Israel vehemently denies that allegation.

South Africa asks the U.S. to respect its sovereignty

South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola said Wednesday that some of the domestic policies that the U.S. had branded as discriminatory were designed to address the injustices of apartheid and hundreds of years of colonial rule before that, when Black people were stripped of their rights.

“South Africa respects that the United States may hold differing views on certain policy measures and their implementation. … The people of South Africa likewise respect the right of the American people to develop legislation that addresses their own circumstances,” Lamola said in a statement. “We expect that the same respect will be accorded to the people of South Africa, as the principle of sovereignty requires.”

The U.S. says more sanctions will follow

The U.S. has enforced a series of other sanctions against South Africa during Trump’s second term for purported anti-white and anti-American policies. They include barring South African officials from meetings of the Group of 20 economic bloc this year in the U.S., and phasing out aid for South Africa’s HIV treatment program.

The U.S. has also launched a refugee program for Afrikaners and other whites, claiming baselessly that they are victims of a humanitarian emergency in South Africa.

The U.S. says the sanctions are because South Africa has not changed its policies, and warned of more to follow.

“This visa restriction policy is only the first step in a series of escalatory measures that will show America’s firm resolve in this matter,” the official U.S. Ambassador to South Africa account posted on X, referring to Rubio’s visa announcement.

Imray writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

A former employee of Activision Blizzard is suing the Santa Monica-based game company, alleging she was sexually harassed and subject to retaliation.

In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Wednesday, the woman, filing anonymously as Jane Doe, says the game giant “fostered and tolerated a pervasive ‘frat boy’ workplace culture,” where male employees and supervisors “openly objectified women, viewed and displayed pornography” and made demeaning sexual remarks in her presence.

She is seeking unspecified compensatory damages, including for lost wages, benefits and earning capacity.

“We take these allegations seriously. We strive to maintain a respectful and inclusive workplace, and we do that through best-in-class policies and systems designed to prevent and address harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, and by holding employees accountable for their behavior,” said a Blizzard spokesperson in a statement to The Times.

The woman, who said she worked for the company for 14 years beginning in 2009 in its sound department, accuses 10 men of subjecting her variously to harassment, physical assault, inappropriate touching and inappropriate comments.

Between 2011 and 2012, she alleges, one co-worker lured her to his apartment, where he repeatedly touched her leg and “blocked her exit, threaten[ing] her with physical violence and attempted to rape her.” He continued to demand dates and spread sexual rumors about her calling her a “bitch” and “slut” in front of co-workers and a male manager, according to the suit.

Over five years starting in 2010, Jane Doe says that she was “repeatedly sexually harassed” by another man, a re-recording mixer with whom she worked with, and who told her that she would “be risking her career if she reported him,” the complaint states.

She further alleges that a third man, Blizzard’s audio director, “repeatedly touched” her leg “in a sexual manner without her permission” and when she rejected his advances he “retaliated against her by sabotaging her work and ensuring that she was denied a promotion.”

According to the suit, Jane Doe’s complaints and reports to her supervisors and human resources about her alleged treatment were dismissed and they “failed to take timely or effective corrective action.”

Further, the former employee says that she was “required to work excessive and unsafe hours” and told not to report overtime.

As a result of the harassment, the employee says in her complaint, she suffered suffered depression “and was required to seek ongoing psychiatric care” before being discharged in April 2024.

A year earlier, Activision Blizzard and California’s Civil Rights Department reached a roughly $50-million settlement agreement to resolve an employment discrimination and equal pay lawsuit. .

The Civil Rights Department sued Activision Blizzard in 2021, alleging that women at the company were regularly subjected to sexual harassment, paid less, denied promotions and met with retaliation when they raised concerns with managers.

As part of the agreement, Activision Blizzard agreed to pay up to $45.75 million to compensate women who worked for the company in California from Oct. 12, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2020. The company also agreed to pay $9.1 million to cover the Civil Rights Department’s attorneys fees and costs.
Activision Blizzard also settled a case with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As part of that 2022 settlement, the company agreed to establish an $18-million fund for workers who experienced sexual harassment or discrimination, among other types of workplace misconduct.

Activision Blizzard has denied all wrongdoing.

California is poised to be the first state in the nation to allow people to identify their Jewish heritage on state forms, sparking debate within the community about identity and the merits of being singled out.

Some Jews believe the move would help people understand the community better, particularly on issues such as health and hate crimes. But some are wary about providing too much information given the history of government-sanctioned persecutions against Jewish people.

The state recognizes nearly 50 racial and ethnic identities for data collection, but it considers Jewish identity only as a religion, not an ethnicity.

Senate Bill 1387, which lawmakers passed Aug. 31, seeks to require state agencies to include a box for Jewish ethnicity on all demographic data forms, ranging from public assistance programs to college applications.

The goal is to improve the accuracy of state data to better understand the needs of Jewish communities, according to the bill’s author, state Sen. Henry Stern (D-Los Angeles). The bill, which received broad support in the Assembly and Senate, will head to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk in the coming weeks for a signature or veto.

The proposed law has gone beyond data collection within the Jewish community, prompting discussions and disagreements over whether being Jewish is religious, cultural or a blend of many things. For some, it’s evoked anxiety about the historical dangers of tracking Jews.

Stern doesn’t mind the debate. In fact, he says, it speaks to a core part of Jewish identity.

“I love that the Jewish tradition is us arguing with each other,” he said. “It is such a beautiful part of our heritage to debate these kinds of things and what it means to be Jewish, and I love making space for that.”

California has broadened the list of racial and ethnic categories people can select in recent years. Newsom last year signed a similar bill that created a category for Middle East and North African individuals separate from the “white” designation that had previously encompassed those ethnicities.

California is home to an estimated 1.2 million Jewish people, representing the second-largest Jewish population in the United States after New York. And for most American Jews, Jewish identity is not one size fits all.

“The difficulty here, I think, is that Jewishness doesn’t fit neatly into the categories Americans normally use,” said Jeffrey Kopstein, the chancellor’s professor of political science at UC Irvine. “So, of course, to non-Jews, Jews are often thought of as a religion, but Jewish identity also has historically involved ancestry, culture and peoplehood.

“Many people who are entirely secular nevertheless understand themselves and are understood by others as Jews,” he added.

A Pew Research study published in 2021 found that about 1 in 5 Jews in the United States — roughly 19% of respondents — said that being Jewish is about a combination of religion, ancestry and culture. About 22% said being Jewish is a matter of culture, while 21% said it was a matter of ancestry. About half as many — roughly 11% — said being Jewish is mainly about religion.

The study found that religion is not central to the lives of most Jews living in the United States. Still, identifying as Jewish matters greatly to them, with three-quarters of Jewish Americans saying that “being Jewish” is very important or somewhat important to them, according to Pew.

Jewish California, a Jewish advocacy group that sponsored the bill, wrote in a statement that when Jewish ethnicity is absent from data, disparities in healthcare, education and discrimination are less likely to be identified or addressed. Data collection, it says, “signals to the public how communities are understood.”

“When California recognizes Jews only as a religion, it reinforces a narrow and incomplete understanding of Jewish identity, encouraging the misconception that Jews are defined solely by belief or worship rather than by a rich and distinct culture, history, peoplehood, and shared experience. That misunderstanding leads to generalizations, creating fertile ground for bias and discrimination,” the group wrote in a statement.

But opponents argue that the bill oversimplifies Jewish identity and could potentially make people more of a target for antisemitism, which saw a nationwide surge after the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, 2023.

In 2025, the Anti-Defamation League tallied 6,274 incidents of antisemitism in the United States, down from 9,354 incidents the year prior. Last year’s numbers were still about five times higher than a decade ago, according to the ADL.

Cat Zavis, a rabbi at Beyt Tikkun, told the California Assembly’s Judiciary Committee in June that the bill erases the diversity of Jewish people whose families come from a variety of places including the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and Europe.

“Jews are not a single ethnicity. Judaism is a religion,” she said. “Many Middle Eastern and North African Jews have spent years working to have their distinct histories recognized. Their stories are not the same as those of Ashkenazi Jews. They have different experiences of displacement, discrimination, privilege and identity. By collapsing all Jews into a single ethnic category, this bill makes those communities invisible.”

Stern says people will still be able to check multiple racial and ethnic identification boxes on forms to encompass all the ways they identify.

Groups have also raised concerns about the government maintaining records on Jews, which is reminiscent for some of the trauma of the Holocaust. In the 1930s, the Nazi government used a variety of forms of public data including tax returns and census records to help identify Jews who would be rounded up and sent to concentration camps where millions were killed.

“History offers a clear warning: when Jewish identity is officially distinguished from that of all other ethnic groups, the results have too often been catastrophic,” the Bay Area chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, an advocacy organization that bills itself as the largest Jewish group supporting Palestine, wrote in a statement.

Supporters of the bill say identifying as Jewish under the law is strictly voluntary. For Stern, the root of the bill is empowerment.

As a kid growing up in Los Angeles, Stern wasn’t as religious as he is now, but he was still singled out for being Jewish. Other students drew swastikas on his backpack. Antisemitic cartoons appeared in his school newspaper.

“Some stuff happened where I went from being a normal kid blending in to suddenly realizing I had an identity and it was one that was sort of defined by being called out for it,” he said. “Back then, there were no forms on campus, or applying for college, that had an opportunity for me to identify as Jewish, even though I was being identified by other people that way.”

He hopes the proposed law will give people the chance to own their Jewish identity on their terms.

“Maybe this is one place where people who are excellent at disagreeing with each other can all kind of agree that there ought to be a space for us,” he said.