I don't doubt this sort of discrimination happens, but is there some sort of data to suggest this is more than isolated? I'm not Indian but rather Bangladeshi (the low-caste Indians who converted to Islam to get out of the caste system, lol). And I've met the occasional proud Brahmin, but in decades of living here I've never heard of caste discrimination being some sort of systemic thing. And yet I've seen like dozens of articles on this all of the sudden.
I'm not endorsing the idea of "isolated incidents" in general! But you can look at data to show that disparities in how certain groups are treated--e.g. employers being less willing to call back candidates with "Black" names on their resume. But extrapolating from the Cisco lawsuit to a narrative about a larger problem in Silicon Valley can have ugly consequences. It can be flipped around to broadly paint Indians who are in leadership positions in Silicon Valley in a bad light.
>In 2016, Equality Labs conducted the first survey on caste discrimination in the United States, helmed by Dr. Maari Zwick Maitreyi and myself. Surveying more than 1,500 respondents, we uncovered a problem that was much larger than we expected: One in four Dalits surveyed reported facing physical and verbal assault, one in three faced educational discrimination, and two in three workplace discrimination.
I worry a bit about this kind of surveys. By this standard, I've faced sexual assault because a drunken guy started petting me once (I'm a straight guy). By any reasonable standard it was a funny incident, but in a strict interpretation of a "have you ever" survey, I'd be a sexual assault survivor.
Could be the same here. Say that in 1/100 of interactions between a upper and lower caste there is some form of discrimination, regardless the intensity. I'm too tired to do the math, but it seems reasonable that would lead to a high percentage of people ending up answering yes to a "have you ever been discriminated" question.
That's not a rebuttal, that's collection of all loony conspiracy theories pinning the blame on British for "inventing" the caste system. Disingenuous stuff, that should not be peddled on here.
It’s not ‘loony’! I got chills looking at the image of the English man measuring the nose with calipers. I didn’t know such images were in circulation never mind on Getty images.
That’s the kind of pictures I have in the books I mentioned in the earlier comment. The British census takers would go village to village..they were obsessed with the angle of the nose and how flat it was up the face. To them these aboriginal features and skin colour were the basis of caste division.
And this wasn’t at all true. The Vedas divided people on the basis of their nature and their dharma or work or duty to society was based on their temperament. A weak vegetarian Brahmin who was keen to learn numbers and had the aptitude for math isn’t going to be riding horses and wield weapons to fight and die for the country. That was the job of the Kshatriyas. The divisions were there so there is a corps of people who did the best acc to their abilities. Was it perfect? No. Did they inter marry and also strive to live the best life exploiting the resources they had as well as their positions. Yes. But like a goat on a leash..they had a radius of free movement but were tethered by social restriction. A Vaishya could never be a king and a shudra could never become a priest. But neither could the king live without the Indian equivalent of democeles sword over his head nor could the Brahmin enjoy creature comforts. The system had nothing to do with the British understanding of caste which was racial.
Then they super imposed their understanding of race over the caste system. And this was patently ridiculous. The world’s understanding of caste system as promulgated by the British doesn’t resemble what is in the texts or what was in practice before they came along. Guess what happened to the all the ‘lower classes’? They converted to Christianity because the missionaries were always standing..waiting in the wings.
This is not to say that there weren’t terrible things that happened in India. We don’t crucify all black people because of a few criminals. We don’t crucify all whites people for the racism of a few. Not all homeless people are drug addicts. We don’t call all men rapists because of Harvey Weinstein. All Germans are not Nazis. Caste discrimination is not a Hindu blot. In all of the above cases, it was ‘humans behaving badly’.
I am blown away every time by how the uneducated untraveled masses are willing to believe second hand accounts of a colonizing power that reluctantly left a country that single handedly overfilled the coffers and granaries of The Empire.
Why is the victim being shamed and the rapist account being taken as gospel? Because the sick fucks went around villages and measured peoples noses like they are cattle and published their understanding of what it means to them first before Indians could master English ..you know in the past 70 years after freedom...to protest all the lies?
I'm an upper caste male from India (now in Silicon Valley), so I suppose by the standards of discrimination discourse, I shouldn't be talking about this, but I will anyway.
The evidence for this happening is poor. I have dozens of Indian friends who have been in the US for three decades, and they've never heard of it either. It could still be happening, of course, but the case for it would be more real if there was one actual case of a company or government censuring someone for it.
> it would be more real if there was one actual case of a company or government censuring someone for it.
To be clear, this story got legs specifically because California is bringing a case against Cisco for caste-related discrimination. So the government is certainly trying to censure someone for it.
Sure, but as far as I know, that is the only case of its kind in the country, and before we raise the alarm about widespread caste discrimination, shouldn't we have at least one case decided?
I'm also an upper caste male in Silicon Valley. While I largely agree with you in that most people state-side haven't heard of it happening here, that doesn't mean it doesn't subconsciously exist.
The main thing I think the article got wrong is this:
> they're often clever attempts to find out something very specific
I don't think they are "clever" attempts. People aren't that clever, in general. It's very possible that people are just used to asking these very normal questions out of habit (e.g. "are you vegetarian" is a perfectly normal question to ask before going to lunch with someone, to factor that in your suggestions of places to eat). It's just that they may be subconsciously deriving further biases based on the answers instead of taking the answers at face value. If, for example, someone not being vegetarian was originally just a benign question to go out to lunch together, but later subconsciously causes the manager to not give them that promotion, that would be discrimination, and I can't say for sure that that doesn't happen.
Someone from lower caste might be more qualified to speak to personal experiences of discrimination, but everyone can synthesize the anecdotes and data for themselves.
No it means he/she self aware of the privileges he/she has enjoyed. You don't get to identify as a particular caste, your name gives it away even before anyone has seen you.
This comment sounds exactly like the comments that are sometimes made when discussing sexism in tech by men. "Does sexism even exist in tech? I've never seen anyone be sexist in front of me."
It doesn't prove anything one way or the other, but it is the exact same rhetorical strategy.
This also isn’t necessarily rhetorical. The reason you won’t see it is because people pick up on just enough social cues that if you are likely to react badly to it, they probably won’t do it in front of you.
I recently listened to an interview with Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents which is about America, but she spent years doing research including visiting other countries.
She tells an anecdote about visiting a conference in India on caste and even though the reason everyone was there was to discuss ways to undo the effects of the caste system, she was able to see effects of the system right there in the conference by how various participants interacted with each other. It was so ingrained to the participants that they didn’t realize they were doing it. It was small things like how one person would yield to another during conversation.
> the low-caste Indians who converted to Islam to get out of the caste system
Sadly Muslims were not much better in this regard and created their own caste system of sorts, with descendants of foreign invaders given more status than descendants of local converts (Afghan good, Middle Eastern better), who were assumed to be low-caste fleeing oppression for that specific reason. I've heard the same from a Christian Indian from Mangalore. Perhaps that's why Dr. Ambedkar opted for Buddhism rather than Islam or Christianity as his recommended path forward for the Dalits (former untouchables).
> the low-caste Indians who converted to Islam to get out of the caste system, lol
I know you're saying this in a bit of an off the cuff manner, but there is a lot more to the history of Bangladesh than you were letting on, and even in a joking manner it kinda contributes to this idea that Islam was this great emancipatory force in Bangladesh, which is...a bit reductionist. The idea that Bengal is historically a nation of low-caste Indians is 100% not the case. Bengal's distinct identity goes back to the Vedic period of 1500BC - 500BC.
Its historic wealth predates Mughal era Bengal when Islam was introduced, and relates back to its historically rich breadbasket/river delta land and strategic placement as a thalossocracy very well placed along the maritime section of the Silk Road. Secondly, caste has always been somewhat complicated, and has a long history of systematically resistance in the Dharmic tradition in Bengal. That pertains to the historical development of Buddhism in the Maurya and Pala empires. To say it was "low-caste Indians" who converted to Islam to get out of the caste system that created the identity of "Bangladeshi" rather than competing ideological traditions (pro-Brahminical Old Vedic religion vs anti-Brahminical Buddhism) is really white-washing things. Islam's interaction with greater South Asian religion and philosophy was a lot more syncretic than that. By the time it had gotten there, there were already existing religios traditions that had begun to explore an idea of a religion without caste against religion through caste.
No reasonable person thinks that every powerful man was impugned by #MeToo, and no reasonable person would think that all powerful Indians are impugned by some kind of caste scandal.
I have been in the US since 2012, never even once in all these years, I experienced or know some one who experienced this.I don’t think well-educated, middle class Indians who represent Indians in Silicon Valley will exhibit this behavior. Like the parent comment, not saying that this didn’t happen to people but it is definitely not a systematic thing.
It is extremely isolated even in India itself. I have interviewed with about a hundred people so far. No one asked me my caste, and I never asked anyone theirs. Some north Indian names give away the caste from the last name. That's less likely to happen in southern India, where most of us don't even have a family name.
For the millions in villages, yes. It is not common in cities. Are you Indian? How often do people ask you for your caste? And please don't tell me my own lived experience is "blatantly untrue".
It is still very common in the cities. A survey from 2018 points to how prevalent it is in the urban regions - including in Delhi - even untouchability is practised in the cities.
Without linking to the actual questions and the data, this is yellow journalism. In one paragraph, it is “self or family member”, but in the next paragraph, it becomes "50 per cent of respondents in urban Rajasthan admitted to practising untouchability". This is the same kind of yellow journalism that in the US lead to prominent figures touting "one in five women on college campuses is raped". There is no epidemic of rape in US college campuses either.
I asked you how often you get asked for your caste, which you did not answer. I have a few very visibly brahmin colleagues. When we work together, they don't discriminate against any of my colleagues or me. When we go for team outings, they don't go to restaurant kitchens and ask the cooks and waiters for their caste, and more often than not, the restaurant serves meat.
You are looking for anecdotal data when I am presenting you with actual survey data. You want to extrapolate from your own situation (as well as mine) to decide what the situation is nation-wide. That is not how things work.
In your particular situation - which may not be representative of the situation of others, you may not be a racist/casteist in your thinking, but you certainly can't extrapolate from that for what the situation is like across the board.
> Please scroll to page 8. The data shows about 27% of Indian households
Good, so these figures are not even close to the 50% figure for urban Rajasthan. Why do you think the figures differ so drastically? Also, clever of the "researchers" to inflate figures using "households". Absolutely zero among my hundreds of colleagues have demonstrated casteist attitudes, so let's ask about their grandparents. That's how you get "households".
> You are looking for anecdotal data when I am presenting you with actual survey data.
Correct. Because sociological "studies" are rife with methodological failures. They drive an agenda worse than any autorickshaw driver drives his auto. This is the field that gave us "one in five women on college campuses are raped" and "India is the least safe country in the world for women". All obvious bullshit, but here we are.
> from your own situation (as well as mine)
This is the interesting part. We don't know each other. You could have told me anything at all about how you have been discriminated against by the "upper caste". Yet you didn't. It goes to show how believable you, yourself, would consider such stories would be.
There is an interesting parallel between believing BS of the holy men in the past (the priests, the prophets) and believing the BS of today's holy men (the academics). Some fields are taking active steps to addressing the replication crisis. Sociology is not one of them.
Hi, yes I am an Indian and its astounding to me that you as an Indian whose life, education, wealth, quality of life, access to healthcare, choice of life partner, friends, status in society, place of residence is all determined by your caste being completely oblivious to it.
You have been so internalized into the caste system that you count only explicit and physically hurting ones as forms of discrimination. You are either incredibly privileged possibly a Brahmin or you're ignorant so much that you deny the suffering of more than a billion people as outright false!!
The total population of brahmins is less than 6% in India. People from other castes - especially the tribals and the dalits (more than 40%), experience caste oppression regularly.
Are you saying 6% of the Brahmins are oppressing 40% of the remaining population?
Source?
[..] India is home to over 200 million Dalits. According to Paul Diwakar, a Dalit activist from the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, "India has 600,000 villages and almost every village a small pocket on the outskirts is meant for Dalits."[..]
It is impossible to have a fact based discussion with you. Your arguments so riddled with logical fallacies that it would take me hours to tease everything out with definitions and explanations. I find myself facing a poverty of time currently and in the near future to be able to engage you further. Thanks for the discussion so far. Have a nice day.
Aristocracy is France was around 10%. There are plenty of upper caste Indians (around 18% to 30% total depending on how you count it) who benefit from this societal structure.
I’m not confused, thanks. I’m saying a small population can easily oppress a larger population, especially with consent and cooperation from other populations.
If you look at the last two pages of this classic paper (admittedly almost 20 years old now), you’ll see a list of some names they used in the field experiment.
Martin Luther King didn’t have statistics, studies to lean on, any spreadsheet either, and yet is universally hailed as addressing a variety of issues. Although he was heavily criticized at the time.
So we don’t really have a standard for perceiving an issue, only acknowledging an area ripe for abuse and aiming to mitigate it.
I think he did have data? There were literally laws that explicitly banned black people from using certain schools and facilities. So - there were a lot areas where he could say that black people are discriminated against with 100% certainty.
I don't know enough about the issue in the article to determine how widespread it is - but I don't think it is fair to compare them.
> "To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone."
> The Court supported this conclusion with citations—in a footnote, not the main text of the opinion—to a number of psychological studies that purported to show that segregating black children made them feel inferior and interfered with their learning.
I think that in general if a bunch of people say they're experiencing a problem than that's enough evidence that there is really a problem. But the Civil Rights movement did have objective factual support from the beginning.
So is the caste system of India. It is in books, it is in public transportation, it is in job market, it is in kitchen, it is schools. To have formal statistics, you first need to acknowledge that the issue exists and then to investigate it. By the same token, the absence of the formal statistics does not disprove discrimination, quite the opposite, it proves that the systematic discrimination is not yet recognized as a problem. Which is systematic discrimination "by definition".
But we’re talking about California. For obvious reasons, I find it a bit problematic to accuse immigrants of bringing a negative cultural practice to the US with them without concrete data.
First of all caste is not invisible as you say. The discrimination starts from the names. Segregation based on caste is the way of life in India. I'm expecting may be its hard for a foreigner like you to notice but for the victims its very real and persistent everyday in their life!
Yes. Lots and lots. The easiest ones to identify is food preference. The upper castes ask you if you are a vegetarian. (Because they consider vegetarian = pure. Meat eaters are impure.)
Also caste determines my job, education, wealth, where I live, where I pray, who I marry and many more.
There are ways to find it from the ornaments and things, clothes you wear. It would be simply called 'tradition'. Caste segregation is the way of life here in India and there are so many different and easy ways to figure out another Indian's caste.
There is correlation between surnames (or the lack of one), language dialects, dietary habits and caste. But the signal here is very noisy and unreliable except for a few cases like having a well known surname.
To my knowledge there is no correlation to place of birth. While there may be statistical differences in the distribution of characteristics such as say skin colour among communities which I am unaware of, you will find a reasonable representation of all physiognomies? in each community.
Yes. Easier to ask them. Honestly, I think the only way to legitimize the delegitimization of the caste system is for everyone to declare their castes. No shadow games. It’s all out in the open.
Heck, when I moved to New Delhi, everyone thought I was Sikh because my last name is Singh, even though my last name is a common Hindu last name in general and not specific to Sikhs. So not even Indians are guaranteed to have the mapping of last name <-> demographic correct.
(Speaking of, do all Sikhs count as Kshatriyas? Even the farmers in Punjab and Haryana? So confusing...)
> Nobody seems to ask this question about the apparently rampant racism in the US
I can't tell if you're trolling or not, but in case you're not from the US and genuinely confused about this... there are mountains of data on systemic racism precisely because it's one of the biggest questions. Academic journals are full of answers, not to mention endless books.
Even isolated prejudices can lead to systematic issues, so even if it was, it would be a problem.
For example, if key individuals in certain positions hold the prejudices, it can have a systematic effect, since they have a lot of influence on the design of the systems in place and can easily create an unfair distribution of other people in charge/not in charge.
I'm not endorsing the idea of "isolated incidents" in general! But you can look at data to show that disparities in how certain groups are treated--e.g. employers being less willing to call back candidates with "Black" names on their resume. But extrapolating from the Cisco lawsuit to a narrative about a larger problem in Silicon Valley can have ugly consequences. It can be flipped around to broadly paint Indians who are in leadership positions in Silicon Valley in a bad light.