One of the most interesting things that stood out to me from this letter and that lawsuit was the assertion by those affected that discrimination on the basis of caste was more impactful and more severe than discrimination suffered due to immigration status, race, and gender in US society, and the letter goes so far as to state "We know that we thrive when we work under a non-Indian boss. Our work is seen and evaluated on merit, and we are integrated rather than being excluded."
It makes these discussions of castes even more important, especially as Indian immigration continues to rise and Indian culture begins to take precedence in the tech industry. Being a white American from the Midwest, I had no awareness of caste or caste discrimination when I began my career, but as I got more experienced began to learn about it and unfortunately I have personally witnessed some incidents in the workplace during my career. I wish that Google had allowed this talk to move forward, because I think ending workplace discrimination is a critical path to ensuring a merit-based free market open to all.
Personally, I've witnessed issues with the Indian caste system in many large corporations. From Johnson & Johnson - where there is actually a development team - where they hired other Indians who were horribly unqualified (multiple times they were poached from IT support - I enjoy seeing people move up in tech, but they were entry level techs with no programming experience) and almost exclusively hired other Indians to a larger tech firm in the US (where I am now) that is not Google or Cisco.
I've also seen this in smaller companies and startups, but there it is usually the Indian CTO or manager hiring an Indian contracting company, where big surprise, there is some prior relationship. I haven't ever had these arrangements work out.
I have nothing against Indian people - but this is an issue in tech, and I feel like it is becoming a larger issue.
I hear a lot of instances of favoritism or nepotism in what you describe, possibly even corruption, but not much sounds like caste-based discrimination. "Incompetent person hires a lot of people they know instead of qualified candidates" is not really what's being discussed here, and I think Ms. Soundararajan would agree.
As a side note, this illustrates quite neatly why most of us who come from India are somewhat reluctant to talk about caste and explain how typical discrimination takes place, because Americans will try to slot it into their preconceived notions about class or race-based discrimination, and tend to jump to conclusions like you're doing here, complete with an "I have nothing against Indian people" disclaimer at the end (Really?).
So, a reasonable question is, "Well, what does a real instance of caste-based discrimination look like?"
Imagine that among a bunch of Indian candidates, an Indian hiring manager hires only Indian people who order vegetarian meals at lunch, and rejects any Indian candidate who orders a dish containing meat. Also, suppose you see this happening pretty frequently, and the manager inexplicably rejected some pretty great candidates, and the only common factor is that they ordered meat at lunch. Then it might be caste discrimination! (please please please note the operative word might, I really don't want to start a witch hunt here)
But something like that sounds pretty weird and far-fetched to most Americans, so it's hard to communicate what it looks like, let alone explain the somewhat complicated backing reasons.
Americans have no idea of what caste-based discrimination looks like and hence merely use it to foist their own prejudices (i.e. "they terk err jerbs") onto the Indian community. Indians have such diversity amongst themselves (North vs. South, State vs. State, Linguistic, Religious etc.) that anything can be used as a bone of contention (real or imagined).
The first thing to realize is that people with grievances whether factual or not, often use the American platform to push their agenda. While it makes some sense to raise Caste-based discrimination etc. within the Indian Workplace, it absolutely does not make any sense to raise it in the American Workplace simply because the repercussions would be vastly detrimental to the entire Indian Community. It is also the case that Caste-based discrimination has declined greatly in Urban India (since Independence) and more specifically in the IT sector where everybody is only after the almighty USD/INR and nothing else matters.
Hence i think Google did the right thing in cancelling this talk.
I may be an American, but sometimes it doesn't take an expert on the Indian caste system to spot caste discrimination. I have literally heard people say "I don't have to listen to him, he is of a lower caste" or some variation of that sentence. In fact, just yesterday, I was watching an episode of one of Gordon Ramsay's kitchen shows. The chef was Indian and said "he can't tell me what to do, we are the same caste and I am older."
Not everything in life is simple and in particular; nuances matter very much when it comes to understanding other Cultures/Social Structures.
Anecdotes like yours really bother me because they sound so outlandish that their veracity cannot be taken on faith. Having spent a considerable part of my working life in the US, i can state that never once has the subject of Caste ever been a topic of relevance with my Indian colleagues i.e. it has never ever come up in any discussions, implicit or otherwise. None of my American colleagues knew much about it; and i have worked across a bunch of companies so the sample space is quite spread out.
So you have no evidence, he has evidence, and your argument is simply "I don't believe you." These are the same forum discussion strategies of white nationalists, and this has been a fascinating thread to read!
The claim you're debating - "does caste-based discrimination exist" is more likely to be true with an anecdote "I've seen it" than with an anecdote "I haven't encountered it."
Those two anecdotes can both truthfully coexist, but the first one proves the statement while the second doesn't disprove it. The evidence needed to disprove such a statement is pretty large; an individual's work history is not enough to say confidently that discrimination isn't happening.
How many companies have you worked at, 6? How many companies are there with significant indian representation? At Google alone there are far more than six TEAMS with majority indian representation. How could you claim that your experience invalidates someone else's?
Meanwhile, if there are a handful of anecdotes that folks have experienced or witnessed caste-based discrimination, we should be pretty confident that it's a problem.
This is a classic example of wrong Critical Thinking. Let me write out the "proof" for you;
1) You have one anecdata from a person who IS NOT hiding behind anonymity. You have another anecdata from a person who IS hiding behind anonymity. Therefore Person 2's claims cannot be taken on faith.
2) The topic under discussion is part of Person 1's culture and hence he is familiar with all its nuances. Person 2 has no knowledge of the subject or at best a cursory knowledge from tabloids and not from any authentic sources. Therefore Person 2 cannot claim equal relevance with Person 1's knowledge.
3) Person 1 has lived and worked across both his and Person 2's cultures for a significant period of time. Thus he is familiar with thought processes of both sides w.r.t. the topic under discussion. Person 2 does not have any such experience. Thus Person 2's "claims" do not have the same weight as Person 1's.
I was just saying their perspective would "prove it" assuming you and the other person's personal experiences are both valid. But you are making the assumption that it's invalid and your own experience is the only one you can trust as valid. I'm not saying this particularly commenter's experience is hard proof of anything, but it's not hard to find enough perspectives from other people to convince yourself that caste discrimination is likely to be a real problem. The rest of the comment probably bears re-reading on your part. P(N people with perspectives different from your experience are all liars) < P(perspectives different from your experience can be true)
Also writing qed at the end of your comment doesn't make it a rigorous proof, lol. Like, you've already failed to understand the basic concept of sampling bias.
I’ve worked in the technology departments of major American investment banks you’ve heard of. I’ve seen Indian colleagues openly discuss caste and speculate someone’s caste based on their name and regional background openly in the company cafe
You'll do whatever you can to maintain the fragile worldview that you haven't been the beneficiary of a class-based system that discriminates and gives you an unfair advantage.
The interesting thing here is the isomoprhism between your reaction and those of other privileged groups forced to examine their ill-gotten gains, but on the other hand maybe it's not surprising, we're just chimpanzees with tools after all
> You'll do whatever you can to maintain the fragile worldview that you haven't been the beneficiary of a class-based system that discriminates and gives you an unfair advantage.
I find this POV extremely fascinating outside India. Here's the thing in case you are unaware: in India, roughly 50-60% of jobs in the government sector, seats in government funded colleges and private colleges (and soon probably even in private companies) are set aside for the "lower" castes and tribes[1]. I use scare quotes here, because there is a whole other discussion of how many "lower" castes actually need this kind of affirmative action since they are extremely well off that I won't get into here. I come from an "upper" caste family (scare quotes here because I find the terminology stupid and divisive, I definitely don't consider myself "upper" in any way) where my grandfather was a dirt-poor farmer who moved from the village to the city, died dirt poor as well (think Slumdog Millionaire level poverty). My father worked hard, educated himself and got himself a job in the government sector despite having nothing "reserved" for him. I did the same too with nobody handing me anything. This is the same story across millions of families across India. So tell me, what unfair advantage or privilege did this system really afford me? And then I see this enlightened person on the Internet who has probably heard/read about caste in the last couple of days have a fully formed opinion on all things caste, with no real intention of really understanding the issue. A superficial understanding is only going to get you so far without descending into all out stereotypes and bigotry, like another commenter on here who equated wearing the sacred thread with a Klan hood. But then I guess you are right in a way: we're all just different groups of chimpanzees with tools.
Or it can be is as simple as saying a caste system is dumb, Americans and I assume other nationalities find it fascinatingly backward. The idea that there are “upper” and “lower” castes is inherently discriminatory that seem abundantly obvious and there’s no real nuance to it.
> Or it can be is as simple as saying a caste system is dumb
Agreed.
And this ironically is the crux of the problem: most Indians find it dumb, don’t care for it and hope it dies out soon. But some groups would like to keep using it as yet another way to divide for myriad reasons: vote bank politics being the biggest if you follow any Indian politics at all. Preventing base bigoted discrimination is a reason too, but a very small reason.
This group equality labs is less of the latter and more of the former.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that this thread is about "The Indian Caste System" as a whole; it is not. That is a different discussion altogether. For some authentic sources on this topic see my other comments in this thread.
This thread is about "Caste based Discrimination" amongst the Indian IT Community in the USA. My contention is that it is not all the issue that it is made out to be by some vested interests who may have their own agenda in raking this up. Hence American companies need to be cautious before giving them a megaphone and a platform.
I was also initially surprised when I heard about caste based discrimination in USA. There are few points which helped me in understanding:
1) Personally a person may not have seen or heard of sexual harassment incidents. It doesn't mean "sexual harassment" doesn't exist.
2) Even if a lower caste person is not being discriminated, but if the person is feeling "uncomfortable" about revealing his/her caste it means that there is something wrong in the society which needs to be fixed. (very much like racism)
As such USA does much better job of telling about racism, then India does about casteism.
However India did a superb job of asking Dr.Ambedkar to write the constitution, by which the upper caste will abide. I am not aware of any other society which has said, "we believe in equality and will allow someone who was discriminated to make the rules by which we all will live".
Allowing rabble-rousers to deliver 'talks' about caste discrimination is not going to change the hearts and minds of people who set store by caste affiliations. There will always be people who will be cagey about revealing aspects about themselves, including gay, queer, furries, upper-caste, lower-caste, nudists... the list goes on. People seem to take the aphorism 'bring your real self to work' a bit too literally. We all put a lid on certain aspects of our personalities at work, and endeavors to change that or eradicate that are highly misguided.
You pejoratively dismiss those who seek to bring attention to discrimination they experience as “rabble-rousers”. You then proceed to acknowledge that this is discrimination is very real (“we can’t change their hearts and minds!”).
You then mention caste with nudism in the same sentence as nudism, like that’s appropriate.
You then blame the victims of the aforementioned discrimination for ‘bringing their real selves to work,’ as if it’s somehow their fault they are being discriminated against.
I’ve heard horror stories from Indian friends in tech. When they start at a new company, upper-caste Indian managers and coworkers will persistently ask them seemingly innocuous questions like where they are from, where they went to school, what Neighbourhood of which city did you grow up in, are you vegetarian, are you vegetarian by choice or birth, what do your parents do, etc. There was an even an episode of planet money where a person who had been discriminated against describes a coworker patting them on the back in the area where Brahmins sometimes where a white thread.
Being born into a caste isn’t some “personality quirk,” and it’s exceedingly offensive to imply it is. Dalit peoples who face discrimination don’t have a choice in the matter, some will always see them as “untouchables” regardless of whether or not they disclose their caste openly.
The speaker is very lopsided and is not accurate. It will give a very much one sided distorted message. Great google listended to its employees and canceled. Will any company invite a fae right or far left activist to talk on campus.
Google is a technology company, not a liberal or conservative think tank. Let us get back to tech talks!
Except that this is not just weird and far-fetched. It is also very unusual for such diet-based discrimination to happen.
I am a vegetarian. All managers (with the exception of one) who hired me in the past 12 years (in India) were not vegetarians. Unlikely that they saw vegetarians discriminating, and did not practice a little reverse discrimination themselves.
The problem today in India is not that there is a caste competition between one caste and another, it is that the IT field is desperately in need of developers and testers. And, the employers are unable to pay the high salaries being demanded.
The instance being described is mainly in the US, where the talk described was given. I know that such discrimination is highly unlikely, especially in the Midwest where there aren't a ton of Indian employees to begin with, and probably even fewer Indian hiring managers.
However, I was merely stating it as an example of caste discrimination – which you seem to grasp readily, probably because you're Indian or work in India.
Explaining to an American person how diet-based discrimination can be an instance of caste discrimination is harder than you'd think. The OP is basically going "I saw an Indian person doing this bad thing, so it must be caste-based discrimination!", which I'm trying to correct by citing an example of (so to say) actual discrimination on the basis of caste.
This is a case of corruption, which is endemic in Indian culture. There are countless examples of mid-high level Indian Managers convincing management to move work to bodyshops from which they either receive kickbacks, are started by close friends so they get to profit also, or use as a side-channel to push their own people (relatives, immigrants from back home) into the organization.
It's shockingly widespread and because the management structures at many tech and IT companies are Indian, no-one bats an eyelid. This is one example of foreign cultures actually degrading American work culture. There are a few others in this category.
I have seen bad hiring in Cisco, which seemed to be based on membership in some sort of clique centered on Pune. I don't know if it was normal "friends hiring friends" or something else.
If you’re a Dalit, you’d know. As I mention in the post, membership to a caste is granted by birth. If both your parents are Dalit, you’re a Dalit too.
How do others know: it’s not obvious. Dalits either change their last name to something common enough to not have any caste indicator. They’d avoid any discussion on caste. So effectively, they hide but there are some who don’t and keep their last name. Still, not every other Indian could tell, but a more caste conscious Indian who belongs to the same region can tell. On top of it, it’s common among Indians to just plainly ask other what their caste is.
Note that there are other 'cues' as well that casteists use to identify your caste, such as the food you eat (veg/non-veg), the social rituals/ceremonies or religious practices you engage in. In fact, you'd see enough Brahmins (in the US!) wear the scared thread[1] and embrace the entire identity of being at the 'top' of the caste system that knowing that you are a non-brahmin is sufficient for them to treat you as a Dalit.
Wrong, I wear the thread the same reason a Sikh wears a turban or a Muslim woman wears a niqab/burka. Wearing a sacred thread has about as much relation to condoning/accepting caste discrimination as wearing a niqab has to terrorism, but these kinds of bigoted ignorant comments are exactly why Google was right in not allowing the talk to happen.
It doesn't matter what reasons you have. What matters is the consequence of your behavior, namely, it is visible difference between castes, which makes discrimination easier and avoiding discrimination harder.
All previous fights against discrimination shared one phenomenon: priveledged start to whine that they are reverse-discriminated. And at some point they probably are discriminated against. But the funny thing, that without their cooperation in a fight against discrimination there are no other way to win but to discriminate in reverse.
And your comment show that you are not concerned in a slightest about discrimination. Tradition is more important to you than people.
> It doesn't matter what reasons you have. What matters is the consequence of your behavior, namely, it is visible difference between castes, which makes discrimination easier and avoiding discrimination harder.
Not unless I go running around naked
> And your comment show that you are not concerned in a slightest about discrimination. Tradition is more important to you than people.
How exactly do you infer that? You don’t know me. I care about discrimination just as much as the next person. What I don’t care much for is rank identity politics disguised as benevolent activism spewed from a non-existent moral high ground.
1. You show that you care about tradition. And you show not a slightest attempt to care about people. Words reflect mind. Not perfectly, but there is one more consideration:
2. I heard a lot from privileged. I said some of that talk myself, and I know how mind must work to say it. I changed myself and rejected my priviledge, my mind works in different ways. I do not belive my reasons to do something anymore, I have found then the only sensible way to judge my inclination to discriminate is to assess my actions and their consequences. In my previous conment I applied the technique to your actions as you described them. It is possible that you lied, but I believe it is unlikely.
> What I don’t care much for is rank identity politics disguised as benevolent activism spewed from a non-existent moral high ground.
You are angry, Jupiter, therefore you are wrong.
When you switch to an emotional talk, it seems to me to be an additional bit of evidence, that you are lying to yourself about how you care about people and discrimination. It is a very predictable reaction.
Wanted to correct one part of what you said: The thread is not exclusive to Brahmins[1]
I know people who identify as Kshatriyas and Vaisyas wear it. It is just that almost all brahmins do it and the practice has reduced or stopped in the other two varnas.
And from what I see, he didn't compare the thread to burqas. He compared the calling of the thread as sign of discrimination to calling the turban as a sign of terrorism. There is a difference.
Many Brahmins I know don’t wear it. So how is it a caste marker? Heck I wear it only during certain ceremonies. So the point the gp was making about people wearing the sacred thread condoning the caste system and discrimination is patently false and bigoted.
That’s not true. Many other castes used to have their own thread ceremonies and wear it. In TN at least, I can think of the Chettiars and Nadars who did a 100 years ago, and who rid themselves of it after concerted efforts by the Justice Party.
Example: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_elderly_Chettia...
Some Nairs wear it as well. Wearing the thread is not a “privilege” afforded to only Brahmins, although now in popular imagination it has become their identifier.
Only members of the KKK wear a hood, and all members of the KKK tautologically support racism.
Presumably it is possible to be Brahmin, without supporting caste discrimination.
A better analogy would be: Do you feel it should be illegal to mention have a degree from Yale or Harvard? They're both markers of status, and people absolutely discriminate based on that, but I don't think "I have a degree from Harvard" automatically makes you complicit in that.
To the Brahmin, wearing the thread comes with religious obligations. Committing oneself to those religious obligations needn’t have anything to do other castes.
> Are you saying that you'd stop being a Hindu if you give up your Brahmin identity?
Surely there are many kinds of Hindus? To each community what’s important is different? And an answer to this question also depends on how the individual makes sense of his religion?
While jati as a feature of the Indian landscape has persisted for a few thousand years, I believe jati and religion/theology are orthogonal. You can belong to caste x and any religion y in the sub-continent. But as it happens, when one talks about being anti-caste today many times it is to call out and disparage one’s Hindu identity. This makes any conversion about caste extremely muddled, with folks arguing past each other.
> I believe jati and religion/theology are orthogonal. You can belong to caste x and any religion y in the sub-continent.
My comment was in response to the parent who brought in the word religion into the discussion, as some means of justification of inheriting the religion of their parent is the same as inheriting the caste. ...and now here you claim that they are orthogonal. How very convenient.
This is exactly the kind of deflection used to 'muddle' the conversation, as you put it.
If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ? If one can follow the hindu religion without identifying with caste why do Indian Hindus still hold on to their caste identity ?
It is easy to say the conversations get 'muddled' without bothering to learn why the thing under discussion even exists !!
None of this is new. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar wrote about this decades ago and yet, here we are, with google claiming the same thing you are -- that talking about caste somehow ends up being Hinduphobic.
> and now here you claim that they are orthogonal. How very convenient.
By that I meant for some group and people jati intersects with particular theologies and for others it doesn’t. What does that say about jati and theology?
> If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ?
Million dollar question. Why do some identities persist and others don’t? For jati, endogamy plays a significant role and it will disappear with the current out marriage rate in a century (that’s of course being optimistic). Making it about Hinduism or Brahmins will not get rid of jati. TN has the lowest ICM in the country despite a 100 years of non-Brahmin movement.
> It is easy to say the conversations get 'muddled' without bothering to learn why the thing under discussion even exists !!
Lol, let’s just say we read different things about the subject or even read the same things and come to different conclusions.
> that talking about caste somehow ends up being Hinduphobic.
If it ends up disparaging people with Hindu religious identity, one could argue its Hinduphobic (which happens sometimes with these conversations).
> If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ? If one can follow the hindu religion without identifying with caste why do Indian Hindus still hold on to their caste identity ?
Social status for some and Reservation benefits for others.
We have that same view in software engineering as well. s/Brahmins/FAANGs and s/Dalit/Non-FAANG. Not saying it's everywhere but it exists, even on these very forums. How is one from a coding school or bootcamp ever to be seen as an equal to those that took a traditional route?
For the most part, people treat people equally but I've seen this kind of behavior on here and in person on a few occasions.
The difference with caste is that caste is inherited. If you wear rose-coloured glasses, you can assume that hiring at FAANG is merit based and a non-FAANG can move to FAANG if they want. That’s not possible with caste.
What makes you think that? People everywhere try to get an advantage on others why would they suddenly change in silicon valley? If anything, i think it would be worse because it's so competitive.
> Why do they do this, and what do they hope to gain out of asking that question?
Answer is a bit twisted. Lot many just ask as a innate curiosity and to find a cultural base to connect with someone new and not exactly for any sinister reasons. There are like thousands of sub religions, cultures, languages in India that it helps people sometimes to know which caste a person belongs to level with them. Not exactly something to be proud of but happens.
At the same time, lot many are orthodox and do ask to get a perspective into someone’s personality and culture to find a stereotype they can base their decisions on - for ex- inside interviews, business meetings etc.
Believe it or not .. casts are carried by Christian [0] and Muslim families converted generations ago .. upper cast by choice and forced on lower cast [1]
If you were born outside of India, it would be pretty much like any other national /racial identity -- inferred from family (based on family names for instance). Like mentioned in the GPs write-up:
> Unlike race, it’s easier to hide your caste, especially in a new country. Many dalits change their official last name to something common enough that it’s hard to identify them.
There's touches of that elsewhere too (hiding race or ethnicity with a name change.) I have an extremely unusual surname in Canada, and most North Americans don't recognize it as European in origin, which has led to assumptions in the past. My grandfather said he considered changing it to something English in the 50s, but ultimately he kept it. I know that, at least historically, some Christian Arabs, Jewish people, probably others, have adopted "white" names upon immigrating, too.
Quite a few essentially had Americanized (or for Canada... idk, Canadized? Anglicized? somebody tell me the best word for that :) ) names forced on them upon immigration.
My mother's ancestral Norwegian last name wouldn't have worked particularly well in English, my own last name of Danish origin survived unscathed for obvious reasons.
I used to wonder if the name Yingling was Asian, but it turns out to be the same as Yuengling the beer, which is an odd but phonetically correct rendering of Jungling with the umlaut. ("Youngling")
Wang is also an unrelated surname in Sweden and Norway. It is a variant spelling of the name Vang which is derived from the Old Norse word vangr, meaning field or meadow.
Germany and Netherlands
Wang is also a surname in the German and Dutch languages. The name is derived from Middle German wang/ Middle Dutch waenge, which is literally "cheek". However, in southern German, its meaning, "grassy slope" or "field of grass", is similar to the Scandinavian surname."
Ah, like how in my home country, it’s a ‘well known fact’ that people lower on the economic ladder like to give their children foreign sounding names, whereas people that are well off give their children traditional, and even double traditional names.
That's common but sometimes the cause is not what you would think.
In Spain there are many people with foreign or uncommon names... that are also biblical names. Abraham, Sarah, Aaron, Jonathan or Josuah (Josué) were unheard half a century ago. Now they're usual.
Why? In part, because Evangelical missionaries were more successful in poor quarters, specially among gypsies.
Also there's the famous actors thing. But now Vanessa also sounds natural enough.
During that time the civil servants working at the registry had ample provision to decide what names would or wouldn't fly, and many made up their own rules. This led to quite different rules in different parts of Spain.
That being said, these were civil servants under a fascist catholic dictatorship, so you can imagine that the range went from "only catholic saint names in spanish" to "if it sounds spanish-enough to me I'll allow it". Foreign names (John) were not allowed in most cases, just like they didn't allow names in any of the other languages of spain such as Joan (catalan), Jon (vasque), Xoán (galician).
Do they choose names that are Brahmin or generic names that can't be associated with caste, including non-Indian names?
If the latter, is it reasonable to assume that Brahmins in power are likely not only discriminating against those who are Dalit, but also discriminating against those that they know are not Brahmin (Indians and non-Indians) in favor of Brahmins?
Your write-up is quite simplistic and hence is very much open to misinterpretation by non-Indians.
I highly suggest that you consult the works of Patrick Olivelle and Susan Bayly to get at the real History of "Caste" (Varna vs. Jati etc.). That way you can present what is actually stated in the Hindu Scriptures vs. Their misinterpretation and later practice within Indian Society.
Recent scholarship suggests that the discussion of varna as well as untouchable outcastes in these texts does not resemble the modern era caste system in India. Patrick Olivelle, a professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions and credited with modern translations of Vedic literature, Dharma-sutras and Dharma-shastras, states that ancient and medieval Indian texts do not support the ritual pollution, purity-impurity as the basis for varna system. According to Olivelle, purity-impurity is discussed in the Dharma-shastra texts, but only in the context of the individual's moral, ritual and biological pollution (eating certain kinds of food such as meat, urination and defecation). In his review of Dharma-shastras, Olivelle writes, "we see no instance when a term of pure/impure is used with reference to a group of individuals or a varna or caste". The only mention of impurity in the Shastra texts from the 1st millennium is about people who commit grievous sins and thereby fall out of their varna. These, writes Olivelle, are called "fallen people" and impure, declaring that they be ostracised. Olivelle adds that the overwhelming focus in matters relating to purity/impurity in the Dharma-sastra texts concerns "individuals irrespective of their varna affiliation" and all four varnas could attain purity or impurity by the content of their character, ethical intent, actions, innocence or ignorance, stipulations, and ritualistic behaviours.
Olivelle states:
Dumont is correct in his assessment that the ideology of varna is not based on purity. If it were we should expect to find at least some comment on the relative purity and impurity of the different vamas. What is even more important is that the ideology of purity and impurity that emerges from the Dharma literature is concerned with the individual and not with groups, with purification and not with purity, and lends little support to a theory which makes relative purity the foundation of social stratification.
>That way you can present what is actually stated in the Hindu Scriptures vs. Their misinterpretation and later practice within Indian Society.
Whether or not Hindu scriptures really support these practices is a matter for believers, the concern here is how it's actually practiced in the real world and the resulting discrimination harming actual people.
The issue is that Indian (or Indian-American) workers are bringing these prejudices into American workplaces. People in Indian workplaces know about these issues, non-Indians in American workplaces very likely don't, which allows the discrimination to go unchecked.
The people i have referenced are experts/scholars in this field (and non-Indians to boot) so you can be sure that it is as close to factual as you can get. The Wikipedia page contains links to their papers/books which you can refer for edification.
> The people i have referenced are experts/scholars in this field (and non-Indians to boot) so you can be sure that it is as close to factual as you can get. The Wikipedia page contains links to their papers/books which you can refer for edification.
What are the cliff notes, because every time I bring this up here one gets accused of being a bigot and missing the nuances of what is essentially nepotism and racism that gets a pass because A: Indians make up an inordinate amount of CEOs in Tech, and B: Well, we've always done this and anything deviation from this brings everything else into question.
I worked in the health sciences before and I saw a lot of this, and got so fed up with just abjectly horrible most workers were who got a pass because of their surname. It's odd, my colleague was a MSc in Microbiology and was Indian, too, but we both had to claw our way into the Industry (in different fields) and she was always worried he H1 Visa would be the only thing that kept her in the US.
My only conclusion was she wasn't a high ranking member of the caste system which is why she was just as hungry as us undergrads in the 2008 financial crisis. She ended up quitting her role in a Govt agency, and did her PhD last we spoke.
My advice is to use your commonsense. Almost all of what you have seen/experienced can be explained by one Human Animal trying to "eat" another within our Cultural/Social frameworks using whatever means is available at hand. Thus you can have Nepotism, Favouritism, Spitefulness, Back-stabbing, Victim role-playing etc. You have to figure it out based on the person and the context. Don't jump to preconceived notions like Casteism which has a very low probability amongst educated Indians.
PS: The study of the subject itself is fascinating and you can start with the wikipedia page i have referenced and then follow the links from there.
Why do people refuse to face Reality? We are just Biological Animals with a Complex Social Structure called "Civilization" which is but just a veneer.
Reminds me of one of my favourite passages from The Sea-Wolf by Jack London;
“Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”
He shook his head slowly, pondering.
“I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.”
He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added:
“It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.”
“Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,” I laughed.
“Quite so,” he said. “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.”
“Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution.
“More freely, because it costs you nothing.”
“And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted.
“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.”
I'm neither a racist nor a bigot, I'm trying to move past the significance of race by addressing it head on and I've had working relationships and friendships with both groups of people which is why I hold the viewpoints that I do about the seemingly paradoxical nature of the discussion.
But I guess you just proved my initial point, and you're right: we won't because you resort to accusations without answering difficult questions.
> What are the cliff notes, because every time I bring this up here one gets accused of being a bigot and missing the nuances of what is essentially nepotism and racism that gets a pass because A: Indians make up an inordinate amount of CEOs in Tech, and B: Well, we've always done this and anything deviation from this brings everything else into question.
So you have admitted to already having a track record of being called as one.
>I have such a low estimation of Indian culture over all
>but somehow Judaism and the Indian caste system
Both the above lines speak volumes about your worldview or lack thereof. This is classic bigotry and racism. The rest of your comments are all meandering vitriol against anything and everything.
I wish it were that easy. First of all lying like that is near impossible unless you know every single thing done in a Brahmin household, you'll be caught eventually.
In a workplace setting, you might be boycotted but if this were in India, you have a high chance of getting murdered brutally.
Dalits get killed for just riding a horse, walking through upper caste residential streets and many normal things. In this scale a Brahmin name would be deadly
The parent comment died while I typed my response, so I'm just throwing it here to elaborate on your comment:
I'm not Indian, but I read a lot about this when the Cisco stuff came out. The gist that I picked up from interviews with Indians dealing with this was that there is A LOT of cultural background that you'd be very unlikely to know if you hadn't grown up in a certain caste.
A (likely shitty) analogy: You can learn about WWII all you want, but unless you were deployed it would be hard to fake that you were at a specific battle or did a specific training. There's probably minute details that were not written down, but people who were there would casually know. There may be habits or turns of phrase that would have been picked up. Maybe a certain landmark or destroyed thing that had a funny nickname. Maybe it's knowing a certain soldier or commander by a nickname that hasn't made it into the history books. "Oh you trained at X? Man I loved tuna Tuesdays even though noone would touch the stuff. Do you remember when private Y did..."
Through casual conversation, it's very difficult to keep the ruse up. Now if the interlocutor is actively trying to root you out its basically impossible. In the interviews I was listening to, the best case scenario was that the higher caste member came away not knowing what caste your from, but definitely knew you were not a Brahmin... Because if you were, you'd casually bring up X, Y, and Z and use these phrases and these gestures and and and...
> Dalits get killed for just riding a horse, walking through upper caste residential streets and many normal things. In this scale a Brahmin name would be deadly
India is a big country. Where in India is this a common practice?
This will happen in any part of the country Dalits exist. So all of it.
The oppression will be localized to that region. Like in southern states there is no ritual where a from rides a horse. So this won't happen there. But in a lot villages in Tamil Nadu Dalits are not allowed to wear footwear while crossing an upper caste St. They have to carry it on their heads. Please Google for these if they are mind boggling
Great question. It will be any upper caste who are above Dalits. There is no one perpetrator here but all of them. The main point to note is that the caste hierarchy is sacred and will be enforced by endogamy (arranged marriages) and other occupational rules.
You will be shown your place very very quickly. Love marriages are quite deadly and parents killing their own children and the lower caste grooms are extremely common. You can search for "honour killings in India".
Please read "Annihilation of Caste" by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Its around 50 pages of an undelivered speech, later published.
If you want to learn about caste, please make sure not to ask for explanations from an upper caste person. This is extremely important!!
Ambedkar said similar things to muslims as well, you can stop hating on Hindus. Hinduism does not condone honour killings, it’s a cultural thing. The amount of hate and comments from you is appalling, while everything you say is not wrong but please be civil.
hating on Hindus? I'm not sure what's hateful here for describing actual events. The ones receiving the caste oppression are also Hindus. Dalits are not Hindus you mean?
The claims made in this post are in dire need of citations, and don't strike me as believable. And just FWIW, most first-generation Indians in America couldn't give two shits about the caste system.
Highly agree on your second point, many first generation born south Asians I work for or work with that grew up within the suburbs couldn’t care less caste and simply don’t relate or identify with their parent’s generation and caste affiliation, they just want to be seen as American and are treated as such.
Only older heads who immigrated here are the lions share of individuals perpetuating this caste based discrimination. Please state your sources if you disagree with my assessment of first generation born Americans of South Asian descent working in big tech and Silicon Valley.
In my admittedly limited experience, people born to Indian parents in the US don't care about caste unless they are Brahmin, in which case, they'll be taught their caste rituals. Indians recently arrived from India care a lot more because reservation (think affirmative action by caste) and Hindu nationalism have become a big deal in Indian politics.
Only Brahmins are authorized to carry out certain religious activities in Hinduism. So if a Hindu wants to conduct those activities at their house in the US, they ought to fetch a Brahmin. That could be the reason why some Brahmins still stick to their identity.
Hindu nationalism has the most support from Upper castes. The majority of Hindus in the west anyway support RSS and in the west they become champions of minority rights and anti-discrimination. A majority of Indians who come to the west are also mostly Upper castes because unlike the gulf which give the job to all strata of people, only high profile people are given visas which happen to be high castes because generationally they hold the majority of the country wealth. So how is your statement many Indians who come to the US care about caste due to reservation even make sense?
> So how is your statement many Indians who come to the US care about caste due to reservation even make sense?
Your comment supports my observations. The newly-arrived Indians really don't like reservation and therefore care about caste. Second generation non-Brahmins in the US don't care about caste because it doesn't affect them.
No, I mean first generation born on American soil as American citizens which is distinct from first wave of immigrants from a specific country of origin. Their children are first generation born American, second generation in America.
Well, we are in the comments for an article which exactly disproves your point. You say Indians don't care about caste but I want to see some intercaste Indian couples and Indians without caste surnames among your "first-generation" Indian Americans.
Plenty of those, and inter-racial Indian marriages among friends who happen to be upper-caste exist. You're either not a first-generation Indian (seems likely) or you're seeing the story you believe in. And FWIW, even my dad's expat friend circle from IITB has people from all different caste backgrounds as extremely close friends, though you might cynically argue that IIT is an even higher caste.
If you see Indians in KFC asking for vegetarian choices, you can guess that they are upper caste. Alternatively, if you see Indians speak of animal rights, while wearing leather bags/ belts or shoes you could also guess from that.
Apparently (from a cursory Google search) it seems that members of some castes (the higher ones, apparently? maybe just the highest?) are typically vegetarian.
Not necessarily. The so called warrior (and "upper") caste members have been eating meat for centuries. Brahmins (the priests) are supposed to be vegetarian. They are also supposed follow few other rules. These "sacrifices" allow them in forming better connection with gods.
'Vegetarian' diet in according to Indian system the regular vegetarian diet+ dairy. They drink milk and may consume other dairy products like curd and ghee. Some Brahmins do not eat garlic and onion.
Almost all upper castes are vegetarians. Brahmins definitely will be vegetarians. There will be exceptions for first generation immigrant kids I suppose.
That's not an easy thing to do as you will be easily identified. However, there is a market for getting identified as "lower caste/tribe" as it bags you affirmative action benefits.
Two quibbles. First, the Rigveda itself didn't separate castes into hierarchical varnas - that was more of a later vedic thing. Second, jatis aren't exactly sub-varnas. Some jatis span across varnas (e.g. because their members engage in both farming (shudra) and soldiering (kshatriya)), and particularly in South India the jati system exists even though the varna system has only been incompletely applied (a lot of regions in South India don't really have any defined varnas outside of Brahmins).
I am not sure if you have rad Beautiful Tree by Dharampal. It has interesting info about Indian education during and before british occupation. There were large number of shudras and other castes(which he assumes in dalits) involved in various subjects. Like Malabar data from 1821, other castes where marjorly learning about Medicines, Astronomy. Which is kind of unheard before independence.
Malabar data is not proper one to study this because the Malabar region or present Kerala region didn't have a proper 4 caste system. Anyone, not Brahmin was Shudra and hence the rigid system like the north was never there. When north had manusmirthi the one in Kerala was Shankarasmrithi that had only Brahmin and the rest Shudras.
It seems that, in some cases, immigrants import their biases with them, and stick to them instead of adopting cultural aspects of their host countries. This can, in a sense, make them less open minded and tolerant than non-immigrants. You can see examples of this all the way back to Gean immigrants to Russia and South America.
I have no problem with this, after all immigrants are by no means obliged to be assimilated. It becomes a problem when politics come to play. E.g. Turkish nationalism, Erdogan has pretty solid approval ratings among German based Turks. This doesn't affect German culture much, so. In case of Indian nationalism, heavily leaning on India's caste system, it is different. Indian immigrants tend to end up in managemebr positions more often than, e.g., Turks do. So they affect company policies and culture more. And in the case of caste discrimination, something most non-Indians have a hard time understanding, it can co-opt whole organisations. And in the case of social media it can have a massive impact on culture in general.
That's why those talks, like the cancelled one at Google, are so important.
> Erdogan has solid approval ratings among German based Turks
This is nothing unusual for emigrants to support the preserving, conservative and strong-arm political position for their former home countries because many feel obligated to do so.
The demographics of formerly rural Turks that immigrated to Germany is also relevant but I think the feeling of obligations for such "defensive" choices is a main driver. You can see this trend with a lot of immigrants, Turks are just an example here.
It's also common among Russians, but having witnessed it personally more than once, I don't think it's the case of "obligations". Most of those people sincerely believe in all that propaganda their mother country churns out.
I am a Director-Level in Engineering/QA/Quality Engineering. I currently lead a team where our ratio of Female Indian women is higher than any other engineering group at the company. Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of has had a higher ratio of females, but not necessarily of any specific background.
My N=1 experience is that this can be related, but not always directly about discrimination or sexism. I would need to include cultural oppression, personal confidence, and others to accurately reflect a summation. I do not doubt that bias or discrimination exist, just that I culturally do my best to have a positive influence.
A few years ago I wanted to understand better, so I asked for feedback from a previous amazing Indian female SDET (whose husband is the CTO of one of the big retail chains). She explained a lot to me about how a woman's position being higher than a mans was culturally challenging. She also had self-doubts about her ability to thrive in a mostly-male driven engineering organization. I worked with her on a transition into a Development team, and the resistance came mostly from her fears of cultural bias and discrimination. The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position.
The bias and discrimination exist, but localized, the teams I've worked with are always very supportive and welcoming.
I was test manager (never again) on a large enterprise system (never again) and half of our QA team offshore in India were all females; I didn't reflect on that at the time.
It's an open secret that multinational companies preferentially hire women in India to pad their global engineering diversity statistics without having to conduct affirmative action in America where it would generate negative press.
An all-female offshore team is pretty extreme though.
cultural oppression - that might have been a valid reason many decades ago but not these days.
Most of the men on H1B visa get married and their spouses arrive on dependent H4 visa. They cannot work with H4 visa (they can work with EAD these days though). Usually, there are a few years gap by the time they get back to workforce.. and what is the easiest field to enter without any programming skill? QA testing !! There are literally hundreds of QA training institutions who train home makers on QA testing and place them in a QA testing role (sometimes inflating the resumes with fake experience).. And there are other subtle reasons like low confidence level, assuming developer roles are more stressful with long hours of coding, cultural bias to focus more on family than career, etc. Outside the fancy startups and tech companies, QA testing is very slowly moving from manual to automated testing. So, it is still one of the easy entry points to the IT industry.
> cultural oppression - that might have been a valid reason many decades ago but not these days.
Most of the men on H1B visa get married and their spouses arrive on dependent H4 visa.
So why aren’t the women arriving on H1B visas and their spouses on dependent H4s?
Women are generally under represented in IT. And usually there is a high level of hesitation, fear-of-unknown-foreign-land among young women when they travel alone from home country to any other country. Things are changing fast though.
Good team mates. This is non existent in India. A woman in a management position has much harder steps to reach there and will be impossible if she is from a lower caste.
I know nothing about the parent or their experience [edit: and thanks to the parent for posting this]. I do know that commonly, people in positions of power (managers or people in the majority) believe the following but it's often not true; that is, the signal is always same, but not the reality. That is, the signal is meaningless as an indicator of the underlying situation, but when I find myself thinking it, it is potentially a signal that I'm missing something.
> "I ... have a positive influence." [note: not what the parent actually said; it's abridged for my example]
> "The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position."
> "I asked for feedback from ..."
A cause is that the people in a vulnerable position, the people who actually have the experience and know if you are having a positive influence or if they are accepted, don't have a voice, a safe way to speak about their experiences. Just saying 'you are safe', 'I support you', etc., doesn't make it so. Just having a conversation doesn't mean you know.
A useful rule for me is that if everything I hear feels relatively comfortable, then I am not hearing nearly everything.
We've all been in situations where someone invites us to be open and frank (especially your boss!): How do you respond? You know that many say it without meaning it - because it's polite, or it's in the HR training, or because they don't seriously considering what they are asking for. You know that some even say it to trap you, and some say it because they want to openly and frankly tell you something - and they do, ignoring what you said and then going on a rant. Some mean it but then can't handle it; they hear something disruptive to their worldview or needs (such as a stable, stress-free team or family), and react poorly, ignore it, or they bury their alarm and carry it around, associating it with you, degrading the relationship. Really, how often do you hear that invitation and then actually speak openly and frankly?
Now imagine that it's about a highly inflammatory topic which has yielded bad results throughout your life, about which you carry a lot of trauma. It might be a relatively new experience to the person in power, but to the vulnerable person it's something they've dealt with daily, they have ways to cope without dealing with it afresh all the time, and they've tried that conversation many times with little success. Just imagine your boss invites you to speak openly and frankly about politics or Donald Trump, and you might have an idea.
It's not hopeless, but there is an art and there are techniques for making it work, and plenty of expertise is available now that can guide people who are truly serious about hearing uncomfortable things.
As the parent, just wanted to give a quick reply with thanks.
My reply here is meta given the topic, but I almost didn't submit my original comment because I've seen how these threads go. Any additional information in my comment would lead to even more complexity/areas to pick apart. Less information becomes easy targets for flame. I can understand why the talk was pulled, because they often seem to result in negative PR, more than any potential positive influence. I felt the same with submitting my comment.
Thank you for offering positive suggestions and discussion to the topic.
Yes, and I hope it was taken as discussion. I am not even making suggestions to you, not knowing anything about you, your employee, or the situation. I do not for a moment think that I do know based on a couple paragraphs on the Internet.
Thanks for submitting your comment. It's so valuable to have someone openly discuss these things.
I think it's more mocking the oversimplification of complex problems.
That though caste discrimination causes significant harm and problems in the Indian and Indian diaspora communities, not every, "bad thing", stem from caste discrimination in specific.
The idea that sexism and other terrible things can be prevelant issues that need to be addressed better but they are not necessarily related to caste.
> Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of had had a higher ratio of females
Positive discrimination is also discrimination, why not look for the same ratio as the job market has? Over hiring from an underepresented group necessarily means lowering the competence, unless you purposely interview a disproportionate number of individuals from the underepresented group, is this what you have done?
Edit: needing to interview a disproportionate number of individuals to be able to overhire from an underepresented group without affecting performance is just a straightforward statistical fact assuming the same competence across all groups.
There's nothing on the GP about positive discrimination.
If you hire based only on competence, you will probably get more people that suffer discrimination than the average. The stronger the discrimination, the higher the odds.
True, although this is similar to what I described, I guess the distinction is purposely imbalanced and accidentally imbalanced. However I think the latter is less likely, the post I replied to originally mentioned doing this consistently across teams. Maybe the pool in QA is imbalanced? In that case we should compare to other QA teams to see if avensec is indeed an outlier. avensec made it seem like they was an outlier, and everybody in these comments is acting like this is the case. So I lean on the side of the pool being balanced.
I'm trying to understand how this is achieved in practice, however I haven't got a good answer yet.
Ever noticed how among professional bowlers, there are fewer conventionally fit guys?
Why is that? You'd think they'd have the same ratio of fit guys as the rest of professional sports by your logic.
Or.
Is it because the current highest earning professional bowler has a lifetime career winnings of $5 million by 2019? Since he turned pro in 1980. So if you can, you play something else.
Similar thing is going on here. There aren't people gunning for QA jobs specifically, there are people gunning for software related jobs in certain companies. People will get various offers from various companies for various positions. And the position you get is a reflection, in part, of the best offer for the best position the best company gave you.
So while the entire pool may have applied for the QA job, some of the people who were given offers got better offers from better companies and/or for better positions.
And let's not forget there could also be a variation of the Dead Sea effect going on. Where those who aren't Indian women get promoted or transferred out of QA at a higher rate, leaving more Indian women in QA. So you have twin effects going on. Where Indian women are getting accepted into QA positions more than other positions and Indian women being passed over for promotions and transfers keeping them in QA positions.
A much more likely explanation on the bowling thing is that physical fitness is not required to be a good bowler. Consider:
-There are lower-paying sports where fitness does matter, and they all have fit athletes at the top.
-There are way more conventionally fit folks than there are pro athlete slots; It's not like the select few fit people in the world are being exhausted before they can fill the ranks of all professional athletics.
You're throwing 12 - 16 pound balls about 16 mph in a way that causes the ball to spin. That takes a decent amount of arm and upper body strength to do it well consistently. Some amount of fitness is required.
If bowling paid like the NBA, you'd see very few non-fit pro bowlers.
At $5 million over 42 years, you bowl because you like it, not because it makes money. People who are fit but are otherwise not good enough to play high-paying professional sports can probably find better paying jobs elsewhere.
Professional bowling is populated by the people it is populated with partly because this is as good or better an option than others that they have.
I said you don't see "conventionally fit" guys. You inferred my claim was that physical fitness was not required.
And the reason I used bowling is because it is a physical sport. And with physical sports, better overall physical fitness can give you an edge.
Hell, even in chess they're beginning to consider how physical conditioning impacts performance.
But now you're kind of at the point of arguing the metaphor. There are more desirable positions in software development and less desirable ones. And everyone is applying for everything. And if one group is cut off from the more desirable ones, they will start to become over-represented in the less desirable ones.
I noticed the text of your comment ins grey, which means someone downvoted you. I disagree on first take of your comment, because QA to me doesn't represent a lower-tier of anything. It's a tech job. Women being in tech is good. Indian people being in tech is good. Will you share a bit more about your thinking? Why do you see this as being discrimination?
Sidenote: I once glanced around a team I was working on a few years ago and found most of the product/program managers were gay or lesbian. Didn't strike me as discrimination, since there are, of course, gay and lesbian hardware engineers, gay and lesbian software engineers... it just happened that we all found each other on a particular team.
So that's why I think that's what's going on here, but I'm eager to hear your thoughts, as they differ from mine.
The comment is only at zero, it means nothing. I made no qualitative statement about QA being beneath anything.
Most developers equate QA is beneath them. I also think QA is just as valid and not beneath dev, but I have also held nearly every roll in modern software companies. How we view QA doesn't mean that is how the tech job market sees it. Pay is lower, qual is lower and at companies that have a sizeable Indian workforce, I have witnessed that QA heavily skews female.
I didn't even notice until I have been on interview loops with Indian men that I thought were nice and that I had professional and personal respect for and this weird tiger came out when it came to interviewing women (for dev roles) that didn't come out when interviewing men. This is just anecdotal, not all not all.
This comment itself is going to get flagged or downvoted, but I can't put a caveat on every sentence.
> A couple of women who I knew had studied STEM subjects but had changed their career trajectory after graduating, explained the systemic sexism that women face in universities in India which deterred them from pursuing it any further.
And then I see those pressures in the hiring loop (for devs), we didn't interview QA, it would make sense that they get pushed into QA or get pushed out entirely.
Sexism in tech is much stronger than men realize, women are fully aware.
I think the status quality of jobs is an interesting aspect of discrimination. Why do certain jobs have higher or lower status? If the perceived status of various jobs was flatter, would various discriminatory schemes (intentional or not) continue to operate? Would differences in income persist?
My hypothesis is that demographic clusters of people within certain occupations are in part affinity and in part discriminatory which operate as a yin-yang.
Another hypothesis is that the existence of under-represented demographic segments in certain fields of study/occupation such as STEM means that the over-represented demographic segments are under-represented in other fields. Changing representation has classically focused on importing under-represented folks into high status fields. This effectively overstuffs some fields which decreases effectiveness. A better approach would be to make the other fields more attractive/high status so that the over-represented demographic segments in fields like STEM grow interest in other fields.
My hypothesis has always been that job status is largely driven by compensation and difficulty obtaining the position. If these are the drivers, I don't know how you would equalize status without overturning the job market at Large
One aspect I've noticed throughout my career is that the engineering problems QE engineers face are generally more straightforward, with well-defined parameters, and common patterns. The skills required to be a successful QE engineer require, generally, less breadth and depth of expertise than some other disciplines of engineering. I think it's a natural landing place for people who know how to write some code, but struggle to view problems at multiple levels of abstraction.
One way to look at it is that the disparity may be a symptom of complicated cultural biases, and we may not know the specific reasons. Since there’s nothing gender or sex related to doing the job of QA, then if the disparity actually is measurable and widespread, it does reveal cultural bias. This is currently true for nurses and for elementary school teachers in the US, for example.
It’s important to note that this can happen without individuals who have any overtly “sexist” behavior at all. It can be the result of cultural attitudes and not prejudiced hiring practices. This is why using the word “sexism” on it’s own might not be the best word for it, even if it’s technically true. Perhaps better terms are “cultural sexism”, or “cultural bias”. I’m sure there are better terms. The problem with using the bare word “sexism” is it tends to be accusatory and out people on the defensive, where the issue may literally be with all of us.
How do you know it is "cultural bias" and even if it is why do you think it is a problem? It could be that men and women have natural different disposition to work in certain fields, it might be that even in fields where it is balanced it is the "cultural bias" that make it balanced rather than the natural disposition. I don't understand how something like that can even be proved, how do you control for all the parameters? I also don't understand why we should strive for balance? what is wrong with each group, whether grouped by sex or race or age or whatever else being specialised in different fields on average?
Because gender disparities are changing every year (very quickly in historical terms), and because they are different from country to country, that rules out the possibility that the cause has anything to do with intrinsic differences between men and women, it disproves the idea that there’s a “natural disposition” that is purely based on sex, at least as the primary reason for the distribution today. There might be some natural disposition, but you can’t know what it is until the known, demonstrated cultural biases have been eliminated, and the ratios of men and women settle and stop changing, and women agree that things are fair. Moreover, there is a long history of people claiming “natural dispositions” based on sex that have been subsequently proven false, which means you have the burden to demonstrate why your idea of a natural disposition is somehow different from the previous claims. To date there is no evidence to back up the idea that men & women have any differences in their interest & ability to write software based on sex. There are differences in attitudes, and differences in how many people study and seek such jobs, but those differences are linked primarily to changing social norms, i.e. cultural bias, and have never been shown to be sex based.
> It could be that men and women have natural different disposition to work in certain fields
It could also be, and happens to be more likely, that cultural biases cause sex or gender preferences. If that’s case, then the problem is that insisting there could be sex based differences, when in reality sex based differences may be too small to even measure, may be a self-reinforcing cultural bias. Instead of assuming that bias doesn’t exist and demanding someone prove that it does first, we need to be assuming it exists and actively asking the question how can we get rid of it and then prove that we got rid of it. After all, we know for a fact it used to exist in the US, we know for a fact that it exists today in certain countries, and we can’t show that it ever got completely solved, because it never did yet.
> I also don’t understand why we should strive for balance? What is wrong with each group, whether grouped by sex or race or age or whatever else being specialised in different fields on average?
You might be making assumptions here about what the goal is. The goal is to eliminate prejudices that are actively harmful. The World Health Organization, for example, talks about why it’s important to eliminate these prejudices. https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender
> because they are different from country to country, that rules out the possibility that the cause has anything to do with intrinsic differences between men and women, it disproves the idea that there’s a “natural disposition” that is purely based on sex, at least as the primary reason for the distribution today.
The numbers may be going down in some fields, but that does not mean empowerment is the cause. And in case my point wasn’t clear, your link is not evidence that the distribution is sex based, it is proof that the number of women in STEM fields today is not primarily based on sex. The fact that it was higher and went down within a single generation proves it’s changing for social reasons and cannot be a “natural disposition”. Our biology didn’t change dramatically in 30 years, right?
I’m rather skeptical that it’s truly “broad” in historical terms, it’s still changing much too fast. I’m skeptical that trend for 1 or 2 decades is likely to continue and not change direction again, since it’s already changed direction in the last century. Women going into STEM went way up from the 40s to the 80s. In computer science it’s gone down since the 80s in the US, while in India it’s continued going up, and even exceeded 50% one or two years. The numbers in the US vary wildly from field to field, it’s different in CS than it is in biology or math. All of this is further undeniable proof that today’s causes are primarily social and not sex based.
The deeper problem with this article is that it flirts with some vague concept of different interests between men and women without addressing the well known fact that social norms influence interests. You simply cannot separate attitudes from cultural biases, it’s not possible, and it’s either ignorant or willfully misleading to suggest otherwise.
The question you need to be asking is the opposite: how can you demonstrate that bias has been eliminated? Sex bias was absolute and baked into law 100 years ago, and it has been slowly getting eliminated, but there has not been any point in time where we can demonstrate it’s gone, precisely because we have evidence it’s not gone yet. (Pay gap still exists, gender disparities between schooling and employment still exist, etc.)
We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.
This page for cultural bias is as good any any other definition for my purposes here, which was purely to say that “cultural bias” is less inflammatory than “sexism”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_bias
> The question you need to be asking is the opposite: how can you demonstrate that bias has been eliminated? Sex bias was absolute and baked into law 100 years ago, and it has been slowly getting eliminated, but there has not been any point in time where we can demonstrate it’s gone, precisely because we have evidence it’s not gone yet. (Pay gap still exists, gender disparities between schooling and employment still exist, etc.)
I don’t understand the meaning of the term “sex bias”. So it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.
> We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.
Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards? What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times?
> I don’t understand the meaning of the term “sex bias”.
This and “cultural bias” and “sexism” are all pretty well established terms you can Google, and are taught in social studies and history courses.
Sex bias means a cultural bias or prejudice based on someone’s sex. I’m using sex here more or less interchangeably with gender right now, but there are times where that distinction matters.
> it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.
There’s no question about whether sex bias has existed, nor whether society wants it to stop existing. Those are facts not being debated. The primary example I had in mind when I said 100 years is women’s suffrage: the right to vote. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage) When women were legally barred from voting, or owning land, or initiating divorce, those things were sex based biases. Women gained the right to vote in the US a while ago, but it took longer before women started to appear in C-level corporate roles, that is still changing today.
> Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards?
Please read the link I posted. Cultural bias is about having ingrained prejudices in large social groups. It can be, but is not primarily about people from different cultures in the sense of, say, Indians vs Americans. Indians have certain cultural biases, Americans have their own separate cultural biases. The idea that nurses should be women is an example of a cultural bias.
> What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards
The goal is to remove bias and prejudice that is hurting certain categories of people, preventing them from having equal access to opportunity to improve their lives, and to make decisions about people based on their interests and abilities, and to establish and respect some basic human rights across the board. I don’t know what you mean by “imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times”, but this sounds like a straw man and that you’re skeptical. It might be described as imposing minimum uniform standards, perhaps.
I will turn your question back on you: what is the alternative you’re suggesting, do you support having different standards for men and women in QA? Why or why not? Do you support the idea that a woman developer who writes the same quality of code and works as hard and has the same level of experience as her male coworker should be paid the same amount?
> Ah, it sounds like you may need to study a little history if you’re curious about these terms.
I am a mind in thrall to delusion.
> Sex bias means a cultural bias or prejudice based on someone’s sex.
Using the word “prejudice” to define “bias” doesn’t help me to understand the term.
> Cultural bias is about having ingrained prejudices in large social groups.
Okay, so different people having different assumptions which they use to judge phenomena.
> The goal is to remove bias and prejudice that is hurting certain categories of people, preventing them from having equal access to opportunity to improve their lives, and to make decisions about people based on their interests and abilities, and to establish and respect some basic human rights across the board.
There are lots of things that lots of people will tell me are hurting them. Personally, I don’t care about any of them. But how do you prioritize one claimed hurt over another?
> but this sounds like a straw man and that you’re skeptical
Probably, I was just guessing.
> I will turn your question back on you: what is the alternative you’re suggesting, do you support having different standards for men and women in QA?
I don’t really care. The hiring/promoting practices of 2022 American QA departments doesn’t interest me. Let the Harvest Gods have their day.
> Do you support the idea that a woman developer who writes the same quality of code and works as hard and has the same level of experience as her male coworker should be paid the same amount?
Depends on the context. Does disqualifying the woman help me to get what I want, then I’m all for it. Otherwise, I don’t care.
At least partly. When I was starting out, I would apply to dev positions only to get offers to interview for lower-paid QA positions. After changing to a gender-neutral nickname and removing all female-identifying terms from my resume, I got the interviews for dev positions.
You claim "at least partly" and then proceed to prove it with anecdotal evidence. You'd need to prove it with a study similar to the ones that send identical CVs to companies, just changing one thing, which is what they want to discover if there's bias against.
I am not obliged to defend every statement I make with a study for my thoughts and experiences to be worth sharing. Also, anecdotal evidence is evidence. Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.
In any case, I have done the five minutes of googling you seem to want. Biases in evaluating resumes based on gender and other such factors are not new nor unknown: here is an early study from 1986[1], 1988[2], 1999[3], 2001[4], 2007[5]. Feel free to visit google scholar and look more studies by yourself.
Interestingly, when those resume studies are more narrowly focused on Silicon Valley tech firms women experience a significant bonus relative to men [1].
You can sure share your thoughts, and I can share my thoughts on whether you're correct, I'm just pointing out it's not proven your personal experience proves discrimination is part of the explanation.
None of those studies support your original claim. They support the more broader claim that women are discriminated in the job market.
> Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.
Sorry, a single data point, by itself, when you share it attempting to generalize, is worse than worthless, since it can be terribly misleading.
I see why you may think that way, but I don't think you're right.
I guess for you it's a given QA jobs are "inferior" to SWE jobs. I guess you believe the articles you linked proof women tend to get "inferior" jobs just because they're women? (I haven't read the articles, although I believe this to be true).
I just can't make the jump that this applies to QA jobs (granting they are "inferior"). That would imply "inferior" jobs are always overrepresented by women, and there are counterexamples to this, by almost any definition of "inferior".
So talking about generalities, there are plenty of statistics that show that women have lower paying jobs and get paid less even for the same jobs. We can argue about the reasons but the fact that they are paid less has been shown many times, so if you are disputing it you should be provide some compelling evidence.
So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
> So talking about generalities, there are plenty of statistics that show that women have lower paying jobs
Yes, that's not disputed by anyone serious.
> and get paid less even for the same jobs.
Also yes, but only if you don't account for hours worked and experience. A Harvard study found that after accounting for both the type of job and hours worked [1]. Google actually found women were paid more than male employees working the same job [2].
In short, the pay gap definitely exists in the sense that women's average pay check is less than the average man's. But there's not much evidence of discrimination in pay. Men make more because they work different jobs, work longer hours, and stay in their field for longer.
Also,
> you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
One, this isn't calling QA "inferior". Compensation is not a moral judgement of work. Pointing out the fact that coding isn't a requirement explains why there's a larger potential labor pool and thus lower pay. My first job in QA was doing manual testing, following a script of things to check on canary and staging builds. I was paid $12.50 an hour. This wasn't some moral judgement about the value of this job, it's the fact that pretty much anyone could do it so there's no reason to offer more than minimum wage.
> We can argue about the reasons but the fact that they are paid less has been shown many times, so if you are disputing it you should be provide some compelling evidence
I state I believe this is true in one of my previous comments.
> So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
This could be, but you need something else to prove it, otherwise lower paying jobs with different distributions than the job market distribution are always root caused in discrimination, is this your argument? There are many high paying jobs that result in a huge selection bias with respect to employees, just because many people simply don't want to put the hours. And thus discrimination is not the whole story in these cases. It may be the case in QA teams though (or part of the story), I'm simply saying it needs more research.
Nevertheless this hasn't been my point, my point is simply a single data point by itself can't be used to account for part of the explanation.
The average salaries in QA are noticeably lower than those in SWE, so those are indeed "inferior jobs" - i.e. less attractive, and pushing some group from one to the other would be discriminatory because it would underpay that group.
Good, did I deny this? I'm simply asking for proof and saying what has been provided in this thread is insufficient.
By the way, lower salary doesn't mean "inferior", there are very high paying jobs, very stressful, that I wouldn't want, and work life balance is a huge component of a job.
Obviously not, see my other comment. Anecdotal evidence is part of the evidence, it doesn't allow you to claim part of the explanation is your anecdotal evidence.
Every number is a number, including zero. Therefore some number of members of any given group have been discriminated against. Therefore any group is indeed discriminated against. You can't argue with objective mathematical proof.
Slightly more seriously, if someone is discriminated against for being part of a group, you don't get to appeal to the fallacy of composition applied to all groups in order to claim that there is no discrimination against that individual. Yes, yes, you're not actually writing out that argument, you're just leaving its ingredients lying around next to a naked flame.
Of course. Women are not physiologically better at QA than other roles in tech companies. That's it. That's 100% of the information required to determine that this is the result of sexism.
However, a lot of people seem to think that describing reality is an insult to them, so I have to explain further - this is a result of systemic sexism starting at early childhood. It starts with what toys children are given to play with. It continues via socialization in schools. It's propagated via every surprised face when a woman shows up to learn about technology. No individual person involved in the process might have any malice at all. It's the result of entire systems of behavior, no individual part of which can be described as "the problem". You might call it systemic sexism.
You don't have to be able to explain the entire method of operation to see the result. Is there a statistical difference in outcomes between groups that isn't explained by a difference between the groups? Then there's a systemic bias at work.
>Of course. Women are not physiologically better at QA than other roles in tech companies. That's it. That's 100% of the information required to determine that this is the result of sexism.
Car mechanics aren't all women, even though women's hands fit much better into all those tiny spaces in the dashboard and engine bay? Sexism
Nurses aren't overwhelmingly male, despite the fact that a significant part of the job is wrangling patients, who overwhelmingly skew obese? Sexism
I was trying to show by example that grandparent's definition of sexism is ridiculously expansive to the point of choking out all other dimensions of life.
I chose them as two things that don't often get cited as evidence of sexism (though mechanic isn't so dirty a job, and isn't dangerous at all. I have more personal awareness if mechanics, so that's what I chose.)
> I was trying to show by example that grandparent's definition of sexism is ridiculously expansive to the point of choking out all other dimensions of life.
Unless they can back up those claims with evidence, like male nurse resumes receiving fewer callbacks than identical women's resumes, then there's no basis to their claims.
Nope. That's exactly my point. The fact that they aren't somewhere around 50% is sufficient to show it. Filtering does not happen solely at the interview. It happens at hundreds or thousands of steps along the way. It's a systemic problem.
Go ahead, do your study. You'd probably find that most hospitals have a slight preference for male nurses as they're trying to increase their diversity for all the practical benefits it brings. (Yes, diversity has a lot of practical benefits. Having people with a lot of different backgrounds around significantly improves the odds of having someone around who can successfully interact with a person no one else can.)
So if hospitals, theoretically, have a slight preference for male nurses in hiring right now... Why are they so uncommon? Because there are fewer candidates.
Hiring isn't "the problem". No one thing is "the problem". There's no bad guy to blame. No evil cabal. You don't need to get upset every time someone points out a systemic bias.
You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
>Hiring isn't "the problem". No one thing is "the problem". There's no bad guy to blame. No evil cabal. You don't need to get upset every time someone points out a systemic bias.
>You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
But who are you to say that the way a thing is done by everyone, everywhere, is out of whack? Perhaps you (and I) just don't have full knowledge of all motives and incentives?
This whole discussion misappropriates the term 'sexism' to make it meaningless just like racism has become a meaningless term.
How is it anything other than out of whack if observed reality isn't statistically aligned with potential? Simple economics tells us that we get the best outcomes by aligning those. (And... motives and incentives are part of the systemic biases. As I said, you don't need to identify them to observe their results.)
Also, did you know that language changes? It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
>How is it anything other than out of whack if observed reality isn't statistically aligned with potential? Simple economics tells us that we get the best outcomes by aligning those. (And... motives and incentives are part of the systemic biases. As I said, you don't need to identify them to observe their results.)
The set of all relevant characteristics to evaluate 'potential' is either infinite or approximates infinite on the scale of human lifetimes and capabilities, not least of all because 'potential' is also the evaluation of that infinite list of characteristics across an infinite list of possible uses of one's time within some moral framework that must be used to determine which is the optimal solution. The practical implication is that 'statistical alignment with potential' is a fantasy, and anyone who indulges it will spend all their time trying to figure out how to amass and analyze the relevant information (and no time accomplishing anything else), which we can hopefully acknowledge is not the best use of potential.
>Also, did you know that language changes?
Please, don't be snide.
>It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
It's a good word to describe forms of bias because its prior meaning gets people's attention, because it is a word that means something that needs to be fixed. The extent of 'systemic sexism' far outpaces 'sexism', meaning that the first use will necessarily eclipse the second, eventually taking away the shock value and, in the meantime, it removes the significance of what was once an unambiguous and damning word. It is a loss of linguistic clarity for political expedience.
Except "fixing" this problem involves deliberate hiring bias. As per your other comment [1], the solution involves direct sexism in the form of gender discrimination in hiring. Direct sexism, in order to fix the "sexism" that most normal people just call "choice" is not something many would support.
> You'd probably find that most hospitals have a slight preference for male nurses as they're trying to increase their diversity for all the practical benefits it brings. (Yes, diversity has a lot of practical benefits. Having people with a lot of different backgrounds around significantly improves the odds of having someone around who can successfully interact with a person no one else can.)
This is illegal hiring bias. It doesn't matter if a company thinks it'll perform better, it's against the law. If a company finds that male salespeople make more sales, are they justified in turning away women?
No? You write that hospitals are discriminating against women because they want to increase their representation of men. I respond saying this is illegal (because it is).
People don't fit into the workplace based upon their physiological capability to grasp the highest role. You need more information than that to determine systemic sexism.
People have free will, life circumnstances seperate to corporate goals and a nature.
You can track a bias towards food and water that starts from birth and runs through all of society. We don't explain the lack of people in deserts as systemic waterism. Why do we see women working voluntarily with women in some roles as sexism when it has happened since the beginning of time?
The systematic worldview breaks down when it hits the nature of people. We aren't all pawns in a corporate game 24:7, so there are many reasons for people to work they way they do. One would hope they are freely choosing their work roles and not living their lives according to the dictats of gender equality statistics.
The truth is that there are no studies (that I'm aware of) that research into whether there's sexism in QA. So the answers to your question are going to be filled with speculation.
There's no sexism until I see a study, and I'm not doing a study if there's no sexism. Doing a study at all when there are no previous studies would be a clear case of anti-male bias.
Correct. Until I read feminist theory, QA is relatively easy job, good pay and anyway I hate coding. After I read, its deep rooted institutional bias against women to not be allowed to work in high paying, high prestige software development jobs.
There are people in QA who are Patel. We have women from India who work at all levels, from ED to L1. All pillars are necessary.
The biggest problem I've encountered is that they are sometimes socially isolated because Western colleagues don't know how to approach them, when they're really easy to talk to and have a lot to say!
"Etymology
The term patel derives from the word Patidar, literally "one who holds (owned) pieces of land called patis", implying a higher economic status than that of the landless,[6] ultimately from Sanskrit paṭṭakīla,[7] with the ending -dar (from Sanskrit "धार" - supporting, containing, holding) denoting ownership.[8]"
I'm afraid there is none. Also its better if people from the west do not try to draw parallels with their experiences and culture. It simply doesn't match. This would help you understand the caste system and once you do, you would literally see it in any place where Indians live/work. The revelations would be mind boggling for sure.
For ex, if there are a bunch of Indians in a work place and a few of them are from lower caste, they will not be invited for lunches, dinners or any socialising event by their upper caste counter parts. Implicit untouchability.
I have read that in the US tech companies this is far too common and since their white (only white specifically. Because they don't care about what their black/asian/latino colleagues think.) colleagues don't understand caste, there are no repercussions for any discrimination.
Any suggestions on how an European can tackle this? I now have quite a bunch of Indian collegues, and while I know what the caste system is and how it sucks, it is all just theory for me. If women are cut short in meetings I see it and can do something. If all Indians are excluded, or all Blacks, Asians,..., I see it and can do sometjing. Well, in theory. But of it is only affecting a sub-set of a group that is completely indistinguishable from the rest, it gets close to impossible. Plus, it feels like a really sensitive topic. Just wondering, not that I encountered a situation like that so far, or rather not that I saw one for what it was.
I don't buy this...even if white people don't understand caste, they would still understand random team members not being invited to group events and perhaps try to find out why it happened that way.
Because for us Westerners this form of discrimination is, well, invisible. It is based on subtle things we don't see. It stays within a group, that to us, seems completely homogenous. Plus, how many Westerners actually are aware the Indian caste system exists at all?
men discriminating and harrassing women? Sexism, check.
White discriminating people of color? Racism, check.
One Indian being a dick to another Indian? A personal thing between those two people. Only that ot is not, it is so much more, we Westerners just don't see it. And since we don't see it we have a pretty solid chance of intervening on the wrong side, if we intervene at all.
Effectively, the idea was "Don't be a dick." That is a reason right there where a person can intervene if they are in a position to do so. However, the issue as you raise it is that this is not a law.
There are laws about sex, racism etc that can help people in low power situations exercise some power. But we don't have that equivalent knowledge/ability regarding caste.
Agree there is a ton of nuance, at vmw I didn't notice it till I heard about it, then I did, but like you said its really hard to know how to intervene
Interesting fact: Talk to Indian upper caste women who claim to be feminists about caste; you'll be shut down quickly. I have had countless arguments only to be named "mansplainer". The activism from powerful groups will flow in the same social structure which does not affect their power.
This sounds extremely similar the ~century-ago situation in American feminism. Lesser right for women of "lesser" racial, religious, social, etc. backgrounds were, ah, not much of a concern.
It's also the same the other way around: a lot of male anti-racism activists / communists / etc were very sexist. Some still are. I still think it's nice that feminists are, today and historically, generally ahead of the curve when it comes to these things.
Quite a few people who are into the "revolution" stuff are there because of the associated macho masculinity. It's no coincidence that Che Guevara is such a popular icon.
Generally speaking, the more authoritarian someone on the left is, the more likely they are to be sexist. Stalinist tankies are the rock bottom.
Hell, I have had conversations with my immigrant mother-in-law where she complains later immigrants hang out only with each other, only speak their own language and should be deported.
In her own language. Just after she's asked us to take her to her ethnic group gathering that is pretty much her only social outing...
Hypocrisy has many shades and people compartmentalise attitudes with issues.
I actually had a pretty balanced department that only slightly favors women. As a male QA/QE I tend to hire for detail orientation with a back up of actually caring, and a level of either assertiveness or grit in holding the line.
Anecdotal survey of 10 years of QA, and I haven't found any corrrlation with sex and QA, except that women have tended to be easier to work with on average, and the men I work with are either really good, or meh. Amusing historical point though: programming was considered women's work originally.
As commonly implemented, it’s certainly a less-skilled job with a lot of banal repetition, tedious procedure, and not much scope for or need of original thought.
As one familiar with the Indian education system (which is heavily rote-based and does not generally encourage understanding-based learning, especially before the tertiary level) and the mentality it produces in comparison with the western mind, I would say (and please don’t misunderstand me; I’m making a dispassionate assessment of why it might be so, not whether it should or should not be so) that this is actually a pretty good match, and it would not surprise me—nay, I would expect—to find Indians and especially Indian women fitting in better into that style of QA department than into other fields such as development; and when you have a large fraction of people who think in such-and-such a way, it will tend to be self-reinforcing and -perpetuating. (This is also a significant factor in why these sorts of effects in how you think as a whole have a habit of lingering for a generation or two after transplantation into another country.)
While it pays less I don't think I'd ever state that it's "lower tier". If QA is an integral part of your process, that the customer pays for, then you don't disparage people doing the necessary work.
Yes, there are levels of QA. But QA, at its most difficult is also software development, but for the most part, is not.
I would say, that on average, QA is a lower skilled profession than software development. If I were to make an analogy, QA is the nurse to the developer's doctor.
And, yes, it is a lower tier. You hire developers before QA and fire QA before developers. But, like you said, it deserves respect. Just like all professions. And I'd say that a competent QA staff is the sign of a successful organization. Because while you can have your developers test, it's better to move those responsibilities off their plate so they can focus on their core work. Just like you could have your employees take out the trash and sweep up, but once you're beyond the "5 people in a garage" setup, you're going to hire a cleaning service.
To the point of the higher up comments.
It is an issue. Even if QA were more difficult, challenging, etc than development, we can't get around the fact that it is perceived as supplemental to development. It is a place where organizations put people who want to be developers but the organization doesn't want to be developers. Or a dumping ground for 1x developers. And it seems, a way to tweak diversity numbers without actually doing anything.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? Your posts in this thread have been way over the line, and you've unfortunately done posted this way to other threads too. We ban accounts that do that.
On a topic like the current one, if you want to share some of your own experience and cut out the swipes and putdowns of others, that would be fine. Otherwise it's best not to post.
Okay dang i will go ahead and read the guidelines. Sorry for being passionate and being myself, i will try to be someone else. Thank you for not banning my account even though I get ruthlessly downvoted for speaking my opinion and will never hit my karmic goal of being able to downvote posts.
There are no magnitudes. One person’s sorrow doesn’t diminish another’s.
> indians who have a 99 percent employment rate and some of the highest salaries
Ah, got it. Because some Indians do well none of them have any legitimate claims or qualms. Quite literally a racist surmisement, but at this point I should not be surprised.
What makes you think you're qualified to make such a blanket statement? Especially since caste discrimination is pervasive in India and immigrants tend to bring their culture with them.
I just don't think you could know this, and I wonder what else might be motivating you to make vast generalizations about things you don't know.
You're just one person. It's obvious that you don't personally know about caste discrimination in all of the United States. If you had data it would be another matter, but you presented none and I'm pretty sure it's because you have none.
It's not a subjective matter, it's just transparently absurd.
> To Soundararajan, Google was long overdue for a conversation on caste equity. Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told The Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.”
> Soundararajan said Pichai has not responded to letter she sent him in April. Google declined to comment.
Advocating for the condemnation of casteism is only anti-India if you think casteism is an essential property of India that cannot and should not be changed.
Do you think casteism is an essential property of India that should not be changed, throwaway_1928?
India itself condemns casteism by, among other things, granting 60% job reservations ("affirmative action") to its 'lower' castes.
Does the US condemn the mass murder of and continent-sized land theft from Native Americans and the mass kidnapping and centuries-long enslavement of Africans by granting them 60% of all jobs at every level of government?
This has nothing to do with the original topic. Why can't a Brahmin in the US condemn casteism? Why did you say it's anti-India to ask for that? And why do you pivot away to a different topic when asked these questions?
As you say, India has acted more resolutely against casteism than the US has against racism in some ways. So it should be incredibly easy for someone coming from that background to condemn casteism. If they didn't, it would be anti-India.
Americans do not fight racism as hard as they should, but almost all of them find it extremely easy to condemn racism. Not sure why it should be different for a US Brahmin and casteism.
> "If he can make passionate statements about Google’s (diversity equity and inclusion) commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege," she added.
Any corporate leader of any identity should be able to condemn any kind of bigotry that may be occurring at their company. The targets of bigotry have a right to know the leader has their back. It doesn't depend on the identity of the leader, the perpetrator of the bigotry, or the target of the bigotry. And this is not a request to comment on events in distant lands.
I don't think anything exists on the English language internet about that. (I doubt Saiva Vellalars hangout there, but I also have no idea who they are.) Wheras so many people insist he is Brahmin that if you enter "google CEO caste" into Google search, the algorithm spits out "Brahmin" (this is more of an amusing detail)
I’m a white Australian and am in my last few weeks of a decade long stint in a large company, caste discrimination is certainly not the only discrimination in Australia, but it is the most overt explicit discrimination that I see every week. We have laws and company policies on other forms of discrimination, but the predominantly white corporate culture hasn’t figured out how to talk about caste discrimination without sounding like it is criticizing Indian culture so has just turned a panicked blind eye to it. I regularly see or am told of behavior that should lead to arrests, but because many Indians in Australia are on fragile visas it is swept under the rug.
My fear is that Australia now has a large workforce of people on fragile visas with no political representation and that this is corrosive for our democracy, so this situation will last much longer than it should
Yes,
Two employees hired via an Indian recruiting firm were not paid wages they were legally entitled to, that my company was paying for, and threatened with cancellation of their visas and legal action in India if they reported the underpayment. In one case my colleague agreed to pay back his last three months wages when he quit to the recruiting firm, not to my company that had already paid the wages. He wasn’t contractually obliged to do this it was just bullying. (He had also not been paid superannuation for three years) Other Indian workers were bullied to secretly to work for other clients and phone in sick. (Australian workers get paid sick leave) others were regularly required to write fake resumes for candidates applying to work at my company and coach candidates on their fake work history. These are the explicit extreme examples, the mistreatment an dismissive behavior towards Indian women and my Tamil colleagues is unpleasant but more subtle, one female Sri Lankan colleague deliberately adopted an Australian accent to be accepted by some of our Indian male colleagues.
In all of these cases the managers responsible were higher caste than the workers, who accepted the mistreatment despite Australian law being strongly on their side.
I disagree, the people being exploited are being exploited by other Indians, there is a power dynamic which may not purely be about caste membership, but is related to a group of managers who understand power, and other groups of workers who don’t understand or don’t want to risk standing up for their legal rights, and in ever case that I was aware of the managers were ‘higher’ caste and the workers were ‘lower’ caste than the managers.
But, I’ll let others continue the conversation from here.
Question from a layman. How does one know that someone is from another caste? If I was someone from India, how would I know what caste my fellow Indian is from? Is there some kind of code? Or where you are from?
Here in New Delhi, people will straight up ask you, especially if they're older.
Trying to get a house in Delhi as a single, straight male is an exercise in discrimination 101. Landlords will ask you if you drink alcohol, eat meat, have female friends, belong to a non-Hindu religion (especially if you're muslim), your caste, and heck, even what city/state you're from.
My friends have been denied housing simply for being from a state with a somewhat poor reputation. Some were denied because they were lawyers AND from a specific caste (the landlords feared that my friends would somehow take over the property through legal shenanigans). And I won't even get into how hard it is for a muslim male to find housing in India, especially outside of big cities.
So much of this simply never gets talked about in Indian society. But its just accepted as something that happens. Sometimes feel that we're developing backwards as a society.
It's true in places you mentioned from even my understanding from multiple people. But it's the same in the whole of India is not correct, as Kerala comparatively has very less problems like this. It's actually surprising for people from Kerala to even know such issues still exist even in metro cities of other states. True that it makes sense to generalize your comment as Kerala is just 2.5 - 2.7% of the Indian population.
Usually you know someone's caste from their last name.
I am someone who was not given a caste-based last name because my parents were influenced by a regional movement against caste. (I didn't even have a last name to begin with but eventually added a non caste-based one to avoid visa issues.) Whenever I traveled by train and chatted up with a co-passenger, almost surely they would ask my name and would never be satisfied with just knowing my first name. They would get visibly confused when I would tell them I didn't have a last name.
Edit: Curiously, based on the last name of the person (Soundarajan) whose talk got cancelled, I would actually have guessed that they were upper caste (Brahmin - the highest).
For the same reason that I, a white English-speaking person, am not going to be able to fool a British old-money old-boys club that I have the same cultural background that they do.
As far as I know (from some coworkers) they do.
But last name is only the first step/flag in identifying to which caste person belongs. Sorry, I don't remember exact details, but there some additional steps like special clothes I think?
> Edit: Curiously, based on the last name of the person (Soundarajan) whose talk got cancelled, I would actually have guessed that they were upper caste (Brahmin - the highest).
This is most likely because her parents/grandparents changed to using patronymical last names, precisely to avoid this problem. There was a very popular movement in South India (particularly the state of TamilNadu), called the self-respect movement, which a large part of society (except for the upper castes - who had a lot to lose), adopted.
This is why my own name does not give away my caste. Because my grandfather switched to patronymics from the existing caste based last names.
I’m curious: would you say the absence of a surname implied anything about caste? I’ve dealt with the children of people with leprosy (mostly SC, with a little ST and OBC) in the vicinity of Hyderabad, and it wasn’t dreadfully uncommon for their parents or grandparents to have no surname on their Aadhaar card, at least, and perhaps even a few of the children.
(In Telangana, surnames are almost exclusively used as just an initial preceding the given name, and sometimes that’s even all that ends up on official documentation.)
I don't know, in my personal case, this was definitely a regional movement - with plenty of upper caste families also giving their children no surname or a generic non-caste based ones. That is why you will see a lot more "Kumars" and "Anands" and "Ranjans" and "Jyotis" from Bihar than from other parts of the country.
> Whenever I traveled by train and chatted up with a co-passenger, almost surely they would ask my name and would never be satisfied with just knowing my first name.
What happens of they find out you’re a lower caste, so they just stop talking to you, talk down to you, etc.?
I don't think any of those things are true. Indians in general are hyper "hierarchy" aware (not just with respect to caste btw). They just feel the need to know how to place you.
I'm also not lower caste (or particularly upper caste for that matter) and my parents were doctors, so my family was relatively well-off in a very, very poor part of India, so almost all other social indicators would tell them to place me higher in social status. So, the experience of others would vary.
Your parents tell you your caste. You can also get a caste certificate from you local municipal office which helps you take advantage of some perks if you belong to a "lower" class.
Generally you wont be able to figure the caste of someone but there are clues like skin color, fairer skin generally is "upper" caste, sometimes your surname also gives away your caste.
Unfortunately some Indians specially from the "upper"caste take this very seriously and think they are superior compared to other Indians.
fair skin thing is nonsense. I'm a Tamil Brahmin (Brahmin being the highest caste) and I'm one of the darkest skinned people in India. Most of my friends are far darker than most Indians from North India. It's much easier to identify through surname (Pichai I'm pretty sure is a brahmin surname), but certain states like Tamil Nadu banned surnames for this reason. If people ask me my surname, it is T. Every government document has T as my surname, I just go with that
Well it is a stereotype, and they are often true, but not always.
eg, in TN, the average brahmin or upper class individual will be fair-skinned while the lower class one would be dark skinned.
I guess up in the North, this does not hold.
> but certain states like Tamil Nadu banned surnames for this reason.
The govt did not ban it. It was more a social movement where one was looked down upon (and even discriminated against for showing they belonged to the higher castes). That's why there are still folks who continue to keep 'Iyer' in their name.
Well if Surnames are banned, why is the name Pichai still used? Genuinely asking. I also see tons of engineers from Tamil Nadu in the US with last names Iyer and Iyengars.
It wasn't banned. It was one of the side effects of the popular Self Respect movement which saw most people switch to patronymical last names from caste-based last names.
Ofcourse the Iyers and Iyengars wouldn't switch because they had more to lose than they gained from hiding their caste identity (they are the so called upper castes who have traditionally held a much priviledged position).
The point where caste defines purity. Classism is a separate axis from the notion of religious purity that is a fundamental part of caste (which is effectively an amalgamation of the two). As such, the closest "reference point" for a U.S. citizen is the attitudes held by antebellum slaveowners regarding race. You can't comprehend the sort of...emotions that inspire the strict anti-miscegenation of racism or caste-ism, from a lens of "knighthood in the olden times".
Nevermind that one can be "knighted" - the idea that one could be "brahminated" is no different from thinking one could be "whited" in the antebellum south. (And no, the "honorary whiteness" given to certain asian ethnicities is not akin to "whiting" - it's merely defining a subdivision of a caste to be slightly higher than the other lower castes)
If we're being strictly anthropological Western 'racism' is a type of caste system but all caste systems have the trait of assigning better or worse outcomes to disparate breeding pools, however defined, and re-enforcing breeding rights on some level. Almost all human societies are caste systems of some sort since the introduction of farming at least, and from a more modern perspective is a composite of multiple, simultaneous caste systems (usually referred derisively as 'isms').
At no point. Indians have a distorted view of caste because of 400 years of British invasion after 500 years of Islamic invasion.
Since economic mobility was greately reduced because of economic stagnation caused by centuries of invasion, they re-applied the originally profession-based caste system using racial discrimination brought to India by the Mughals and the British.
Unfortunately, it has to be. If you want to decrease the effects of centuries of oppression, the oppressed have to be given a giant helping hand. Which is done by both the union and state governments in India in the form of reservations for people belonging to oppressed castes. Now this is a controversial subject, because there are people who have abused the reservations system, but overall I am of the opinion that it is a much needed system. The only way to enforce that only the oppressed castes get these benefits is to officially recognize castes and issue certificates attesting this.
That problem and increasing intercaste marriages is why casteism is dying in many parts of India. The new generation doesn't know how to determine the caste and are generally not interested. Most of the system in large parts of the country will die out with the previous generation.
That NPR story was great, thanks. The transcript is definitely worth reading for anyone curious about this.
In a nutshell, people can sometimes tell by your last name, and if they can’t, they will ask you questions about your background, such as what town and/or neighborhood your family is from, until they figure it out.
In one example in the story, a guy is outed as a Dalit by a coworker who knew him from college.
Outing a co-worker is pretty mean. And asking all kinda of private background questions in order to judge someone's social standing and treat them accordingly is intrusive and bigotted. As usual, racists are more often than not mean bigots.
It is somewhat different if you grew up in the caste system, and the discriminatory behaviour was just ingrained. If you start falling back to that based on, e.g., surname it's hard to avoid. Actively seeking information you can use to treat people like shit is a different level all together!
> And asking all kinda of private background questions in order to judge someone's social standing and treat them accordingly is intrusive and bigotted.
This also happens in the west and it's not caste-related. Go to a suburban barbecue or something, and observe: people will ask what you do for a living, which neighborhood you live in, how long have you been living here, where did you originally come from, and so on. Often they are doing this kind of small talk just so they can figure out where you are on the social totem pole.
It varies from place to place. For example, people are segregated by caste in many places. In other cases, it's easy to identify from surname. But there is one method that you should be aware of - it's more relevant to silicon valley. There are a lot of cases where it's not immediately possible to distinguish caste from name or looks. People from all castes look more or less similar. In such cases, the caste believers would do covert background research. That might be from your social media profile, public and political connections or even professional service records. There are also cases where they make the determination based on subtle differences in traditions (like marriage ceremonies or celebrations, clothing styles etc). And then there are some obnoxious methods like patting someone on their back to see if they wear a 'sacred thread' under their shirt.
In many regions / castes, the last name is specific to a caste. Also sometimes you can tell by appearance, e.g. I can often recognize Brahmins from my ancestral region just by looking at them.
That said, one of the reasons I'm really skeptical claims that casteism is widespread in Silicon valley is that I have a last name that's caste-ambiguous (could be anything from dalit to brahmin) and yet I've never been asked my caste. So it's rather bizarre that casteism could be so widespread without me having ever encountered it.
Aside from last names, diet is a big giveaway. If someone is vegetarian, it is highly likely that they come from the so called "upper" castes. In certain interpretations of Hinduism, which are now becoming the dominant ones in India, meat is considered polluting. If you eat meat, you are dirty, and this "dirtiness" is at the root of why some castes are still considered untouchable.
I observed it multiple times during CS graduate school. An Indian high caste classmate refused to let his roommate sleep in the same bedroom. The higher caste guy told us that his roommate is of lower caste. The other poor guy ended up very obedient and sleep in the couch for 2 years. They have a group of high caste guys and talk sht about a few fellow low caste guys in the class
High caste people in India will often find ways to casually mention their caste in conversation, sometimes within minutes of meeting someone new. Its reflexive - like subtly turning your wrist to show off a new watch.
And I have no data to corroborate this, but I've felt caste chauvinism increase in the last few years.
There's a broad trend in the rise of populist ethnocultural nationalism around the world, which usually brings with it a revival of all kinds of discriminatory outlooks because they're "traditional".
I forget what the concept is called, but I will call it something like emigrant conservatism, where emigrants bring essentially a snapshot of their culture from when they emigrate, and that snapshot remains fixed - they don't feel American, so they don't integrate into American cultural norms, and they don't have much active interaction with their previous home's culture which is constantly progressing.
Well. I am from an NIT in India and upper caste groupism is super common there. Of course to an outsider it seems like these are guys from the same high school and same hostel hanging out, but in reality it is mostly upper caste Brahmins in those high schools as well who end up continuing their groupism and favoritism in college and beyond. The same groupism exists even today - decades later. You see the same upper caste brahmins hanging out in the US together still in their close knit groups.
That is a very poor argument to backup your claim. Not is it just anecdotal, why do you even assume that everyone else has the same experience as you do? Reports and statistics are much more believable. I cited a report. Do you have anything of equal stature to counter it?
"If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem." - Dr. B R Ambedkar said this in 1916 [1]. The surprising incident in US was predicted more than a century ago.
For more context, Dr. B R Ambedkar was the main architect of the constitution of India. He also formulated the affirmative action for Dalit representation, called the reservation system. He was one of the so called Dalits who faced extreme caste discrimination in India despite his brilliance and all his achievements. There are documented instances where upper caste government officers refused to touch files that he signed. The discrimination was so bad that he and 500K of his followers converted to Buddhism.
These days, some sections treat him like an ideological revolutionary (sort of like marxism or leninism). Many are openly calling for replacing his ideas with those from manusmriti - an ancient text that is a huge source of racism and misogyny in India. Hope this gives you some insight into the problem.
> The surprising incident in US was predicted more than a century ago.
That's my question: was this in US? Because in US if anyone pulls that kind of shit you head straight to the dean's office and address the problem. 2 years sleeping on a couch because of your roommate's conceit? It boggles the mind.
One of the funniest parts of our HR training at my employer was "If someone does something you don't like, first talk to them and tell them you don't like it."
It is indeed US. Well for some reason the guy did not complain. I might exaggerate it a bit - the guy slept elsewhere as well but in this very dormitory he only slept in bedroom when the other guy is not home
Think about the “MeToo” movement, do you think it was nonsense before? Obviously until this movement there aren’t any sources.
In this case believe it or not, it’s a personal anecdote and true story. I’m not interested in revealing the identity or source in case of internet violence
Okay fair enough :) but some people on HN blame entire people or religion as if they are the perpetrators. Like it’s affecting my mental health, can’t stop thinking of people blaming my religion for it. I am sad
I've definitely been to a few of those in person that were more controversial than talking about caste (and also did not have the benefit of actually being useful, like addressing workplace discrimination is).
I can believe caste discrimination is a serious problem. Though not in anything tech related yet, I've had Indian bosses and colleagues, and among them were some of the most spiteful and vitriolic people I've ever known in my life, especially to people from the 'wrong' parts of the Indian subcontinent. I dread to think how they'd abuse others if they got into higher management.
Do you use it in regular conversations or writings, or come across it in new articles/quotes etc and don't flinch at all?
Can you consider if you would have the same reaction if the 'pariah' word was replaced with the dreaded N-word?
I think this could be an educational issue.
This too is a slavery issue, instead of a group of people we know suffering through centuries of mistreatment and worse, these people in India have suffered for millenia...
The real reason why Google canceled the talk is because the speaker has a long history of anti-hindu rhetoric and multiple employees complained about the talk to HR.
That Washington Post article is lying (or being extremely disingenuous) to take advantage of outsiders without context of the situation.
That would be because casteism is deeply tied to hinduism. You can't criticize it, without also implicitly criticizing the other. What is the context that would make this okay?
That is an insincere take. You are confusing varna system with casteism which became an issue later. It is not a Hindu problem but South Asia issue where muslims and Christians allow follow it, apart from discriminating against infidels and non believers
If X has been marginalizing Y throughout history and you belong to X class then its possible that you might be uncomfortable to hear the history and find it anti-X. But that doesn’t invalidate the struggle of Y right?
They don't like Modi and BJP for sure. But if you're drawing equality between these and India or Hinduism, you're kinda implicitly asserting that the things that are problematic with the former stem from the latter.
My statement was on the present and in no way an easy-vs-west value judgement. Everyone knows that the European colonialism and the ongoing neocolonialist story are pure evil.
Islam conquered and ruled India by the sword. Similar to how Europeans conquered many 'western' lands today. Islam and Europe are then quite similar to each other and quite dissimilar from India in their lust to conquer and subjugate and their generous use of violence.
Lower and upper caste divisions are made by government for reservation. Mostly they use them as vote bank.
50-60% of seats in govt. are reserved for so called lower castes defined by govt. Along with promotions.
50-60% of college seats are again reserved.
The law is extremely favorable to lower caste.
Now discrimination is everywhere in India. It is in the blood of everyone including both lower and upper caste. Once the lower caste reach higher status, they discriminate against others.
Even many caste with in lower caste discriminate among themselves. Similarly, castes within upper caste discriminate among themselves.
Both castes discriminate against citizens of other counties. Infact, discrimination is everywhere. Even among lower caste. Even among upper caste. Even towards each other.
There are particularly some castes in India like Brahmins in Tamil Nadu. Choudhary in Andhra. They show extreme favoritism. Once they are in a company, they only recruit or promote only their caste. One should not think this favoritism as discrimination. Because they show this against other castes too including upper caste.
Now, at least in this corporate companies. Many people find respite that this has not infiltrated in them. Any start of this conversation within corporate world itself should be looked with suspicion.
There’s another dimension to this that people outside Google don’t understand.
There’s a lot of disengaged Googlers specially in the traditional AdTech part of the business.
Career progression is very slow and the performance review process which has been in place for god knows how long was so damaging to individuals, on top of consuming an amazing amount of time 2x a year as people desperately tried to piece together “packages” proving they’re better than mediocre, that it’s been completely replaced with a new system.
My point being, there’s lots of people bored, feeling like they can’t “win” and with a high degree of uncertainty as to what metrics will have an impact on their career prospects or the company.
combine that with a culture of speaking your mind and potentially a feeling of superiority for being special enough to work a Google… you get some very disparaged but entitled people who I think consciously or not, are trying to denigrate the company.
I believe these issues are all important and should be dealt with.
I *don’t believe* it should be discussed out in the open within a “for profit business”. Leadership should acknowledge the issue, state their direction clearly and end the conversation.
Also I’m from a South American background and unfortunately was very ignorant of the Indian culture and have never met an Indian person until I immigrated.
I have Indian colleagues and a one of them became a good friend. I asked him once or twice about castes and how it worked etc. He said it’s all bullshit and it didn’t matter and I felt like it was a topic he was felt awkward discussing so I made a mental note not to ask him about it.
I Googled around and found his surname was from basically the 2nd highest caste. A few years later a young Indian woman joined our company and I was very impressed by her.
She was confident, eloquent and seemed eager to make an impact. I told my friend something like: “man the newbie is here to kick ass isn’t she?! Loved how she spoke at that meeting”
To which he made the only comment on castes I’ve ever seen him make, something along the lines of: “She’s a brahmin bro, she thinks we all work for her”.
Lol, the majority of Indians especially in the west are upper-caste Hindus. The funny thing is they say all progressiveness but support Hindu nationalist like Modi and RSS, make comments like the sh*t you mentioned but in reality have high caste pride and view non-Hindus as mlechas. It is also partly due to the colonial baggage of west of west, India is given a free pass and it's funny that even during colonial rule these upper castes were the ones who most benefitted.
It'll be interesting to see how this issue evolves with more american-born Indians entering the workforce. Hopefully it'll fade like a lot of other old-fashioned discrimination has.
Ah! Perfect occasion to quote from the paragon of pacifism and morality.
“The ideal bhangi of my conception would be a Brahmin par-excellence, possibly even excel him. It is possible to envisage-the existence of a Bhangi without a Brahmin. But without the former the latter could not be, It is the Bhangi who enables society to live. A Bhangi does for society what a mother does for her baby. A mother washes her baby of the dirt and insures his health. Even so the Bhangi protects and safeguards the health of that entire community by maintaining sanitation for it. The Brahmin’s duty is to look after the sanitation of the soul, the Bhangi’s that of the body of society. But there is a difference in practice ; the Brahmin generally does not live up to his duty, the bhangi does willy-nilly no doubt.
But that is not all. My ideal bhangi would know the quality of night-soil and urine. He would keep a close watch on these and give a timely warning to the individual concerned. Thus, he will give a timely notice of the results of his examination of the excreta. That presupposes a scientific knowledge of the requirements of his profession. He would likewise be an authority on the subject of disposal of night-soil in small villages as well as big cities and his advice and guidance in the matter would be sought for and freely given to society.
It goes without saying that he would have the usual learning necessary for reaching the standard here laid down for his profession. Such an ideal bhangi while deriving his livelihood from his occupation, would approach it only as a sacred duty. In other words he would not dream of amassing wealth out of it. He would consider himself responsible for the proper removal and disposal of all the dirt and night-soil within the area which he serves and regard the maintenance of healthy and sanitary condition within the same as the summum bonum of his existence.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Google outsources more than people realize. A lot of things happen out of India. The minimum amount of customer support that Google provides happens out of India. The mystery account bans, that sometimes get a lot of attention, happens out of India.
I’ve got this impression that all these diversity and equality programs employed by large American corporations are annoying to some and lame generally because they are astoundingly myopic.
Like, they do a vastly simplified, explain-like-I’m-five take on these issues (blah blah white male middle- and upper-class are evil type of thing) and tackle it with full ineptitude of five-year-olds.
I think a lot of people benefit from such approach.
First, hordes of people are generating busywork and you don’t really need mad skills or even basic competence to be doing it.
A lot of busywork paints a picture of the company press and shareholders will love.
Meanwhile, all the bullies keep on bullying.
There’s this culture where you will be treated better or worse based on the color of your badge. Race/religion/gender are off-limits, but discriminatory employee-contractor dynamics are blessed!
There’s this other bit of corporate culture that flew under the radar of any and all equality/diversity effort where managers of Indian origin would treat their also-Indian reports like shit because the poor schmucks happen to be of a lower caste. They would also make an effort to halt their career progress.
Those same managers would treat their overseas office teammates (in Poland) as if they were below the lowest caste possible.
Speaking about companies that have offices in both USA and, say, Eastern Europe, the Eastern Wuropean teammates are often treated as second-class people. They don’t get to participate in any project discussions of importance, presumably because those discussions happen informally, at the watercooler, in the US office, and should be content with all decisions handed down, like it or not.
I’m seeing the same kind of attitude starts happening now with onsite/WFH workers: since you don’t see the latter ones face to face, they are not quite real people.
Oh, and if you want to see a full-fledged rampant racism and supremacism, you should try working for a Korean company as a worker of their European branch office.
But apparently such issues are way too complex to be actually worked on by your off-the-shelf diversity and equality teams, for whom the white/nonwhite and male/female divide is the upper limit of comprehension.
I am surprised at how far from reality many of the comments are! I am an Indian living in both USA and India and I never witnessed cast-based discrimination to the extent some of the comments describe (I do understand it exists subtly) .. at least in the urban part of India where we live it is almost non-existent.
I want the cast system to diminish - for me, the casts of my colleagues never mattered and so does for many of my Indian friends. but some people will link everything and anything to caste bias - they like to live in that shit. If you are telling them they need to improve performance, they will say you are saying this because I am so and so caste. There is a law called 'atrocity' heavily skewed towards victims where if a lower cast person complains of abuse, police will make immediate arrests. I know many upper cast people unfairly in jail due to misuse of this law. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduled_Caste_and_Scheduled_...)
Brahmins are the most abused community in many parts of India for something their earlier generations did ..
I read wome people complain about groupism in colleges - why there won't be, when upper cast person has to get 90% and above to get into a good college and due to reservation policy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India), lower cast person will get into same colleges even for 50-60% that too for free .. many people are reaping the benefits for reservation for generations now and getting richer and richer .. while poor Brahmin boys have nowhere to go.. Somebody needs to tell this part of the story as well..
Bias exist in us all. It's innate. It's what makes us alive.
However, We've never been able to effectively label our bias. We build up these preconceived notions based on our experience and we put them in certain categories that often turn out to be mis-categorized. Taking an example from the article
>I think we would perform better under a non-indian manager
Instead of labelling your bias with 'Race/Class/Caste X', label behavior. We as a society need to be more honest about our bias and use stronger words like "Incompetent, lazy, scattered, arrogant, ineffective". Otherwise you have miscatergorized an entire group of people, not based on behavior but because of some inherited trait.
As a leftist, one of the things that gives me pause about identity politics and the language of identity divorced from class struggle is how easily it is repurposed by reactionaries:
> But Google employees began spreading disinformation, calling her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders, documents posted on Google’s intranet and mailing lists with thousands of employees.
I don't have a solution, just a depressing observation.
It's definitely frustrating. Culture, religion, sexual orientation, skin color, and politics often get combined into one, so it becomes impossible to criticize particular cultural or religious practices and beliefs without getting jumped on as racist or ignorant. This strategy of calling someone anti-X is a great way to end actual discussion about specific issues.
You see weird reaction in debates about feminism. People go along with the belief that men and women are the same. And then use that to justify male anger about unfairness by just parotting the same talking points. When actually feminist could always accept that there were differences and that was the point. But the argument changes at different levels of abstraction. It's confusing. Individuals should be treated the same, but are different statistically and in aggregate.
People see that "men and women are different" is used as justification for prejudice (like a person not getting a chance because people of the same sex did rarely have success previously). Which sucks and people feel its unfair. And when trying to conceptualize that unfairness into words, their contra opinion sometimes ends up being "so man and women must be equal" instead of "a persons sex does not justify prejudice".
Peoples feelings about fairness and justice are always valid, but hell, many people suck so hard at putting it into words.
What wasn't clear to me was whether they were claiming that her ideas about caste equality were specificall anti-hindu, or if it's just an ad hominem attack to try to shut her down.
Can someone with information on the caste system chime in on how caste members recognize one another (especially outside of their native environment/homeland where cultural modes of expression such as clothing may be vastly different)?
Genuine question, what is stopping you from identifying as another caste in 2022 with the mass adoption of the concept of identifying with different genders?
Just like being assigned a sex of Male or Female at birth, those who don’t want to associate can identify with another gender identity or even transition their bodies to whatever sex they please.
I don’t buy the notion that once a Dalit by birth you are destined to a lifetime of suffering, especially if you made it to FAANG in the USA, you won the lottery are in the top 1% of Dalits that are in the cohort of successful, wealthy, educated technologists who can break down the walls of caste identification back home. With the protection of civil rights laws and freedom of religion in the USA, you can use your money and influence to start a movement that breaks the chains of caste identity for the oppressed community back home.
I know the college youth in Delhi are very progressive and champion Women’s rights and protesting as a movement emerged when the horrific rape trials were brought to global attention. Maybe tap into this educated youth cohort to be the change for future generations to come and break caste identity at a conceptual level.
Money and freedom in another powerful country = power and influence to change the narrative back home as a symbol and poster child of Dalit role models changing the world.
Sorry I’m rambling, but if you made it to FAANG and aren’t paying it forward to your oppressed communities back home, then is your inaction to take a stand against Caste discrimination benefiting your oppressors because the top 1% of Dalits who can affect change left India as part of the brain drain of skilled individuals trying to make a better life for themselves abroad?
Let casteism die with the older generations, start a movement with the youth to turn the tides in favor of fluid caste identity until it is no longer relevant conceptually.
Someone please help me articulate this stream of consciousness into a single concise paragraph that is actionable. Thanks for listening, I would love to help in any way I can.
> Genuine question, what is stopping you from identifying as another caste in 2022 with the mass adoption of the concept of identifying with different genders?
Since this is a genuine question, there’s something you should know about not conforming to the gender you were assigned at birth: we’re not accepted for our identity either. The concept of self-identification is separate from cultural acceptance of it.
Moving to a place, however unrealistic the prospect, where autonomy in identity is more common doesn’t automatically make it safe or practical. Generally speaking, people who would benefit from emigrating, and can, already do. And they’re facing much more entrenched biases of racism and xenophobia.
What would it take to plant the seeds of change in the youth to abandon casteism conceptually as technology allows us to be on a more equal platform with all the world’s information at our fingertips?
I truly don’t know and fully defer to people who are directly familiar for that portion of the discussion. My only point in responding was to say that increased (public) diversity of gender identity hasn’t been a panacea of acceptance.
If anything I’ve seen the opposite, much more transphobia and even just ignorant objections to parts of speech, in recent years. I can speak a little bit to that, but technology has mostly been more of a problem than a potential solution. A century of advances in access to information and how quickly it travels has nothing on a century of lessons learned mechanizing terror and pain.
I think where the activists went wrong was in trying to increase acceptance of gender identity, rather than acceptance of diverse gender expression.
We can see that distinction very clearly in the increasingly influential 'TERF' movement: being radical feminists who are deeply critical of gender stereotypes, they of course have no problem with men wearing dresses or other gender non-conforming accoutrements. But men saying they are women, that is where the line is drawn, as these men are identifying into an already existing, and marginalized, group.
"Stop bullying cross-dressers" would have been a far more effective model of acceptance than "men can be women if they say they are".
That’s fascinating. So my “activism”—spending my entire life in no way identifying as “man” other than being told I was, and very quietly telling my closest friends and family that’s how I feel, and inviting them to embrace that if they choose or change nothing if that’s more comfortable to them—that’s why I have to call women men? This is the most vocal I’ve ever been on the topic. And I never felt like I was a “cross dresser”. Hell, as much as I enjoy occasionally going out fem, most of the time I’m just quietly being nonbinary with my (really nice full) beard and keeping to myself. But I guess my activism of “being who I am” really ruined it for people who expect me not to. And I guess fuck people who have more at stake in who they are… how dare they exist? Right?
Hillary Clinton called 25-50% of the country deliverables, and it was basically well accepted by the media and most on her side. I don't think labeling the other is going away any time soon.
I have very little in common with either Clinton, but it’s hard to disagree with that assessment (even though it’s misconstrued), given the facts. Basically everyone that could be harmed by their coalition has been or is in their sights. Basically every bit of progress to make our society more inclusive has been under threat. The defectors from that program have been high profile but very lonely in their principled stands. I’m fairly privileged but I feel more vulnerable than ever that “then they came for me” is sooner rather than later. That’s more true for more vulnerable people I know.
Calling people out for what they’re doing isn’t anywhere near the same thing as assigning lifelong attributes to them for their heritage.
The problem is I feel the same way about your side, and even worse really. You're trying to take away my guns while leaving it for people that can afford security. You're trying to talk to my kids about sensitive sexual issues at crazy young ages. You're trying to make it harder for my kids to get jobs or go to college because they were born a certain color. You're trying to make it harder to lock people away for major property crimes. You're trying to make it easier for undocumented people to come to the US instead of being selective like even Canada is. I could go on and on, but I think the things the left is doing is flat out dangerous to society, while what the right does is maybe mean spirited sometimes but for the best.
> You're trying to take away my guns while leaving it for people that can afford security.
I mean this with a surprised but real sincerity. I’m a former gun rights advocate and this notion was a big reason why I was. Don’t get me wrong, I do want to selectively restrict gun access. I want to preserve it for hunters, and potentially for severe cases where individuals are acutely threatened. I don’t otherwise want private individuals or police or state organizations to have access.
> You're trying to talk to my kids about sensitive sexual issues at crazy young ages.
I understand the origin of this point but it doesn’t faze me. Know how I learned too early about sexual issues? My brand new step brother had been raped by his father who very much shares your views on this topic. He told me to warn me, at my mom’s wedding. That’s how I learned about sexual topics I wasn’t prepared for. His father had his record erased. My family kept it secret but I knew, every time it came up in hushed tones. Spare me keeping kids safe from talking about sex.
> You're trying to make it harder for my kids to get jobs or go to college because they were born a certain color.
I don’t know what this is even about, but I didn’t go to college so maybe enlighten me.
> You're trying to make it harder to lock people away for major property crimes
Not even slightly cheeky… huh???
> You're trying to make it easier for undocumented people to come to the US instead of being selective like even Canada is.
This one you got right. I emphatically agree with this characterization of my position and think it’s understated.
> I could go on and on, but I think the things the left is doing is flat out dangerous to society, while what the right does is maybe mean spirited sometimes but for the best.
I don’t think I have any chance of convincing you otherwise, I just have years of witnessing and experiencing violence to the contrary. Violence mostly directed at people who just wanted to exist, many of them politically involved in nothing at all. My “side” isn’t what you think. My entire political focus has been centered around advocating for people who are harmed for no fault of their own.
Anecdotes about bad things that happen to some people aren't going to phase me and change my mind out about large scale systematic damage the left wants to do.
Regardless though, my point is that there are 'sides' and 'groups' and thinking poorly about the other side isn't going to go away when someone running for president of the United States calls people basically evil.
People on the right think that people on the left are naiive and foolish. People on the left think people on the right are evil. So if anything, the left is doing what this entire thread is about.
> Regardless though, my point is that there are 'sides' and 'groups' and thinking poorly about the other side isn't going to go away when someone running for president of the United States calls people basically evil.
There are sides. I don’t care for the good/evil distinction, but there is a clear conflict of values and it’s not going away with the actual president who doesn’t seem to muster any effort for the values he claims to represent.
> People on the right think that people on the left are naiive and foolish. People on the left think people on the right are evil. So if anything, the left is doing what this entire thread is about.
Looks like we’re discussing thoughtcrimes not facts. One participating party doing violence and the other perceiving them as resorting to violence isn’t equivalent harm done.
Correct, the left is the one that does the violence. You can look at jails and murder stats for that if you like, but in general is pretty obvious who the very intolerant ones are and it's the left.
You weren't able to find if most murderers vote Democrat or Republican? Doesn't that make you doubt if you're able to find anything at all? Should you even be talking about any of this if you can't even do that?
Not that I think there’s any value in continuing this discussion. But for posterity, it’s absurd that you extrapolated my point which was obviously about political violence, past violence generally and straight to a facile talking point gotcha used as red meat for people who already agree eat it up. Even if there’s anything meaningful to learn from murderers’ voting history, that’s hardly a representative sample of violence generally or of political violence specifically. I’d also point out it’s absurd to characterize voting for Democrats as “the left”, but I think we’re so far in the whatever spin zone that I don’t think it matters what I say so… take care I guess.
caste has been described as "Tower without staircase", i.e. no ability to move up or down, regardless of your economic class, education, or any achievements. You don't identify with a caste, it is tied to your birth (family name, place of birth etc.).
It's a fair question. And I think that logically it's equivalent.
However, to maybe see why people don't do it (I imagine, I have no personal experience on this), let's put it in a US perspective. What if a visibly black person identifies as white? Or vice versa? Do you think it would be taken seriously by even the most ardent liberals?
EDIT: For context, let's remember the case of Rachel Dolezal [1]
Sadly most caste accusations come from a place of extreme hatred for Hindus. I have seen this when questioned by people who talk of Caste and the Hindu religion and when I dig deep, they often have a extreme dislike of Hindus more than anything.
Caste comes from the Portuguese word "Castus". There is no literal translation found for this word in ancient Hindu Sanskrit texts. The quoted article comes written from a time under British Raj where peoples backgrounds were used to further divide society so that they would not rise up against the British.
Caste in the same sense of occupational background exists in all cultures but was never used in such a divisive way like the British Raj did. For example people of the "Smith" surname used to be Goldsmiths or Blacksmiths. But the British put a sense of elitism into some communities in India, telling them they are higher than others. There is no Hindu scripture which says who is high or low, but merely responsibilities.
Skilfully sidestepping any explanation of the metric being used to measure “high”, the educated spiritual priests in British Raj times and intellectuals were all banded together into one and labelled "highest caste" because they represented the “highest threat” to Anglican domination and those who represented the “lowest threat” to the Anglican were pushed into the lowest caste.
During the British Raj of the 540 principalities existent at that time, over 400 were ruled by Shudra Kings (Professor Vaidyanathan, IIM Bangalore) which the British denoted as low caste. When the British left, the second largest landowner in India after the Indian Government, was the Church and thus it’s reasonable to note that the largest transfer of assets and land from was in fact from the Shudra groups (Lord Harries’ so called low-castes) to the Church. Further, there is readily available overwhelming historical evidence that the Dalits “the Untouchables” were themselves a creation of the crushing sanctions created and imposed by the Anglican Colonialists of the Church of England as is clarified below. The castes and tribes “notified” under the 1871 Act were labelled as Criminal Tribes for their so-called “criminal tendencies”. As a result, anyone born in these communities across the country was presumed a “born criminal”, irrespective of their criminal precedents.
Mixing castes was normal as it was based on deed back few thousand years ago, only recently caste mixing wasn't allowed. Some further reading:
Oh just fuck off with these Marxist bullshit already. If you suck you aren’t going to be hired. If you are good you will succeed. Whatever discrimination there is against Indians, it’s way less than what they deserve. Actually Americans give them too much credit, which then we have to fix it Eastern Europe.
> “We also made the decision to not move forward with the proposed talk which — rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness — was creating division and rancor,” Newberry wrote.
This doesn't surprise me one bit. Even on HN, every thread on this topic turns into a flame war with a bunch of people crying racism/religionism. How dare we discuss something we don't fully understand? How dare we criticize another culture when we have our own problems? It's the same arguments every time, and then the article ends up flagged to death.
The role of caste within the US is a super important conversation to have, and every resident of the US is entitled to participate, but there are a lot of people with a vested interest in shutting it down and the tools to do so.
> every thread on this topic turns into a flame war with a bunch of people crying racism/religionism
Is there a term for shutting down a discussion by turning the belligerence to eleven? Such that people outside the discussion tune out not the views of those being belligerent, but the discussion itself?
>"Is there a term for shutting down a discussion by turning the belligerence to eleven?"
We really need one, because it's a known phenomenon without a known label. If we can't assign a word or phrase to it, we'll struggle to communicate the concept to others when we see it happening. That, in turn, makes calling this behavior out monumentally more difficult and far less likely to succeed in pressuring people to stop. Imagine if we didn't have the term "ad hominem" and how much more difficult it would be to confront someone making such underhanded attacks in arguments. It would be a lot more difficult to discredit the person, despite recognizing what they are doing.
Topic dilution is the closest thing I can think of that's already been coined. Rather than participate in good faith, the actors bring up some hot topic like racism, and off it goes until it's a full-on flamewar, or people drop out, or mods shut it down.
Trolling, or a specific case of it? I think of trolling as disruption, and it is commonly used to shut down discussions and attack good faith community (i.e., where people disagree, listen, tolerate, and support each other's right to hold and express differing opinions). This is one application of it.
> 2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit.
> 5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal', 'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.
> 18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'
I'm still astounded by how consistently contemporary defenses of Apartheid blamed the objections to it on "anti-Boer bigotry" in order to derail the conversation.
belligerence is a bourgeois and pearl-clutchy way to dismiss desperate people writing text on the internet as a part of their struggle to improve the horrible material conditions of their lives and the lives of the people they love. it’s easy to be sophisticated when everyone else is effectively your slave because you happened to be born higher up in the global supply chain. belligerent is how Marie Antoinette would have described people who don’t want to want to be told to eat cake.
That quote from the article gave me pause. It sounds like an admission that they wanted the good PR from having a caste bias speaker, but when having a conversation on a difficult topic actually became difficult, they backed down.
Maybe, Google, instead of just giving up you should be asking why a speaker on Dalit rights and inclusion is causing "division and rancor" in your community? Or is that also a difficult conversation you'd rather not have?
This quote from the article best summarizes similar efforts, even outside of Google,
>> Longtime observers of Google’s struggles to promote diversity, equity and inclusion say the fallout fits a familiar pattern. Women of color are asked to advocate for change. Then they’re punished for disrupting the status quo.
I'm not a big culture warrior, but I believe that if as a company you choose to do a thing, you do it fully, from top to bottom.
Yet the outcome described is exactly what you get when you have {status quo} + {new initiative from leadership} + {failure to dedicate time and resources to following up and implementing}.
People are always going to be resistant to change. Middle management is especially resistant to change, not unreasonably.
Consequently, effective change takes follow-through, verification, reminders, and eventually termination to actually implement. Otherwise, everyone shrugs their shoulders and returns to what they've always done... and punishes whoever is still dancing off the beaten path.
There's an archive link to the article below; apparently that's exactly what happened:
> "According to Gupta’s letter and Soundararajan, the decision to cancel the talk came from Gupta’s boss, Cathy Edwards, a vice president of engineering, who had no experience or expertise in caste."
And, another excerpt:
> "To Soundararajan, Google was long overdue for a conversation on caste equity. Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told The Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.”
Soundararajan said Pichai has not responded to letter she sent him in April. Google declined to comment."
Clean your own house before pointing at your neighbor's dirty yard...
Large private sector corporations are by definition vehicles of economic exploitation on a massive scale. Why do we expect them to sincerely do anything to reduce other forms of exploitation?
99% of corporate DEI initiatives are performative in nature. I realized it when the majority of companies were pushing employees to read a book on systemic racism written by a white woman who was obviously using it as an advertisement for her corporate consulting and training business.
> Maybe, Google, instead of just giving up you should be asking why a speaker on Dalit rights and inclusion is causing "division and rancor" in your community? Or is that also a difficult conversation you'd rather not have?
The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes.
These discussions need to be done with some strict moderation and sensitivity, usually with actual historians who can properly contextualize the issue. If all you're doing is bringing in "activists" from a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well.
a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well
Why do we owe this degree of sensitivity to some types of bigot but not others? Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? The realpolitik answer is that Google isn't dependent on the work of klansmen and gaybashers but they are dependent on the work of casteists, and throwing them out the door would hurt their bottom line.
In the same way that in the 90s you could not have immediately started having every major company start celebrating gay pride.
Cultural change takes time.
When you still have a practice occurring among over a billion people you can't simply throw it out and declare everyone doing it a bigot. You have to transition in steps and get buy in.
Put another way, you wouldn't march single handedly into Saudi Arabia and tell them Islamic law is dumb and they are dumb for following it.
> Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral?
This is imposing the cultural dynamics of American racial politics onto an issue with a completely different historical and cultural context. I wasn't talking about people who are expressing a belief of castes being inferior, I was talking about activists who depict a religious group and other castes in a specific light based on a factually inaccurate and outdated reading of history. Hence why I used the world "perspectives" and not "beliefs."
I've been to about 3 of these Equality Labs workshops and just gave up on them because in each one they were throwing around "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" level disinformation about Hinduism, and specific Brahmin groups particularly, while basically shouting down anyone saying things that disagree with their framings of historical events or philosophical references.
I've been to about 3 of these Equality Labs workshops and just gave up on them because in each one they were throwing around "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" level disinformation
Ah, I see how it could cause problems with that type of "equality lab". The equality, discrimination, etc training I've had was very different, and boiled down to "here is a list of behaviors; if you do any of them or anything like any of them your ass is fired."
> I've had was very different, and boiled down to "here is a list of behaviors; if you do any of them or anything like any of them your ass is fired."
Yeah this is good in general but needs tempering through a bit of conflict resolution/appeal process built in. Discrimination issues can often just be the result of misinterpretations and blind spots people have, especially when bridging cultural divides. There's some stuff that crosses a clear red line, but most behaviors are subtle and often unintentional and the approach to dealing with them productively should more closely resemble relationship/marriage counseling or the sorts of reconciliation processes they do in post-conflict zones.
The ones I went to involved being told I needed to make "anti-casteism" part of my identity and pick arguments with my aunts and uncles when they make 'problematic' statements. And it then came with a side of misquotes of The Bhagavad Gita and selective quotations out of the Manusmriti to argue that simply identifying yourself as a Hindu is inherently discriminatory and violent towards lower castes. As a history major and religious studies minor in college I took issue with just about every historical and theological "fact" they brought up but didn't think it was worth arguing. But there was nothing particular to the organization we were in and no specific instances of issues reported internally by anyone so I had a hard time understanding why this was happening.
There's a particular historical narrative among certain political movements in India that depict Brahmins as basically collaborating to institute a conspiracy to to impose a caste hierarchy across all of Indian society for millennia. It's a very simplistic and one-sided reading of Indian history and Hindu philosophy, but it has gained a lot of traction within social justice/DEI spaces and particularly with groups that are more focused on pushing an ideological project.
It would be analogous to having a Louis Farrakhan disciple on to talk about being Muslim in the workplace. There are many better people to raise those issues who will bring them without the side of eliminationist rhetoric. It's one thing to meme about people with privilege or be dismissive in a casual context, but at the workplace (or really any public venue) that sort of talk is just mean. It's especially frustrating because this discrimination actually is a blight on Indian society (though most of the issues in the US are in the realm of microaggressions rather than structural or overt discrimination). But that doesn't excuse just peddling nonsense in response.
The ones I went to involved being told I needed to make "anti-casteism" part of my identity and pick arguments with my aunts and uncles when they make 'problematic' statements
I admire that you kept your composure in the face of such ludicrous demands. An employer has to be insane to think they can even suggest how I should interact with my own family.
This wasn’t an employer, it was a volunteer effort by a Hindu group to organize legal representation for Syrian refugees caught up in Trump’s Muslim ban. There were a few people on the committee who were really intent on spending time doing stuff like this instead of connecting people to legal resources they needed.
The group has, since, dissolved for obvious reasons.
>Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral?
Who says there’s no need to be careful? Almost every discussion about “big tech censorship” has been people crying that they are no longer allowed to be bigots on the timeline.
Who says there’s no need to be careful? Almost every discussion about “big tech censorship” has been people crying that they are no longer allowed to be bigots on the timeline
Sure, but that's coming from the bigots, not the company executives.
> The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes.
I agree. Maybe a more precise way to think about this is that they’re only on the “right side” of the issue to the extent that “the other side” is “Israeli settlement policy” rather than “Jews” or “the existence of Israel as a state”.
That's definitely a genuine factor. But much the same blasts of hot indignation were released when, for example, people in the US tried to address domestic racism in the era between the end of WWII and the Civil Rights Act. And by and large there wasn't any threat of a serious backlash against most of the US' white majority. Instead the anger was driven by the desire to go on being racist without facing criticism for it, or sometimes more by just "but ... but ... I'm the sympathetic Main Character!" attitudes. Clearly both causes are at work to some extent in the backlash against discussions of caste in the USA. It would be wrong to suggest that South Asians or people of South Asian descent in the US are in as secure a position as most of the white population is and was. But I have to say that, without being really familiar with the situation, to me it looks as if it's mostly the latter at this time.
> It would be wrong to suggest that South Asians or people of South Asian descent in the US are in as secure a position as most of the white population is and was.
People in upper castes may be that secure in their communities, which might be what matters.
Would you dismiss Martin Luther King as an “activist”?
But your point is in some ways valid, as it’s important to be able to see Israel through the lens of colonialism and to show that the state’s brutality applied to brown people of all faiths, including Jews.
I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic. I actually think equating the brutal behaviour of the Israeli government with Judaism is the real anti-semitism. The Tora has exactly zero passages about it being OK to murder children or sterilise black Jewish women.
> The Tora has exactly zero passages about it being OK to murder children
Now, go and crush Amalek; put him under the curse of destruction with all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. - 1 Samuel 15
That's one example. The old testament claims God commanded the total extermination of multiple nations competing with the Israelites [1]. This extermination is celebrated to this day during the Purim festival [2]. When someone mentions Judeo-Christian morality, know that the first part of that duo is not remotely "turn the other cheek" - it is literally old testament.
Here's some classic leadership from Moses. Numbers 31:17
"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves"
And from the Big Guy Himself, Deuteronomy 20:
"As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves [...] However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites"
Does that count as one isolated instance, or six?
(Just btw: I offer the above merely as a counterexample to a rather glaring claim, not as a criticism of Judaism. Just because I was taught as a small child, by christians, that everyone who disobeys god deserves to die, and if they don't it's solely due to his mercy, doesn't mean everybody contextualizes these passages that way. Also, the term "murder" is slippery because it isn't a synonym of "kill". If you argue an instance of slaughtering people is justified or legal, you can make it "not murder" by mere definition.)
The central issue with discussions about Israel is a failure to differentiate Israel (the state and government) with Judaism (the religion) with Jew/Hebrew (the ethnicity).
(And yes, I realize Israel is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, but to a first order approximation and given current political dynamics... it's not)
Given that there are relatively few states with as intertwined religions and historical atrocities perpetrated against their people, it makes sense the ability to talk about this is underdeveloped.
> failure to differentiate Israel (the state and government) with Judaism (the religion) with Jew/Hebrew (the ethnicity)
That has not been my experience. AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush. Jewish people have been severely oppressed for centuries, and the state of Israel has been attacked repeatedly. The response has been a strong emphasis on solidarity and mutual support, which is generally laudable, but in some this manifests as militant intolerance of even the tiniest deviation from the (insiders') conventional position. Unfortunately, those few - and I know most Israeli and Jewish people are much more open minded because that has been their tradition for millennia - often end up controlling the debate.
>AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush
This is clearly a defense tactic used to avoid criticism and I see it employed heavily by apologist. Criticism in general should be embraced, as nothing is perfect and we can always improve. But in this case, they are well aware of their wrongdoing, which is why they employ such tactics.
> Criticism in general should be embraced, as nothing is perfect and we can always improve.
Honestly it depends on how that criticism is framed and who it's being directed towards. It reads differently if the criticism framed as "I care about you and want you to do better" versus "I dislike you and have developed a narrative that justifies mistreating you." It also matters whether the criticism is directed as feedback (e.g. "When you do X it makes me feel Y and I think doing Z would be better") vs. directed towards a third party to intervene in a prosecutorial way.
> AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush.
Ironically, that often results in Jewish people being disproportionately tarred as anti-Semites, because they have specific and knowledgeable criticisms that they're not willing to just let go of.
It isn’t enough to focus criticism against a specific individual or narrow group. You also have to consider whether the criticism is justified or echos specific stereotypes
For instance, there’s many who feel that some of the criticism against Barack Obama was racist. Not because it isn’t ok to criticize a US president but because prior presidents hadn’t been treated similarly/held to the same standard
What if someone has consistently criticized other people or governments for comparable behavior? In my experience, it makes absolutely no difference. Even international organizations with rock-solid records of speaking out all over the world get the same treatment. What's the excuse then? It's just guilt by association, only it's not even real association, from people who absolutely should know better.
Not sure whether you meant to respond to a different comment (mine didn’t say anything about “excuses”), but assuming this was meant as a reply…
You clearly have one/several specific organizations in mind, but I’ll point out that my comment was about the content of criticism rather than the track record of the group making it. Track record gives a hint of whether someone might be acting in bad faith, but it is perfectly possible for someone to usually offer fair assessments but let their prejudices slip though with regards to members of one minority group or another. In fact, some would argue that everyone has such blind spots and that they can only be mitigated, but never eliminated.
Not sure I understand your point about guilt by association, but if you are arguing that using the same talking points as a known racist shouldn’t make others suspect you of being a racist… then I think we’re probably going to disagree.
> if you are arguing that using the same talking points as a known racist shouldn’t make others suspect you of being a racist
That is a (very) thinly veiled version of exactly the tactic we're talking about, and I probably shouldn't engage with it, but ... who says something doesn't affect whether it's true. Why is the demand for perfection - dare I say purity? - so one sided, and limited to certain topics? If a racist says that it's wrong to assault peaceful pall-bearers at a funeral for a journalist who was already a victim of a highly questionable military action ... well, they're right. One should of course be careful not to validate anything else the racist might say, or to let them shift focus/proportion beyond where it belongs, but rejecting truth because it was stated by The Wrong People is exactly what the racists themselves like to do (not to mention every authoritarian of every stripe). It's not reasoned ethical debate. It's pure blind partisanship, which is not healthy even in an otherwise good cause. Set aside the ad hominem and guilt by association. Consider whether something is true no matter who says it, and whether its truth suggests change.
Blowback validates the wordlviee hardliners are selling; in a different context, that was pretty central to al-Qaeda’s strategy, where provoking blowback was a way of selling their clash of civilizations narrative.
Hardliners of all stripes tend to recognize and actively exploit blowback.
I think you've inadvertently made the case for cancelling the "activit talk".
If for example you had a talk in Google Israel that presented the discrimination against Israeli arabs in modern Israel, I suspect you'd get a decent turnout and positive response (especially as Tech is unusually left leaning).
If you had a talk that mentioned colonialism (like you do in your post) you'll just get people fruitlessly arguing with each other ("This is our land from 2,000 years ago, the arabs are the colonists", "This is our/your land thanks to a UN decision, settlements that go beyond the 1948/1967 borders are colonialism", "All you jews are colonists").
You'd just end up further dividing your employees into hostile groups, even if they were previously able to work together (by just being silently tolerant of each other's opinions).
> I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic.
I think this one is a problem "on both sides".
There are some on the Israeli side that will try to silence criticism by equating it to antisemitism.
There are some antisemites that will express themselves in the form of "reasonable criticism".
There are some that will innocently make some criticism that seems reasonable to them, but due to ignorance of the situation or facts, lack of nuance or just the difficulty of communicating cross culturaly via a limited medium end up with sometimes that seems antisemitic when examined at depth by "the other side".
And no matter which way you go, it is very hard to tell where you are.
Not the OP, but I think the same principle applies. Whenever you accuse an entire race of something (as opposed to isolating your criticism to individuals or even systems), you’re engaging in racism, and this is unfortunately common in DEI trainings and among “race activists”. I don’t think strict moderation is necessary in the general case (especially since a lot of the most credentialed people who would moderate are themselves the sort of race activists who agitate)—rather, I think we’ll work through it in time.
It is a shame though that we were on this path toward a post-race world and then some of us abruptly reversed course and dragged the whole nation with them, setting us back decades.
After Trump's nativist rhetoric, a steady stream of police brutality against black men like George Floyd making national news, and a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo, I agree we've been set back decades. But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists. Woke activists might make some white people more uncomfortable than tiki torch-wielding Caucasians chanting "Jews will not replace us" or Dylann Roof shooting up a black church, but that doesn't make them comparable in any way.
> After Trump's nativist rhetoric, a steady stream of police brutality against black men like George Floyd making national news
The media coverage of police brutality against black men predated Trump's candidacy and it was entirely falsely predicated: the media cherry-picked instances in which black people were killed by police (or rather, those instances were plastered on the front page of national outlets for weeks while egregious killings of white people would rarely break into national news at all where they would be footnotes), which gave the impression that only black people were being killed by police or that police killings of black people were more egregious--neither of which are true.
> a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo
Yeah, this is precisely why we shouldn't legitimize extreme, racial politics or political violence. Every thinking person saw this coming and warned about it (e.g., "we shouldn't engage in racial politics because it's going to embolden and swell the ranks of white-supremacist types").
> But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists
Of course, but woke activism is the only kind of racism that is still regarded as legitimate (i.e., we even allow our most influential institutions to preach it), and by tolerating it we (1) legitimize racism generally (2) allow it to drive a right-wing reaction. The most effective way to treat right-wing racism is by dismantling left-wing racism and re-establishing a liberalist orthodoxy.
Racists on both sides like to frame this as a dichotomy between left-wing racism and right-wing racism, but the only dichotomy is racism vs egalitarianism. Left- and right-wing racism are just two sides of the same coin.
You're blaming left-wing rhetoric for right-wing violence. That doesn't compute. The voices shaping the narrative on the right have agency. They are not puppets of the left, and they don't get to simply point at woke Twitter and say, "They made me do it."
There is a rot in American culture that is giving rise to anti-democratic and racist violence, it needs to be rooted out, and it has found shelter and succor not in radical university campuses or woke social media, but in right-wing America.
It’s not “blame”, it’s looking at causality to try to understand how to get us out of this mess. I’m looking at why race ideologies (and violence) have exploded over the last decade in the same way we would look at the causes of a crime surge.
It doesn’t absolve individuals, but it gives the rest of us an idea about where to focus our efforts: on the influential institutions who are driving race ideology on the left and right. It’s better to plug the leak than try and save the boat by scooping water out.
Anyway, right-wing violence isn’t the only threat—left wing people campaign against liberties (especially free speech and equality) and they have their own violence (nationwide riots, property damage, assaults, and even the occasional terrorism). Moreover, left-wing people have their own anti-democratic bent: the “not my president” stuff in 2016 and calls for revolution, agitating for and rationalizing political violence, etc. I’m not comparing left-wing and right-wing sins, but rather noting that we want to defend against both and mercifully the solution is the same: deradicalize institutions.
>It’s not “blame”, it’s looking at causality to try to understand how to get us out of this mess. I’m looking at why race ideologies (and violence) have exploded over the last decade in the same way we would look at the causes of a crime surge.
If that's the time frame you're predicating your analysis of race politics in America on, you're not the non-partisan analyst you think you are. Racist mobilization of white Americans started well before Obama's 2nd term, well before Ferguson, MI and Baltimore, ML.
I didn't used to, but after seeing how noxious communities get when you normalize the kinds of reflexive confrontationalism and assumptions of bad faith you find online I changed my tune. I haven't seen a single place improve once people start treating and talking about structural discrimination as some sort of original sin that individuals need to repent and seek absolution for. It's generally much more useful to focus on individual behaviors people are engaging in and pointing out the ways in which they are helpful or unhelpful at creating an inclusive community.
The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes.
The roots of this behavior as well as the fear of this behavior lie in a logical fallacy called composition, which is spelled out at the Nizkor Project (a site on the history of the Holocaust):
> The first type of fallacy of Composition arises when a person reasons from the characteristics of individual members of a class or group to a conclusion regarding the characteristics of the entire class or group (taken as a whole). More formally, the "reasoning" would look something like this.
> Individual F things have characteristics A, B, C, etc.
> Therefore, the (whole) class of F things has characteristics A, B, C, etc.
Just because the Israeli government is highly repressive towards the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and treats non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel proper, does not mean that all Jews around the world share this behavior. Similarly, just because some Arabs have carried out acts of terrorism does not mean most Arabs approve of terrorist attacks on civilian populations. These notions can certainly be extended to caste conflicts among Indian peoples.
For example, Jews and Muslims live side-by-side in New York City in relative peace and harmony, as do European and Arab descendants.
The reason for this is that the American tradition of strict separation of church and state prevents any one religious group (or ethnic class) from seizing political power and using that power to repress other groups. This is one American tradition that the rest of the world would be wise to embrace, if they wish to minimize such conflicts.
> Just because the Israeli government is highly repressive towards the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and treats non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel proper, does not mean that all Jews around the world share this behavior.
This is a rather hilarious statement as almost no one believes that. You are committing the same fallacy that you repudiated.
Anyway inference is kind of predicated on guessing with some facts isn't it? If Israel is "the only democracy in the middle east", and they elected a government that is openly apartheid, and commits atrocities the jewish people themselves have been victim to, doesn't that make the whole of Israel's voters complicit?
If Israel (and Saudi Arabia) were to adopt American democratic norms than all members of their population (by which I mean, populations under their military control) would have a right to vote in national elections, yes? So everyone in the West Bank and Gaza would get one vote, same as everyone in Israel proper, for electing members to the national legislative body. Perhaps some degree of federation (as with American states vs American federal) would be appropriate.
Now there was a period in American history when only white male landowners really had opportunity to vote, but that notion has been soundly repudiated, hasn't it? Even then there was a significant group who advocated for the expansion of voting rights to all. See composition fallacy again.
Similarly, the right to emigrate or own land would not be restricted to members of certain religious groups (imagine if that was the case in the United States!). Hence Israel doesn't actually meet the basic requirements of 'democratic norms and values', does it - and nor does Saudi Arabia. Curiously however, these two states are often referred to as "America's closest allies".
As far as repression, well the targeted assassination of an American-Palestinian journalist in Jenin is just one more example of this. See also the targeted assassination of a Washington Post op-ed columnist Jamal Khashoggi, ordered by Mohammmed bin 'Bone Saw' Salman in the Saudi embassy in Turkey, for comparison.
> American democratic norms [meaning] all members of their population (by which I mean, populations under their military control) would have a right to vote in national elections
Since when can non-citizens vote in US national elections? Let alone people living in Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever else is/was under US military control.
I think you'd want to look at the definition of who is and who isn't a citizen, and what constitutes a nation-state. Clearly everyone in the West Bank is under the control of the Israeli state, and the same is more-or-less true of Gaza. Palestinians in these regions are not immigrants, they're citizens under any rational view of what a citizen is, and hence deserve the right to vote in Israeli national elections.
A valid comparison would be claiming that Native Americans were not citizens of the US government and hence had no right to vote for members of Congress, wouldn't it?
Notice that you completely dodged my question. There are lots of non-citizens living in the US who cannot vote. And during the US military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan none of the people living there were granted voting rights. Hell, look at how many senators Puerto Rico and Guam get
Nobody born in the United States lacks the right to vote in U.S. elections. I don't see how that's dodging the question; clearly visitors don't have the right to vote, and immigrants have to go through a legal process to obtain citizenship to obtain the right to vote.
To be more specific, my view is that all people born in the West Bank/Gaza/Israel should have the right to vote in Israeli elections, and Palestinians outside Israel should have the same right to emigrate to Israel as New York Jews do. Some will disagree, but that's basically how the American system works, and I think it's a better system.
If you think that anyone can simply emigrate to the US and then just go through some straightforward process to obtain the right to vote... you may be a bit out of touch with how the US immigration system works these days.
Further, there's been plenty of people born in and living in the US (under your definition of "a country includes any territory under its military control") who weren't able vote in US elections. There's residents of US territories who are technically citizens but cannot vote unless the migrate to the mainland. And the US has never granted voting rights to people living in countries under US military occupation.
Clearly not all Jews in Israel believe that Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians etc. should be treated as second-class citizens. I'm also not sure that religious identity is to be viewed as 'racial identity' unless you want to revive the definition found in the German Race Laws of the 1930s.
> I'm also not sure that religious identity is to be viewed as 'racial identity' unless you want to revive the definition found in the German Race Laws of the 1930s.
Personally, I'd suggest using the definitions that people use for themselves. And if you do that, you'll find that there are both religious and ethnic components.
Whenever differences - actual or imagined - between different groups are discussed, two major things happen.
First, some members of group found at a disadvantage are upset. This is regardless of how many other members of that group express that they themselves are not. You can dispute facts, but you can't deny people's feelings.
Second, the disadvantage is then used by some people to justify something that fits their agenda, prejudices of beliefs, whether it makes sense or not.
So I can hardly blame anyone responsible for managing a huge number of people of avoiding sensitive topics. Besides, a corporation is not exactly the place to discuss these things: they need to be dealt with as a society in general. If you try to introduce these topics into your workplace, you might even achieve the opposite of what you want, because people will do whatever you expect them just to keep their jobs, but won't change their opinion because their manager told them to, or because they attended a workshop where it was explained to them that their culture is inferior, for example.
Let's be real here. The talk was likely scheduled by a moral individual which thought the topic important. Then controversy began and middle management was made aware to this. Guess what happened next?
It's not that Google gave up. They were never going to allow it to begin with and the organizer likely just hoped it would fly under the radar.
Exactly. Anyone who thinks that if tomorrow most everyone woke up with a position against anything Google currently "stands" for that they wouldn't immediately flip to be in line with it is kidding themselves.
> every thread on this topic turns into a flame war with a bunch of people crying racism/religionism
Isn't that the first step in the flame war, attacking, dismissing, and blaming one side (and before they even say something)? How will someone with a good faith interest in discussing concerns about racism or religionism act, seeing this comment - they will feel shut down, and like they won't be heard and will be attacked. There's already no room for those discussions.
There is a lack of trust - a situation that is the goal of people trying to disrupt open societies and the trolls that help them. Whatever we say or do, the primary goal needs to be to build trust. People who are alarmed act badly - that's why trolls try to alarm people (even if they aren't quite conscious of how it works). Even when people are acting badly, if you can build their trust then very often the situation will improve.
It would be extremely valuable to society to find a way to conduct constructive conversations; I think we are improving, but not nearly quickly enough.
> It would be extremely valuable to society to find a way to conduct constructive conversations
It's tough.
I mean this sincerely - It requires heavy moderation.
The government can uphold a free speech ideal, but the good conversations happen in bubbles where someone can't create a burner account and start talking shit as loud as anyone else.
Some years ago, Christopher Hitchens gave a talk about free speech. It's very compelling. Nobody yelled "FIRST!" over him, cause it wasn't an Internet comment thread.
Maybe we should distinguish between free speech and "free-for-all" speech. I'll listen to Hitchens saying we have the Right To Read about Holocaust deniers, but I don't want any given thread to be over-run by the same Holocaust deniers.
I was going to comment the same thing but then realized the parent comment is listing the tactics people use to shut down the conversation, not their own personal opinions.
The point being made is that people who don't want this conversation in public (i.e. people in favor of and/or who benefit from the caste system) will flood the comments with this type of rhetoric which instantly turns the conversation into to a flame war rather than a helpful discourse on how to improve things.
The fact that you and I both instinctively fell for this reaction is evidence that parent is quite correct in the effectiveness of this tactic.
> will flood the comments with this type of rhetoric which instantly turns the conversation into to a flame war rather than a helpful discourse on how to improve things
Having stayed in Columbia TN for a decent while, I can tell you that the legacy is alive and well. Really, visit if you ever drive by - the confederate headquaters is in an anti-bellum house where they give tours, and they never say anything bad about the social dynamics of the past. It really leaves an elephant in the room, when they are selling battle flags in the gift shop embroidered with things like history not hate.
I think OP's point is those revering confederates today aren't confederates, they're something else. Sort of like how we term neo-Nazis separately from the historic Nazis.
You're right, or at least I think so yeah- and that point is definitely precise. From the years I spent in the area and outside of Nashville though, I'm not so sure that the sons and daughters of the confederacy as it is referred to all think of themselves as a part of the union. I'm pretty sure of the opposite for a few people in my mind rn. Don't take absolutes away from what I'm saying, this is just my experience.
Aside: The largest minority in Columbia besides black Americans were Indian Americans and immigrants. I didn't have any insight into how they saw the caste system, but living in that city probably gives them a unique viewpoint that might be worth asking about should you have the chance. I wish I had.
I assumed they meant the Confederate States of America. Which was founded on principles that some humans are less than others. Burn that shit down (again).
>The role of caste within the US is a super important conversation to have, and every resident of the US is entitled to participate, but there are a lot of people with a vested interest in shutting it down and the tools to do so.
I don't believe HN's current moderation policies/leadership make this the place to have that conversation though. Participate in good faith all you want, you'll still earn a ban/warning for "arguing" if you piss off the right people.
Last time I saw a big thread related to the topic there were super deeper threads of people just straight up calling each other slurs. They probably would have been flagged, but the threads were just so deep you wouldn’t see that unless you’re intently following the thread.
>Last time I saw a big thread related to the topic there were super deeper threads of people just straight up calling each other slurs.
I hope you didn't take my comment is advocating for that. I can't really comment on a thread I didn't see.
>They probably would have been flagged, but the threads were just so deep you wouldn’t see that unless you’re intently following the thread.
Sounds like pointless name calling. That said, my original point that HN is not a good place to have these discussions stands. Unfortunately this community is for sterilized technical discussion, anything with spice or flavor isn't permitted.
It is not possible with HN's content moderation. These are deep social topics that require delving into historical truths, ones that are inappropriate for a forum that mainly discusses JavaScript frameworks.
>It is permitted, but it’s important to tread carefully
How so? You can't say what you mean here, you're forced by moderation to be dishonest and sterilize everything. Nuance is only rewarded if you're nuanced about the right side.
>is respectful of other points of view.
Again, this is not in any way consistently applied. If you disagree with the majority here no amount of nuance will save you from ban/rate limit.
Yeah, giving the power of censorship to the masses leads to the opposite of free conversation. And these particular masses do indeed like to flag anything they disagree with.
And that message, "You're replying too fast, slow down". Lol. What duplicity.
I've slowly come to the conclusion that it's a form of opinion-shaping. A huge number of people aren't particularly interested in what's true, they're interested in what's _popular_.
For argument's sake let's assume it's 80/20, with 10% on each side of a topic very passionate for their side. By banning and/or rate-limiting the 10% you dislike in any issue you can sway the 80% to follow the other side thus "manufacturing" the consensus.
I don't think there's any distinction to be made between what's "true" vs what's "popular" when it comes to online discourse unfortunately. Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug, especially when combined with votes, flagging and reports.
Yesterday, I found it on the top of my front page. Then barely an hour later it disappeared from the front page and I could not even find it when I searched for it. Very suspicious.
Oh while we are on this topic there are branches within Brahmins and each group gets to feel superior to other Brahmins because reasons.
In some regions, there were also some devout worshippers of one God that take adverserial position about worshippers of another God (Shiva versus Vishnu)
Luckily most of these (I think) are on their way out and don't manifest in professional workplaces of today.
These tendencies must have definitely shaped careers and unfairly disadvantaged people as recently as a couple of decades ago.
That has nothing to do with it. There's no tolerable level, but more is still worse than less, and GP's point means more people with a direct vested interest in calling for change.
> Soundararajan appealed directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who comes from an upper-caste family in India, to allow her presentation to go forward. But the talk was canceled, leading some employees to conclude that Google was willfully ignoring caste bias.
> Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told The Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.”
Sounds like Mr. Pichai has some explaining to do...
It's rather you to work on the explaining there. Pichai isn't claiming to be unaware of how caste politics may work. I think it's not only OK but desirable for companies to stop ruining the workplace with societal politics. There is a law and public debates for castes and how to address the (no doubt existing even outside India) problem.
Prompting an employee of a tech company, even its CEO, reminding the audience of its ethnical background is what i find suspect.
> There is a law and public debates for castes and how to address the (no doubt existing even outside India) problem.
That's kinda part of the problem. In India there are laws dealing with caste based oppression and discrimination (how well they are enforced is another story). But in most other countries such laws do not exist. And caste-based discrimination is exceptionally easily and silently accomplished because for a vast majority of Indians, your last name gives away your caste.
That's right, in the West at wide they roll up to anti discrimination laws, agreed they probably don't tackle the very specific problem castes pose, I would much rather have anti discrimination encompass them in a more generic form to tackle all forms of discrimination based on "classes" than making it an indian caste problem. I fail to see how the unambiguous distinction in names makes the problem solving any easier, it isn't only about identification, and if that identification is used to implement quotas or whatnot, since that's how companies then read the law, it will 1/ create a new problem, 2/ suddenly see a lot of people change their name for "business" purposes.
While I am in favor of generic anti-discrimination laws, I don't think they can be generic and target caste based discrimination. Let me give you an example:
A hiring manager, gets two resumes. Both are equally qualified. He glances at one, see's the last name and decides on the spot to not hire him. Because of caste.
If he's slightly clever, he'll atleast schedule an initial call with the candidate before inventing a reason to reject him. How does a generic anti-discrimination law identify this as an instance of caste-based discrimination?
Exactly as it would "just" solve the use case without getting into the castes system specific worry.
E.g:
Candidate selection should be based on the skillset and fitness of individuals for the scope of work/description, without discrimination attriuted to personal affiliation, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation, difference, + "group identity", . The employer would thus commit infringement if when faced with two somewhat equals in fitness candidates he folds some individual based on gender or whatever else that falls into personal, group identity factor or affiliation to a certain group. I think it covers the caste system issue we see at the workplace without having to talk about castes in the legislation, and the benefit is that it allows the text to cover other group identifications.
Btw we have other avenues, anti discrimination is one that covers shutting down labelled candidates. Nepotism is described as favoring relatives or friends, just add "or group identified with" to it and boom that covers the caste system issue (and beyond). I'm no legalist so of course I'm not drafting a clear definition of group identity but you get the idea, i hope.
I suspect we are stuck on this because on some side we have identity politics and quotas advocates wanting the legislation to accommodate their wishes, hence forbidding group identified favoritism in the law. This avenue is being at best ignored as a potential simple solution, at worst battled against with teeth and nails for other unrelated motives.
I don't think workplaces should operate outside of and without influence from society. They're just a group of people in a building (metaphorical or otherwise).
>According to Gupta’s letter and Soundararajan, the decision to cancel the talk came from Gupta’s boss, Cathy Edwards, a vice president of engineering, who had no experience or expertise in caste.
Nothing abot this is puzzling. beneath the surface of Google's attempts to "look happy", there is a huge amount of resentment between individuals, and between individuals and leadership. Even when I joined in 2007 it was noticeable, but by the time I left (the second time) in 2019, it was painfully obvious.
Sundar's goal has been to smooth over this resentment and prevent events that would exacerbate it. That often occurs by cancelling a venue for discussion/healing. GOogle sort of evolved itself into a state of weaponized progressivism, and is now realizing just how unrealistic its naive view of using technology to transform the world for good was, and how it needs to turn into everything that it said it wasn't to continue to succeed in the face of more determined competitors.
I doubt it. In fact attrocities on brahmins is rarely discussed [1]. Infact his state TamilNadu there is a strong anti-brahminism sentiment in political sphere. This is one of the reason why lot of upper-caste men/women go outside India.
Don’t assume guilt based on association or membership to a class. Thats a form of discrimination too. Pichai is brahmin so he has some explanation to do—> no he doesnt. Its like asking any white man to explain why us cops are killing black folks.
Corpos naturally have split personalities, but it wasn't "Google's plan". Mid-level people proposed it and high-level people blocked it.
What's not often said clearly is that corpos don't want social justice which might come at the cost of rancor, they want "DEI PR" that they can charge to the marketing budget.
In other words, they want the low-hanging fruit they can get by having recruiters source employees from more places, and artists and photographers draw multicolored graphics, and asking people to be less cruel when all other tradeoffs are neutral,and if that makes the world more fair, that's great.
But they management won't allow anything that risks disrupting the moneymaking operations, regardless of long term potential benefits (which almost certainly don't exist -- racism exists because it works, locally, for economic and social benefits, not because people are moustache-twirling comic-book supervillains).
This is why free markets alone can't solve injustice, and broader social movements are the tool that works.
> After Gupta posted a link in the email group to a petition to reinstate the talk, respondents argued that caste discrimination does not exist, that caste is not a thing in the United States, and that efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division.
> Some called caste equity a form of reverse discrimination against the highest-ranked castes because of India’s affirmative action system for access to education and government jobs.
> Others said people from marginalized castes lack the education to properly interpret Hindu scriptures around castes.
Wow. I did not expect saints; every person and organization will be fallible and all that. Yet this is still so... absolutely stunning.
I think the argument that "efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division" isn't totally without merit.
As an America-born Indian-American, I honestly don't know what my caste is beyond knowing I'm not Brahmin (I didn't do the string ceremony some of my childhood family friends did), and have basically zero idea of how I'd identify someone else's caste. I imagine that that's not terribly uncommon among ABCDs.
Educating people like me about that would suddenly create the ability for them to identify a difference that they wouldn't have noticed before. This makes it unlike gender, racial, or age discrimination, where the categories are usually surface level obvious. That in turn could have a star-bellied sneetches effect, where people identify with the new categories that they wouldn't have considered before.
>> Educating people like me about that would suddenly create the ability for them to identify a difference that they wouldn't have noticed before.
This seemingly small insight goes miles toward explaining the current American obsession with racial and gender identity. Gender/racial/age discrimination are not surface-level obvious in America these days, which is why once people are told they're being victimized and discriminated against for X reason, everything starts to look to them like a microaggression against their identity group. They're essentially told you have no choice, you are this. This in turn creates an artificial political base where you're supposed to put your X identity ahead of all other considerations and fight for X people, and since X people only vote for Party A or Party B, you're supposed to vote that way.
I can tell you why it's utter nonsense. Because these groupings are engineered, as you said, to make people identify a difference that they wouldn't have noticed before. The same people who claim racial identity is so central to one's "lived experience" and such a huge basis for discrimination are quick to tell me "well, you can choose not to be Jewish if you want."
Caste is like a whole new frontier. Surely, they'll say, you've been subjected to terrible treatment and it's changed you... you just don't realize how unfair it's been, but we can show you!
It is of course possible that other Indian-Americans can identify your caste, and have discriminated against you, without you realizing it. But if that's the case, you're lucky not to know, because the worst thing you can do is let a sense of victimization become a central part of your identity.
> Gender/racial/age discrimination are not surface-level obvious in America these days
Yeah yea, tell that to the people who "ching chong" me whenever I leave the liberal coasts.
Incredible how you people paint one of America's greatest strengths, one that few other countries possess - the willingness to speak about racial problems and create a real _home_ for talented immigrants - as a bad thing. There's a reason people like Jenson Huang and Satya Nadella are not in France, for example.
The "American obsession with racial and gender identity" is a symptom of our desire for a better society and country, unlike the unobsessed French, 22.7% of whom are unwilling to live next to non-white neighbors[1].
I've experienced (and still experience) plenty of racist jokes, and some very not-well-meaning diatribes in my travels. I've been told point blank by a girl that her father would kill her and me if she brought me home.
Is it upsetting sometimes? Sure. But it only shows certain people's ignorance. It's not my identity.
Let me try to show my perspective. I come from a culture that is painfully aware of its minority status and a long history of extreme violence directed against it. I believe that the story of our persecution is valuable insofar as it makes us tolerant of others. But I have always believed that the factions in my own ethnic group who use victimhood to explain failures or to bolster their personal identity are committing what might be called "stolen valor". And that it in fact not only reflects negatively on the group, but is deeply corrosive to an individual over time, to frame one's understanding of interactions with the other groups in that way.
In short, even if it's absolutely true, it's a crutch. And when you want to see it everywhere, you can.
There's a blessing in being born different, or in a minority. It makes it easier to separate good people from assholes.
The discussion of racist history and racial integration is extremely important in America. But it's ill served by allowing race to be a marker for our individual identity, or to project an assumption of identity on other people. My people came here to get away from that and, even with discrimination, even being hated by some, to succeed on their personal hard work and their individual merits. Let the haters hate. Be bigger and don't let them define you.
> Racism isn't real anymore, except for being a manufactured socio-political construct to create (D) voters
How sheltered are you that you believe this?
EDIT: Because calling you sheltered for your ignorance of racism isn't enough:
You're claiming that people who think they're experiencing racism are simply primed to view negative interactions as racism, raising their sensitivity and lowering their specificity of racist experiences (i.e. that they can't tell the difference between assholes or reasonable setbacks in life and racism).
You're using this perception of minorities' racist experiences to prime yourself to dismiss every racist experience. Do you see how this is problematic?
Please see my other responses. I'm not dismissing the fact that racism exists, and I've personally been the target of it dozens of times. I have an issue with the notion that it defines and circumscribes our experience as individuals, or that it should be grounds for declaring our identity or the presumed lived experience of others, because that's not a path out of it and it's immensely destructive to the project of equality to create categories of victimhood based on skin color. One of the things I find most racist and offensive is other people telling me how I should feel or what I've experienced because of my race. We've gone back fifty years in the name of "equity" which is, substantively, white people's way of continuing to divide people into racial groups while acting holy about it.
Interesting that OP can attack whole classes of people from an obviously privileged point of view, yet a mild but directed criticism of his ignorance is considered off-limits.
Your comment simply adds nothing. "Do you even know how wrong your beliefs are?", without any further elaboration or commentary, is just pointless. Explain yourself and provide references and you'll accumulate upvotes instead.
> But if that's the case, you're lucky not to know, because the worst thing you can do is let a sense of victimization become a central part of your identity.
But this really takes the cake. I'm not sure what bizarre leap of logic has led you to believe that the only options are "rank ignorance" and "extremist crusader".
Take a look at the brown-eye-blue-eye experiment that a teacher did with her students. Everyone already knew the color of their eye, but no one gave it much significance. But as soon as the teacher started talking about the socioeconomic-status associated with eye color, students immediately divided themselves and started fighting over eye color.
Never underestimate people's ability to segregate themselves using whatever demographic markers society tells them is important to their identity.
> The children with brown eyes were suddenly more confident — and condescending. They hurled nasty insults at the blue-eyed kids. The children with blue eyes made silly mistakes and became timid and despondent. The two groups stopped playing together. Fights broke out.
"as soon as the teacher started talking about the socioeconomic-status associated with eye color, students immediately divided themselves and started fighting over eye color"
It wasn't the teacher talking about socioeconomic-status associated with eye color, but explicitly telling the children that blue-eyed kids were better than brown-eyed kids.
So it wasn't just consciousness of differences, but explicitly telling some of the children they were better than others.
All that proves is that you can teach hatred.
But you can also teach peaceful coexistence, where people are aware of ethnic/cultural/biological differences without looking down on those who differ from you. You can be taught to value and celebrate your differences.
Same with people from other castes. There's no reason why one has to be looked at as inferior and the other as superior.
It really reminds me of a Star Trek episode where there's a war between two alien species which are identical except that one is black on the left side of their body and white on the right side of their body, and their enemy is white on the left side of their body and black on the right side of their body: [1] A ridiculous and meaningless distinction, and yet they kill each other over it.
It also reminds me of the religious wars among Christians over minutia like whether one should cross oneself from left to right or right to left. Sheer insanity.
This is not true, because caste is an (evil) artificial construct which only has ever had one purpose to begin with: To discriminate against people of a lower caste.
Caste is not an ethnic/cultural/biological difference, and it explicitly is about saying some people are better than others. You can't celebrate the differences between castes any more than you can between jailers and prisoners, or masters and slaves. Caste is codified generational inequality.
> It wasn't the teacher talking about socioeconomic-status associated with eye color, but explicitly telling the children that blue-eyed kids were better than brown-eyed kids.
Amazingly, the teacher had done the exact opposite and told the brown-eyed students that they were the smarter group. Now, is that your bias showing?
> Amazingly, the teacher had done the exact opposite and told the brown-eyed students that they were the smarter group. Now, is that your bias showing?
Rather famously, the point is that the teacher did both.
> But this time, something was different. Elliott noticed that the blue-eyed kids were not as condescending, not as mean, as the brown-eyed kids had been. She asked why.
Yep, and look how well it's working. We've gone from occupy wall st, which was about ultra-extreme-unbelievably-rich vs everyone else, to the "culture war", which is everyone except the ultra rich vs each other. I hate it so much.
This. The sleight of hand that replaced class awareness with false awareness based on race is all you need to know about where progressive politics diverged radically from the traditional liberal left in the past decade. This is poison for the Democratic party and for workers' rights. It's pretty much the hitlerian model of substituting racial groups and racial strife as a corporatist placebo for class awareness to keep the masses atomized and confused.
I don't think we should base DEI policy decisions on an uncontrolled experiment done 50 years ago on a handful of 10-year-olds.
I think you've also taken the wrong lesson from this: the teacher's point here was that most (all?) forms of identity-based discrimination are learned behaviors. And if a behavior can be learned, it can be unlearned.
Because for many people, the division actually doesn't exist.
Artificial divisions between people only exist as long as people pay attention to them. If you're unable to categorize yourself or others it's really going to be quite hard to have tribal opinions about those divisions.
Eventually "support" for equality among division simply reenforces those divisions. The best way to rid yourselves of the remaining small minority of people sticking to hatred around those divisions is to forget about them and the next generation simply won't understand what they're upset about. Forgetting the division is the last step, not every division is in that phase yet, but many are approaching that territory.
It's more like insecurity through obscurity. Caste discrimination among educated circles is viciously covert. You may not know your caste or your colleague's caste. But the ones who are interested will definitely know it and discriminate on its basis. The discrimination and harassment will make no sense to you, unless something or someone tips you off. It's not like discrimination based on color or gender, where the difference is immediately apparent. You can't distinguish people of various castes unless you go actively looking for it. It's better to be aware of possible avenues of exploitation than be negligent and vulnerable to it.
As an America-born white hippie, though... I have a hard time seeing an argument like that and not equating it with attempts to suppress discussion of racial equality issues here at home[1]. The fact that you don't experience discrimination doesn't mean that no one does. And you should know if people do, and why.
Nothing gets better if the skeletons stay in the closet, basically. It's no different for caste awareness than it is for teaching slavery and segregation.
[1] Edit: and look what I did! "Here at home" clearly comes out making this seem like a "foreign" problem, but as you point out this is your home too! That's why we should all be hearing people speak out about it.
It's always the white folks who claim this. The often false assumption that people who are non-white must be being discriminated against and that being colorblind is not enough, etc., is just a new version of the "white man's burden." It's neocolonialism dressed up as empathy. Most people want to be treated as just... people. Not handled with kid gloves or lumped into a racial group and having all kinds of assumptions made about them based on their skin color, regardless of whether you think those assumptions are supposed to help them. They don't help.
The Portland white woke spiel goes like this:
Latinos are non-white, therefore they're being discriminated against, this therefore shapes their lived experience, therefore they must support progressive economics and want to vote Democrat.
Except people don't want to spend their life feeling discriminated against; they want to move up in society. They don't want to base their identity on your exoticized idea of their group suffering.
So sure: Introduce new ways that people can feel like they've been discriminated against. That's the way it's done! More and more identity groups! Caste, why not? Hey, we can even celebrate it.
This white guilt has done nothing but create more and more disharmony and disunity in a country that was founded on being a melting pot and where civil rights and equal rights were fought for, and won.
> So sure: Introduce new ways that people can feel like they've been discriminated against.
But this isn't "new" and isn't a "feeling". Caste-based discrimination is real among Indians. This is not even remotely new. And it's not a "feeling". It happens, and it's widespread.
> This white guilt
If you feel guilty, then maybe you should sit down and think about why. I'm a white dude. I don't feel guilty. I feel disappointed, though. Often outraged. But I personally haven't done anything to feel guilty about; I don't think that I am responsible for slavery in the US and hundreds of years of oppression, for example. But if I do do something to feel guilty about, I do my best to acknowledge my fault, and resolve to do better. I'm not sitting around all day wallowing in guilt over my privilege. That serves no one, and is just kinda stupid.
> where civil rights and equal rights were fought for, and won.
That's just not true. Civil rights and equal rights have been fought for over the span of centuries, certainly, but we're not done yet. That particular war is far from being over, and far from being won.
I'm not white and I don't feel guilty - nor should white people who aren't racist. My point is that white guilt and white racism are two sides of the same coin. The endless hunt for new forms of oppression which do not legally exist in America, such as the caste system, has the extremely undesirable effect of actually defining and codifying them into law here, even if that law is intended initially to protect some groups from discrimination. There does not need to be a law or a movement specifically privileging one type of discrimination over another, or affording special protection to one group over another. It creates a perverse incentive to define oneself in terms of oppression and forces one to be part of an oppressed group one doesn't necessarily identify with just because they have the same color skin. That box - brown people vs white people - is created and perpetuated by white people, even or especially those who think they're doing the world a service. They're not. You treat everyone equally. Speak up against anyone who doesn't. That's all you need to do. Not tell people that they're oppressed because of what you perceive or imagine their experience to be. I don't need your checkbox on the hiring form to get special dispensation, and I don't want it on the hiring form because it has zero to do with my ability.
> You treat everyone equally. Speak up against anyone who doesn't.
So... how do you square that with preventing a caste bias activist from speaking at Google? What Soundararajan does is quite literally speaking up against people who don't treat others equally.
I'm not in favor of preventing anyone from speaking. I started this by seconding parent's point that a lot of times it's better to move on with making a success of life and not know or not focus on the potential motivation of people who might be quietly discriminating against you.
FWIW, that wasn't the implication I got from this:
> So sure: Introduce new ways that people can feel like they've been discriminated against. That's the way it's done! More and more identity groups! Caste, why not? Hey, we can even celebrate it.
That sounded pretty unconditionally dismissive of the issue under discussion. I'm happy you've moderated your tone.
> The often false assumption that people who are non-white must be being discriminated against and that being colorblind is not enough, etc., is just a new version of the "white man's burden."
I dunno, man. I just think that, y'know, sometimes discrimination really does happen and I'd like to know when it does. That way I can try and fix it. Not everything is a cult. Most of us are trying to help.
This is a fascinating thesis, but it utterly fails to take into account that, well, maybe actual discrimination, as opposed to imagined discrimination still exists.
> equal rights were fought for, and won.
Some of them were won, to some extent, leaving plenty of gaps. We've reached civil equality about as well as the USSR reached 'true communism'.
But I think the same argument can be applied here in the USA, too.
Your point about "security through obscurity" makes sense; I wouldn't attempt to conceal the history and the current problems.
But the strategy here today seems to be trying to force people to own a given racial identity: at least some people are demanding that white people should stand up to publicly renounce their privilege, etc. And I'm afraid that this strategy of forcing people to self-identify as "white" rather than just "person" plants a seed in some minds that germinates into them sprouting into white nationalists and so forth.
FWIW: I think you're conflating things. Teaching kids about slavery and segregation, and teaching older kids the enduring effects thereof (which are quantifiable!) isn't the same thing as forcing them to pick a racial identity or renounce their privilege or whatever, even if some of the same people want to do both.
You can oppose the latter without denying the former. From my perspective on the other side of this divide, I see a lot of people making arguments like yours as a way of shutting down discussion about inequality entirely. That's exactly what you claim not to support, right?
Are they really? I mean, I understand we can quantify generational or class-based inequality, but can we really quantify how much of that difference is attributable to slavery and/or segregation? Or is the implicit default to attribute 50% to slavery and attribute the other 50% to segregation?
Yes, it's actually pretty simple. Non-white groups lag in almost all economic categories. The fed publishes a lot of this data[1], you can see for yourself. There are also lots of other things to look at, like rate of incarceration. The effect is real, and there are basically two explanations: Either it's due to systemic oppression, or its due to non-white racial groups being inherently inferior. Unless you're racist, only one of those explanations is valid.
>Non-white groups lag in almost all economic categories.
Why are the data for Asian people not shown on those graphs? It only lists Black, Hispanic, and White. Is it because (at least according to the stats on Wikipedia[0], sourced from the US Census) they don't reinforce that narrative? In fact, according to that data, the median white income is ~$66K, which is surpassed by Ghanaians (~$69K), South Africans (~$98K), and Indians (~$150K). I can think of several reasons for that that have nothing to do with racial superiority or systemic oppression. Deciding what must be the cause of the problem ahead of time and claiming anyone who disagrees is a racist is both poor form and ineffective in actually solving problems of inequality.
The data for asian americans isn't shown on that graph because the underlying data used for the graph groups people into white, black, hispanic, and other. I apologize for saying "non-white" when I really meant "black and/or hispanic".
Yes, there are some ethnic groups that have higher median incomes, but that doesn't mean there isn't a racial disparity in america. The fact of the matter is that african americans, as a group, have much less wealth than white americans, as a group. If a person believes this is due to some "inherent racial trait", they're a racist, plain and simple. On the other hand, if one accepts that this is not due to any inherent racial trait, then one has to look at American culture and history with an open mind and try to understand how it came to be that way (the fact that asian americans don't see the same disparities as african americans is an important clue here).
I'm glad to see that you are interested in solving problems of inequality and engaging in a good faith discussion with me on this complex social issue.
If a person believes this is due to some "inherent racial trait", they're a racist, plain and simple.
From this I think you're (a) allowing that there might be cultural differences correlated with race that are causative; and (b) expressing that it's flatly impossible that there could be (statistically on average) genetic differences that contribute to greater or lesser success depending on the prevailing environment.
Point (b) sounds like a denial of the mechanisms of evolution that we have high confidence are correct, and Lysenkoism more generally. It's not that (b) is necessarily true, but your implication that it cannot possibly be true (or at least that admitting it's true makes one the worst sort of monster) is shutting science out of the discussion before it can even be consulted.
I don't think that's the most charitable possible interpretation of the argument, though I would heartily concede that the matter is heavily, and at times it seems even intetionally, obfuscated by the double meaning of the terms racial superiority/inferiority. To whit, they are used as both objective measures and moral ones, and vacillating between the two allows for specious arguments to be put forward.
An example of the first; we know that there are genetic differences in average heights of populations, and other physical measures; if a biologist were to tell me, for example, that people with lighter skin were superior at generating Vitamin D from sunlight, I would not be inclined to disbelieve them; there is strong evidence for heritability of traits as fine-grained as political leanings; and so on. Saying that a race has a superior economic position due to these factors is, as far as I can tell, usually insufficient - the differences are minor enough, and usually overshadowed by other factors like noise or culture, that I don't think the math adds up.
But there's also a moral judgement made in the racial superiority argument; that because Race A has higher incidence of traits X, Y, and Z, they deserve a higher place in society/greater wealth/whatever. This is a racist outlook because it prejudges people based on their race rather than their merits, and paints an entire race of individuals with the same brush. Still, this is the argument that many avowed racists have made in the past and many in the present are quite sensitive to it.
The difference is subtle but important; the first meaning acknowledges distinctions between races and ethnicities, but allows for individual variation and places no moral weight on those differences. The second implies that acknowledging differences between races is tantamount to declaring that one race deserves supremacy and obeisance from the others. The difficulty comes from people who believe the implication of the second meaning while hating the conclusion, and that's where you get Blank Slaters and, as you mentioned, Lysenkoism.
Arguing for the first meaning is not productive without disambiguating it from the second.
Your first meaning, the non-moral one, is what I had in mind. Clearly there are some people who would prefer to think about the alternative way, and they have my contempt.
But the popular culture today is, itself, trying to impute a moral judgment. Where most of us, I think, very much want to get past all this racial BS, we're being forced to view the world through a racial lens so that the "anti-racists" can make a moral judgment about observed differences in outcomes.
I made this point above and you didn't engage, but there's a point at which "wanting to get past all this racial BS" turns into "you can't teach kids that minority communities are poorer" or "you can't speak to Google employees about caste discrimination".
Where do you draw the line? Doesn't a straightforward interpretation of free speech and civil discourse demand that we let the assholes be assholes, and not cancel them?
From my perspective on the other side, I find it really weird that a bunch of highly paid, middle aged white professionals (and I'm one too) seem so threatened by college kids yelling about privilege or whatever. College kids have always been assholes. You don't remember meeting (or... being?) them?
>On the other hand, if one accepts that this is not due to any inherent racial trait, then one has to look at American culture and history with an open mind and try to understand how it came to be that way
Absolutely. My disagreement comes from the presented false dichotomy of the explanation being either racial inferiority - which neither of us believe - or ongoing systemic discrimination which (in my view) can only explain some of the problem. Further, I think that over-reliance on it as an explanation blinds its advocates to other possible causes and therefore other solutions.
Let's take a toy example for simplicity; a game of Monopoly. Systemic economic discrimination would take the form, perhaps, of one player having favorable rules; they get to reroll their dice, or get more money from passing Go!. Clearly unfair, and the solution would be obvious; equalize the rules. However, there are other ways the game can be tilted. If one player starts with more money, i.e. benefits from historical wealth, then they are likely to do win more often. This historical economic oppression is not the same as systemic discrimination - the rules affecting each player can be identical once the game actually begins - and requires different interventions to resolve.
I recall reading some time ago that immigrants to America from African nations tend to do better than the background African-American population, despite often coming with even less than a typical African-American family would have. One would expect them to experience just as much systemic discrimination, and they are just as impoverished as those who have experienced historical economic oppression, so that also does not seem to explain things fully. We can then turn to matters of culture and environment. If one of the players in the hypothetical Monopoly game pursues a non-optimal strategy (by refusing to buy real estate[0] for example) then they are likely to lose even with equal rules and starting assets.
The cultural explanation also helps understand why the Japanese, literally interned as prisoners en masse during World War II, and the Chinese, imported in their thousands as low-wage labor to build the railroads and both banned from owning property until 1952 [1], were able to bounce back into two of the most wealthy population segments in the country. Strong social cohesion and an understanding of long-term beneficial life strategies both help oppressed minorities overcome their situations. This is entirely independent of discrimination, which is why it is so frustrating to see, for example, no less a source than the National Museum of African American History and Culture [2] label traits like "objective thinking," "hard work being the key to success," and "delayed gratification" as aspects of white culture, and therefore alien.
Let's take another example - crime statistics. The "classic" systemic discrimination explanation of higher numbers of black people being incarcerated denies that actual crimes committed are higher and statistics showing that they are is a symptom of racist police forces and justice systems. To solve it, we need police and prison reform, racial sensitivity training, etc. The historical economic oppression explanation instead concedes that yes, black communities tend to have higher crime, but that is because of fewer opportunities available and recommends investment into education, reform of certification and some financial laws to make it easier for small black businesses to get started, and stronger investment into infrastructure to make it easier and safer for the population of inner city communities to access the job market. The cultural explanation also concedes that there is more crime there, and that black people have the power to solve that amongst themselves, by cooperating and developing stronger social norms that discourage violence. In one remarkable example, such an effort gave birth to hip-hop culture [3]!
Each explanation points at part of the problem; I hope you'll agree now that labelling only one as correct and sufficient, and saying that everyone who disagrees with it can only explain the problem through racism is non-productive. Even if the cultural and historical explanations are rooted in systemic discrimination of the past, they demand different solutions in the present to resolve, just as making a playing field even after one player has already accrued a significan advantage would not lead to a fair game.
You're correct, it's not as simple as "systemic oppression or racism". There are absolutely lots of factors, both historical and ongoing. I think I misunderstood the original comment I replied to, thinking that they were saying that racial disparities were not quantifiable. Rereading it, they are just saying you can't quantify how much is due to one specific cause, which I agree with.
I'm not really sure it's an important point though, since most of the things we can/should do to remedy it IMO (medicare for all, ubi/negative income tax, and in general a more expansive social safety net) don't depend on quantifying the harm done to an individual.
> As an America-born Indian-American, I honestly don't know what my caste is beyond knowing I'm not Brahmin (I didn't do the string ceremony some of my childhood family friends did)
That's not actually sufficient information to infer anything, since people from any of the four savarna castes can participate in the ceremony. It varies a lot by region and community.
It's not actually unheard-of for Dalits to have it, although that's rare.
I am also a foreign born person of Indian descent and agree with the person you’re replying to. I have never been aware of my cast, the cast of other Indians / Indian origin people I interact with, and think that’s a good thing. Could you elaborate on why you think the negative effect - that making previously oblivious people aware of castes could increase discrimination - doesn’t exist?
I'm a little surprised to see "promote ignorance" as a "solution" to a problem some people face.
Certainly not every non-Brahmin of Indian descent in America experiences caste-based discrimination, and I expect there are some who, like you, don't even know much about it. But I don't think it's fair to those who have experienced this sort of discrimination to just say "we're not going to talk about it because it might be better for people who don't know about it to continue not knowing about it".
"Educating people like me about that would suddenly create the ability for them to identify a difference that they wouldn't have noticed before. This makes it unlike gender, racial, or age discrimination, where the categories are usually surface level obvious. That in turn could have a star-bellied sneetches effect, where"
Putting your head in the sand doesn't solve problems. Awareness does.
I've heard similar arguments being made about teaching CRT in school. Are you really saying ABCDs are so confused about their own identity that they'll cling on to n antiquated notion of a social hierarchy based on knowledge of the Vedas?
I think it's pretty normal as a human to attach oneself to various identity groups (An anodyne example being local sports teams), and the more you salience an identity, the more likely and more strongly individuals are to attach themselves to that identity.
It seems like that could in fact an issue with race-centric DEI training, at least per the one study I found at short notice[0]. But that needs to be weighed against the potential benefits and the fact that race relations are a significant issue across America society regardless of whether we address it explicitly or not.
With caste discrimination, the issue currently exists within a very small slice of American society (immigrants born in India). So even a small negative effect across the rest of American society would wipe out even the most significant improvements in that slice.
50 points for reference to "star-bellied sneetches effect." I use it to describe the political/social duopoly in the US. We go round and round. Someone else makes money.
>Some called caste equity a form of reverse discrimination against the highest-ranked castes because of India’s affirmative action system for access to education and government jobs.
I've heard some pretty horrible stories about this in particular; like Brahmin kids being legally adopted into Sudra families in order to get into a reserved position at a State University, and rich kids with private tutors getting given further advantage over poor kids doing all the work themselves because they happen to be of a lower caste.
Just like in every other country, affirmative action does nothing but help members of a specific group who are already advantaged.
There is 70% affirmitive action. If you are a Dalit with 50% mark you will get admission to a medical seat and you will be a cardiac surgeon, but if a brahmin girl gets 99% she will not get admission and will be a clerk. Go figure the Indian system. This is why you see thousands of Brahmins in Silicon valley as they are kicked out or disgusted with Indian political system of favoring lower castes. USA benefited immensely from it.
>If you are a Dalit with 50% mark you will get admission to a medical seat and you will be a cardiac surgeon, but if a brahmin girl gets 99% she will not get admission and will be a clerk.
That brahmin girl may also go onto become the Defense Minister of India and then the finance minister because she is the right caste.
Meanwhile, the poor Dalit surgeon will be ostracized at his work and gets harassed by casteist everyday and is so depressed that he can't sleep and thinks about suicide all the time.
Nepotism tastes like butter but Affirmative action tastes bitter. This is the definition of hypocrisy.
>If you are a Dalit with 50% mark you will get admission to a medical seat and you will be a cardiac surgeon, but if a brahmin girl gets 99% she will not get admission and will be a clerk.
Is it possible for someone with a 50% GPA to finish a cardiac surgery training program in India? Or is that a gross exaggeration?
I'm sure OP is exaggerating a bit but it's no different than the American affirmative action system where if you are black/native then you can get a 1300 SAT and get into an T20 school but if you are Asian then you need a 1600 and a laundry list of achievements.
I'm trying to get a sense of how exaggerated it is.
In the US, someone with a 1300 SAT has a good chance to graduate from T20 school, but someone with a 50% GPA is unlikely to be admitted to any medical school, and if they are admitted, they have roughly 0% chance of getting accepted to / completing a cardiac surgery residency, which is incredibly demanding.
This is indeed true, 50% mark is not exactly like 50% GPA but affirmitive action in India is so f*ed up. I know very bright people kicked out and come to USA for BS in reputed colleges. This is reason, India not able to progress as fast as China or USA
> affirmative action does nothing but help members of a specific group who are already advantaged.
If you don't know any highly skilled people from disadvantaged backgrounds that benefited from some affirmative action, that says more about you and your environment than the policy. There are definitely problems where affirmative action gets exploited, but it is horribly reductionist to find the entire tool useless because of that.
Anyone that really thinks the USA has no caste is in an upper level caste. It's less formalized here than in other countries, but it absolutely exists.
Anyone who thinks the USA has a caste system doesn't understand what a caste system is. People are not defined or restricted based on the occupations of their parents.
Class mobility is celebrated, so much so that the successful often play-up any humble origins in their families.
Social mobility has been declining in the rich world since the 40s. The USA doesn’t have a formal class system, but it’s increasingly rare for people from poor families to become wealthy in modern day America.
We’re right to celebrate people from humble origins climbing the social ladder. But it doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as it should.
Systems of social class and caste systems aren't the same - but they're definitely related.
Subtle bias against the lower classes is absolutely alive and well in the west. We just don't talk about it, or consciously notice it a lot of the time. People who grew up in poor areas, or who didn't go to good schools just "don't seem like one of us" or fail "culture fit" interviews.
They are related in that they are both possible forms of discrimination.
The spectrum runs from chattel race slavery to ugly people getting laid less.
Social class objectively exists, but I think it is disingenuous to say class bias has an impact anywhere close to that of the caste system on life outcomes, or deterministically dictates economic outcomes.
There is a loose correlation between class and outcomes, but this also includes perfectly logical factors like better educational attainment, parental nurturing, support, crime, and drug use.
Whoa - I was with you up until that last sentence.
> There is a loose correlation between class and outcomes,
My understanding is that the correlation is very strong.
> but this also includes perfectly logical factors like better educational attainment, parental nurturing, support, crime, and drug use.
The right question is about social mobility. If you're born in a poor family, what is the chance that you'll escape poverty yourself? The numbers are pretty damning. In the USA today, a child in the bottom 20% of the income distribution only has a 7% chance to ever reach the top 20% of the income distribution. Poor people stay uneducated and poor.
And yes, its for "logical" reasons like crime, nurturing, etc. But that doesn't make it fair or right. From a purely selfish perspective, if tomorrow's Einstein is born poor in america today, its very unlikely they will ever be able to make use of their talent to aid the world.
Caste systems teach people that this lack of social mobility should be preserved - and thats abhorrent. But if we look at outcomes rather than beliefs, it doesn't really matter why people from poor families are prevented from reaching their potential. Its in all of our best interest to fight that battle.
>My understanding is that the correlation is very strong.
Look at the table that I shared. A very strong correlation would look like:
Bottom 20% > bottom 20% = 100%
Next 20% > Next 20% = 100%
....
Top 20% > top 20% = 100%
Pure randomness, (e.g no class impact whatsoever) would look like:
Bottom 20% > bottom 20% = 20%
Next 20% > Next 20% = 20%
....
Top 20% > top 20% = 20%
What we see is far closer to the latter than the former. Another way to put this is every single group in America is more likely to end up in a different economic quintile than the one they were born in!
>In the USA today, a child in the bottom 20% of the income distribution only has a 7% chance to ever reach the top 20% of the income distribution.
What do you think that 7% would be in an ideal world? 7% sounds small, but keep in mind that in a system where birth class had no impact whatsoever, 7% would become 3x higher to 20%. Also, keep in mind that this is the absolute worst case for all of USA and a tiny part of the big picture. E.g. the most capable 20% of the bottom 20% don't make it all the way to where they would under a fair system 60% of the time (this is about 2% of the population). Most people (numerically) have very little impact from class.
>From a purely selfish perspective, if tomorrow's Einstein is born poor in america today, its very unlikely they will ever be able to make use of their talent to aid the world.
This is hyperbolic. If they were born in the bottom 20%, and not part of the majority that bottom 20% that escape poverty, maybe. Keep in mind that the real Einstein was born into the 1% in Germany, son of a factory owner, not a chimney sweep.
>Poor people stay uneducated and poor.
This is objectively not true. Most people born in the bottom quintile escape the bottom quintile, as demonstrated by the data.
I agree that more should be done to help those borne into poverty, but this fatalistic attitude does not match reality. There are some noteworthy effects of birth class, primarily in the most extreme situations, but most Americans are unaffected. For those borne into poverty, we know what factors generally increase mobility. If you stay in school, off of drugs, and keep a clean criminal record, chances are very likely you will escape the bottom quintile. I think more effort should go into helping people do these simple things, and less effort should be spent spreading the idea that outcomes are determined by birth.
You don't have to. It comes up with your universities, your hobbies, your zip code, even your name. That leads into what jobs you get, how much money you earn, and now what position your kids are in.
I'm not Indian, I don't think there's a caste system for me. If people discriminate against me for not being Indian and thereby not having a caste, then I hope they get brutally fired and ridiculed, and their wealth is dispossessed.
We should be treating people as individuals, not collectives. Anything less is profoundly immoral.
It's money and everything that comes along with it - social status, health (both because of access to healthcare, but being able to afford a healthy lifestyle), education, safer interactions with law enforcement, job prospects and advancement, etc. If you're born poor, it's very hard to break out of that. It's not literally impossible like changing caste is, but it's very difficult.
Moving abroad and changing your name may even be a little easier than breaking out of American capital chains. Youll still be dalit but it doesnt have to define you.
India also has a dalit president.
America hasnt had a president of modest income since Truman.
Money, education, Mayflower ancestor, eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, distant relative of some famous or wealthy family, member of some social clubs (even inexpensive ones), and so on.
Edit: but as many other folks are mentioning, this is class and not caste. You'll notice that around half of the things I've mentioned are something you're born with.
Honest question, in what situations have you been in where you were aware that someone had a Mayflower ancestor or was eligible for the Daughters of the Revolution?
Ok my reaction too but we should temper it in that we're hearing someone reporting what someone reported that they heard. It could be utterly baseless, it could be missing a load of context, it could be distorted beyond reason.
"Others said..." Also a them kinda deal right there.
To me, all of these statements 100% confirm caste discrimination exists in America. Whenever I hear confronting history and privilege as "sowing further division" I cringe hard. The parallels in American history are, well... very parallel.
The problem is "affirmative action" is just reverse discrimination and this is why it bring further division. Because people from both sides now, no longer feel reward is based on merit alone anymore.
If there is another solution than "affirmative action" this might not be divisive.
is there other form of affirmative action that are not :
- just a type of quota to give preferential treatment to a group of people not because of merit but simply as a way to increase diversity for some arbitrary measurement (gender, race ...)
> The term "affirmative action" was first used in the United States in "Executive Order No. 10925",[17] signed by President John F. Kennedy on 6 March 1961, which included a provision that government contractors "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin".[18] It was used to promote actions that achieve non-discrimination. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 which required government employers to "hire without regard to race, religion and national origin" and "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin."[19]
You asked for:
> is there other form of affirmative action that are not : - just a type of quota to give preferential treatment to a group of people not because of merit but simply as a way to increase diversity for some arbitrary measurement (gender, race ...)
Are you asserting that treating people fairly (what JFK said) is somehow not "because of merit"? If so, there's the difference of opinion I was recommending you learn about.
There is no such thing as reverse discrimination it's a purely content free term. Discrimination is merely discrimination with the insertion of the word reverse having no additional meaning.
It's normal for any system which creates an incentive to hire minorities to still be so biased in favor of white dudes that you are still much better off being a white dude.
Basically for every minority that wouldn't have made it on merit it's likely you could find two white dudes with the same level of actual merit.
This degrades substantially the virtue of complaints about such discrimination.
You are basically saying its ok for a white dude from a family of homeless to be doubly discriminated
(1- because he does have money to go to college
2- because college reserve seat for non-white people)
And you justify it because statistically if you take a random white people and a random black people the black person would deserve it more.
While this is true this logic is morally wrong because you punish or reward an individual not because of this individual merit but because he happens to have the same skin color as other individual.
It's as absurd as saying there are not enough professional basketball player that are redhead so we should have quota of redhead regardless of skill level.
> It's as absurd as saying there are not enough professional basketball player that are redhead so we should have quota of redhead regardless of skill level.
If the end goal is that after a number of generations we finally have the proportionate number of redhead basketball players that would have existed if we didn't discriminate against recruiting redhead players in the past, then no, the idea isn't absurd at all.
Note the keyword here is the end goal - of creating a equal and just basketball team... or society, if you reel in the ad absurdum.
Attend more carefully to what I'm saying please. I said that discrimination is just discrimination. The term "reverse discrimination" is semantically nonsense. Selecting people based on skin color is always discrimination.
That said the situation as it stands is so tilted against minorities in favor of white dudes that this injustice rarely leaves a white guy in the red on net and fixing what pitifully little preference there is before making any dent in rampant discrimination will on average net out to a decrease in justice.
Consider even in microcosm a white man applies to 10 positions who loses one due to preference given to a minority while 7 identically skilled black man fills out 10 apps each and 5 take lesser jobs. It's hard to imagine that the victim here is the white dude. Speaking as a white man white victimhood doesn't really pass the sniff test.
You mention education so lets talk about Harvard. This blew my mind.
> Study on Harvard finds 43 percent of white students are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staff. The number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories, the study said.
Almost all the minorities are people who belong their by merit. About half the white people do. Before reading this I was against racial preference in education.
The problem here is that you think you can come to a reasonable conclusion without actual numbers AFTER actual numbers were given clearly. The current situation is that we have massive affirmative action for white people and no plans on getting rid of it.
Do you actually believe that there is a standardized test that can fully quantify who the next generation of doctors and engineers will be with no human judgement involved?
you just confirmed my assumption, by saying “it will on average net out”.
I agree that “on average” the white population will still not be disadvantaged.
But it’s still morally wrong because for one particular individual it would not.
It the same thing as laws making it illegal to own a pit bull dogs in some city.
Maybe it’s true the majority of pitbull are dangerous!
but is it still fair to the pitbull owner that have a well trained one to suffer the ban because it will average out ?
In my example you can say that affirmative action (banning pitbull) is still discrimination against pitbull !
which is why people call it reverse discrimination.
but if you prefer you can simply call it legal discrimination
It doesn't merely average out in terms of population it averages out even in the case of individuals because a single individual in the course of putting out many job applications will deal with far more employers who will give them preference because they are white than those that will give a minority preference.
unfortunately if you are an individual that does not have connection.
It will not average out because the business will keep the spot for white people only for people from rich family that have connection.
So your probability of getting hired will become less than a minority.
This is completely fictional and provably so. Distinctively black names on identical resumes are less likely to get a call back. This is classic white victimhood.
You are correct in saying the Majority of white (80%) will have better odd of getting a call back compared to an average black person.
But while forcing company to use hiring quota will help the the black population. it will make it harder for poor white people to get hired as compared to poor black people.
you could say it’s acceptable collateral damage but you can’t say it’s not true .
I specifically don't agree as a poor white person that I have it harder than a poor black person of identical qualifications nor do I see any affirmative action policies as applied anywhere changing this even if they became pervasive.
> efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division.
I think is a real point and is true of many issues - the problem is how do you fix a problem silently in the background? Can it be done with better results than hyperfocusing on it? I would guess and hope there might be a way but don't know how.
Talking about social problems only "sows further division" in the sense that people who currently benefit from those problems get angry that you want to change things.
Well to be fair If in United States, I met/interview someone from India. I would have no idea which caste they are, so I don't see how I can discriminate one caste over another :)
Ever get an offhanded comment from another co-worker (indian) that says something like, yeah I don't know about this guy. What if THAT was him thinking about the entire CASTES thing!?!?!?! I mean that's often enough to pass up entire people
Companies only talk about equality because 1. Requires by title IX and 2. Advertising. It is immediately clear to anyone whom has done even the slightest research that no org with millions/billions sitting around can ever claim to support equality in any respect.
"rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness — was creating division and rancor"
Insert every social movement in the last 10 years. Absolutely hilarious that a company that goes out of it's way to participate in the US culture war identifies an actual systemic issue in the country where the CEO just happens to originate from, it is suddenly a divisive action to make half baked hyperbolic social statements.
There's a lot of bias in the tech industry, not just caste. if your company is sufficiently large it will have various HR policies on this and in my experience they will enumerate the kinds of discrimination they don't tolerate.
Here's an exercise for you: go through the list of US protected classes [1] and see which ones are explicitly stated and which ones aren't. It's actually enlightening. For example, I don't think I've ever seen ageism specifically called out.
As for the impact of the Indian caste system in US tech, I can't really comment on that. It's not my lived experience. I've worked with many Indians. No idea what their castes were. Saying that, just like racism I find it incredibly plausible that if you grew up in such a system, the effects are pervasive and linger.
So should Google allow such a talk? That's a difficult question. It's clearly a divisive issue. It reminds me of Meta telling employees to stop talking about abortion [2]. Now that issue probably doesn't lead to workplace discrimination (alleged or actual) although you might be able to argue that your political views could hurt you. There's something to be said to keeping your political views to yourself, particularly at work.
I imagine (but, again, don't know from experience) that this might be on the level of racial discrimination in the US workplace. So it seems worth examining. I imagine to mahy outsiders it might not look "real" because at the end of the day they're all Indians (which, to be clear, is also a form of racism).
Is a talk the best way to handle this? I honestly don't know. I can sympathize with avoiding divisive issues and also with the desire of a company to cover their ass and not create an HR nightmare. I really wonder if this ends in a lawsuit.
Age discrimination is illegal by statute - the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. If you haven't seen that, it might give you pause about whether you have enough information about this subject to form an informed opinion.
> For example, I don't think I've ever seen ageism specifically called out.
Ageism is illegal in the US, however the way the law is written it specifically only protects people over 40. I've always personally theorized that this is why tech ageism tends to start affecting people in their 30s, so that it doesn't wait until it's illegal and gets the job done of oppressing more senior employees earlier on.
First off, activism is uncomfortable - it’s about changing the status quo and anyone who benefits will take issue with it even if they don’t actively perpetuate the system. MLK wasn’t met with open arms; he was harassed, arrested and ultimately assassinated.
Personally I’ve worked with many Indians too and I have never heard anyone one of them bring up caste; but I’m not Indian, so why would they?
A better benchmark is how many people of lower caste have you talked to and how do they feel about it? It may be the case that the structures of American Indians have already expunged all the lower caste Indians from your workplace.
The talk should have allowed to go through. The post I think said it right, people wanted to shut it down and the only way to do it is to discredit the speaker because they know there is truth to the arguments.
However we should step back and think about how important it in the American context. What purpose is that talk going to serve? I don’t know if it does anything other than satisfying esoteric learning needs of a few. It may be an issue in he US but the problem may be among single digit or double digit individuals at best. Is it worth spending cycles on it?
Racism and bigotry are worth addressing at all levels, IMO. But I question your assumed figures: surely there are a lot more than 99 Indians of lower castes that are affected by caste-based bigotry in the US?
Even directly in USA Google (and other companies) employ very many Indians. The stats that I can find about Google say that in their USA offices 42% of them are Asian, and out of those the general tech industry stats tell me that roughly 40% would be from India, so caste might be relevant to something like 15% percent of the workforce; and I have no stats on caste distribution but if I guess that disadvantaged castes might be 1/3 of that i.e. 5% then that is a larger group than African Americans which are 4.4% in Google USA.
Google is the largest purveyor of information across the world. Having policies that deal with caste would seem to require making its American employees and managers aware and mindful of it, no?
~70% of eng is Asian within SV. About half are Indian. Other half is Chinese.
It’s a very prevalent problem. A lot of people come from India and keep their cultural values - including caste discrimination.
It’s a small issue in the general US but a huge issue within SV. Same as any Asian topic tbh. Most Asians don’t exist outside the coasts - yet we talk about their issues cause they’re in important cities in significant numbers.
>> discredit the speaker because they know there is truth to the arguments.
Source please.
>> the problem may be among single digit or double digit individuals at best.
Why do you think it's in single or double digit "at best"? This is a huge problem in India and moving to US doesn't make a racist person inclusive automatically.
idk woke people are obsessed with protecting very small minority groups. in fact often the smaller the better in terms of virtue signaling points.
so it just goes to show how hypocritical Google is being when they are mega woke on every other facet. probably because their ceo harbors a like for the caste system
Is there a Wikipedia list of obscure 'race'-isms? I find reading about other cultures or other time period's biases to be informative and wonder what the common elements might be.
Off the top of my head, issues I can think of where an outsider may be oblivious between the "sides" are:
Indian caste
Japanese Barukumin caste
Protestant/Catholic in Europe
Jewish people in Europe/US/USSR
English Class System, or Southern/Northern
Jim Crow, or North/South or Midwest Vs coastal, WASPs, or Nativism.
Of course your message was followed with people accusing the whole culture of robbing people. It's quite interesting how if you switched any other culture this would be downvoted to hell, but the moment we talk of Romani people, the most strong worded racist comments are just accepted. I guess we still have work to do.
It's the pattern seeking part of your brain doing it's thing. Negating it with virtue signalling won't make it go away.
Go to police.hu and every time you see someone with the family name Balogh | Góman | Lakatos, you drink. I guarantee you will be dead from alcohol poisioning in an hour or two.
Not to be confused with the Romanian people - i.e, people from Romania. (Though some of the Roma people can obviously also be Romanians!).
EDIT: I absolutely condone discrimination, but I think for the people that live in areas with very visible Roma people, it's kind of obvious why.
At best, you'll just see them begging on the streets. At worst, you'll experience getting hounded down by them, getting robbed, or your property looted. Mostly just an issue in larger cities, and it used to be much worse 10 years ago.
We had this one older Roma guy that would have his usual spot, and he'd sit there and beg all day long. Rain, snow, or wind - he'd always sit there. In the end, he became a fixture in the city scenery.
But one particular winter got really bad, and some senior citizen offered him their apartment (rent-free) for a couple of months, as they were away for the winter. He passed away a couple of years later.
I live in a country with two large-ish gypsy areas, and we have a lot of people who are very loud about their rights and discrimination against them...
...somehow none of those people actually live anywhere near them.
There really is discrimination against them, but on the other hand, the system (police, courts, politics) allows them to do all the shitty stuff they're stereotyped by.
(From the us) I went to school with a Hungarian who couldn't understand why we were confused about his jokes - they were based around body building so that his arms could become "gypsy killers". He was such a nice guy, it seemed really discordant. This is an anecdote of the kind of cultural exchange we have.
I knew a similar guy, but he was Spanish and his catchphrase was “Moor killer” which was just really odd to me, given the Reconquista ended a very long time ago, but he says a lot of terms/cultural aspects still exist from then.
Regional elitism in the USA is definitely a form of soft caste system. If you are from the upper East coast or the West coast you are a member of a higher caste than if you are from the interior, and inside the US there are definitely smaller caste differences.
The South gets it the worst. When I was in college (University of Cincinnati) engineering students from the South were sometimes encouraged to lose their Southern accents because it made them sound "stupid." I heard a few stories about this.
I live in the Midwest in Michigan, and I can’t say that I feel like I’ve been treated as a lower caste in the Midwest. We have some wonderful learning institutions, such as the University of Michigan, and a lot of talented and individuals.
This is maybe the strongest out-group bias in elite circles in the US currently. I believe that is largely because it is acceptable, or even required, in the current elite ideologies that dominate corporate and academic entities currently. And they hate to have it pointed out.
I've thought for a long time that woke could get actual traction by being more woke and extending the concept of "-isms are not okay" to include American caste and regional elitisms and classism that isn't about race.
A course on recognizing bias against lowland Southerners would be funny but not wrong or inappropriate and you'd see plenty of rich coastal fragility on display.
Classism and regionalism are absolutely huge in this country, especially when those on the receiving end are not in a racial minority.
But what would people do if there were no easily identifiable out groups to stereotype and mock?
As someone who grew up in the Deep South but studied and worked on the east coast for many years, I can confirm this to be 100% true.
At a past job, I worked for a company headquartered on the upper east coast, but which had opened a "tech hub" in the mid-sized Southern city where I lived at the time. Some of my co-workers had fairly pronounced Southern accents and people in the home office would regularly laugh and make fun of them during meetings. And after I put in my notice, the tech lead on the project I was on declared, completely unprompted, during a completely unrelated call that "we haven't had any issues with code quality or anything, but Southerners are just slow. That's just how they are. It's the culture." I think that I will regret for the rest of my life not telling him to go eff himself right then and there.
And I wish I could say that that was an exception to my experience elsewhere, but while living on the east coast I heard more offhand comments about "stupid Southerners" than I can count, often followed by an awkward "I mean, not you of course, you're different". Interestingly, many (but not all) of the same people who think it's funny to beat up on the South are also the most likely to make impassioned performative declarations of support for every DEI initiative they come across. The level of cognitive dissonance required to maintain that kind of mindset must be intense.
> The level of cognitive dissonance required to maintain that kind of mindset must be intense.
Holding and advancing multiple deeply contradictory ideas is something humans are very good at.
I've come to believe that most people spend very little time asking if their ideas are reasonable. They just believe what they need to believe to fit into a group. It's more about group membership signaling than anything else.
Primates will choose social connection over food, so it's not surprising that we'll also choose social connection over rationality.
For what it's worth, the stereotype of the "stupid Southerner" in America got started due to an absolutely massive hookworm infestation, "an average of 40% of school-aged children were infected with hookworm". The crazy thing is that it has handled a century ago yet the stereotype and prejudice still linger.
> On October 26, 1909, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease was organized as a result of a gift of US$1 million from John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The five-year program was a remarkable success and a great contribution to the United States' public health, instilling public education, medication, field work and modern government health departments in eleven southern states.[45] The hookworm exhibit was a prominent part of the 1910 Mississippi state fair.
> The commission found that an average of 40% of school-aged children were infected with hookworm.
The common element is always in-group vs. out-group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group). It doesn't have to be based on race or ethnicity, it can also be e.g. Democrats vs. Republicans in the US, supporters of different football clubs etc. etc.
I nearly listed football/sport team support but thought it might be too out there a reference for most people. Now I'm wondering how global such sporting based rivalries are, and if they always originally grew from one of the others.
I don't know if the Indian caste thing should be considered obscure. There are 1.3 billion Indians. By number of people affected it might be one of the more important conversations in the world today.
I think discussions of "obscurity" are always relative to the audience in question, so while I highly doubt caste discussions would reasonably be considered obscure in India (or within the Indian diaspora), I (a non-Indian) had certainly never heard of casteism abroad until I saw submissions on HN discussing it at Cisco.
Not as much of a day-to-day issue for the newest generations but French Canada vs. English Canada (historically "Lower Canada" vs "Upper Canada", which shouldn't be relevant but some people still use the old labels an excuse for casual 'race'-isms as you call it).
The youngest French Canadians generally speak English. However the oldest generations (50+ or 60+ depending on the region) couldn't and mostly still can't due to the way the system was set up. And since a lot of companies came from either the US or the rest of Canada, they had no hopes in climbing ranks or being competitive as businesspeople. There are some records of French Canadians being sent to unusually harsh missions during the great wars too.
There are casual insults such as calling French Canadian "frogs" and English Canadians "square heads" still in use today.
It is still present even in tech companies where English speakers are sent to client meetings as it is sometimes perceived "rude" to sent someone with a French accent to the front.
These days, it's mostly about not extending the classic "warm Canadian welcome" to the other category. But in some situations, it can get more serious.
(That being said, in 2022 it does not really compare to some of the other examples listed above.)
Bad analogy. A person’s deeply-held belief that a given religion is true, and calling others to that belief, is not the same as saying “you were born of a lower caste and should never be able to escape that.”
Of course, it goes without saying, perceiving you belong to the true faith does not justify violence or discrimination. But faith-based identification is not analogous to a caste system.
Are we going to lightly dismiss the prosecution of polytheists in many Islamic countries?
>Of course, it goes without saying, perceiving you belong to the true faith does not justify violence or discrimination. But faith-based identification is not analogous to a caste system.
They were clearly talking about faith-based discrimination. Why would you assume that they were talking about faith-based identification, especially given the context?
The word you need is “xenophobia” (hate of the others, of those who are different). Race is a limited, artificial concept and by focusing on it we miss the forest for the trees. Xenophobia is as old as humanity and can be based on anything: physical features; ideas, religions, languages, family ties, etc.
Not sure how the Sámi people are treated in Sweden, Finland, or Russia - but here in Norway there has indeed been a long history of discrimination against the Sámi.
But tbh, it's just half a century ago that pretty much all people from Northern Norway were discriminated against, in the southern parts. Which is why most people moving south were recommended to change accent - fast. More so if you wanted to work in any client/customer-facing job...
Back to the Sámi - unfortunately there are still shitty people out there that feel the need to voice their opinion if they see Sámi people wearing traditional clothing. But it should also be said that there's conflict within the Sámi community, which also comes down to what type Sámi you are (sea/coast Sámi vs hill/raindeer). Most of the real conflicts in any case revolve around land/areal usage.
Sure - traditionally the Sámi people have been divided into two groups: Those that have lived around / near coastlines ("sea Sámi"), and those more inland (typically just "Sámi", or "reindeer Sámi", "hill/mountain Sámi".
In short, the coastal Sámi people have made their living off fishing, farming, and similar activities.
On the other hand, those living inland have mostly made their money off reindeer husbandry. Reindeers will forage over a large area, and in Northern Norway / Sweden / Finland / Russia that includes large tundra and hilly places - so many of Sámi involved in that trade would trek over and live in these areas.
With that said, these days I think only 5%-10% of Sámi have reindeer husbandry as their main profession.
But the vast majority of conflicts between Sámi people and the rest usually comes down to the reindeer. Since the reindeer need a huge area to graze on, it tends to become a problem for companies wanting to develop the area for industry.
Just recently our supreme court decided that a wind farm had been bult in conflict with cultural landscape of local Sámi people. Reindeer husbandry is a cultural heritage activity, and thus protected. The area reindeer graze on, is thus a cultural landscape, and also protected.
The intra-Sámi conflicts, from what I've seen and heard, boils down to either things related to the reindeer industry - or I guess elitism from the "true" Sámi people toward the coastal Sámi people.
In Russia (and also Ukraine and Belarus), it's more often the Caucasian people these days. And I don't mean the weird American synonym of "white", but actual people from the Caucasus - Chechens, Ossetians, Armenians, Georgians etc.
These are not obscure at all! Especially the last one. See the intercepted phone calls from the security service of Ukraine, the level of Russian racism is beyond what I could imagine prior to Feb 24. It is worse than whatever the Red Army did in WW2, and almost reaching the level that the Nazis showed.
Russian Nazism is very real, leads to rape, murder, forced deportation and torture.
Lumping in hindu castes, Christian denominations, and Jewish people in what I assume is the beginning-mid 20th century, makes no sense. Yes, it all falls under xenophobia, but the impact are wildly different.
ZeroGravitas is asking people to come up with a list of situations that fall under xenophobia. I do not see them implying that those issues are related or comparable.
Google has cancelled many discussions about various bias; their "Talks" have not been thought-provoking or even relevant for some years now, probably since middle management from other mediocre companies percolated the organization.
Do we need every mega-corporation to weigh in on every social issue globally? The thing I like most about work is that its a relatively diverse group of people working together on shared goal. People have known for a long time that work should be professional and you should avoid politics and religion. But I guess people have to relearn these lessons every few decades.
They don't have to weigh in. But, if few Indian managers discriminate against Dalits, how are their non-Indian peers and managers supposed to correct that discrimination if they don't even understand what are castes? This isn't political, it's professional: US laws and Google policies forbid discrimination, and so people need to be trained in understanding what discrimination looks like. You don't categorize "security awareness training" as political either.
> US laws and Google policies forbid discrimination
Does U.S. law have precedent for discussing caste?
There is a case for typing the lowest-caste Indians, the Dalits this cancelled talk was meant to discuss, as a race and thus protected class under U.S. and Californian law. But I don't know if this is legally precedented.
Isn't racism fundamentally a type of caste/class discrimination? Not as well defined castes like seen in India, but "black people" are discriminated as a result of slavery, "asians" as a result of mass immigration. To the point where in many countries you were not allowed or able to marry outside your "caste", had different rights than locals/whites etc. People today don't feel racism as caste discrimination, but to say that there's no precedent in the West is being pedantic IMO.
The word you are looking for is bigotry. That's the generalized equivalent of racism. Thing is, bigotry in general isn't illegal. Specific kinds of bigotry are in regards to hiring though. Racism is one of them. But caste isn't.
A lawyer might be able to make the claim that it would fall under "national origin or ancestry" since, to my knowledge, caste is hereditary and hard to change.
But if so then that makes these kinds of talks all the more important. Because it helps Americans recognize a form of illegal discrimination they would otherwise not recognize.
Being hereditary is necessary but not sufficient for a grouping to constitute a race. Blond hair and blue eyes are hereditary, but blue eyed people aren’t a different race.
“Race” is a fuzzy concept but generally distinguishes people of different ethnic origins. Indian castes aren’t different races—low caste and high caste Indians can come from the same ethnic group. It’s more like the European distinction between nobility and commoners. That’s also hereditary, but it doesn’t define different races.
Proportion of steppe/Aryan origin varies among caste groups (some places as you go farther from cow belt that were subject to Brahminization or like Kashmir are exceptions to this, however this doesn’t mean all Hindus in Kashmir were Brahmins regardless of what certain recent films might claim on the subject) Physiognomy as some of the British attempted is not a golf way to go about studying it (see Native American skulls as to why, brachycephaly etc can be influenced by environment over generations) Markers like sickle cell trait (which I possess incidentally) are almost always found among aboriginal/tribal lower castes . It seems that story of “dasas” and Nishadas largely matches up with being forced into lower caste hood or untouchability as a result of losing wars.
'Racism' is absolutely a caste system, since the fundamental point of a caste system is to proportion resource and opportunity between breeding pools, however devised those are. The differentiator is simply the terms used to draw these boundaries. Which matters because different terms, say religious terms vs medico-scientific terms, resource different graphs for further narrativization. Jewish folk from Europe know full well the difference between being narrativized according to religious lines and according to medico-scientific lines, neither even approaching something like true or right. Black folk in America have been hounded about their medico-scientific distinction from the get-go, right down to the resurgence of heritable IQ and multi-regional emergence theory today.
It might not be considered "racism", as such, in the same way that discrimination against women is not necessarily racism.
But it certainly seems like caste would be a protected characteristic under California law--"Race, Color, National Origin, or Ancestry" are protected characteristics. Caste seems to obviously fall under ancestry.
Because your caste isn't a race. Caste is just taking the class system further. That's why its bigotry but not racism. I've no idea why people seem to want to extend racism to mean all of these things when there already exists a word for it.
Arguably it’s not protected right? Caste is more or less like the old European class distinction between royals and commoners. Nobody contends that lower caste people are a different race than higher caste people. (And I would argue it would be problematic to try and reframe caste distinctions in racial terms.) As far as I know, class discrimination isn’t illegal in the US.
Not under "race", but CA law lists "ancestry" as a protected characteristic. I'm having some trouble understanding how caste discrimination is anything other than ancestry discrimination.
Discrimination against protected classes is illegal. For example, until somewhat recently it was legal to discriminate based on someone’s sexual orientation (don’t ask, don’t tell).
Case law matters, and caste seems to not have clear answers as to whether it qualifies. If caste is considered equivalent to race, it would.
> But, if few Indian managers discriminate against Dalits, how are their non-Indian peers and managers supposed to correct that discrimination if they don't even understand what are castes?
Shouldn't the managers and decision makers be aware of the local customs, cultural issues and employment laws in the region they manage? You really think it's appropriate for some white American manager to lecture his Indian subordinates after spending a few hours in training?
>You really think it's appropriate for some white American manager to lecture his Indian subordinates after spending a few hours in training?
Yes. Ethnic discrimination is absolutely unacceptable in any American workplace, full stop. There is no room for cultural relativism here. To imply otherwise (e.g. “it would be inappropriate for a non-Indian manager to tell off their subordinate for being caste-ist”) is itself extremely racist.
How exactly would you determine that a manager is acting against an employee under them due to an internal caste bias and not due to lack of performance or insubordination (or whatever other valid grounds there are for acting against an employee)?
There's no silver bullet. It's equally hard to determine when a manager is acting against subordinates because of petty grudges, or when a manager is acting against subordinates because they're bad at effectively telling subordinates what they want. I think that's kinda the job you sign up for when you choose to join higher-level management.
Caste-based discrimination would be a pretty serious charge against a manager, surely sufficient grounds for termination. We need to have a talk of how we are going to determine when it's happening if we are seriously considering policies to act against it.
If a manager is acting against an emoloyee, someone should ask very pointed questions why. If caste might be at play, yes, saidanager ahould get a very stern talk from his superiors and HR explaining how this behaviour is unacceptable.
Again, how is that determined? Do you assume that a caste angle might be at play every time the manager is upper caste and the employee's of lower caste? Do you wait for the manager to be stupid enough to outright utter a casteist slur at the workplace?
As a manager, if you see one of your directs singeling out one of his emoloyees, it is your job to find out why. That includes talking to the employee. And because caste is so hard to grasp for non-Indians talks like the one cancelled by Google are so important.
Maybe I have a different view on that, we German's are quite sensitive when it comes to anti-semitism. And as woth caste, if religion is never openly discussed, I have no idea how to spot a jewish co-worker. If that jewish co-worker would complain about about being discriminated, it's more than reasonable to follow up. Same goes for caste. It is up to the employer to create an environment where employees can raise those kinds of concerns openly, most fail. Honestly trying so actually goes along way.
>As a manager, if you see one of your directs singeling out one of his emoloyees, it is your job to find out why
You are just saying that it is the job of the super-manager to find out why without answering how the job is supposed to be carried out. The manager says he is acting against the employee because of their lack of performance or insubordination. The employee says the manager is discriminating against them based on caste. You're the super-manager, what do you do?
Oh, you have talks with everyone involved. You consult HR. You get to the bottom of it. When you did, and it turns out that it was in fact discrimination, terminating the discriminating manager might be an option.
Not sure what a "super-manager" is supposed to be. Everyone reports to someone, even the CEO reports to the board. And the board reports to the shareholders. If a company cannot figure out cases of discrimination it is already screwed.
In real life, so, the disriminated party either gets a transfer or a generous severance package. Even if the discriminating manager gets fired. Nobody likes people that make waves.
> Shouldn't the managers and decision makers be aware of the local customs, cultural issues and employment laws in the region they manage?
Google is a US company. In the US, the "local custom and employment law" is that companies don't accept caste based discrimination. (It's also technically illegal in India). I think not only is it appropriate for a white American manager to lecture Indian subordinates about stopping caste based discrimination, it's an obligation to do so and fire the subordinates if they continue.
> You really think it's appropriate for some white American manager to lecture his Indian subordinates after spending a few hours in training?
If he/she sees a clear violation of discrimination laws/policies, then yes! Although "lecture" wouldn't be the best start. Asking questions to the alleged discriminator would be a better way forward. Find out what happened and why, and ask multiple people for their input. Start by assuming innocence and let evidence prove otherwise, not the other way around.
The truth about a given situation is not completely inaccessible to people without "lived experience". That's why words are so powerful - when used truthfully and in good faith, they enable to bridge gaps where we lack that personal experience, and make accurate judgments.
> when used truthfully and in good faith, [words] enable us to bridge gaps where we lack that personal experience, and make accurate judgments.
That's why learning to express ourselves well, and listen well (including empathetically) is so important to a functioning society.
As a society, we need a restored faith in the power of words to communicate any truth (including truths people erroneously say are "inaccessible apart from lived experience") and be understood by those who will listen well.
The problem isn't that truth is unknowable or incommunicable, the problem is that not enough people are speaking it, and of those who are, many don't speak intelligently and/or intelligibly. And not enough of those who listen do so carefully, thoughtfully, and empathetically.
That's their job. If they don't like it, they aren't fit to do it. If managers could only come from the exact same background as their subordinates, globalization would be screwed.
Because race really matters when your worldview is all about creating post-facto equity between races, not equal treatment and opportunity.
When you have an a-priori assumption that every difference in outcome is due to oppression of some sort, the argument is over -- you've already allowed that discrimination on any basis is OK, as long as it's against whoever you've labeled the "oppressor" group.
As a final coup de grace, you can label anyone who disagrees as an "oppressor" (or at least "fragile") without engaging their argument -- it's all circular reasoning supported by an ad-hominem fallacy.
Respectfully, you didn't really answer my question at all. The question, which I'll phrase slightly differently, is "why can't a person who's not from a particular race or group (i.e., an outsider) observe that people in that group are treating each other poorly, unfairly, or unjustly?"
What you said, on the other hand, is a bunch of familiar, well-worn complaints dating back to the 1990s from privileged white people who think they're being oppressed, even though that's not even the subject.
We don't need them to weigh in on social issues, but we do need them to not be part of the problem. E.g. if a company of Google's size had an issue where Indian employees tended to prevent qualified candidates from being hired because they were lower-caste, then that would both be a problem for Google (because they would be missing out on labor) and those being discriminated against.
I’m wondering what you mean by weighing in globally. Do you mean publicly, or internally within the global google employment base? Google is big enough that I’m not sure public/internal can really be teased apart, but I guess intention might matter.
Regardless, I’ve come to realize that not talking about politics and religion doesn’t make political or religious action and impact go away, it just stays insidious.
Yes, we do need that, at least in the USA. The last 42 years of politics have neutered the federal and state governments when it comes to any kind of social issue. The only institutions that get respect are The Military, churches, very rich (and therefore very intelligent) men, and some big companies. The US government has so many checks and balances that virtually nothing has gotten done in years.
This is likely an example why it may not always be a great idea to discuss politics at work. I know a lot of us have strong personal opinions on a lot of subjects, but making sure everyone on my team aligns with my beliefs is likely not conducive to teamwork. Quite the opposite.
If I was not an IC now, I would definitely be trying to cut discussions like that in a bud.
No. Everything is politics. You just happen to be too close and emotionally invested to see it as such. It is fine to hold strong opinions and consider some items 'obvious' or even 'inalienable', but pretending those are all not just a temporary set of values we agreed on as a society is silly.
edit: Even saying 'I am apolitical' is a political statement.
Everything may have a political lens with which it can be viewed, but that doesn't make literally everything "political" in the typical usage of the word. Are all workplace conflicts political? Is all unethical workplace behavior political? Is failure to follow IT security guidelines in the workplace political? It's possible to confidently answer "yes" to all of these questions with the right logical contortions, but at that point we'll have reached reductio ad absurdum.
When you manage a group of people that have to work together while trying to maximize workplace outcomes within existing legal framework, organizations have a professional motivation to cover topics like workplace fairness, bias, respectful behavior, etc.
We are actually in agreement. What we don't seem to agree on is that easiest way for a corporations to avoid this particular pitfall is by not being anywhere near it. Especially in 2022.
> What we don't seem to agree on is that easiest way for a corporations to avoid this particular pitfall is by not being anywhere near it.
I think we disagree in that I don't believe many of these issues can be avoided. If you're seeing caste-based discrimination in your workplace (for instance, just to use an issue that isn't legally mandated to address), any attempt to avoid it is a tacit endorsement of the practice. There are no sidelines upon which to stand.
Except racism (and "caste-based discrimination" is also racism) shouldn't be considered "politics", everybody should be able to agree that it doesn't have a place in a modern company.
According to people like Robin DiAngelo, white people are inherently racist, as she wrote in her book White Fragility.
It’s difficult to say that we can all agree to not be racist when some ideologues from whom’s political ideas companies base DEI initiatives on claim that racism is an immutable characteristic that many of us are born with.
These people often use Trotsky's definition of racism which means they can't be racist towards White people. We should all stop using the word because it means something different to extremists. "Racial bigotry" makes much more sense.
Having public messaging about negative social behavior often results in more of the negative behavior. Studies suggest lots of media about school shootings results in more school shootings. Similarly, messaging about getting help to reduce self-harm results in more self-harm. DARE resulted in no reductions in drug use.
If the people creating these programs/talks don't understand this, they don't deserve the platform. And if they do understand it, they are evil and intentionally trying to make race/bigotry tensions worse. In cases such as this where the relevant psychology of the issue is essential to the career, I tend to assume the worst of anyone doing it.
So the problem shouldn't be discussed? So for security vulnerabilities, disclosing them allows them to be exploited. So 0-days and their corresponding patches shouldn't be discussed or released?
Why is it an exception and why is it not politics? Can you define politics and tell me why "cast-based discrimination" does not overlap with that definition?
I'd posit that 99.999% of people agree racism is bad. It's mostly when the definition gets muddied and expanded that people start disagreeing and it becomes political and touchy.
I don't think it's a matter of definition. Unless you mean "it's not racism when I say it. When I say it it's just a fact".
Whether they use the N word, or saying "being on time" is "whiteness", racism is always defined as "not what I'm doing".
Actually the only real definition of racism I would say is "mentioning race in any way, except the way I do it".
For your 99.999%, I would say that WAY more than one in a hundred thousand would overtly say that their group (race, religion, skin color, gender) is "better" than another. Especially as you leave western countries.
Though in some countries their racism doesn't even place themselves at the top.
27% of Americans say that homeopathy is an effective treatement. I've never met anyone who would admit to this. I know someone who believes in crystals and fortune tellers though.
I don't know how many people are pro-racism, but it's not three orders of magnitude less than people who believe in the power of nothing.
I think the problem is - and that is likely what OP was referring to - that if everything is racism then nothing is racism. And if being on time is racist, I guess everything already is racist.
It is an odd frame of mind.
>>> For your 99.999%, I would say that WAY more than one in a hundred thousand would overtly say that their group (race, religion, skin color, gender) is "better" than another. Especially as you leave western countries.
Is it possible you are conflating racism with xenophobia ( which has slightly expanded to include foreigners )?
No, I'm not conflating. Especially when referring to those (like I mentioned) who don't place themselves at the top. That's the opposite of xenophobia, if anything.
I'm saying one in a hundred thousand is too few. The US has more than 3000 people who judge even by phrenology, I'm sure.
Apart from the morality of the situation, the fact is that racial discrimination in the workplace is illegal in the US (and rightly so, in my opinion). Whether caste discrimination is a form of racial discrimination is the subject of current litigation in California. Given that there are legal requirements the company needs to stay in compliance with, this is squarely outside of "politics at work".
This is likely the only reasonable counter to my opinion so far. That said, is caste of a racial nature? To my understanding it really more of a social construct more tied to ethnicity.
To be clear, race is also socially constructed; they're different cultures' ways of stratifying social categories. That said, all that matters for the law in this case is what the courts say.
It's okay to just admit you don't know something. Here's the American Anthropological Association's public outreach site on the subject, so you can catch up on the relevant science.
This may be where the disconnect is. The definition I provided was from a biology domain and not from humanities domain ( not that there no attempts to do the same in biology ). This is not discredit anthropology as it is a fascinating study. I just do not think it is relevant here.
I do happen to think that, where there are clear physical differences ( gasp ) between white and black people, it may be a good idea not to try to cover it with yet another social construct. Unless, naturally there is a disagreement that there are real physical differences ( for example, if we wanted to move from skin pigment, there are documented issues that affect black people more than whites ). Are those issues racist?
That said, it is somewhat interesting that the main quote on the website provided does not come from a renowned representative of the group, but relatively unknown historian ("[Racism] is not about how you look, it is about how people assign meaning to how you look"). Quite frankly, that is not racism. That is otherism and it goes back to the previous comment about how the waters and definitions are muddied further to pigeonhole something for one reason or another.
To be blunt, there is a good reason for a society ( and its members ) to not be focused on race, but pretending race does not exist is a disservice to that society as it is hiding the reality from its members.
Maybe I am approaching it the wrong way. Maybe I should try Socratic method here.
All of your concerns and questions are addressed in the website, which I recommend that you explore more in depth. The site is not purely from a cultural anthropology point of view, but physical anthropology, as well. As such, it addresses genetics and health issues.
I am mildly amused that you decided to skip over the questions and refer me back to the website, which I already indicated am not perceiving as an authority on the matter.
Still, as a show of good faith, I did just that. Needless to say, I was not impressed, but I would be more than happy to discuss my contentions.
Separately, I also allowed myself to dig deeper under ESI-0307843 that funded this project and one of the first things that came up was an evaluation of the website.
You will note that under 'expectations not fulfilled' some complaints do stand out(1):
-"There are no clear definitions of terms or comparisons of biological race v. social race, ethnicity, etc"
-"I expected to find more scientific studies about races, at least as a complement."
-"Maybe some more information about the concept of ethnicity and 'clear' definitions"
-"I expected a professional explanation given to a public audience as happens with so many effective professionals associated with museums, freshman teaching or public programs in the social sciences and humanities."
-"Everything was about self-reflection and self-confirmation about American
conceptions and categorization. I expected a step beyond that."
-"I expected to find a mention of R. Lynn's Race Differences in Intelligence
(Washington Summit Publishers, 2006) for an important exposition."
I think that discussing caste-based discrimination is great for a western company to do. Especially one with a lot of Indian workers. Most western workers/managers have little understanding of this topic, and will probably miss it if a coworker is being discriminated against because of their caste. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
The most number of Hindus in west support RSS and in these western countries are so much vocal about minority rights and discrimination. In fact, most RSS support is from the creamy urban layer of Hindu society. It's not surprising to see the bad PR for Hinduism prevention is being done.
This is what happens when a for profit company LARPs as an ethical one. On one hand they talk about diversity and on the other they desperately hire people they can pay less from areas of the world where "diversity is our strength" isn't really the norm. So in the end the company makes more money thanks to the cheap labor and it becomes even less inclusive and diverse.
That's pretty harsh. Google would have no trouble hosting a police reform discussion because they have no local PD fearmongering through highly dependent local media. They do have a number of employees who could be made uncomfortable by a discussion of caste. That's hypocrisy. That's doing the easy things. But it isn't an indictment of for profit enterprise.
Google’s culture is dominated by arrogance. Management repeatedly tells employees they work on the world’s hardest problems using the world’s biggest computers and the world’s smartest people. Doing anything less is “ungoogley”.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that this would encourage racism. But it sure isn’t surprising.
I’ll bite with anecdotal pov. I think most of the people who are the “best” are advantaged from the beginning. Whether it is attending prep schools (40k a year or more private school for 12 years), having a home (not moving multiple times, sometimes in a year over many years), or honestly having the familial backing to “take risks”.
The last point is so wild when I hear it from some VCs or successful CEO. It’s easy to take a risk when your parents and family are loaded, even if you have nothing to your name at the time. It’s easy to say such things when your parents are doctors or entrepreneurs who put you through private school and then you got into Stanford. I’m sure they’re smart, but they bought their way in when you reduce it. Sure they took it from 20-100, but many people can barely get from 1-10 due to socioeconomic circumstances. I respect the people who manage to go from 1-100 way more than someone who was bound to be reasonably successful at worst from birth.
Elitism comes with a lot of rationalizations to justify the beliefs about who is worthy or not.
Typically one of them is "sharing these key characteristics with me make you better than those who don't", these characteristics often involve some kind of racial-like features.
When you’re conditioned to think of yourself in a superior class of people, I can easily see how that mindset carries over to nonprofessional circumstances.
Also it’s not recruiting or hiring that I think is relevant. Those activities mostly impact non-employees. It’s in this drumbeat from leadership about prioritization of projects which reminds googlers not to waste their time on simple or small problems (or fixing bugs or maintaining a service) that any non-googler could do. It says “Remember that you’re better than they are.”
> I can assure you there is no hidden community of brahmins that look out for each other and help each other succeed and I doubt there is for most castes in India.
Still ongoing. But given that one of Cisco's arguments is simply "how dare you, Caste discrimination isn't illegal!" I don't see them as particularly deserving of any benefit of the doubt.
Maybe someone that is a member of the caste that is accused of discriminating against lower castes shouldn't be deciding if that group is being discriminated against. It would be like if white people were the deciders of whether black people are oppressed in modern America. Numerous law suits have been filed about this very thing, so it is obviously still an issue in the workplace.
> No doubt lower caste members have disparate outcomes compared to Upper Caste but this is not due to "Caste Discrimination".
This sort of opinion forming based purely on personal anecdotes is why talks such as the one under discussion are needed. You've convinced yourself that caste discrimination doesn't exist just because you didn't happen to encounter it in your personal limited experience! Please listen, read and learn from first hand experiences of those that live it every day. Even today.
Yeah, high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1, so most students miss out on reconstruction, and pretty much no curricula will talk about the explicit race discrimination in the GI bill/redlining.
> high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1
I very, very highly doubt that. In terms of US history, this period covers several important topics:
* Reconstruction
* Settling of the American West
* Rise of the Granger and later Progressive movements
* Burgeoning immigration to the US, and all the tensions that result from that
* Second Industrial Revolution, which also fuels the Gilded Age and labor movements
* Beginnings of American imperialism (and somewhat ironically, the end of it... the US becomes pretty uninterested in territorial expansion almost immediately after experiencing its first major bout of imperial expansion in the Spanish-American War).
It's possible that you just don't remember what you learned in US history classes in this time period, but completely excising a quarter of the country's history would be rather surprising, especially when it's the part of the history that covers both the biggest shift in self-image (from an agrarian country distancing itself from world politics to an industrialized powerhouse increasingly engaged in world politics) and the development of mass political consciousness worldwide in the late Long 19th Century.
I was really interested in history (so presumably I paid attention) and my education mirrors his. I went to a good public school in a state that people who are looking to lie with statistics in order to make a politically charged point like to hold up as a pinnacle of educational achievement. Pretty much any topic that someone who is a big proponent of government solutions to problems might find troublesome got glossed over as quickly as possible.
Thankfully I lucked into the English section taught by the female equivalent of Ron Swanson who made us read books that covered the Jim Crow south and the Indian wars. Looking back she was obviously a bull #### and rightfully had a bone to pick when it came to mistreatment of demographic groups under color of law.
I can't parse your second sentence. I went to high school in Chicago, in the 1990s. Everything 'jcranmer mentions mirrors my own experience. We definitely didn't skip from the Civil War to WW1.
This varies massively by school or district. I teach history to undergrads, and some of them come in having had entire high school classes on the history of civil rights--these students are usually either from majority-black districts, or from elite private schools. Others had history classes that don't even acknowledge that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.
What high school students curricula are you following?
All of those topics were covered where I went.
Though interestingly, the ones I do also tend to get across the point that caste discrimination was made illegal in India, and never tend to go into much explicit detail on how just because something is illegal, it doesn't mean it isn't done/is regularly enforced.
> importing ethnicities means importing their ethnic conflicts too, always
Is there evidence for this? Couldn't null be valid: those choosing to emigrate are most likely to be willing or wanting to leave that nonsense behind?
Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values. Plenty of Indians emigrate while leaving their caste identity, and any will to act on it, behind. There may remain implicit biases. But these can be aspired to be corrected versus assumed to be the default.
"those choosing to emigrate are most likely to be willing or wanting to leave that nonsense behind"
In the modern, technologically connected world, it is much harder to leave nonsense behind. Even if you move to the other side of the world, you will still be exposed to your home country's politics through easily obtainable TV channels and through your Internet acquaintances on worldwide social networks. In a way that was impossible in 1920 or 1820.
That's might have been true of the more "enlightened" Indian engineers who immigrated to Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s. There were also ambitious Indians who liked the old ways but lacked the opportunity to engage in such discrimination until they adapted or the opportunity eventually arose.
Either way, as more and more of a certain ethnicity/race enter a country for the purposes of bettering their financial prospects, many of these immigrants reinvent the social dynamics of their origin country. This is how enclaves are created. And while many of the "enlightened" Indians have left behind explicit caste discrimination, they didn't leave other practices behind either ( e.g. parental authoritarianism, arranged marriages, etc.).
A different geography doesn't necessarily produce a different worldview. Every immigrant arrives with his own family values, religious dogmas (or lack thereof), and modes of thought that lead to these aforementioned conflicts.
> Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values
If we're excluding slavery as a de facto caste system, then sure. However certain behaviors being antithetical to our founding values doesn't make them easily solvable problems.
> If we're excluding slavery as a de facto caste system
I agree that caste and slavery have overlap, but banning slavery was about making our country more in line with its founding values. America is an evolving project, not a single point in time.
We still have a long way to go, and are regressing in many ways of late, but still more in line with those values than we were at the founding.
So which way do you want it then? Multiculturalism, with all the "nonsense" that comes from those cultures, or do you just want every brown person to come to america and start acting white?
I thought one of the big benefits of multiculturalism (that all big businesses love to tout) is how it brings diversity of cultural values to the workplace. Well I guess mission accomplished because now you've got the indian caste system in the workplace.
> Plenty of Indians emigrate while leaving their caste identity
Caste is something most Indians grow up with, you dont really lose it just because you go to another country. Most kids of these Indians fortunately dont really care about caste.
>Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values.
"Caste" as being your ring in the social hierarchy is present in almost any culture or civilization, and prejudiced treatment of people in either higher or lower social rings is definitely (in my opinion) a part of American culture. This country definitely offers special treatment and privilege to those in higher "castes"... Hell, even just having a Southern accent in America will grant you a prejudiced treatment in many settings.
Indeed and in 19th century New England there was actually a term "Boston Brahmin." It was also based on surname and social standing. The term is still used, often in articles discussing people from white well-to-do, old money New England families.
The United States is one of the least racist countries in the world. Yes, really. Yes, we have too much racism still; but it’s a lot easier to look less racist when a whole country, 1/10th the size of the US is one nationality.
And if you’re from any of the New Worlds, go look how your country did or still treats its original population.
We’re all in glass houses and the US is actually one of the better ones, if you can believe it.
We’re not good. We have a long way to go. But look in the mirror, or if you’re American, go read another country’s history books.
Which would give grounds on the hiring manager front for investigating one's employer for de-facto blacklisting.
Which is illegal.
Just because someone points out the elrphant in the room at a workplace does not make them "radioactive". Quite the opposite. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Organizing a labor protest because of unfair working conditions, or as an attempt to unionize, is "protected" by US regulations (not necessarily laws).
Organizing a labor protest because of a (real or perceived) culture of sexual harassment is not. If she had a valid and provable claim of wrongdoing, she should have approached an attorney and sued Google to elicit change (and maybe some compensation). I believe I read that her protest was staged to "bring awareness" to the issue. If you were an employer (regardless of your views on the topic), would this be okay with you?
The same thing goes for trying to organize a meeting with a speaker who will talk about the caste system in Silicon Valley. Yeah, caste == bad, but is the employer obligated to host such a meeting (at their expense)? Obviously she could rent a venue and invite others to the presentation on their own time, but why must Google submit to her demands for them to pay for it?
>Organizing a labor protest because of unfair working conditions, or as an attempt to unionize, is "protected" by US regulations
>Organizing a labor protest because of a (real or perceived) culture of sexual harassment is not.
...Pardon me, but do you not consider a workplace wherein sexual harassment is implicitly encouraged or tolerated to the point that someone feels the need to clarify or remind others this a workplace to not be a subset of unfair working conditions? I do. Generally it is something that hardly needs explaining in the majority of places I've been, but in the places that needed it, it was needed. It can be overdone. Given recent history on Google however, I'm willing to entertain the benefit of a doubt.
>The same thing goes for trying to organize a meeting with a speaker who will talk about the caste system in Silicon Valley. Yeah, caste == bad, but is the employer obligated to host such a meeting (at their expense)?
Does the employer outsource a sizable chunk of business to somewhere where these concerns are valid? Is management composed of people to whom these concerns should apply? If yes, then absolutely.
Look, the bigger a collective unit of humanity you are, the higher my standards go. Everyone individually is prone to their own vices/biases/fallibilities/etc... but the entire point behind collectives is that not all component members are hopefully having an evil day at the same time. So on average, behavior should tend away from blatant unethical or immoral behavior. This is doubly important, because group behavior is indicative of culture of the constituent parts.
I understand there are some people who look at businesses as nothing but profit engines. I don't. If your business ends up perpetuating discriminatory practices because there is some executive at the top who is a caste-ist bastard, and you've got boots on the ground attestating that yes, that tendency shines through to them numerous enough, then it is absolutely a valid expenditure of our collective society's time.
Should it eclipse everything else? No not necessarily. Is there a point where one needs to rein it in? Who should be entrusted with that decision?
Certainly not those in power/up top. There are fewer of them, and the power they wield taints their impartiality. It is most safely ensconced amongst your workers.
If one person asks for it, say no. Two or three do, start paying attention, possibly escalate. If it is worth your people's time to hear this person out, it is worth your time.
Beside's which, as a leader, you are best thought of as a cache. If you haven't formed a stance or policy in it, do the expensive operation, then cache the result.
Boom. Done. Everybody's happy. Ignoring the potential problem won't make it go away.
Bottom up, not top down. Telling the bottom to chill out because Fearless Leader would never let anything improper happen is about the most unamerican thing I can possibly imagine... Nevermind the biggest bloody lie out there.
In short; I tend to disagree with your standpoint. My job isn't to optimize your accountant's profit figures, it's to make sure that signals get handled so the people doing the real work can concentrate on that. The profit will generally take care of itself.
People are complicated. Those that think they've simplified them enough are inevitably due for a refresher in human nature.
Only if someone is dumb enough to document in an email they’re firing her for speaking out. In the real world if you spend your whole workday investigating and criticizing your employer, you’ll eventually no longer work there. They’ll find cases where you missed deadlines, bad performance reviews, etc.
I guess toxic is an adjective with a similar meaning, but a worse connotation in my view. Both words imply that she is to be avoided, and she will probably have some difficulty finding a new job after her very-public departure from Google.
> For tech companies like Google who hire purely by merit, if someone has made inside Google that's it. Otherwise if there is discrimination they would not have hired it.
I don't think anyone is claiming that companies like Google are organizationally enforcing caste discrimination, more like some employees within the company are doing it on their own.
> Thenmozhi is a radical leftist out to create division rather than love.
Pointing out wrongs may indeed create division, but that doesn't mean it is wrong to do so.
> her father is a doctor, so if they are suppressed how come he is a doctor.
Maybe he would be surgeon general(or equivalent) right now if he wasn't? This logic is just plain wrong - it would be like saying that racism didn't exist in the US in 1967 - otherwise how would Thurgood Marshall be on the Supreme Court?
> In April, Thenmozhi Soundararajan […] was scheduled to give a talk to Google News employees for Dalit History Month. But Google employees began spreading disinformation […]
That is not journalism. That's editorializing — and in the very first paragraph, no less. This is how media like the Washington Post encourages a kind of caste of its own, by signaling "right-think" to its readers.
“…according to copies of the documents as well as interviews with Soundararajan and current Google employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation.”
Google is so morally bankrupt at this point they have no idea what is right. The far left has given everyone the impression that standing up to this nonsense is racist
Extremely dishonest article. Tries very hard to trick people in believing "Hindu nationalists" didn't like her talk because they're great fans of the caste system. Yet it's common knowledge they're against the very idea of caste.
> sites and organizations that have targeted academics in the United States and Canada who are critical of Hindu nationalism or caste hierarchy.
Whatever the real grievance is, the article definitely doesn't talk about it. Presumably people felt her activism actually strengthens the caste system/division rather than combats it.
Every couple of months an article about caste is posted on HN. The article and the reactions are always the same.
* Shallow allusions to how caste dynamics = white-black dynamics in the US
* Any one in opposition = caste supremacist = hindu nationalism
* Belief that caste dynamics in the US = caste dynamics in rural India
I am going to buck my own trend of writing explanations about how western interpretations of issues faced by foreign civilizations are wrong. I will instead link to older comments [1] I have written before:
Choice quotes:
> Caste related pieces in the western press miss the entire context around 1st-world-discrimination among Indians. It annoys me to no end, because discrimination is still a major problem in certain communities. But, the western media has cast it onto their agonizingly shallow concept of privilege and bigotry.
> caste is not caste anymore. The nature of internal sharding, class division, and discrimination in the diaspora has its own patterns that don't abide by caste lines.
I have some strong suspicions on why caste has suddenly become a major issue in California politics over the last decade. I know better than to talk about on a pseudo-anonymous account.
There are 200+ million Dalits in India. These are the people which were previously called “untouchables”.
I work in medicine, many Indians work with me and most are Brahmins with a few Christian Malayali from Kerala.
I think the Malayali have shown it is possible to escape the caste system and to have success.
However I am worried Dalits have been at the bottom and treated as such for thousands of years that it has effected more than just their psychology. In a high population density area with food insecurity there will be high baseline stress, malnutrition, and starvation. Those will cause epigenetic modifications to DNA which are (surprisingly) heritable. Over thousands I imagine these effects will produce behaviors which are going to be hard to overcome.
And secondly, low SES populations have much higher rates of psychiatric disorders and pretty much all diseases. If one were to combine thousands of years of epigenetic effects and persistent unescapable low SES status, then it does not take a leap of faith to hypothesize there will be long term effects. Much less "barely plausible", a comment that only arises because this is not your domain, but it is mine.
The worry is that it will take many generations of significant investment back into the Dalit communities to bring them into parity with the rest of the Indian population. That even after the investment the longterm epigenetic effects from thousands of years of high intergenerational stress will show a significant increase in diseases of all types with higher all cause mortality/lower life expectancy.
Lifestyle factors drastically dominate when it comes to mortality/life expectancy. Also, the whole idea is highly speculative and would/should have no implications for workplace/hiring practices regardless.
Yes it is true that with improvement in maternal/fetal survivability modifiable lifestyle factors drastically dominate life expectancy. However that's a throw away line to disregard significant differences. It's basically zooming out far enough to say it doesn't matter.
And yes, its a speculative idea that I proposed, I certainly didn't suggest it was dogma. However this kind of observation is what would lead to a study.
Lastly, while this discussion is tangential to Google hiring practices, it is a related topic. I'm sorry if you feel like I robbed you of your time.
It’s not “a throw away line to disregard significant differences” when I say that almost all the genetic factors you’re concerned about are subordinate to lifestyle factors — they are. Genetic factors can be governed (genes switched on/off) via lifestyle factors such as diet, activity, etc. Never mind that whole populations have endured famines, passing on harmful traits epigenetically, and yet, those populations have recovered well.
I don’t think you’re wasting my or anyone else’s time, but I think your post was missing crucial info, especially given the context. If there was a post about career achievement or discrimination of Finnish people, I wouldn’t post about their unfavorable epigenetic profile since the famines of WW2, lest it be construed as partial justification.
