The defiance of an 'untouchable' New York subway worker
bbc.com
bbc.com
Indians who are deemed lower caste are converting to Christianity to escape the tag.
The race to slavery connection was more an accident of history than any design. Early America had some black slave owners and they imported from Africa because Native Americans tended to die from disease or escape.
NYC did see slavery from 1655 (fist auction) to 1827 but issued a gradual emancipation act in 1799. Hardly hundreds of years of institutionalized slavery. Even before that there was various waves of freed slaves associated with the Revolutionary war. When black men made up one-quarter of the rebel militia in White Plains and where then freed after the war etc.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/...
Also, segregation spread from the South after the Civil War so there was a significant gap from the end of NY slavery to the start of Radical segregation which means it was not a continuous period.
Remember the Civil War ended in 1865 slavery absolutely ended in NY in 1827, but was almost non existent at that time long having been phased out.
However, at the time women where not allowed to vote at all. Thus it was not pure racial discrimination.
Just for perspective North Carolina and New York did allow freed blacks to vote in 1790. And in 1860 two states still had property ownership requirements to vote I am saying deep cultural views are a more complex topic than you think.
PS: As one historian put it, economics pushed poor white farmers to abolitionism before the civil war. However, economics pushed those same farmers to discrimination after the civil war.
Look at the 16 or so classes of the "sistema de castas" that the Spanish American areas used., for example.
PS no hispanics were ever enslaved in Canada and the United States.
A similar trend is present in India. The new kids in urban centers don't care about caste. The old people in the villages and hinterlands? They do somewhat.
And then you always have the politicians on every side of the spectrum who artificially inflate caste and race issues for their own gains.
I'm sorry but this is just wrong, and you can prove it to yourself by reading the news any day.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...
Oh yes they do, maybe less than before, but its still present. To native, +-cast membership is usually very obvious.
When you are born into privilege, and you are told whole childhood that you are entitled to it and those less fortunate 'deserved' it by their actions in previous lives, it's hard thing to give it up, and say 'no, I deserve less'.
Excuse me?
There is also a lot of evidence of caste discrimination in the UK otherwise why was caste discrimination added to the protected groups in the UK, I know one of the MP's involved
I would not mind seeing an AMA from someone in a lower caste in India, someone from a lower caste in US, and someone from an upper caste in the US.
[1] https://scroll.in/video/862235/video-how-do-they-say-there-i...
The whole point of the article, and her book, is to bring the caste system and its consequences into light. Allegorizing it would wash away all the specific issues she is trying to raise!
This is a good thing?
It's a decent middle class job.
>Might
My friend got under $40K as a physics postdoc in TX, my partner got around $50K as a math tenure-track in midwest, and those are the lucky academics that could find these positions.
You can look up salaries at many public institutions. The trend is pretty sad.
Some people might get a lot of money by winning the lottery, doesn't mean it's a viable career choice.
Disclaimer: I jumped ship, and still might suffer a bit from the sour grapes syndrome - but not because the salaries in academia very any good.
We also forget that their are people still alive today that experienced racial segregation. Many will gladly tell their story.
Sure it's soul crushing for those who are oppressed, but the oppressors would probably be well adjusted people in other societies.
Of course, this is all based on personal experience. I wouldn't say this is the general rule.
Any time in history when one group has been oppressed by another, it's been considered normal by majority social standards of the time. When those standards change, discord and sometimes even war is the result.
Is that cognitive dissonance? Almost certainly, but is it hate? I don't think so.
We throw around the word "hate" too much and doing so loses a lot of the nuance bound up in human attitudes.
I think people that oppose gay marriage do so because of hate. But found a neat little loophole out of being called hateful by claiming that they have no problem with gay people.
My reasoning is this: taking any kind of stance on any subject requires some kind of motivation. If you are moved to spend energy on something, you are motivated by some need to do so. If you oppose something that does not directly affect you, the reason is most probably hate.
The belief that others can only oppose groups of people out of "hate" stems from a strong lack of empathy and understanding for people on the other side of the issue.
> If you oppose something that does not directly affect you, the reason is most probably hate.
Either that, or you are serving something percieved as greater than yourself.
On the other hand, accusing the people you oppose of being demonic Satan-spawn looking to corrupt our youth and destroy our lives and country, of being the baby-molesting other that causes nightmares, well, that probably isn't caused by an excess of good feeling.
Hatred at its core is causing others to suffer in service of the things that live in one's head. Emotions can be hateful, so can ideas.
Most everyone understands that people are not their actions. You can believe a behavior is wrong without hating the person behaving in that way.
It's a very simple formulation.
Now please tell me how opposing the gay marriage is not in any way a sign of hate towards gay people that bars them from certain legal liberties? You could try to sell this point of view as a "kind" point of view, but your conginitively dissonant ignorance still makes you hate people as a result; even if you are not conscious about it.
Disagreeing with someone isn’t hate.
When a gay couple gets married on the other side of the country, do you notice? Does your life change? If it's the mere idea of it you're opposed to, then that's bigotry, not some practical concern like a giraffe blocking your view of the screen.
This urge to thrust "hate" on people is dangerous because is dehumanizes them. If someone is hateful, then they are evil, and evil people deserve punishment.
So the thinking goes, but it is regressive thinking.
The disagreement about gay marriage stems for many from religious doctrine and what is traditional social practice, not hate.
How many times does the story need to play out? Didn't we just see the #metoo thing play out? These women are victims of hate. Same story with LGBT and black.
No one is dehumanizing anyone. The word is about human autonomy and dignity.
Hatred - a "strong dislike" - does not need to be expressed through fiery emotion. A checklist which says "I will not provide service to someone who is {insert protected class}, followed robotically, is still an expression of hatred.
A computer vision system could be used to implement some sorts of racism, so of course the CV system itself could not be said to "hate" the person. Instead, it's an expression of the hatred embedded in the system.
Someone choosing to follow God's law is expressing the hatred embedded in that belief system. That they might "only" be an instrument of that hatred rather than an instigator does not absolve them.
You wrote "Is it really hate though? Or just people accepting certain social standards and living their lives in accordance."
If those social standard are based in hate, then why shouldn't we say those people are being hateful?
Moreover, if many others from the same society hold different beliefs (e.g., there are Christians for and against gay marriage, and for and against slavery, and for and against tattoos, and for and against women speaking in the church, etc.) then why should we excuse those people who choose a specific interpretation which condones and encourages discrimination?
The word 'marriage' doesn't mean in 2018 what in meant in 1918, or even in 1968, or 1993. In large part, that's a good thing (domestic violence is no longer legal spousal rape is no longer legal, married women don't have a kind of legal-child status), but it's also a bad thing (due to no-fault divorce laws, marriage can be terminated by one party at any time; marriage is no longer the cornerstone of a couple's life, but the capstone to their lives; there's no longer social support for a reliable, lifelong marriage).
Many people who oppose legal recognition of homosexual unions as marriages don't have animus against homosexuals, but rather nostalgia for the previous meanings of marriage. They believe that a stronger concept of marriage makes for a stronger society.
Personally, I think we ought to go all the way and abolish the legal concept of marriage entirely: it's a religious state, not a civil one, and thus not the business of the State. But I understand the concerns of those who worry about how a diverse society which has lost all respect for marriage will survive — I just think we're already there, so we might as well be honest about it.
This is exactly what hate is. And it should be pointed out by everyone. The oppressor only has power if others give it by being complicit.
[1] https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/sujatha-gidla-an...
Edit: Fascinating interview, by the way. Thanks for posting it! Loved this part:
>GIDLA: I will say this: Everybody is dying to know whether I got into university because of reservations. My answer to them is, “Go ahead and die.”
[0] - https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/sujatha-gidla-an...
Never heard of America?
America has its own ethnic-based social stratification issues, but I think that opponents of caste systems would say that comparing modern day America, with its issues, to the entrenched caste system in India is a comparison that greatly waters-down the oppressiveness of caste and minimizes the challenges facing its reform.
Gidla says that proselytization didn't help her lot. "Christians, untouchables - it came to the same thing. All Christians in India were untouchable. I knew no Christian who did not turn servile in the presence of a Hindu."
Proselytization did help her a lot: it was the reason the christians were there in the first place.
And upon reading it, what a delightful surprise instead!
Both racism and casteism have similar results. That is, subjugation of certain peoples, violations of human rights, the preservation of the oppressing class, death--a whole host of evils.
However, they have different sources, are codified differently, entrenched in different cultures, and therefore should be addressed and combated differently.
Sujatha did not write a book to make people understand that American slavery (and its continuing echo) is bad. Furthermore, purely trying to understand Sujatha's story through the lens of American slavery is essentially hand-waving away the points she is trying to make.