California sues Cisco alleging discrimination based on India’s caste system | Hacker News Reader

California sues Cisco alleging discrimination based on India’s caste system

latimes.com

84 pointsIMAYousaf56 comments

Discussion 10 days ago (600+ comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083 "California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste"

Thank you for this. I must have missed it.

Interesting because this is not the first time I've heard that Indians in Cisco are extremely cliquey. Definitely remember hearing story of a workplace discrimination settlement from there. In that case it was argued in the gender angle, but the person involved said it's actually a group of Indians who were allegedly pulling all stops to promote each other while trying to exclude other Asians.

I'm from India, and can totally believe it. Have also heard of stories in Texas where they will keep a trusted Indian guy in interview panels to make sure that it's not a cousin or friend (who only barely looks like the interviewee) actually coming for the interview. And then there are these "consulting firms" who specialise in helping you fake a resume and get a job (most of the time these are people who won the H1 lottery and have come to the US via Infosys/TCS and are trying to switch to a real job instead of the half-pay serfdom they are in). These shenanigans are of course not common nowadays, but what this means is there's a big population of disingenuous Indian origin people in the second-grade tech jobs in the US, which does not bode well for the general image of Indian tech workers unfortunately.

I've sadly heard stories about forced deference, though not seemingly as overt as in Cisco, at other tech companies.

The most shocking experience is actually a personal anecdote. Someone from India from a client once asked my father, who also works in tech in a senior position, why people listen to him given his background. Kind of jarring given that the discrimination in the US tends to be much more structural and sinisterly subtle as opposed to some Indian or South African style outright "one drop rule" thing.

I'm confused. Was it about the Indian's background, or your father's background?

Specifically with reference to my dad's background and why people in the US at large, including the native population, let him be in charge.

This will be an interesting case because it will need to test how a construct like caste maps on to the protected classes of US anti discrimination law. There's plenty of overlap between caste and many US protected classes, including race, class, and religion, but there is not a tight fit to any of them.

Perhaps countries like the UK have more experience with this, because they have proportionally much larger and older Indian populations, and also the UK has its own historical hereditary caste like system.

It's the equivalent of hiring white supremacists and letting them make employment decisions.

It does seem a lot like that. And I did find an article which suggests that caste and skin color are associated:[0]

> Our understanding of the genetics of skin pigmentation has been largely skewed towards populations of European ancestry, imparting less attention to South Asian populations, who behold huge pigmentation diversity. Here, we investigate skin pigmentation variation in a cohort of 1,167 individuals in the Middle Gangetic Plain of the Indian subcontinent. Our data confirm the association of rs1426654 with skin pigmentation among South Asians, consistent with previous studies, and also show association for rs2470102 single nucleotide polymorphism. Our haplotype analyses further help us delineate the haplotype distribution across social categories and skin color. Taken together, our findings suggest that the social structure defined by the caste system in India has a profound influence on the skin pigmentation patterns of the subcontinent. In particular, social category and associated single nucleotide polymorphisms explain about 32% and 6.4%, respectively, of the total phenotypic variance. Phylogeography of the associated single nucleotide polymorphisms studied across 52 diverse populations of the Indian subcontinent shows wide presence of the derived alleles, although their frequencies vary across populations. Our results show that both polymorphisms (rs1426654 and rs2470102) play an important role in the skin pigmentation diversity of South Asians.

0) Mishra et al. (2017) Genotype-Phenotype Study of the Middle Gangetic Plain in India Shows Association of rs2470102 with Skin Pigmentation. Journal of Investigative Dermatology: 137, 670-677. doi:10.1016/j.jid.2016.10.043

https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(16)32648-3/pdf

@dsr_ I'd argue it is more of a clique/cluster thing - very common in the bay area. A couple of people get hired and bring 'their' people in, whether from Indiana or Iran. They have the all important inside track on information and hiring criteria and help bolster the first in's career. It's a huge HR problem (and HR are typically oblivious, more interested in hiring and firing to order)

How so? From TFA, I get that all of the relevant parties are from India.

I was commenting more broadly

Kind of, except with caste the "racial" categories have repeatedly both smoothed out and discretized over the millenia, though always with a with a hierarchy. It's a far more complicated system of discrimination and social ordering than the traditional black/white dichotomy of American discrimination.

Sophistication doesn't make racism better.

I didn't mean to imply it was better. If anything it is even worse because it attempts to hide the aspects of it that come from racism.

Sorry to say it, but I believe there will always be groups of people who unjustifiably feel they are superior to another group of people.

People in the US can feel however they want, but they don't get to discriminate on the basis of protected group status.

"The suit alleges that Iyer told other workers the employee was Dalit and had gained entry into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology through affirmative action."

Indian law explicitly requires a much lower standard of admission for the lower castes. Is it illegal to take consideration of this fact?

I suspect so. Affirmative action laws would be meaningless, otherwise.

I couldn't read the article because of the paywall.

I'm going to assume the person in question graduated from IIT as well as gained entry. If so, I don't see how it matters if he got in through a door with a lower bar, if he graduated, he graduated. Unless graduating from IIT is a rubber stamp for showing up?

Also, just because the bar is lower for admissions doesn't mean that people who cleared the bar couldn't have cleared the bar otherwise. I don't see how IIT entrance exam scores are relevant for employment at Cisco anyway.

It depends on what theory you believe about why a university degree is valuable. If you see it as a competitive signal of how many people a candidate was better than, then the signal is contaminated.

One might feel the same about an African American graduate of MIT, but it'd be illegal to discriminate based on it.

Ivy League degrees are worthless to most employers except for what they say about how you score (or who your parents are) and this signal is unavailable to those who benefit from lowered admission standards. Does anyone actually think that you learn anything of substance better at the University of Pennsylvania than at the University of Iowa?

Haha, Spot on!

It's rare that any single, isolated statement or action will rise to the level of illegal discrimination. Usually there's a pattern of behavior, and that pattern would provide context to prove any alleged implications in bringing up the affirmative action programs. You'd have to read the actual complaint. The journalist is only giving highlights that they feel are newsworthy, which may not strongly correlate to legal significance. However, mentioning the discussion of color is probably exceedingly important. The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination based on color explicitly illegal. Without that hook it might be more difficult to argue that Federal civil rights legislation applies to discrimination based on caste.

Yes, it is discrimination as the premise is that "merit" is inborn and fixed. So the fact that someone came in through affirmative action is trotted out as incontrovertible evidence that they are of inferior birth aka an inferior caste.

It's an interesting situation.

Discrimination based on something not common in one country can still have negative impacts.... but perhaps it hasn't been sorted out legally in our country yet?

We live in a strange global world.

Yeah well sounds about right, entirely possible.

Will this be a precedent setting case?

Laughs in Californian

This is rich coming from a state that introduced a bill like ACA-5.

shocking but still confused. When they practiced the indian caste system in the US, how would they interact with people not from india, e.g. people with US, EU, Vietnam, Korea etc background? Do they get treated as "high caste" or "low caste" people?

Caste is highly correlated to skin pigmentation, so in practice... this would be almost indistinguishable from regular old racism.

It's not at all highly correlated, and skin color certainly wouldn't trump real caste affiliation.

Additionally, there's north/south discrimination, with greater antipathy from southern Indians against northern Indians.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23799512 for a recent paper which reports that it is.

As a Hindu I'd like to take the opportunity to share that the implementation of the caste system is not based on what it really means to be Hindu. The Vedas state that one's caste is fluid (not based on lineage) and can change in one's lifetime, and that further a person of the worker class is not lesser than someone of the priest caste, they both perform dharma necessary for the community.

are you defending the caste system?

It sounds like he's defending _a_ caste system, but probably not the one you're thinking of.

caste system would have no problems. Caste discrimination is the problem. Every religion and Entire world has caste system in one form or the other. otherwise there would be no fights.

> Every religion and Entire world has caste system in one form or the other.

Except one thing isn't like another. If you think otherwise, I'd appreciate examples.

> caste system would have no problems. Caste discrimination is the problem.

That's like saying, apartheid isn't the problem, the ensuing discrimination is?

No, the other reply has it right - I'm just pointing out that what we see of as the caste system is not what is originally intended. It should not be about inequality

I'm also Hindu. It's quite obvious that caste and lineage are immanent within much of our cultural patrimony. I don't mean to get into an ideological debate but there is no point to this pretense.

Sorry, to which pretense?

Not an expert on the Vedas thus not sure if any value judgement is made regarding the varnas in it or not but I am definitely SURE it nowhere says that all "varnas" are equal and that mobility between varnas is possible or based on one's "merit". the varna division just by articulation implies a hierarchy. Who wouldn't see the priestly class, the keepers of knowledge, as superior than the sewage workers? Saying that the Vedas say that caste is not based on lineage is utmost tomfoolery. Show me any instance in history where this mobility has been possible; is or was there some kind of "merit committee" in India who decides which caste you belong to, that i have heard nothing of? Which brahmin or other upper caste parent would willingly let their child be judged for which caste they should belong to by merit, be this at any point in history or present? By saying this all you are doing is revising history and saving the face of scripture you deem "holy" and "flawless". At the very least Vedas are definitely not the latter.

How are you definitely sure of this while simultaneously claiming you don't know very much about the Varna system as the Vedas outline it?

You're also missing my point - of course people have abused the Varna system, but that's not how it has been described that it should be so.

This is from "Living with Siva":

> The original caste system had these four divisions. The divisions were all based on the ability of the individual to manage his body, his mind and his emotions properly. If he stopped fulfilling the dharma of his caste, society would recognize that he had moved from one caste and was now in another. The original caste system was based on self-discipline through education and through personal sadhana. The original caste system was based on the unfoldment of the consciousness within each individual through the fourteen chakras.

> People everywhere naturally divide themselves up into castes. We have the workers. You go to work, you work under somebody else--that happens all over the world--that's the shudra caste. We have the merchants, who are self-motivated. That's the vaishya caste. We have the politicians and the lawmakers and the law-enforcement people. That's the kshatriya caste. And then you have the priests, the ministers, the missionaries. That's the brahmin caste. Every society has these four castes working within it in one way or another. In today's world, if one is not fulfilling the dharma of his born caste, then he changes castes. For instance, if a brahmin husband and wife are working eight to fifteen hours a day in a hospital under others, they are no longer of the brahmin caste, because they are not performing the duties of the dharma of that caste. They are workers, in the shudra caste.

Caste system can find its roots in Hindu texts, although just like other religious texts it is possible to defend it interpretation. For example, Shambuka's story [1]. In any case, the only credible interpretation will be to see the implementation in practice.

Caste system is modern day slavery or worse, and unless you're Indian (and especially unless you're from a caste lower down the hierarchy) it's difficult to comprehend. It's woven into the social fabric - even people's names carry their caste so it's often possible to discriminate or favor immediately on introduction. People usually do not marry castes lower in the hierarchy, so this is perpetuated over generations. It's changing, but not fast enough.

For those who are unfamiliar:

- Untouchability still exists in a big way in India. Even today, many Brahmins don't touch (or share meals, space etc) with Shudras. Yeah, not kidding.

- Caste based discrimination at the work place is rampant. Which is a big reason why there are fewer lower castes in the org hierarchy.

- Violence against lower castes happen every day.

- The situation continues to be so bad that there exist elaborate laws to make sure you don't get insulted or harmed over caste. [2]

- Caste is (nearly always) assigned at birth.

Finally, I don't wanna get into Godwin's law territory. But Indians should refrain from arguing about the merits of the caste system, in the same way nobody ever says "but Nazism isn't all bad."

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambuka

[2]: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/globalcaste/caste0801-03.ht...

People should stop defending the caste system. I've seen people explain it on FB like how it was misconstrued or what we see today came from the British.

Call it out for what it is, even if it was in the Vedas, literature or God said it personally. We should change our beliefs as we mature, take what's right or question what's not.

It was never about a person's role, it was a tool of oppression by a group that wanted to rule over others, where each sub-group did this to groups below them and so on. People who had the same color, kept other people of same color below them, because they were from a lower caste. This is worse than racism.

If it wasn't that worse, then the constitution of India wouldn't have articles prohibiting caste based discrimination or declaring untouchability illegal.

Even if the caste system that is today was from the British or Mughals, people did follow it for centuries under their rule. Why didn't they follow their dharma and treate those from other caste with dignity? It doesn't make sense. In reality, British and the Mughals used the existing system for their own advantage, to divide and rule.

Even if we have laws to prevent caste discrimination, unless it goes out the window socially, we would regress back to the dark ages.

> We can see around us the deterioration of the system which has been abused beyond the point of recognition. Members of the brahmin caste are now beating their children, abusing their wives. Members of the kshatriya caste disrespect the laws of the land. Members of the business caste are deceptive and dishonest. All are confused, living in anger and in jealousy. No wonder their families break apart and their businesses fail. In the eyes of the Gods, most of those who adhere to the caste system that exists today are low caste. This is because they live in lower consciousness. They look at the world through the windows of the chakras below the muladhara. These undeveloped humans are struggling through the lower chakras, trying to get out of the dark worlds of the mind. Let us not be deluded about what the sapta rishis had in mind when they casted humans according to the soul's unfoldment in one or more of the fourteen chakras. We should totally ignore the Hindu caste system as lived in India today and, through example, show a better and more wholesome path for modern society.

From "Living with Siva"

The word for caste in sanskrit is Varna, which literally means 'Colour', it is a colour based racial system. Otherwise I dont see what purpose does it serve other than classifying people like a canines.

It's to help society be more organized so that we can collectively work together better.

From "Living with Siva"

I guess it was working very efficiently at dividing the society which made it very easy for outside forces to conquer India multiple times. India has seen so many waves of invasion where Indians are fighting other Indians.

I think that's an oversimplification. The varna dharma system was no in place universally, as all over the world, humans are still human and subject to corruption.

Classification is segregation if people are free to take any job there is no classification required. It was a short sighted system, a modern economy works by people participating in it by exchange of skill/work for money. There is no scientists caste , no computer programmer caste all that exists is peoples skills, ability to up skill and take a job as they qualify. Todays Programmer could be tomorrows priest, CEO or politician. Also economy and society as a result is much wider than 4 Groups of the Hindu caste system. It is a terrible system no matter how you look at it. My understanding is it was a reservation for Jobs for certain class of people from them to their sons and daughters which was codified in religious texts or law giving books of the time. Not only something like that vicious but out right unethical.

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