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Comment by jerzyt | Hacker News Reader

What's shocking is that this caste system is being continued in the US. US is oblivious to this system, very few people have any understanding of this, yet it affects success in the corporate world. Obviously, there's enough Indian presence in the business to influence it, but it's flying under the US corporate culture. I've worked with many Indian coworkers in the tech industry, and now I'm rethinking some of the connections I've observed.

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> What's shocking is that this caste system is being continued in the US.

There are no overseas communities of majority Indian subcontinental origin that maintain rigid caste distinctions. Not even Mauritius which is majority ethnic Indian or Fiji or Guyana where they’re about half the population. Caste will not be maintained in America for the same reason no ethnic group maintains itself without religious endogamy or continuing immigration; People socialize and mate with those they spend time with unless there are powerful reasons not to. All will be assimilated in time.

Your being naive Caste discrimination does exit in communities overseas in the UK for example.

I believe you. It just doesn’t matter. Once immigration stops these people will all dissolve into the general population like the Huegenots, Flemings or other old ethnic groups. When mass immigration from the subcontinent stops caste based discrimination will go from a lot less than in India/Pakistan/Bangladesh to non-existent in short order.

That's going to be a long time.

Look at northern inland there are places in Ireland and parts of Scotland and even the USA where I would have to be careful as I am a product of a mixed marriage and I also was a a "crown servant for 15 years" and have a southern ie catholic last Name.

Parts of the UK that have so much immigration from India that the local population are majority desi are few and far between. There’s nothing like historical Irish immigration to Britain. Scottish Catholics before 1970 or so were all descendants of the Irish and that’s what ~40% of the Scots? There were so many Irish in Liverpool they elected Irish Parliamentary Party MPs before the Irish Civil War. And still assimilation proceeds rapidly. Wayne Rooney Player for England, not Ireland. Out marriage is the death of ethnic identity. Look at the US. There are actually people identify as White, or as Asian American. How far does a Chinese, Vietnamese or Japanese person have to be divorced from their culture to think the most important thing about their ethnic identity is their skin color? Similar dynamic earlier in US history when the ethnic marriage markets collapsed into religion bounded marriage markets, when Herberger wrote Catholic Protestant Jew. Once people are willing to marry out assimilation is a matter of time absent continued immigration. Irish immigration to the US dropped off a cliff in the 1990s. One day South Boston will be known for some other group, not the Irish, just like Little Italy turns into Chinatown.

I've seen it explicitly at work in the US, e.g. in choosing which partners to marry.

Ironically, it is breaking down in India because of female infanticide creating a skewed gender distribution (around 1.14:1, when the natural distribution is 1.05:1), and men having no choice but to look outside their caste if they want to marry.

I was told US Indian diaspora has disproportionate high caste due to historic migration patterns which lets the system self-perpetuate more readily. At least that's the experience repeated by Canadian Indians who works in the US. All will be assimilated in time, but some issues needs to be addressed actively.

I think a counterpoint to this view is that Englishmen with Norman last names still make more money than average.[1] Despite the fact that the British regime hasn't discriminated along the Norman-Saxon divide since the 1300s.

I doubt if the average English person today is really even consciously aware of the Anglo-Normans being higher class. Certainly there's no easily visible divide or overt discrimination in modern times. Yet the legacy of the caste system left by William the Conqueror continues to shape society a thousand years later.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/842...

Same same but different “The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence”: https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...

>> What's shocking is that this caste system is being continued in the US.

As a low caste Hindu who grew up in India, it is not at all shocking to me. In-fact Dr.Ambedkar, the lead author of Indian Constitution, wrote "If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem."[1] and he is proven right.

The reason Indians continue the caste system wherever they go is because, it is ingrained in the Hindu religion. Caste system and the religion are inseparable. Ambedkar realized that it is impossible to get out of the clutches of the caste system as long as one is Hindu. Hence he said “I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of an Untouchable. However, it is not my fault; but I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power.”[2] and he converted to Buddhism.

1. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_...

2. https://time.com/5770511/india-protests-br-ambedkar/

I think more Americans notice than you think. We just keep our mouths shut because there is absolutely no upside to saying anything.

> What's shocking is that this caste system is being continued in the US.

Is it so shocking though? The US has its own sordid history of caste-like discrimination in work, civic, and personal life, as the African American community can attest to. Huge portions of the US had anti-miscegenation laws on the books up until 50 ago [1]

If anything, many of the patterns of discrimination in the US line up quite nicely with those that arrived with some (though not all) Indian immigrants.

This has frequently resulted in a stark schism between the older generation of Indian immigrants, many of whom readily adopted the US' racist attitudes toward African Americans, Mexicans, etc, and their American children, who often have nearly the opposite perspective.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws_in_the...

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