How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
What can be done about the above? Do racial discrimination laws even apply to the selection of H1B holders? The company was already getting away with favoring visa holders over citizens and permanent residents so there was no reason for them to fear not being able to get away with excluding Indian candidates due to our head of software engineering having a personal grudge against India. The only reason why I was hired was because they had a client with a need for someone with deep knowledge of Microware OS-9, which wasn't something they were able to find in their usual sources of employee candidates. Makes me wonder how many of these companies silently exist as black boxes that no one outside knows what discrimination is going on inside of them.
I went to visit them once. (Always a good idea to personally get to know people who work on your stuff!) They're in Odisha, in the east of India.
I asked the group, over lunch, about the caste system. Everybody agreed that it was a thing of the past and a historical shame.
But, later, each team member found a private way to tell me they came from Brahmin (top caste) families. It was really interesting to see how it played out.
Is it possible that human nature relentlessly drives us to this sort of tribalism? It shows up as racism in the western hemisphere, the caste system in India, the class system in England and their former colonies, and so forth.
At any rate, resisting this tribalism is hard work. But do that work we must. It's helpful to this westerner to learn about the caste system. I suppose it's equally helpful to people from India to learn about American racism.
News from today: Woman married a lower-caste guy, eloped, families lodged missing person complaint in Police, Police found the married couple and handed them over to their families. Woman's brother beheads his brother-in-law, sister hangs herself.
https://twitter.com/ShoaibDaniyal/status/1370344548535177216
I mean, that sounds precisely analogous to lynching black people for holding certain kinds of jobs, having wealth, or smiling at a white woman.
I know extremely little about India so it is possible that I am entirely ignorant. But the situations you describe here sound like 1:1 matches to racist violence in the US.
But you'd be wrong, since it involves active, current racism by legislators, police, prosecutors, judges, jurors, and witnesses, among others, not just “autopilot” racism in the way people in the a more racist past set up the system.
i could add some more examples.
sunni-shia conflict,
arab muslim vs non-arab muslim,
rich vs poor
punjabi muslim vs bengali muslim (what caused 1971 bangladesh war)
Few years back, an indian muslim went to join caliphate and fight for ISIS. he was made to clean toilets because Arab muslims treated/thought indian muslims are inferior and not good enough for jihad.
There's also this tam-bram pat where people feel janeu (can be worn only by upper caste hindu men), you don't even have to ask last name...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/27/indian-...
https://thewire.in/caste/cisco-case-caste-discrimination-sil...
Here is another good article which says the same and the dubious role HAF is playing in order to advance Hindu Upper Caste's systemic oppression. Please note, HAF is run by all Hindu Upper Caste people, and they are invested in this case so as to not set a precedent.
On the surface, it seems that the HAF is inserting itself to argue a side point. The core issue is about whether caste is a protected category, and whether discrimination actually occurred at Cisco. HAF isn't really talking about that at all! Instead, they're just trying to make sure that court documents don't describe the caste system as "part of Hinduism". On the face of it, that doesn't seem so bad.
Now, I do see that some people view this as a diversionary tactic by the HAF, and that it should not to be taken at face value:
> According to Anil Wagde of the Ambedkar International Center, HAF’s intervention is an attempt to obfuscate the matter and confuse the court.
It seems you also do not take HAF's objections at face value?
But on the surface, their demands are -- a little distracting, but basically orthogonal. It feels like the solution to this is to say, "fine, we'll change the language used here (i.e., the description of Hinduism), and then get on with dealing with the core issue (i.e., the discrimination)".
Come to think of it this "Attribute quotes to people and then say 'read the (paywalled) article' when someone asks for context" strategy seems like a pretty good way to spread misinformation.
Edit: Okay did some googling and found the source statement. That tweet is definitely a very bad faith misreading of HAF's statement which says:
> In its complaint, California argues that Cisco failed to address discrimination against one of its engineers by co-workers on the basis of his presumed caste. California goes on to state that caste is “a strict Hindu social and religious hierarchy” and therefore an integral part of Hindu teachings and practices. Framing its argument in this way, California is attempting to do what the Constitution clearly says it cannot, HAF said: defining Hindu religious doctrine for Hindus.
In other words, HAF isn't saying discrimination is a Hindu right. They're saying it's inappropriate for US Courts to define what constitutes "Hindu belief systems." This sounds appropriate since setting precedent in a court that defines anyone who professes belief in Hinduism as being casteist a priori would basically be opening the door to religious discrimination.
And in the case of "Hinduism" this is extra complicated, because there is no central authority, and barely even a core "religion" in the manner of monotheisms. "Hinduism" barely exists (some people say it's just a word invented by the Britishers); it's a loose confederation of Shaivism, Vaishnavism, etc; it's amorphous. It's hard to say what is and isn't a "core belief". Whenever you try to grasp it, it will slip out of your hand.
A jati is what people talk about when they talk about 'caste.' They're sort of like large, extended kinship groups analogous to Clans in Scotland. These groups all have associated vocations akin to how in the West we have stereotypes like linking Jews with banking or Koreans with dry cleaning. There's all sorts of legal, practical, and historical reasons why these associations take hold. And since they have associated vocations, they have associated Socio-economic-status markers as well. It's not all that different from ethnic discrimination except more concentrated and formalized since it has a much longer history.
Untouchability is kind of a special category. Those groups were sort of pre-designated as being outside the pale of polite society. This was largely informal and variegated around India but become codified around the late Gupta empire (around 500-600AD). There was still a sort of group or ethnicity-based form of social mobility around this time. My own jati, for example, would have been considered among the lowest of the low in antiquity but by the time of the British Raj they had became more of a "middle-tier" caste. This was much more common in South India than in the North where the lines were never very formalized or rigid. There are all sorts of records of geneologies being created to link caste groups to mythological heroes to raise their profiles.
The British Raj--by creating a sub-continent-wide government, a census, and a literal-to-the-letter interpretation of Hindu law books that exaggerated the traditional influence and role of priestly castes--ended up hardening and ossifying these pre-existing cultural mores into hard rules that we're living with to this day. You notice a big difference in older diasporic Hindu communities, such as in the West Indies where Indians were brought over as bonded labor. Most high-caste brahmins absolutely did not go because of a superstition around losing your caste if you cross the ocean. BUT they still observe many of the same rituals and religious rites. It turns out there were low-caste/low-status mendicant priests around. They just weren't the high-status ones that the Raj and Western anthropologists talked to when they started defining what "Hinduism" is.
General cutoff in 2015 ( my batch ) = 105 marks out of 360
Sc/st/marginalised group cutoff marks = 52.5 marks out of 360.
Its literally cut to half and the author says its NOT as far below as is commonly assumed.
There is still more to it. You would think that it benefits the SC/ST/marginalised group but the truth is the entrance exam is so tough that unless you are quite well to do to go to a coaching institute you wouldnt even crack it. The main benefit of the caste system in entrance test doesnt go to the poor rural area kids who come from lower caste but the kids from metro cities who are already pretty rich go to the big schools have a very good formal education and fortunately have a SC/ST/Caste card to present during exams.
It feels like shit when you work and toil as hard as your dads colleague's son ( both of us have gone to the same school since we were kids, both of our dads earn the exact same ) and still end up in a bad college whereas the other kid with SC/ST/Quota card goes to a very good govt college.
I scored a decent 140/360 and still got a worse rank and worse college than my friend who scored 100/360.
I am all up for quota students who come from rural villages and dont have a good economic background but in reality its the rich metro sc/st/ kids who were already as privelaged as me who get it easy.
It's not about the income level. It's about the social injustice those people have endured for all these ages. These reservations are nothing but a minor apology from our society to these communities.
Naah, absolutely never.
As I said I have absolutely NO objection/problem with SC/ST/OBC/single girl students getting a better shot at education through quota if they had an underpreviliged childhood because of financial difficulties and caste based discrimination. But guys from big cities going to the same coaching institutes coming from same economic background, having a privileged life playing the SC/ST/OBC card is just plain pathetic.
This is not just "A MINOR APOLOGY" its something that can literally change the course of your life.
To my fellow Indian-Americans : we need to be adults and stop being so defensive about anything critical about our community. While we can be justifiably be proud of our community's success, but also need to be aware that we are also eminently capable of folly, and alert to some of the disturbing undercurrents in our community. I feel we absolutely need to take these charges seriously, just as we would sexism or racism in America.
Have you not seen a single matrimonial advertisement in the US for members of the Indian community or back home in India?
I find the statement perplexing having lived in India for a while and having professional relationships with many from the region.
However, I didn't see any overt casteism, I would play and be best buds with people of other castes. With caste being somewhat akin to how Americans think of ancestry. AFAIK my parents and their colleagues never once brought caste into any of our interactions. But it could very well be my upper middle-class and urban upbringing and not representative.
1. I know people in my friend circle here in USA who refuse to invite people from lower caste into their home. One even had separate set of tea cups for lower caste friends to serve tea in. In india lower caste people are not allowed to enter the homes of higher caste people.
2. indians in usa form their friends group based on their nationality/language/region/caste in that order. While I don't think intent is malicious, its still a problematic mindset.
3. 99% of indians marry within their own caste. South Asia has on the highest levels of endogamy in the world.
4. I am skeptical that there is caste baste discrimination in workplaces though. But there might still be subconscious bias.
on 3: looks like its around 95%
"We thought the Brahmin priests could perform the ritual, without coming into our house but they refused," he says. "All they offered was a very short naming ceremony."
"Eventually we found a priest from Adelaide who directed me over the phone to perform the ritual. I felt it wasn't my father-in-law who died, it was me who was dying."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-11/caste-system-of-india...
Planet Money has an excellent episode[1] on caste-based discrimination in the workplace—in Silicon Valley specifically. I'm not very knowledgeable about such things, but it was an interesting (an aggravating) listen as an outsider.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/14/923736245/caste-arrives-in-si...
1. Maintaining separate cups is a social oddity. my mom follows the same principle. House members have their own cups/plates, guests have their own cups/plates. even if my relatives come to my home they will use guest set. My mom protests if i eat in my sister's plate. Nothing related to caste.
Lower caste people banned from entering homes is a bit of a stretch. Are you saying upper caste people are getting their water filter serviced with upper caste repairmen? They will allow whoever the water filter company sends them.
I went to homes of all my college classmates and dined in their homes, none of the parents stopped me and asked my caste before entering.
2. this is accurate with some minor changes. i have been in all 4 groups. forming a support circle is easier with something in common.
3. i highly doubt its 99%. you are just pulling these numbers out of thin air. In my small family circle, i can count 1 inter-religion marriage, 5 inter-caste marriage. i am not even in a metro city. i can put the number as 80%-20%
4. i agree with subconcious bias. its hard to measure. it may be there. it may not be there.
Not based on any formal survey but my perception is 80-20 tilts towards higher caste population believing in superiority of their caste. I would also add many believe reservations for backward caste is unfair.
Hindu nationalist movement (ruling party and its offshoots) will have a positive impact on caste conversation in India for sure. Unfortunately prejudice will be directed against minority religions as a result.
One important aspect the article did not mention is the impact of religion and conversion among Dalits that gave them a ticket (not always the case) out of caste based discrimination. Slowly but steadily religious rights have been taken away from them by the right leaning governments post independence.
better to be safe than sorry.
What I'm curious about is, do they go OTT with it? I know for my country folk, something about moving overseas seems to compel us to wear All Black paraphernalia far more than we do home, and also, the drunken 3am hakas outside a kebab shop, far more commonly encountered overseas than in NZ itself.
I know one of the MP's that helped add caste discrimination to the UK's legal system - this probably ought to be added to the US laws as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPmAltGay3s
The episode shows contemporary discrimination against a woman of a so called "untouchable" caste. She is a PhD-holding lecturer at Delhi University, a major national research university. And even with her accomplishments, she sees discrimination in housing and in education. Of course, people without education or the accomplishments she has had deserve to live without prejudice as well.
I think a major problem is urban Indians or those who have migrated abroad not looking deeply into seeing how prevalent these issues actually are. I often hear that caste discrimination is a thing of the past or is on the way to oblivion from these folks. It's a bit maddening. More than 90% of urban Indians marry within their caste, and the number is at 95% for rural Indians. Now, multiply caste with language, dialect, economic class, education, skin color, and diet - you have a large number of complex identities that are seen as lesser by various groups. These don't necessarily form a total order, of course.
I am willing to bet, 100% of non-arranged marriages are outside of caste/religion. The dating scene is still in its infant stages, you can expect more inter-caste marriages when arranged marriages decline.
I want to point out that prevalence of same-caste marriage does not automatically translate to caste based discrimination.
For example, I am open to marrying other caste person, but if other caste persons are not willing to marry me (for whatever reason), and I end marrying in my caste. does it mean I discriminate others based on caste ?
if a white person marries another white person does it mean that white person is racist?
-Newspaper ads and matrimonial websites openly discriminate against castes and skin color. I can guarantee you that every single Indian you have worked with in the valley has discussed their "Match Type" at some point and this is almost always a discussion around an "Arranged wedding" where women and men are matched based on caste, skin color , wealth etc -The kid in the story is not an outlier but the norm. It isn't uncommon to hear stories about kids lynched by "Superior" castes because they dared soil the belongings of a higher caste person or were dating someone they weren't supposed to. (This isn't just India, but the general region around India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the extended communities that have immigrated to western nations) -Casual humor and memes around caste and skin tone is EXTREMELY common place and can be found on prime time TV, popular Facebook pages and groups liked by tens of thousands of immigrant communities. -The more modern youth generally don't appear to subscribe to these ideals, but there's no choice, very few break the mold.
It really is sad to see it first hand, i don't know what the solution is since it literally is a part of life in that part of the world
I'm not from India though, so I'm just repeating what I've heard about a system that makes no sense to me.
However, the government fucked up by baking caste based reservation systems into law, thus making it harder to eliminate the presence into oblivion.
It's also hard to dismiss caste as an ongoing issue when you find out that all but two out of 50+ engineers you worked with is Brahmin. (I only found that out through the one colleague who was close enough and open-minded enough to discuss such things with me BTW.) Ditto when you find out that one of those two exceptions had been repeatedly passed over for promotion despite being twice as skilled as some of those who were promoted. Once you start looking, the patterns become clear.
When considering these issues from outside, though, it's important to realize how entangled they are with another aspect of Indian culture: high context. Even among people of the same caste, there's a strong idea of social position and "right behavior" with respect to that. Whenever we very-senior Americans came to visit, the jockeying over who was invited to meetings and who was allowed to speak in them was almost comical. Often, the person speaking was clearly unfamiliar with work that had been done by someone more junior. That was considered quite normal.
There was also a darker side. On two separate occasions, people I had formed strong working relationships with were completely shunned by most of their local colleagues because they were perceived as "jumping the queue" by associating with me. After that, I started paying attention to these relationships. If I wanted to speak directly with the junior person who had actually done some work, I made sure to do it as discreetly (even secretively) as possible. I wouldn't mention it to their status-conscious seniors; instead I'd send feedback directly to top-level people who did their reviews and knew how to handle such sensitive communication properly.
Please note that I'm not criticizing Indians here. Having seen how my fellow Americans treat "outsiders" even without an ancient caste system, I doubt that many of them would do better within one. But there are definitely differences in social behavior (the "never say 'no'" thing is another) that anyone working with many Indians either in India or elsewhere would do well to learn.
This is not unbelievable but this large a number is quite surprising. 48/50 from various "upper castes" is quite common though.
Nepotism is rampant though, not unbelievable.
The reason caste still exists as an issue in India, is because 1. It is bought up every now and then, during elections or by the media to add fuel to an already burning issue. 2. It is used as an excuse to flout laws or treat a fellow human being as trash and maintain superiority over them. 3. Lack of education or a general lack of interest in knowledge which leads to people believing what they are told rather then trying to understand what is. (could be more reasons as well which I am not be aware of)
Indians who are brought up in an environment where there is constant mixing of cultures, castes or religions typically do not bother about which caste or religion the person sitting next to them or having lunch with them. Like children of expats studying in the same school, places where political or economic situations bring/force people to exist together like labour camps in the middle east or communism dominated towns in Kerala.
The above group cannot/do not act on this issue because any concern raised over division by caste is immediately countered with whataboutism or alienation(even being disowned by family), which forces most educated Indians to go with the flow rather than oppose it. There are even outliers in this group that profit out of the divide like those who influence the first point stated above.
This extremely vulgar expression of privilege on my part mainly offends what we would call the petit bourgeois here, where working people tend to find the lack of pretense a relief. This is the horror of being middle class anywhere, because it's living with the fear of exposure that we aren't really all that different from the people we were raised to hate.
Welcome, my Indian sisters and brothers! We are more alike than we ever knew. :)
Look IITians are often entitled, opinionated and in rare cases obnoxious.
But never during my 5 years in IIT KGP, I have ever felt casteism among students and even amongst alumni after that.
Initially during freshman year there’s a slight sense of resentment against quota (affirmative action for lower castes) students but all of that evaporates as quota and non-quota students alike progress.
The whole point of getting advanced degrees is to shed the ignorance and discrimination and pursue what’s interesting, work with the brightest and of course make a better life for oneself.
Being casteist and discriminatory doesn’t take anyone far in life.
I really hope reports like these are media exaggerations and entitled casteist are very very few.
I have worked my whole life to ascend over this garbage. I don’t want this stupid discourse to follow me now!
Also upper castes continue to propagate caste names in naming children which acts as a badge to upper caste identity.
Important positions in both government and industry seems to be filled with people from the upper castes.
I've worked with IITians and this is very accurate. They also refuse to consider alternate opinions, because if their opinion is not accepted, they assume that it would damage their careers.
I also know of one team that hired all IITians to boost their output. Lots of "white papers" but not much action. After a year, the whole group of IITians were upset because they weren't promoted, demonstrate low engagement with other teams and eventually left. It was funny to watch that team self-destruct because it went from the golden team to the team no division wanted in 12 months.
Ppl still want to keep old systems in place because their parents have brain washed them into thinking that they're upper caste and that Hindu Khatre mein hai
Overtly discrimination will happen less but covertly ot happens a lot.
But the good news is that not everyone is like that so we are slowly progressing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India
Some strange observations for me from the article:
- There's 200M people in the world born into a life where they are/were considered physically untouchable by other "higher-ranked" people around them
- The usage of the label "backwards" in “other backwards classes,” or OBCs. I'll chalk it down to English not being the native language, but "disadvantaged" is more appropriate as "backwards" has a negative meaning.
I wonder if a better solution for the mental health of these people at the IITs is to simply have their own IIT where they make up the bulk of the student population. Then again, they might face discrimination by "upper-caste" professors refusing to work there or being "that" IIT that tech companies shouldn't hire from.
To the Americans on HN: is this type of discrimination comparable to being born as an African American in a city like Baltimore?
personally, i am against it. we already have schools which only accept specific religion (muslims, christians) and cross religion interaction is sorely missing and causing a rift right from childhood.
I have much easier solution which can eliminate caste altogether.
When british was signing up Indians for indentured labor in Caribbean, British offered to give fresh set of identity (like witness protection in US) to anyone who agreed to go to Caribbean. every one chose brahmin surnames.
When Indians finally arrived at Caribbean, all Indians were brahmins. when all are brahmins, being a brahmin stopped being special.
Indian government should 1. give an option to change surnames. OR 2. stop recording first name/last name/family name in all official documents. 3. stop recording caste as part of aadhar/official census/all governement documents.
if goal is to have a society with out discrimination, lets start doing it. that should push us towards a caste free society.
Not Indian but major respect for this man!
If you are part of a tiny sect it matters not at all, the others in your new group are happy to have anyone. If you are part of a very large sect then there is a need to divide into smaller groups because a person can only have so many friends and caste is an the fallback to divide on.
Most people have family of other religion, and so they often do something about family. Sometimes that means other-cast friends in the religion are kept apart from family, sometimes it means they are thrown in the face of family as a way to show how different they are.
I know more about Christian practice than Muslims. I suspect the same logic applies but I'm not sure.
one of the data point they ask 'caste preference'.
caste is a social nuisance, not a religious one.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rough-translation/id12...
At a glance, caste discrimination seems like it would in fact make it harder for the upper classes to exploit the lower past a certain point, as it makes people very aware of their own interests. Social mobility is a wonderful thing, but it can help arguments for policy that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor fly under the radar.
Infact the European origin of the word caste, shows you how far the narrative is from reality.
People wanting to maintain a certain lifestyle is conflated with orthodoxy/discrimination.
Forcing someone used to generations of vegetarianism to use the same kitchen where meat is served. Jains who follow ahimsa, do not want to rent out their homes to meat eaters.
This is often labeled discriminatory, not by the Hindus themselves, but by the sjws.
In a poor country like India often people's occupation matches their family name.
The only difference is that Indians recognized the social mobility problems at the time of framing the constitution.
Social mobility is a problem that even a wealthy country like Germany faces. The fact that Indians recognize this and want to address it should not be ignored
Jesus was a carpenter because his father was a carpenter. If Jesus's workshop burt down and he wanted to rebuild he can always depend on the carpenter community to help him out.
Jesus wants to be part of the carpenter community as it serves him.
Truth is some sections of American society do not want immigrants to work there and these articles are born from the same mindset. India is losing its caste based social norms as the years pass by much faster than America is losing Black are inferior mindset. Even political changes have come in India which has narrowed the caste lines to almost extinction.
They usually plaster their caste names on the bike or number plate
I had two upper caste members in my Team. Both born after 1993.
How did I know they're upper caste?
They.always.reminded in every sentence
"in us Rajputs" or "in us Bramhins"
I have had 100s of member sin my team otherwise, some surnames which I've never heard before and yet I did not know their caste
Also these upper caste folks make groups based on their castes.
And they never let you forget which caste they belong to.
Every single conversation has to mention what "kulcha" they have back at home.
Caste system is reduced yes but it is not extinct.
Easiest way to see is how Political parties. Check who their top leaders/ministers are except the token Affirmative action hire.
I hope the Valley absorbs all of the world's horrible tech sociological antipatterns because I ejected from that heap. Transient gold miners descended on the place where I grew up, treated it disposably, and failed to make any effort to integrate because they're just visiting to make their coin. Sunnyvale Costco is like an airport in Burma (okay, Myanmar), not because of race, culture, or ethnicity, but because of the predominant "fuck it" attitude: don't learn the customs, don't speak the language, don't put down roots, and don't interact with locals. There are perfectly nice, Americanized immigrants like a good fraction of the TiE folks but when you bring in a junior software engineer's extended family, you're getting a swath of average people too... and that's like moving a crowd of random Floridian Disneyland-goers in for a temporary extended stay.
Also, I noticed how the offspring of the well-to-do from authoritarian countries act like, or even worse than, drunk American college students in the rest of the world. For example, I noticed mainland PRC kids pointing, laughing, harassing, and taking poverty porn pictures of homeless people in Palo Alto.
The fundamental flaw in humanity seems to be this absolute belief that they are the good guy and everyone else is the bad guy. Self reflection will reveal that we all live in the same spectrum of shittiness just coming in different flavours given circumstances.
Human nature is what it is. Bring enough of any group of people to another place, there will be cultural replacement.
What about the self reflection of those who let themselves be underpaid and displace the local culture for a quick buck? It seems like you're being sanctimonious.
The Bay Area can keep Man Jose, Sunnyvale, and the East bay. I avoid American yuppies without life experience and the precariat too, so don't feel too special.
If this phrase isn't an example of white privilege so despised here, I don't know what is.
But sure. Let's blame the workers who aren't in charge of policy or decision-making.
To complete that bingo, the only thing missing is an "I don't vote because the system is rigged" statement.
>The Bay Area can keep Man Jose, Sunnyvale, and the East bay. I avoid American yuppies without life experience and the precariat too, so don't feel too special.
"I avoid people based on their life experiences, but also you specifically because of where you are from, so don't feel too special"
To anyone wondering how casual racism looks like, you're welcome.
So what should these people do instead? Stay where they are and get paid much less?
These kids (huge majority from upper castes) are treated with too much deference at home by the parents, family and society. Since they are served well at home by servants and society when they go to foreign lands their expectations don’t change and they take the baggage with them. Mind you, they’re modulating the behavior a bit abroad because at home it’s even more pronounced.
And while SV is taken by DEI there are more than a few companies that lean very heavily to one foreign ethnicity to the exclusion of others. It’s an amusing contrast of signaling vs reality.
On the other hand, I’ve worked with nice ‘regular guys’ (from India) who had sloughed off any trappings of caste don’t have pretensions and they are a pleasure to work with and indeed contribute to our society.
Do not know which area you are from. But in practice most of the traditional "Upper caste" people are not rich enough for having servants. Their air of superiority comes from mere name of the caste and tribal feeling, but upper caste people will be dime a dozen in any given area and grow up like middle class kids.
Take melanin content, any other arbitrary physical attribute, or tribal identity: we know that leads to real -ists and -isms.
Independently, give kids more than others, like the rigged Monopoly game and watch as they take more shared food.
Combine these two patterns together, and it's easy to develop truly repugnant, entitled, greedy, mean people with permanent insouciance and shit-eating grins.
Mexico has no shortage of local culture, thankfully.
Sigh.
This comment above made me a bit sad.
People congregate with similar people. This is something torontonians have gotten over ages ago. Mingle if you want to, but also accept that not everyone is a lend-sugar-to-neighbor international social butterfly. NIMBYism isn't going to help.
You've just described a large amount of tech expats, no matter where they're from or what they're mining.
The fact of the matter is that OP's comment is good old-fashioned racism wrapped in fancy words to harness HN votes.
Your rhetoric is not that different from Trump's. I get that there are anxieties about the familiar culture of the place you grew up in changing due to immigration/migration from other parts of the country. However, no place in the history of the world was culturally static.
I mean, have you seen the waiting times for Indian US green cards? You may literally die of old age before getting through the queue right now. The system is structured to make them disposable temporary workers and not future American citizens. So why is it surprising that they act like it?
Edit: seems like thing have diverged since I had to worry about these things: The waiting time for non-Indian green cards is the same btw.
I had to suppress a laugh flash whenever an ICE agent wanted hard to find out if I wanted to illegally stay in the country. Why on earth would I?
I mean, sure there is, people just don't want to fix it for various reasons. For example, reform the H1B and Green Card processes. Make the H1B an actual path to a green card and citizenship which most people seem to want nowadays. Cap H1Bs per nation (so there's a clear concise path to citizenship if you're in the US) rather than Green Cards or increase the Green Card caps.
Blaming the people who are trying to make a better life for themselves by working within the system that those more wealthy than them have set up just seems very silly to me. Blame those who setup the system instead.
The solution is actually to clear the EB Green Card backlog with a one time allocation to all backlogged applicants followed by removing the per country cap.
Visa abuse is rampant at consulting companies... that are mostly Indian-owned! [0] This doesn't help the wait time for the legitimate cases.
[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...
Self-imposed by whom ? Why is the individual responsible for the actions of a whole group of people/companies?
It's not just me saying that, the Congressional Research Service has it in their report about removing country caps. If that happens then there is no reason for these companies to prefer hiring Indians over others. TLDR: The abuse that you speak of is the end result of the racist per country limits from 1964.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45447
>Others who favor eliminating the per-country ceiling contend that the current system discriminates against some foreign workers based on their country of origin, a characteristic they contend has little bearing on workers’ labor market contributions. Such proponents argue that the current system effectively ties immigrant workers to the employers that sponsor them for extended periods and invites potential exploitation. According to this perspective, employers who petition on behalf of prospective employment-based immigrants have disproportionate power over them. Because such employers can withdraw their petitions at will, they discourage foreign workers from negotiating for higher wages and/or improved working conditions.55 All else being equal, rational employers therefore benefit financially by sponsoring such workers who remain relatively immobile during their extensive waits to receive LPR status. Prospective immigrants who consider leaving their employers face the prospect of effectively forfeiting their pending employment-based immigrant petitions. If they cannot utilize another immigration pathway to remain in the United States, they must return to their home countries. In particular, Indian (and to a lesser extent Chinese and Filipino) nationals sit in much longer queues of pending employment-based petitions submitted to USCIS and visa applications to DOS than their counterparts from other countries.56 They consequently must wait the longest to obtain LPR status. Those who favor eliminating the per-country cap contend that such circumstances effectively encourage employers to sponsor prospective employment-based immigrants primarily from India.57 According to this perspective, de facto discrimination results on the basis of origin country, fostered partly by U.S. laws which otherwise prohibit most forms of labor market discrimination. The more that employers follow this hiring approach, the greater the queue of Indian prospective immigrants and the longer the waiting times for acquiring LPR status, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that may limit hiring of prospective employment-based immigrants from other countries. Proponents argue, therefore, that removing the per-country ceiling from employment-based immigrants would “level the playing field” by making immigrants from all countries more equally attractive to employers. If the per-country ceiling is eliminated and the current queue of pending petitions and visas is processed, proponents argue, employers would have no incentive to sponsor employment-based immigrants from any one country over others except based on conventional labor market criteria. As a result, waiting times for prospective employment-based immigrants to receive LPR status would ultimately equalize across countries of origin
There isn't a huge amount of difference between what you're saying and what the previous president had to say on immigrants coming to the US - "when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best". Which a lot of people find an extremely problematic perspective.
You're entitled to your opinion, but I find it a little ironic when your HN profile says you have:
> Love for all: LGBTQ+, BLM, poly, AGR, and misfits of the world unite.
Read it again. That’s precisely what happened, followed by clicking the person’s profile to move on to fundamentally shaming the person rather than the problematic idea. That’s a standard playbook in 2021 and it is absolutely not at all about what was actually said. It’s a mating dance for those with similar belief structures and the person being disagreed with is a passenger; the response is only marginally addressing the speaker.
This community can’t get enough of that conflict because the microcosm of people it represents themselves cannot. So it does well here. Other people peacock it, and before you know it, it’s our defining culture. It’s how talking about culture without disparaging other cultures gets risky, because of the pattern matching mechanic against a black and white list with no acknowledgment of grays. “You talked about race, therefore you’re racist” is increasingly logical to folks, and once that chum is in the water whatever point you may have had no longer matters.
If this was about the groups in his profile, it wouldn't be acceptable. The only reason his comment is acceptable is because he is picking on an easy target.
In this case, I think the commenter meant "xenophobic", based on the parallels to Trump's rhetoric.
The correct answer is that it’s a shibboleth to organize, and rally, like-minded people.
If you're going to assume everyone who thinks those things are real problems believes something pretty much nobody actually believes, more power to you I guess? Seems problematic. By which I mean "intellectually dishonest", maybe a bit of posturing for likeminded people, maybe a shibboleth to organize and rally like-minded people.
> The correct answer is that it’s a shibboleth to organize, and rally, like-minded people.
Well, you've clearly already made up your mind.
Fighting on social media is known to be pointless by most people. It is not the steady state of human nature. To keep doing it, and to do it passionately, the cause must be deemed important enough to consider throwing more shit into a pile of shit worthwhile within a limited lifespan, and that value calculus usually results in the moral framework I point out. It wasn’t even my main point; it was to counter the notion that these arguments pay any respect to civility or diplomacy (I mean, look even here).
Nobody worth listening to disagrees that those are extremely important issues within our societies. Some of us believe throwing bricks at each other in comments is counterproductive and don’t subscribe to partisan politics over real social issues. Calling someone’s views problematic, particularly when it’s a restating of their original point, is otherizing and is not a path to influencing people (roughly akin to “you’re on the wrong side” without explaining why).
Put it this way: one is either waging these cultural arguments to influence the viewpoint they find disagreeable or to remove that viewpoint from the discussion. There is no third option. If the approach is “that idea is problematic,” implicitly that tack supports concluding that the goal is removal, which undermines tackling those real social issues by driving the alternative opinion to darker corners where nobody is left to influence them in the direction you’re hoping.
Now look around in general and tell me I’m wrong.
The original examples:
1. The "Jewish Question" or "Jewish Problem" -- ideas from the then-intelligencia that led to the "Final Solution" of the Holocaust [1].
2. The "woman problem" (which had no similarly dramatic "solution") [2].
The current usage of "problematic" is an intentional "turning of the tables", an inversion of that previous use of language. The people who began this trend of inversion did so deliberately, knowing that they were playing with fire, since in the past those word-games had led to genocide.
A similar inversion of "ressentiment" [3] also happened. At one time it was used for antisemitic purposes; now you're more likely to see it wielded against Trumpists.
Over time, the weapons of one side can, and will, be appropriated by the other.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Question
> “Chiva,” his uncle said. Goat, the Mexican slang term for black tar heroin. “This is how we make our money.” Cora Indian campesinos grew the poppies in the mountains above Xalisco. They harvested the opium goo from the flowers and sold it to cookers whom Enrique’s uncles knew. A newly cooked kilo of vinegary, sticky chiva would head north in a boom box or a backpack within a couple days, virtually uncut, and often hit L.A. streets only a week after the goo was drawn from the poppy. As Enrique’s uncle spoke, he rolled little pieces of the gunk into balls the size of BBs.
"Dreamland" https://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate-Epidem...
very scientific, thank you Hacker News
The heroin resurgence came on the back of enterprising Mexicans who took advantage of loose sentencing of small amounts and rampant Oxy addicts looking for alternatives.
> In two years, from 1995 to 1997, Boise’s minor market had a half-dozen crews selling heroin like pizza. But that wasn’t all. From the wiretaps, Ruplinger heard Polla call Phoenix, Ontario, El Monte, Salt Lake, Portland, Billings, Las Vegas, Honolulu. If Boise had a half dozen, how many crews must Denver have? What about Portland? Las Vegas? The heroin cells were like ants in a garden: You didn’t see them unless you got close enough and knew what to look for. Then, even when you stamped them out, more came to take their place.
Did anything bad ever come on the backs of enterprising Americans?
Is there any purpose of your comment other than to indict an entire country of people for the actions of a few?
Yeah it’s bad and we should punish them.
At the time he made that statement the opiate epidemic was still in full swing. You can take the media narrative that it was racism, but 70k dead a year for the last decade requires a more nuanced look.
No, there is no truth. I consider all the hardworking people, including Mexicans, who harvest my fruits and vegetables, do construction and landscaping labor, work in meat processing plants, and any other task “to be the best”.
How one can indict Mexico for the opiate problem rather than the pharmaceutical companies and doctors that rubber stamped it all and looked the other way is beyond me.
I never said this and neither did Trump. You should restate it to make sure you understand the real argument.
If you notice I mentioned Oxy. Everyone shares some of the blame.
Thank you!!
My 2c.