Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
Given that the example came in the context of this question, the answer is a resounding "not like that".
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.
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.
>their veracity cannot be taken on faith
If you think what he "claims" is evidence, i have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
I will place my decade and a half of working experience across half a dozen companies in the US over any anonymous person's "evidence".
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
QED.
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.
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".
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.
I seriously suggest you reevaluate your thinking.
> [...]
> Hence i think Google did the right thing in cancelling this talk.
It seems to me that this talk could have been an opportunity for Americans to learn about caste discrimination and what it looks like.
Google is a technology company, not a liberal or conservative think tank. Let us get back to tech talks!
How exactly?
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.
This line of arguments will not work with the sensibilities of the priestly caste not native to India.
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.
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.
https://feminisminindia.com/2020/03/02/sexism-in-engineering...
> 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.
A single anecdote is sufficient to merit "at least partly."
You can say it's not generally proved. But it also wasn't a universal claim.
Do you realize how absurd language would be if what you claim is true? For example:
- Is is true latino men are discriminated against when applying for florist positions?
- Yes, it happened once.
Literally any group would be "party discriminated" in every possible scenario according to how you define "at least partly".
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.
Entirely seriously, here is your proof:
https://www.r-bloggers.com/2019/12/modeling-salary-and-gende...
Now switch to some other attempt at distraction via reducio of the actual argument.
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.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022103186... [2] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.5... [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018839203698 [4] https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0022-4... [5] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-23339-007
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 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 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".
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.
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.
1. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_genderga...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
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.
1. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Gender-and-Race-Prefer...
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 this to be true?
> cultural bias
What definition are you using for this term?
Goto LinkedIn and search for QA engineers in Indian cities. I think that should be a very good proof for you
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
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?
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?
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.
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
There is a broad trend that as women are more empowered, they are less likely to go into STEM: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
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.
Presumably you wouldn't know without a study, thus you do the study.
Often perpetuated by women as well as men, so this isn't man-blaming.
And having a few token women in dev doesn't change the situation so much as it cements the status quo in place.
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.
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 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.)
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
What makes you think it isn’t?
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 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!
What does this mean? I thought Patel was a surname.
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.
"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]"
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.
An all-female offshore team is pretty extreme though.
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.
I'm trying to understand how this is achieved in practice, however I haven't got a good answer yet.
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.
-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.
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 would speculate that most top tier bowlers do have the arm and upper body strength to do it well.
They also have a variety of body-fats and other attributes that don't particularly impact performance.
>If bowling paid like the NBA, you'd see very few non-fit pro bowlers.
Why do you think that would be the case if it doesn't impact performance?
If chess paid like the NBA, we still wouldn't expect top players to look like NBA athletes.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
Thanks for submitting your comment. It's so valuable to have someone openly discuss these things.
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.
So why aren’t the women arriving on H1B visas and their spouses on dependent H4s?
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.
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.)
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.
I also think it's counterintuitive to fixate on this stuff. It doesn't have to be sexism- it could be a fluke.
Generally speaking, the more authoritarian someone on the left is, the more likely they are to be sexist. Stalinist tankies are the rock bottom.
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.
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.
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.
One question I've always had is, how do you know you're Dalit if you were born outside of India? How do others?
Especially, say, when meeting other Indians in some tech company in the US?
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.
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.
Non-Brahmin Hindus are not allowed to wear the sacred thread.
Turbans and burqa do not have such intra-religious restriction.
Comparing the sacred thread to turbans/ burqas is a false comparison.
But only Brahmins have the right to wear it.
Wearing a "sacred thread" in a society that wants to eliminate caste based discrimination is promoting and condoning discrimination.
As an extreme example, how is this different from a klan member choosing to wear a "hood" in public.
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.
A college degree is earned, a Brahmin caste status is inherited much like the klan claiming supreme status by blood.
> 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.
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.
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).
Social status for some and Reservation benefits for others.
Just because I bear a name commonly used by people of my community, does not make me complicit in the ills of the community I belong to.
Or are you also judging a person by their surname?
Why should this be a right?
Inherited "wealth" is not considered a unrestricted right in many societies.
The wealth tax is a great example of how society regulates "concentration of power" through inherited wealth.
Caste based inheritance of wealth has no such regulation.
Soundarapandian Nadar of Justice Party (and after whom Pondy Bazaar is named) campaigned in the Nadar community to get rid of the thread: https://alchetron.com/W-P-A-Soundarapandian-Nadar
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.
What we need is a system based on laws with checks and balances that ensures the poor and the marginalized get their fair shake?
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.
[1] https://www.firstpost.com/india/hinduism-denies-spiritual-ri...
That's the comparison.
>know people who identify as Kshatriyas and Vaisyas wear it
I know but all Brahmins wear the sacred thread.
False. I may have only anecdotal evidence, but even one counter-example renders your statement incorrect.
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.
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.
“Caring” about tradition (whatever that means) is equivalent to being complicit in social ills. Ok got it.
No you didn't.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_among_South_Asi...
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/kevins-murder-...
Why do they do this, and what do they hope to gain out of asking that question?
Related question -- I would have thought that high-tech Indians in Silicon Valley would detest a system like that. Is that not the case?
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.
> 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.
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.
>"Europe
Scandinavia
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."
Guess the country :)
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.
Actually not even foreign names. IIRC only names that were insulting or prone to be laughed at were forbidden.
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).
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?
Do you need identifying papers?
Is there a big market for forgeries?
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
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!!
Example of this enforcement: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-15997648
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...
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.
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.
India is a big country. Where in India is this a common practice?
This may sound uneducated, but do Indians in the US only eat Indian food? How would someone know if you rotate through different cuisines every day?
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.
Excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism) :
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.
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.
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.
This sums up your world view. I am sitting here thinking we are all debating with someone who wants to improve society for all humans...
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.”
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.
That's why i said in another comment that it makes sense to discuss this in the Indian Workplace more than the American Workplace.
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.
That is THE assumption which is being challenged; the reasons in my other comments.
I feel sad and sorry.
Like all unjust discrimination, this one triggers on things one has no control over. Doing that to others is completely unacceptable.
> 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.
How many Ethiopian Jews are there among Jewish American CEOs? How many Gypsies ("Romani") are there among European American CEOs?
Do you know?
Oh boy. I guess pichai would have quite a different story about this and
Google did the right thing by keeping her out.
[1] https://twitter.com/dalitdiva/status/1465358123640655875
both the OP and your citation are her complaining about a tech CEO being Brahmin and avoiding the caste conversation...
Must the Jewish founders of the FAANG companies share their views on the Israel-Palestine conflict?
I’d certainly hope the CEO would say something if their Israeli employees and Palestinian employees started firing rockets at each other on work time.
Do you think casteism is an essential property of India that should not be changed, throwaway_1928?
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?
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.
Could you give some examples?
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.
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.
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)
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.
Do you have ancestral home in Mylapore? If not you're not real Tam-Brahm. (JK obviously)
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.
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).
caste certificate
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).
(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.)
What happens of they find out you’re a lower caste, so they just stop talking to you, talk down to you, etc.?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Eye opening.
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.
[1] http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_...
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."
What a joke. That would never work.
And I have no data to corroborate this, but I've felt caste chauvinism increase in the last few years.
...as has Hindu nationalism, as noted in the article.
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
Hopefully the world is changing and demonising ones race, even if that race is white or Hindu, will soon be neither celebrated nor even acceptable.
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).
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...
That Washington Post article is lying (or being extremely disingenuous) to take advantage of outsiders without context of the situation.
Meanwhile, how many Muslim pogroms have there been in India since independence?
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 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 *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.
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”.
That’s when I knew it wasn’t “all bullshit”.
“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
More: https://scribe.rip/@dalitdiva/why-it-is-time-to-dump-gandhi-...
Trapped in Silicon Valley’s hidden caste system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515099 - March 2022 (543 comments)
India’s tech sector reinforces old caste divides - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29994226 - Jan 2022 (5 comments)
The Casteism I See in America and American Tech Companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29133517 - Nov 2021 (5 comments)
How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435117 - March 2021 (195 comments)
Caste discrimination in some of Silicon Valley's richest tech companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952698 - Oct 2020 (322 comments)
India’s engineers have thrived in the tech industry. So has its caste system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24923338 - Oct 2020 (6 comments)
How India's ancient caste system is ruining lives in Silicon Valley - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24555492 - Sept 2020 (47 comments)
Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24552047 - Sept 2020 (613 comments)
Silicon Valley Has a Caste Discrimination Problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065132 - Aug 2020 (14 comments)
California sues Cisco alleging discrimination based on India’s caste system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23798922 - July 2020 (56 comments)
California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083 - July 2020 (592 comments)
Ask HN: There is caste system in the Silicon Valley? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704504 - Feb 2017 (6 comments)
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.
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.
> 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.
Peoples feelings about fairness and justice are always valid, but hell, many people suck so hard at putting it into words.
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.
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.
Calling people out for what they’re doing isn’t anywhere near the same thing as assigning lifelong attributes to them for their heritage.
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.
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.
Already addressed that, try to keep up.
> 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.
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.
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".
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]
After the guy passed, he mutters "remember, don't ever trust the dark ones"
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:
https://pragyata.com/caste-system-pointers-for-the-social-me...
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-gene-data-reveal...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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”.
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 word means basically nothing on HN, outside it’s use in political slurring.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Hardliners of all stripes tend to recognize and actively exploit blowback.
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.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-labour-antisemitism-ac...
> Jewish Voice for Labour tells EHRC that Jews almost five times more likely to face antisemitism charges than non-Jewish members
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_warfare#Wars_of_ex...
"The Holy Quran Experiment": https://youtu.be/zEnWw_lH4tQ
"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.)
In fact in Jewish tradition Amalek remains a force to this day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
The group has, since, dissolved for obvious reasons.
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.
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.
http://www.nizkor.com/features/fallacies/composition.html
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.
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?
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.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/24/middleeast/shireen-abu-akleh-...
'They were shooting directly at the journalists': New evidence suggests Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in targeted attack by Israeli forces
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
People in upper castes may be that secure in their communities, which might be what matters.
>> 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.
> "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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, I must have missed the not, I thought you were saying this is a good place.
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.
And that message, "You're replying too fast, slow down". Lol. What duplicity.
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.
How would you scientific-revolution social media?
Because there are now 4.6 million Indian Americans and they are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the US.
So it's our own problem now too.
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.
Which is how they got Google to cancel the talk.
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?
"Trolled into oblivion", perhaps?
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.
The most appropriate ones here are probably:
> 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.
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'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.
Right, but what are the implications of it being limited or not? Is there a tolerable level of discrimination?
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.
> 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...
[1] https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/the-brahmin-files-why-atro...
It's like holding any white British person to explain all the bad things British did in their colonies.
Prompting an employee of a tech company, even its CEO, reminding the audience of its ethnical background is what i find suspect.
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.
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?
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.
Isn't the failure to do so the subject of the talk?
Truly puzzling decision.
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.
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.
> 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.
If there is another solution than "affirmative action" this might not be divisive.
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.
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.
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.
So the best you can do is create a new sport “ redhead basketball” the same way we now have “ women basketball” to not discriminate women !
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.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...
> 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.
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
So your probability of getting hired will become less than a minority.
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 .
option 1:No affirmative action: 50% of white are legacy and all other student art there on merits
option 2: affirmative action: 100% of white students are legacy 0% are on merits and 50% of all other race are accepted because of merit
I picked some random number for option 2 but i assume you see the problem.
If this is done you cannot say the university are racist anymore.
If they decide to do this, there will be a lot more asian at Ivy league university because on average they score much better.
As someone who is not asian I would still be 100% OK with this because this would be they only accept base on merit.
But people will still complain there is an equal proportion of student from each race.
Have you ever noticed that this opinion isn't the only one out there?
> 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.
1-Diversity quota 2-lawsuits against the company for not hiring you.
everything you quoted just say “be nice” but doesn’t describe the mechanism that can be used to increase fairness.
I don't know about you, but my companies have never had a quota, and have never been sued, and, had more diverse employees than our peer companies.
Maybe you can explain how we did that?
It's almost as if, in practice, JFK's idea worked for us.
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.
The only people who really want to stop awareness of this are people like that manager.
A few things that I found poignant in this talk:
One in four people in the world live within a caste system.
Soundararajan's father only admitted his dalit status to her in his late 70s.
The reservation system in India is the earliest civil rights initiative, predating the movement in the U.S.
The reservation system has expanded from its original role in university admissions to encompass reserved seats in parliament and corporate hiring.
The final question in the talk was from a "closeted" dalit worker at Google who was terrified that she would be outed.
As much as we hope that the caste system has no bearing in U.S. hiring, we must acknowledge that its effects are present.
For what it’s worth, I am not of Indian descent.
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.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/karinabland/2017/...
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.
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.
Computer simulations have proven that completely arbitrary distinctions are still useful genetic indicators of fitness in evolution.
At least with vaccines there was a cause/effect behind it. But then yeah, the usual bullshit starts.
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.
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 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.
[0]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550618780728
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.
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.
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?
[1]: here's a link to household wealth by race, but they also have many other metrics. pick any one at random, they all show the same story https://www.stlouisfed.org/institute-for-economic-equity/the...
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
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.
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.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlKL_EpnSp8 (NSFW, explicit visuals and lyrics) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1... [2]: https://archive.is/gyYNs [3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/disruptin...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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'.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Well, then I have no idea at all what my caste is.
you're an American citizen, by many measures the best caste out there :)
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.
It is very convenient for <the people victimizing you/people made uncomfortable by you pointing this out> if you do just that, though.
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?
We literally had a mass shooting within the last month that specifically targeted black people.
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].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...
Numbers like that tell you little more than how blunt the French are, and what's considered acceptable to tell a pollster over the phone.
The real data is in the ground truth of ethnic divides.
I'm pretty sure the US's "white flight" phenomenon and its self-segregated inner cities are more pronounced than anything happening in France.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20171020/more-than-570-slums-house-1...
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.
> 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".
Putting your head in the sand doesn't solve problems. Awareness does.
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".
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.
An american rags to riches mythos and a small and decreasing class mobility asymptotically trending to zero looks more like caste than not.
India also has a dalit president.
America hasnt had a president of modest income since Truman.
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.
That has literally never happened to me.
We should be treating people as individuals, not collectives. Anything less is profoundly immoral.
Class mobility is celebrated, so much so that the successful often play-up any humble origins in their families.
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.
If you want to talk about social mobility, we can talk about that as a separate topic.
What does ideal social mobility look like to you? Here is a baseline for discussion:
https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/~/media/images/...
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.
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.
> 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.
The economist put out a great primer video on this a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1FdIvLg6i4
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%
Bottom 20% > bottom 20% = 20%
Next 20% > Next 20% = 20%
....
Top 20% > top 20% = 20%
>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.
"If you're one of them, you're too ignorant to understand why we're right". Absolutely repulsive.
"Others said..." Also a them kinda deal right there.
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.
Is it possible for someone with a 50% GPA to finish a cardiac surgery training program in India? Or is that a gross exaggeration?
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.
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 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.
The term gaslighting gets thrown around a lot these days, but…
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group#United_States
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23131714/meta-ban-abortio...
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Ainu in Hokkaido.
Ukraine vs Russian is topical at the moment.
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.
>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?
A persecuted minority in France.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookworm_infestation#Eradicati...
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.
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.
Did you mean condemn?
condemn: express complete disapproval of
condone: approve or sanction (something), especially with reluctance
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.
they live by another set of rules and values
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_society_and_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_(Romani_court)
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.
can you speak more to this? i'm totally unfamiliar with the folk taxonomy
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.
English vs French speaking Canadians?
Dominicans and Haitians
Colombians and.... the rest of Latin america
People are hardwired to perceive outsiders as a threat and usually this originates from good reasoning.
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.
Edit: It might be a quote from fiction but there's some truth in there somewhere
Is was used like that in Greek? Even the clinical meaning today does not include hatred.
> "Revulsion" might be a better translation than fear or hatred.
Fear does not require disgust. I am scared of snakes but I think they are beautiful animals.
Like many psychological things the line is more "when your response is damaging to yourself and others".
I knew someone with a phobia of stickers on fruit. Just tried to Google what that is called and found this comment from a sufferer:
"I can't have them on my skin and if anyone put one on me without prior warning I would panic and scream. I HATE HATE HATE ones on fruit"
Though the line between fear and hate is quite thin and blurry in human psychology. The arachnophobes I know do, in fact, hate spiders with a passion.
> Though the line between fear and hate is quite thin and blurry in human psychology.
In some instances it may be, although the word 'awe' has no sense of hatred in it.
> The arachnophobes I know do, in fact, hate spiders with a passion.
Okay, well how about snakes? I'm afraid of them but I don't think anybody is disgusted by them.
Awful has some meanings that are close
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.)
Russian Nazism is very real, leads to rape, murder, forced deportation and torture.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
https://thewire.in/caste/cisco-case-caste-discrimination-sil...
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?
This article concerns caste discrimination in the United States.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not about Google weighing in. It's about Google being aware of these problems, and doing the work to keep those problems out of its workplace.
It’s called “leadership.”
If I was not an IC now, I would definitely be trying to cut discussions like that in a bud.
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.
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 )?
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.
Why is that relevant to the discussion?
The issue is that any and everything can be claimed to be racist, and therefore transferred to your special pre-political exemption.
Now, if were to look for a biological definition from Webster(1), race would be defined as:
a group within a species that is distinguishable (as morphologically, genetically, or behaviorally) from others of the same species
How is skin color not a distinguishable trait?
Now.. it might not be politically polite thing to say, but it does not change the outcome 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.
Are there black people?
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."
(1)https://www.informalscience.org/sites/default/files/RaceWebs...
Can you show me the same good faith and engage in a frank and honest intellectual debate?
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.
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.
If you're seeing discrimination in the workplace then it's no longer about politics, it's about the workplace and professionalism among staff.
edit: Even saying 'I am apolitical' is a political statement.
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.
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.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that this would encourage racism. But it sure isn’t surprising.
Also - which companies are saying they hire the worst people?
I've worked at several companies - every single one of them claimed to hire the best. It's just corporate psychobabble at this point.
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.
Why are people who think they're "the best" inclined to think it's in part / mostly / solely due to race?
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.
The idea of "best" is ultimately a lie and it's the same lie that supremacy tells.
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.”
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.”
> 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.
* 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.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
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 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.
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.
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.