In reality, it's probably impossible to understand how big or small a problem caste discrimination really is in context. The folks who don't face any negative experiences mostly aren't going to pipe up.
Don't you think this might have something to do with the representation of low caste Indians in the US, and that they have to be their own advocates? Minorities have to make disproportional noise to get issues that affect them to be heard to the same degree as others. That's just how it is, otherwise our systems would always only advocate for the majority and every single minority would group would be systemically disadvantaged.
I think to side with your point ... the vocal extremists have the mic.
The thing that is the issue, again from the little I read, is that such discrimination is brought by other Indians on the Dalit and it's most defyingly bit something they want imported. I didn't figure or yet what is wanted and how but it's not like this is sintering you can blame them for.
> If someone drags it here with them they need to understand its their baggage.
If you're a low-caste Indian working in the US, and your high-caste boss discriminates against you, I think you'd feel pretty pissed at someone trying to claim that you're dragging your baggage with you. It's the high-caste boss that's doing the dragging.
Something like 90% of the Indian immigrants in the US are high-caste (big surprise, lower-caste Indians are less likely to be able to get work visas and travel), so of course this is a minority problem. Certainly not all of that 90% wants to perpetuate the caste system here, but I expect it's not easy to be vocal about it. Doesn't make it any less worthy of investigation, though.
Why do you think this is the case despite one of the most active affirmation programs in the world (just search "Reservation in India" on Wikipedia)? Something like 50-60% of seats in colleges and jobs in the government are reserved for lower castes (not a typo, the Wikipedia page should link you to official Indian constitution websites). I am from India and I genuinely don't know the answer myself.
A lot of industries are based on the idea of "I don't care if people think they're superior to me as long as they pay me." The savvier ones even exploit this: "I'll get people to think they're superior to others because they pay me" (see: Apple, Rolls Royce, DeBeers, BMW, Louis Vitton, and every other luxury brand). American society is uniquely suited to this sort of mercenary economic climbing, because it brings together lots of people who have no knowledge of each others' previous social hierarchies anyway.
Por que no los dos? This is such a tired take -- how is activism at odds with getting good at what you do and working hard? You can absolutely do both. In fact, some of the most helpful activists are folks who made it and give a helping hand to others (e.g. successful black businessmen teaching other black folks to be successful businessmen; successful women in tech helping other women to succeed in tech).
You do realize that this very "capitalism as the great equalizer" take ignores that being underrepresented / disadvantaged also very negatively affects one's economic prospects. Say I'm a woman -- looking at that rare woman in tech who's overcome many sexist hurdles / gotten lucky enough to make it to the top, are you telling me I should be cool with my odds being shittier?
White folks already love yelling about affirmative action because it lowers your already-low odds so very slightly when it comes to Ivy League college admittance. But you'll tell minorities "shut up just work hard activism is stupid" in the same breath.
> There's a collectivist, political, external-locus-of-control assumption to your point.
First of all, minorities ARE collectives even if we don't all contribute equally to our collective causes. And representation is political because policy shapes how we are treated and what our lives look like. A democracy by design favors the majority, so minorities need to be politically convincing that their needs are important too. It's okay to work hard at this, it's okay to want the world to be more meritocratic.
Frederick Douglass could have lived as a free black person and had a much better life than other black folks in the US. There were other free blacks who did less for the collective. Instead, he gave a crap about activism, and used his education and ability to make a difference. Wasn't that great? Plenty of white folks running plantations at the time were inconvenienced by this guy saying black folks should be free and that slavery is bad, and I'm sure they said "you're free why do you give a damn." But some people do give a damn about the people around them and the world they hand to their progeny.
Not every activist is their minority's Frederick Douglass, but you can certainly be a point along that spectrum of activist, in accordance with your ability and concern. Saying that minorities should be "too busy making money" to give a crap about how their children will be treated is some hot garbage.
> American society is uniquely suited to this sort of mercenary economic climbing, because it brings together lots of people who have no knowledge of each others' previous social hierarchies anyway.
Guess I won't convince you of the many glass/bamboo/whatever the fuck ceilings that exist, but it seems obvious that people are _absolutely_ bringing knowledge of previous social hierarchies. Talk to some {black folks, women} in tech and see what kind of bullshit they have to put up with that you don't have to. How many female founder stories can you find that talk about counterparts assuming something due to their gender? You simply cannot escape social prejudice and hierarchy (oh wait, you can, if you're a white male! maybe this is why you're confused).
It's like how if you ask for a raise, you will probably be denied. If you make yourself invaluable to the business and then threaten to quit, you will get that raise.
Slavery and Frederick Douglass is actually a pretty good example. White Northern factory owners won the Civil War - look at the Gilded Age that followed, and how "industrialized society" is just "society" now. Blacks did not. The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction; which was followed by Jim Crow; which was followed by 50s segregation; which was followed by the Civil Rights era; which was followed by Nixon's criminalization of crack, marijuana, and all drugs that were associated with "Black" culture, which led to the creation of a permanent Black underclass. We are still having this debate 150+ years later.
There's an order to acquiring power, and it goes technological -> economic -> cultural -> political -> military. If you try to skip steps (forcing economic development without technological modernization, or political power without acquiring economic and cultural power, or military power without consolidating political power) you don't get durable gains, and your system collapses after 10-15 years.
And I was one of those minority children that was treated as hot garbage. I haven't forgotten. That's made me a pretty avid observer of which tactics actually lead to durable shifts in power balance, and simply asking for more power is not one of them.
Isn't this all obvious stuff? None of which refutes the idea that activism moves the needle and is _required_ for minorities to equalize how they're treated.
> Time spent developing skills and seizing opportunities will not be, because it can be done in secret, and if you hit roadblocks just go around them and find other people to do business with.
This sounds untethered from reality. Consider being a black kid who wants to be an engineer in silicon valley. Your entire ethnicity is heavily underrepresented, so you don't have role models / might not even view working as an engineer as something attainable. Okay say you get past that and work hard, you still get fewer opportunities because bias is real and there are so many unwritten rules about how to play this game (get an internship at these companies! talk to startups! this is how to leetcode!) -- you find a lot of these things out via your connections. But if your entire network is underrepresented, how do you break in?
This is to say nothing of unconscious biases that affect you as a minority. Less favorable interpretation of your interview results, less insider information about how to play the game, fewer opportunities offered due to prejudice about your potential, pay gap.
If you hit these roadblocks, pray tell how you "just go around them" ??? If your advice is "don't protest, just work hard and be that lucky 1 person who made it to the top for your race/gender/whatever" that's pretty shit advice.
> It's like how if you ask for a raise, you will probably be denied. If you make yourself invaluable to the business and then threaten to quit, you will get that raise.
That's the problem though. You can't make yourself invaluable or succeed in your career if folks don't take risks on you. If folks don't give you opportunities. There is a huge opportunity gap for folks born black, born female, in systems of power that disadvantage them. Participating in activism to rectify this isn't a waste of time -- if it doesn't directly benefit the participants, it benefits their children.
> And I was one of those minority children that was treated as hot garbage. I haven't forgotten. That's made me a pretty avid observer of which tactics actually lead to durable shifts in power balance, and simply asking for more power is not one of them.
Pray tell what tactics you're talking about other than "get lucky and work hard and hope the system is less biased and more meritocratic than you think" because that's all I'm hearing in your comments. What "durable shift in power balance" was achieved as a result of this advice?
Activism has a great track record. Consider LGBT rights in the country 20 years ago vs today. Would gay marriage be possible today if not for the tireless work of activism?
You're folks to essentially shut up and work hard in the unfair systems they were born into. It's just not going to work for most of them. And it's not "asking for more power" -- it's _fighting_ for equal treatment and _exercising_ the power they already have to multiplicative effect.
Maybe your main gripe is that this takes a long time and doesn't generally pay off monetarily or career-wise for individuals, since you have to spend your money and time for the collective?
But instead of calling this stupid and at odds with success, why not be more honest and realize you can do that AND also work really hard and succeed with the opportunities you've been given. The existence of full-time activists doesn't diminish the contributions of folks who contribute in other ways, and that you can contribute in other ways does not render full-time activists unnecessary.
At the first level, the Indians who say there’s lots of discrimination against Indians—the folks getting Apu cancelled—get a lot of air time, but aren’t representative. My point is that the same thing may apply to low caste Indians too. The views of this Dalit activist may or may reflect the experience of low caste Indian Americans.
But aren't often those the people who need that sort of representation the most? Even if 90%[0] of Indians aren't discriminated against, the 10% who suffer discrimination absolutely deserve representation and redress.
[0] Apparently 90% of Indian immigrants in the US are high-caste, so funny how that statistic might seem to line up. This of course makes sense, since low-caste people are probably less likely to be able to obtain the education and financial resources necessary to move to a different country.
When you engage in activism on behalf of $GROUP you’re affecting the relationship of everyone in the group with the larger society.
On the other hand, if you are successful at being convincing (and loud enough) for a minority community you can achieve a lot of good! LGBTQ+ activists have made the lives of young non-binary folks so much better in just the last 30 years: they are a minority, but they were loud and convincing that "maybe we should treat people equally (e.g. right to marry) even if their sexual proclivities are different from our own!"
Groups that really change the shape of society ultimately have to be loud if they're underrepresented, and make a lot of people uncomfortable. Frederick Douglass was a free black man, which was rare for the time. He used his very minority voice to make a racket that helped propel centuries of social change for the better. Would you prefer he didn't succeed / couldn't have a platform? It's still up to loud minority communities to actually be convincing, after all. All the hate campaigning like those "god hates fags" stuff won't ever get anywhere because it's not convincing to most people.
It's talking about the kind of racism you see on H1B threads here, like the outright confession of violating federal law that I once saw in a comment "I stopped giving interviews to Indians because I found they lie in the resume".
I disagree with that—the question matters either way. Activism creates conflict, and ordinary members of minority groups may or may not feel like the conflict is justified in comparison to the actual scope of the problem.
Other Indians at Google objected to this activist as being anti-Hindu. At the very least bringing this sort of advocacy into the workplace creates the potential for conflict. Depending on the actual scope of the caste discrimination problem, members of lower castes may or may not feel like the potential for conflict is worthwhile.
Ofcourse they would. They are mostly those whose parents (or themselves) were privileged enough to make it to the US.
I keep seeing this thrown around, but I am yet to see anyone respond exactly what form this "privilege" takes as it pertains to caste. The Indian constitution was co-written by a very forward thinking Dalit and affirmative action for lower castes is literally written into the Indian constitution. The only "privilege" I know of is that only upper castes can conduct priestly duties etc (at least used to), but I mean cmon that's just clutching at straws...
Even if you have affirmative action, if you feel like you're going to work or school in a hostile environment, this is a disadvantage to you. Psychological safety is one example of a privilege (e.g. women in silicon valley have inherently less psychological safety than men in the workplace because there are more men, and enough of them make unwanted advances with high enough frequency to force them to think about it).
Dalits have to deal with the stress of potentially being treated differently on the basis of their caste. Even if laws say "you can't discriminate," that doesn't change the interactions they have to have. And even if only a small number (let's say 1%) of people are discriminatory, but you go to a school with 300 people, you're now dealing with 3 folks who you're very uncomfortable around and may bully or hurt you. That's still going to suck. Privilege is not having to think about any of that.
Another example is being gay. You might say "well if you're gay and you live in SF, you are worry free!" But at work, school, or even at the grocery store there could be people who harbor discriminatory feelings and even unconcious biases against you, and it can affect how they treat you. If you're straight, you're lucky (privileged) not to have to deal with that. You also are lucky (privileged) that you can visit Alabama without fearing for your life. I mean, unless you're a straight black man and you encounter police in Alabama. Again, your expectations given that situation are a matter of privilege.
The reason folks harp on privilege so much is that privileged folks often say stuff like "X doesn't happen to me or in my proximity, so it doesn't happen ever." But the only way to know it _really_ doesn't happen is to exist as someone who lacks those privileges and to see what that's like. Since we can't do that, everyone argues about the validity of minority folks sharing their personal experiences.
There are also levels to it, as with anything. Within minority groups, there can be folks who have more relative privilege (e.g. black men vs black women, or dalits vs brahmins, or dark skinned vs light skinned black folks). Most people have some privileges relative to other people, so it's good for us to all understand what those things are when we interact with one another. We already do some amount of this very naturally (e.g. unless you're an asshole, you probably won't tell your poor friend to just buy better clothes if you know they are less privileged than you, and you might not expect your female friend to walk to your place through the city at night).
In addition to surname, these are all questions that can be used to gather details about someone’s caste.
Or so I’m told.
Buts it’s funny when we start to care about a tiny portion of the poor people.
I think you're talking about this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_discrimination_in_the_Un...
First of all, that poll is about discrimination against Indian-Americans (presumably based on race or ethnicity), while TFA is about caste-based discrimination.
Secondly, the option below "major problem" in that poll is "minor problem", there is no in-between. In other words, 90% or Indian-Americans think it isn't a major problem, but over half do think there is a problem.
Most importantly, polling opinions about this is the worst method of determining if discrimination exists. A better method would look at objective measures like salary/job/hiring rate/layoff rate/etc of lower-caste Indians compared to Indians as a whole.
I think nowadays most people use "TFA" (no leading "R") in a fairly benign way, without the aggressive tone of the original.
I don’t get this at all. If we treat a group as fairly as possible and on average they perform worse than other groups, is that evidence of discrimination? Is there a hypothesis that they need to perform equally as well.?
The other, much more reasonable explanation, is that these differences are explained by the fact that lower-caste Indians are actually _not_ treated "as fairly as possible" by society.
At the individual level exceptions exist, but when you scale out to sufficiently large populations there aren't random demographics that magically perform worse than everyone else because they're all lazy bums.
Becuase I do not believe an Indian's caste affects their inherent ability to perform IT work. If you do believe that to be true, of course you should expect a difference even in a perfectly fair society.
> Can't some groups perform worse than others by random chance?
This is extremely unlikely once you get to higher sample sizes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
> Are there really no other factors besides discrimination that could cause this?
Well of course there are. For example, if one group is more educated than the other they're going to perform better.
I made it sound as easy as "just see if the numbers don't match up", but in real life the statisticians that do these kinds of analysis account for other factors that could impact performance, so that if there is a difference it's purely "because" of the caste.
This the discrimination problem -- if you are not in the minority, it is much more difficult to appreciate how common it is.
And yet somehow that makes it not worthy of awareness and fixing? It's a very odd argument to make.
rayiner's comment about 90% of Indian-Americans not thinking discrimination is a big problem is about perceived racism from non-Indian Americans. If you read the link it's about racist Twitter posts about an Indian American by what looks like white folks. No mention of caste. Nothing about internal casteism in the Indian community.
I say this as a HN'er but sorry HN can be just dumb sometimes.
At the very least, it might mean you don’t bring in an activist that antagonizes members of the majority group, as was allegedly the case here.
Activism undertaken on behalf of a minority group affects the relationship between that minority group and society as a whole. All members of the group have a stake in the overall relationship between the group and other groups.
It’s all relative. My mum (in her 80s) is, as they say, “quite fair”. She’s lived in Boston for decades and when I was visiting a couple of weeks ago I could see she was still subject to the usual Boston racism. But I noticed it was mostly older people — ppl my age (50s) or younger were a lot better, and not just because they don’t notice older people.
I got a lot of appearance genes from my white dad so this issue doesn’t come up for me.
Where I live in Palo Alto the kids I interact with don’t appear to care at all and seem to mix pretty indiscriminately, which is great.
I was just visiting a few weeks ago and a couple of my friends told me "it's not as bad as it used to be" but when I asked, admitted it hadn't improved that much from the late 70s/early 80s that we remembered.
Just a casual example: my mum entered her retirement home with some groceries, using her own electronic key, and was told "deliveries are to be made through the service entrance." This to a woman who has been living there for years and whom the "diversity board" keeps trying to recruit (as it's always been 100% white people).
This attitude is deeply rooted. Remember, though Massachusetts was famously abolitionist, its immense wealth started out from funding slave voyages and slave mortgages. And of course the Bay Colony was founded by a shipload of notoriously intolerant people.
The ultimate question is whether that discrimination gets carried forward into the US and continues to be executed here; not whether caste-discrimination happens somewhere in the world
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/27/indian-...
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/923736245
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-11/how-big-t...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-lawsuit/california-...
>Devesh Kapur, a professor of South Asian studies at Johns Hopkins University, found that in 2003, only 1.5 percent of Indian immigrants in the United States were Dalits or members of the lower-ranked castes.
>Dalit engineers said that most Indian workers from upper castes do not seem aware of their caste privilege and believe caste bias is a thing of the past, despite the fact that high-profile tech CEOs and board members, such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon board member Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of Pepsi, are Brahmins, or members of the highest caste.
What does this even mean? With 1.5% of Indians in the US, just with the probability of numbers, why would anyone expect a high profile CEO out of two examples to be a lower caste Indian? And also with those examples they seem to be implying that Americans are casteist? How does the ladder of managers who decide promotions look like at, say, Pepsi? Were they all Indians that are holding the other 1.5% of Indians from rising up to the level of CEO of Pepsi?
It's a hell of a deal with the devil they have to make: put up with the same discrimination they suffered at home, but without any kind of social support network, in exchange for the possibility getting a green card 10 or 15 or 20 years down the road and thus gaining some security residence-wise.
Sure, the US society should strive to eliminate caste-based discrimination occurring in the US.
But that it occurs in India does not mean that it’s been carried forward in the US.
A history of discrimination leading to a disadvantaged position today, and as a result needing additional support, is a separate problem — an argument for affirmative action — but ultimately is nothing different than all the other classes of peoples who’ve been fucked by history struggling to find security in the US (that is, any solution to the problem is not really particular to Indians, or the caste-system).
It doesn't mean that, certainly, but it seems plausible that it would be, to some extent. And while some lower-caste Indians in the US don't believe they've suffered caste-based discrimination, other do. So... it's here?
The only time it ever came up for discussion is in the context of someone's parents in India preferring their own caste folks as brides/grooms for arranged marriages back home(similar to the very high rates of race discrimination in dating in the US) and even that has trended down a lot recently with everyone becoming more progressive. My sense is that there are isolated cases here and there, and that it's not systemic, and that it's also rapidly getting better with time both back home and with 2nd generation immigrants in the US.
>When I relocated from my predominantly Black suburb in Dallas, Texas to an immensely diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, I didn’t expect to receive so many matches on Tinder and Hinge from non-Black men. I had always found myself in mostly white spaces — college, jobs, vacations — yet white men never took a deep interest in me before I moved to the East Coast. And while I had spent two years dating a German guy who was studying abroad at my university, it was only by transplant that a non-Black person really showed interest in courting me beyond a “you’re pretty for a Black girl” comment.
>Eventually, I stopped swiping on non-Black men altogether. There had been several cases before when a white man would match with me and then DM me something obscure like my skin tone reminding him of chocolate or feeling the need to tell me he’s always wanted to fuck a Black girl. I found it ludicrous that these men actually thought that was the way to a Black woman’s heart — or panties — and would unmatch them instantly. But in New York City, the progressive melting pot of America, white men (and Asian and Latino men for that matter) wanted to take me out for dinner and drinks, probed my interests, and complimented my photos in a respectable manner.
I think many people are a lot more tolerant of discrimination in dating, though, even if it's (IMO) unfortunate. People who don't date outside their race are really closing their minds and their worlds to a lot of potentially great possibilities. I get that many people do it because of parental approval/disapproval, and I can absolutely understand the desire not to piss off parents in that way, but it's still a shame.
Here on HN I have to question whether the voice of lower caste Indians is proportionally represented, and if not, why that might be.
I was in the states for a decade and have encountered numerous cases of bigoted Indian and Indian origin people in power (both academia and industry) who discriminate against caste. Dalit discrimination is one, but there’s actually a more common Brahmin superiority thing as well, which I tend to find easily because I look Brahmin (don’t ask me, that’s what these guys tell me) but I’m not one, so I’ve had 4-5 instances when these Bigots found me because I was eating chicken and they had to lecture about my sin.
The irony I point to them is that If they truly are trying to follow scriptures or whatever then they should remember that their caste is not allowed to cross oceans lol.
Oh haha that has happened to me as well, I’m an “upper” caste fellow and eat meat on occasion and have been lectured by one of these guys on how I am doomed to be reborn as a worm or something! Shitty people exist everywhere I guess..
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/01/tech/cisco-lawsuit-caste-...
If you go head to head with one of these guys in the office, expect to lose. They occupy CEO positions in Google, Microsoft, and 100 other big companies, and their inner circle of top lieutenants too. This is partly due to capabilities and partly due to 2000+ years of being the managerial class, inherited by birth.
That's an interesting comment. "little chance I would have noticed it." . I found this NYT article that pointed out we've long had our own caste system that we don't seem to notice. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson...
" a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip. Off camera, two other men in uniform, who looked like the lighter man, were holding down the darker man from the other side of the police car as dusk approached in Minneapolis. Yet another man in uniform, of Asian descent and thus not in the dominant caste, stood near, watching, immobilized, it seemed, at a remove from his own humanity and potential common cause, as the darker man slipped out of consciousness. We soon learned that the man on the ground, George Floyd, had been accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, and, like uncountable Black men over the centuries, lost his life over what might have been a mere citation for people in the dominant caste. "
It is unclear what you're trying to communicate. Would you like to clarify? Are you saying I don't know what caste is?
I will respectfully disagree strongly. I have read the wikipedia links you provided to back your prior claim that 'caste' is not analogous to 'race'. My readings so far, even based on the very links you provided, shows that it appears to be very much race and skin color related. Literally, the word you mentioned, "Varna" means skin color! "Varna contextually means "colour, race, tribe, species, kind, sort, nature, character, quality, property" of an object or people in some Vedic and medieval texts.[4] Varna refers to four social classes in the Manusmriti.[4][5]"
My understanding from a brief examination of published papers is that it is a significant component of it though.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285414433_Mapping_C... " Color and Caste Discrimination The belief in Aryan racial supremacy dominates social hierarchy practices in India. Upper caste members claim a superior lineage by tracing their “genes” to Aryans, connoting a “natural superiority” over “Shudra” and “ex-untouchables.” (The term “ex-untouchables” refers to Scheduled Castes, also known as Avarna (outside four Varna), Outcastes, Panchama, Antyaja, etc.) This chapter uses terms such as Dalits, ex-untouchables interchangeably, to refer to this population, though the socio-legal term defined to this population is Scheduled Castes—deemed as non-Aryans. Aryans textually are described as a pure, noble, and superior race: physically tall, with sharp noses and lighter skin color. Dasyus or Dasas, on the contrary, are considered of lowly origin and racially inferior due to their dark skin. Such stratification based on skin color is perhaps one of the oldest forms of discrimination and domination in human society. "
Another point of view [0]:
> The view taken by many that caste is invariably related to the skin color variability found in India’s population, and that all Dalits and the lower caste in India are darker skinned, seems a grossly erroneous view. Throughout India, one can find individuals with varied degrees of skin tone in each of the different caste groups, Dalits, or Brahmins alike. However, skin colour is more location specific than caste specific because of India’s widely varied temperatures and geographical conditions. Most of the population in Jammu and Kashmir and other northern states will share fairer skin tone irrespective or their class or caste as compared to their southern Indian counterparts. In states like Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh, many lower caste men and women have the same colour shade as their upper caste counterparts and vice versa.
> One can find dark skinned Brahmins as well as very light colored Dalits.
The author agrees that skin tone discrimination is a serious problem in India, but she sees skin tone and caste as mostly orthogonal dimensions of discrimination.
[0] Neha Mishra, “India and Colorism: The Finer Nuances”, Washington University Global Studies Law Review, vol. 14 n. 4 (2015)
Biases I've noticed:
Chinese have positive bias toward whites
Chinese have strong positive bias toward other chinese
Chinese have slight negative bias toward indian
Chinese have strong negative bias toward blacks
Indians have strong negative bias toward lower caste
Indians have moderate negative bias toward muslims/pakistan
Indians have positive bias toward white
White women have positive bias toward black
White women have negative bias toward white men
White men have strong positive bias toward other white men
White men have positive bias toward asian
White men are neutral toward chinese, hispanic, indian, pakistan...
White men have slight negative bias toward older women
=========
not enough personal data points to tell about muslims, hispanics, black and other groups and subgroups.
you can see this dynamic play out during lunch, in voting, and other various social interactions.
It’s interesting why this happens, the people in this caste have to work harder to get Higher education due to quotas biased against them, and they’re not necessarily more well off either. It’s probably a mix of a focus on education and excellence in their families that compels the children to aspire this way, alongside a community that encourages this as well I suppose. Sad that recent decade has started to radicalize more and more of them (and other castes) due to a religious fanatic government among other things, I would have loved to understand more about what caused the extraordinary success of this community in producing this many talented individuals (like the Hungarian Jewish population did before WWII).
Based on my non-scientific observation of looking at the 300+ Indian origin folks in my LinkedIn profile, the upper castes are likely 60%, though they make up 10-15% of the population in India. The "middle" castes a. k. a Other Backward Castes or the so called merchant castes make up the remaining 35% and likely are 30% of the Indian population.
I have no idea who is "right" here; I'm neither Indian nor living in the US. But I will add a general comment: experiencing discrimination is not the same thing as being discriminated.
For example, let's say I – as a man – have a disagreement with a female coworker, and maybe I'm a bit of an asshole about it. She might genuinely feel discriminated, belittled, man-splained, or whatever you want to call it. It might be I'm doing this because she's a woman and that she's right, or I might just be having a bad day, or I might be an asshole to everyone I disagree with, or I might just have accidentally phrased things in a bad way.
This is a big problem; there have been a few cases where this actually happened and people accused me of being racist or sexist, usually online. Sometimes I could have phrased things a little bit better maybe, but I sure didn't do it because of someone's identity. People will say it's due to "subconscious bias", but I find that's what the kids nowadays call "gaslighting". Maybe subconscious bias exists and influences people's behaviour in significant ways (not so sure it does, but that's a different discussion), but all but one of the times it happened I wasn't even aware who I was talking to until they "outed" themselves when accusing me of discrimination.
To be clear: no doubt discrimination happens in various ways for various people, but in many instances it can be really hard to say if a specific incident is an instance of it, of if it's due to other reasons. This is problematic because 1) it makes it very hard to actually do something about (systemic) discrimination because you can't punish/fine people easily, but also 2) people will still genuinely feel discriminated against even if there is no actual (or very little) discrimination happening (or is no longer happening).
To be clear: I'm not "accusing" those people of "making things up" or anything like that, I really believe that almost all people report genuine feelings and experiences. As one of those white male types I have it easy: if someone is an asshole to me I can fairly safely assume that person is an asshole to me on account of just being an asshole, but for some other groups this can be a lot harder, either due to current or historical discrimination.
My point is that experiences aren't everything when it comes to these kind of topics, no matter how honest and genuine. They're also not worthless, and some experiences do describe clear-cut cases, but in general I'm careful.
Surnames and to a much lesser extent skin color/facial features indicate caste quite easily to people who have grown up in India. Often castes / surnames were historically also linked to professions which followed down family.
In fact in early medeival Europe too surnames historically indicated profession (Smith, Wright, Cooper, Ward, Chamberlain, Shoemaker...) but I believe the major labor shortage and dislocations caused by the black death and frequent warfare requiring conscription across all social classes pretty much ended any likelihood of social rigidity coming out of this. It will be interesting to see though how the capital and political power accumulation by the wealthier Americans plays out over the next few centuries.
In India, the way society developed was to restrict warfare largely to be carried out by certain upper castes and for most of the society, it didn't really matter who the ruling king was - at least until late medieval periods when proselytization started with Islamic invasion. So the caste system developed into something deep rooted, pernicious and divisive.
Interestingly in India, while Christianity and Islam don't have castes in theory, in practice it is commonly observed that their adherents too observe such distinctions which tells you how deep rooted the problem is.
Specifically to the community of the activist, the Dalits were actually considered to be "people with no caste" historically and were treated as "untouchables". Very likely they were the people who got the wrong side of the stick during the Aryan invasion ~3000 years ago which forms the basis of much of Hindu culture though there are obvious deep rooted integrations from the pre-existing pre-invasion culture (Shiva, Durga etc..) likely from the people who were integrated into the Aryan society.
You don't really see "untouchability" today especially in urban largely as a result of efforts of freedom movement era social reformers like Gandhi and Ambedkar followed by "vote bank politics" in the nascent democracy. Some communities also stopped using surnames. However i still recall when we were very young, our great grand parents generation still observed some of the discriminatory structures. So it has taken a couple of generations to get rid of untouchability - ie parents who saw discrimination as children but don't practice it raising children who understand it but haven't seen it raising kids who only know of it intellectually). It will probably take a couple more to eliminate caste discrimination but we are half way there
Surnames and to a much lesser extent skin color/facial features indicate caste quite easily to people who have grown up in India. Often castes / surnames were historically also linked to professions which followed down family.
In fact in early medeival Europe too surnames historically indicated profession (Smith, Wright, Cooper, Ward, Chamberlain, Shoemaker...) but I believe the major labor shortage and dislocations caused by the black death and frequent warfare requiring conscription across all social classes pretty much ended any likelihood of social rigidity coming out of this. It will be interesting to see though how the capital and political power accumulation by the wealthier Americans plays out over the next few centuries.
In India, the way society developed was to restrict warfare largely to be carried out by certain upper castes and for most of the society, it didn't really matter who the ruling king was - at least until late medieval periods when proselytization started with Islamic invasion. So the caste system developed into something deep rooted, pernicious and divisive.
Interestingly in India, while Christianity and Islam don't have castes in theory, in practice it is commonly observed that their adherents too observe such distinctions which tells you how deep rooted the problem is.
Specifically to the community of the activist, the Dalits were actually considered to be "people with no caste" historically and were treated as "untouchables". Very likely they were the people who got the wrong side of the stick during the Aryan invasion ~3000 years ago which forms the basis of much of Hindu culture though there are obvious deep rooted integrations from the pre-existing pre-invasion culture (Shiva, Durga etc..) likely from the people who were integrated into the Aryan society.
You don't really see "untouchability" today especially in urban largely as a result of efforts of freedom movement era social reformers like Gandhi and Ambedkar followed by "vote bank politics" in the nascent democracy. Some communities also stopped using surnames. However i still recall when we were very young, our great grand parents generation still observed some of the discriminatory structures. So it has taken a couple of generations to get rid of untouchability - ie parents who saw discrimination as children but don't practice it raising children who understand it but haven't seen it raising kids who only know of it intellectually). It will probably take a couple more to eliminate caste discrimination but we are half way there.
This is a classic American argument.
I don’t think you can use the same strategies that work with other minority groups in the US.
The level of sexism and racism I see on a daily basis in tech is mind-boggling.
I’ve been in trainings (multiple), in fortune 100 companies (multiple), where white men were asked to apologize for the sins of other white people hundreds of years ago.
I’ve been in trainings where pictures of brains were put on screens and little sections were pointed at as the “racist” part of the brain. That’s, exactly what racists did (great scene in django unchained https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2prpdjkDIO8).
Is there racism against Asians absolutely, all people have bias and it’ll have an impact in particular situations.
The reality, is the focus on “women in tech” and “racism” is largely unnecessary and is leading to the caste system mentioned.
If you look at the office as “oppressed” and “oppressors” and do that based on race, you’re the racist. That’s what’s happening everywhere and frankly I know tens of people who have left these companies because of it.