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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

As someone doing management in a company that hires many Indian workers, both in on-shore and off-shore teams, this is a highly relevant topic for me.

I'm a native western european so I'm likely blind to some extend for these issues. Like the article says, this sounds like harmful class-ism that silences or disadvantages specific groups, but not in an "obviously" racist manner based on skin color.

Anyone care to share some real life experience? Was this a problem in your workplace? How did you detect this was going on, at all?

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> but not in an "obviously" racist manner based on skin color.

There is plenty of colorism within India too (everywhere in fact). I think you should definitely read about forms of discrimination.

He didn't say there wasn't. He said this, i.e., caste bias, is a form of discrimination that is not made obvious by being based on skin color.

Higher cast Indians have lighter skin color in general (compared to lower cast Indians). There are exceptions, of course.

Isn't being blind to caste distinctions the optimal way to avoid discrimination? It's like a blind audition.

Yeah, sure! I however want to understand if something untowards is happening between team members. I might be blind, others amongst eachother might not necessarily be.

Maybe if you and your peers and all of the higher-ups are equally blind, ya. Otherwise your blindness might prevent you from seeing what's going on.

Yes and no. It's great to not have that inherent bias, but it's important to be able to see where the bias exists.

Somehow in $current_year, blind auditions are also racist:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220725001219/https://www.nytim...

The article does not make such a claim.

Part of it is to do with emigration from India to the US (where money talks) during the communist Cold War era when there was discrimination against upper castes in India (and note that an upper caste person may not have much money). In the UK and other English speaking countries, immigration was varied and across a much longer time period with predominantly middle class and skilled people.

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