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Comment by Aunche | Hacker News Reader

>Numerous employees within the company expressed the view that any talk on caste discrimination was offensive to them as Hindus, and made them feel unsafe.

>You don’t get to claim or hijack one form of discrimination to perpetuate another form.

And yet from the Hindu's perspective, this is exactly what Gupta is doing. The only instances of caste discrimination Gupta can recall are anecdotes of "coded speech". Meanwhile, I'm sure that many Hindus feel that anti-caste-discrimination is coded speech. If there's a lesson to be learned, it's that using feelings as a rationale for argument is completely counterproductive.

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The DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) forum is pretty unambiguously the forum to talk about caste discrimination. What forum is Gupta "highjacking" to talk about caste in your opinion?

The lesson to be learned is, if you are offended by someone saying they experienced oppression/discrimination, really, look inward.

If your platform champions people's subjective experience, and Indians at Google feel that Soundararajan is discriminatory herself, then they have a right to oppose her talk without being labelled as caste bigots.

What about those that felt discriminated? Where is their forum to talk about what happened to them?

Might I add, if you weren't a party to an experience, an off handed observation that those are just subjective experiences, is frankly not yours to make.

Google's reaction was the Damore memo was that it didn't matter that Damore felt discriminated against. People felt attacked by the memo, so his opinion wasn't welcome. If they want to be consistent, they had to reject the caste talk. It's that simple.

>Might I add, if you weren't a party to an experience, an off handed observation that those are just subjective experiences, is frankly not yours to make.

Do you share the same opinion about the white activists who are supporting Gupta? Why are you calling me out for expressing a nonzero disagree of sympathy towards her opposition who also claim they are discriminated against? I'm not Indian, but I've seen fairly egregious examples of caste being used to attack Indians. Admittedly, it was on 4chan, but I'm sure weaker forms of this attitude exist in real life as well.

Caste discrimination is not a "subjective experience", however much your subjective experience maybe telling you so.

Like I said, their only example of caste discrimination at Google is "denial of caste discrimination" and "coded conversation", which is very much subjective. A Hindu can make the same case that "denial that caste is used as a dog whistle for Hindu discrimination" or "accusing Hindus who are opposed to a caste talk as being bigoted" as forms of Hindu discrimination.

From the article:

> when you’ve got people who are caste privileged and caste oppressed, the people who are caste oppressed start to be given inferior assignments, get treated differently, left out of meetings, which are certainly things that I heard from Google employees within the company.

> Asking things like “What’s your last name? I’m not familiar with it.” Then, when the manager hears that last name, they’re, like, “Oh, so you’re from this caste—no wonder you have these leadership skills.” Things like that. And somebody else in the room is, like, “What the hell?” It’s those different types of experiences that I’ve seen or that have been shared with me that show that caste discrimination is happening in the workplace.

There might also be employees who spend their personal time on stormfront dot org and feel that all sorts of DEI language is coded speech, but we generally don't regard their opinions as valid.

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