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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a company where this was an issue at one point (granted this was one situation among a lot of employees). A manager was pretty much dismissive of everything anyone of a lower caste did / wouldn't communicate with them effectively.

HR absolutely struggled with the issue. The HR folks tasked with dealing with discrimination issues largely had spent their time constructing company wide emails and classes that revolved around white folks discriminating against others / concepts of privilege, absolutely froze when faced with a discrimination issue outside that stereotype.

Long story short legal eventually was the brave one and decided that yes it was discrimination and the manager in question was asked to move on. The folks he refused to work with were compensated and their status in the company (pay scale, etc) was corrected.

As one of my Indian college's observed about the manager in question "If he was white this would have been dealt with sooner."

Credit to my Indian coworkers who really pushed this issue with HR and made legal act in the end. They wanted nothing to do with this kind of behavior.

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Most likely they struggled because the legal language in policies was ambiguous on how to handle the situation, therefore opening the room for the manager to pursue action against the company for consequences for their behavior.

It would have been dealt with sooner if the employee was white because (assuming they meant white as in western white skinned person) culturally there isn't an equivalent of caste that would make sense for a white person to act on, and they could have acted based on the other groups listed in the anti-discrimination language.

I think it's good they found a way to go forward with dealing with the manager and compensated the employees. In a visit to India a few years ago I saw a shopkeeper make someone leave the store because of caste, not sure if there are actual laws/regulations about this in place there to simplify the process of handling discrimination. The issue of discrimination is very easy to find anywhere, though, and most often presents in a subtle form of prejudice because many people feel a certain way toward others in another group. Anywhere there aren't enforced laws with legal language that protects a group there will be difficulty dealing with discriminatory practices against said group, because laws have to be specific in the way they are written to allow for their enforcement being simple/easy.

> culturally there isn't an equivalent of caste that would make sense for a white person to act on

Sure there is. People from English-speaking countries & Western Europeans vs "Eastern Europeans" and Latinos.

Ignoring for a moment that using the term "Eastern Europe" is itself hugely problematic, though usually because of ignorance not racism, I have worked in one and heard of several examples where there were huge discrepancies in salaries (much more than CoL-related), raises, promotions etc. between native English speakers and people from the CEE region.

There's absolutely a "caste" system among white people in tech. North Americans, UK, NZ, and AUS first, western Europe second, everyone else fifth.

I cannot really confirm that within Europe where I live at least. Using Eastern Europe isn't problematic either. It doesn't have negative connotations where I live, it simply refers to the country of origin. Southern Europe perhaps, but that isn't really meant too seriously and more referring to fiscal policies.

Companies pay their workers the lowest wage they can get away with. In some regions the wage level is smaller so people tend to accept lower wages. Unfair of course if they live and work in the same place but also not really discrimination. They have to demand more.

I doubt this is comparable to castes in these cases.

> I cannot really confirm that within Europe where I live at least

Brexit literally happened because of among other reasons too many "Eastern Europeans". Germans have zero qualms about using phrases like "Barely stolen, already in Poland"...

> Using Eastern Europe isn't problematic either. It doesn't have negative connotations where I live, it simply refers to the country of origin

If you can give me a concise definition of "Eastern Europe" that doesn't have a bunch of asterisks and doesn't use effectively colonial groupings (i.e. when the USSR occupied/puppeted countries usually considered EE) I'll concede this one. But I doubt that you can give me such a definition.

> Companies pay their workers the lowest wage they can get away with. In some regions the wage level is smaller so people tend to accept lower wages. Unfair of course if they live and work in the same place but also not really discrimination. They have to demand more.

I know how capitalism works. But when you see someone with 10 years of experience quit because they couldn't get beyond $x regardless of what they did and how much they asked for more get replaced with someone with 3 years of experience making 150% of x for 50% of the same job... The difference being the former was Polish and the latter an American living in Romania (i.e. with an even lower CoL than Poland)...

Does it seem incredible, considering companies should optimize for profit? Absolutely. But I've seen it happen with my own eyes and I've seen the work of both.

At least the north Americans think so.

> Most likely they struggled because the legal language in policies was ambiguous on how to handle the situation, therefore opening the room for the manager to pursue action against the company for consequences for their behavior.

How? Do you really think their language specified that discrimination could only happen from white people to minorities?

I'm guessing they weren't sure whether caste was a protected class.

Discrimination in law revolves around protected classes (race, religion, national origin, age and sex are the "big five" in the US, and subsequent acts and decisions have added sexual orientation/gender identity, familial status, pregnancy, disability, veteran status, and genetic information). If you act on the basis of that, someone can, well, make a federal case out of it.

On the other hand, if you discriminated on the basis of eye color -- pretending for a moment it wasn't correlated with race -- you might be a shitty manager, but it wouldn't be a legal issue.

I'm not sure why laws about protected classes would be directly relevant in the case described in the top-level comment here, which is a manager who "was pretty much dismissive of everything anyone of a lower caste did / wouldn't communicate with them effectively." That just sounds like an ordinary problem with basic job performance. Surely most company policies would have ways of handling employees who are just blatantly obstinate and hostile towards other employees regardless of why they decide to act that way.

The history of employment law suggests this is not the case. See for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Country_(film)

> Josey quickly befriends several other female workers at the mine and soon realizes the women are constant targets for sexual harassment and humiliation by most of their male co-workers, who, like Hank, believe the women are taking jobs more appropriate for men. The union in real life was USW, and did nothing to stop it. Josey in particular is targeted by Bobby Sharp, her ex-boyfriend from high school. Josey tries to talk to her supervisor, Arlen Pavich, about the problem, but he refuses to take her concerns seriously. The women experience additional harassment and even abuse in retaliation, and Bobby spreads rumors that Josey attempted to seduce him, leading his wife to publicly berate and humiliate Josey at Sammy's hockey game. Sammy begins to resent the way the townspeople treat them and comes to believe the gossip about his mother's alleged promiscuity.

> Josey takes her concerns to the mine's owner, Don Pearson, but despite his previous assurances that he is there to help, she arrives to find that he has invited Pavich to the meeting, along with several other executives and offers to accept her resignation immediately. She refuses, and after Pearson implies he believes the rumors about her promiscuity, leaves devastated. Later, after being sexually assaulted by Bobby at work, she resigns and asks Bill White, a lawyer friend of Kyle and Glory, to help her file a lawsuit against the company.

Companies have to protect people from protected classes. That doesn't mean they can't fire people for being assholes to non-protected classes. (It's a separate question of whether casteism would count as discrimination against a protected class - arguably it should, since only people of certain nationalities / races are subjected to casteism.)

My point was that even people in protected classes will be abused with impunity, if the business doesn't believe that credible case law and/or regulation will actually be able to punish them if theey fail to protect them. Expecting business to randomly protect people from abuse is just wishful thinking.

> Expecting business to randomly protect people from abuse is just wishful thinking.

Excellent point! Unfortunately, at least to me, it seems like most people who are pro DEI _do_ think that such policies are enacted for moral reasons. Which would be fine, think what you want, but it’s pretty frustrating to be told that my actual problem with it is that I’m just a privileged white guy who’s afraid.

I didn't mean to express confidence that all or nearly all companies actually do have reasonable policies that are well enforced (but I see how my comment could be interpreted that way). I am not at all surprised that many companies are dreadful environments like the company in that lawsuit. What I meant is that it's not reasonable to hold companies only to the standard of legally protected classes. That's a good standard, of course, but a very low bar.

Why is caste not a subset of national origin or race? Do Indians who discriminate on the basis of caste also discriminate against non-Indians of a lower caste, or is it solely confined to other Indians? If not directly a protected class, why would this not clearly be a disparate impact type of case?

Morally, it may be obvious to us that that's how it should be, but the law doesn't work like that. The law runs on precedents. Taken another way, the law is like code. The "architects" of the code are the legislature who write the laws, and the "programmers" are the judges, who decide exactly what goes in the if-else conditions, based on their interpretation of the law, and those become precedents the next time someone revisits that condition.

The U.S. law on the matter doesn't explicitly mention caste. There are constitutional originalists who take a very "conservative" approach to applying the law, and they might say it isn't illegal until the law is changed to explicitly forbid caste discrimination. When I was growing up, I knew some conservative Indians who would've taken that stance.

The Cisco discrimination suit is the first test of the law, and is likely setting the first precedent. Apple has decided its position (make of that what you will), and chosen to get ahead of the game.

Applicable precedent is basically already set for this, especially in the liberal Ninth Circuit. This is the language of Bostock regarding LGBTQ discrimination, decided in 2020 6-3 and written by a conservative constitutional originalist (Gorsuch):

"An employer who fired an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit."

Replace "homosexual or transgender" with "different caste" and "different sex" with "different race/national origin/ancestry (in California, ancestry is a protected class)" and the passage quite obviously still applies:

An employer who fired an individual for being [from a different caste] fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a [different race]. [Race/National origin] plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

I think that word replacement, in a court of law, might be harder to do than you think because caste is not officially recognized by American law. I'm not sure how you could prove equivalence without a definition to work from.

It seems this is all being activity worked through now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_discrimination_in_the_Un...

I don't think a subset is a protected class. If you don't want to hire/promote/etc people from Oklahoma, that's not explicitly prohibited, because state origin isn't a protected class.

If you only hired/promoted/etc people from upper castes, that would be discrimination on national origin, because anyone who isn't from the historic India region wouldn't be eligible. But if you're promoting upper castes and not lower castes, and you promote people from outside the region, there's not a clear discrimination on national origin. I'm an outsider to the caste system, but I don't think caste is considered to be the same as race? Especially not in the US, where federal race has very limited categories {(select one: Hispanic/Latino, not Hispanic/Latino), (select at least one: American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black/African American, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, White)}.

Of course, IMHO, the underlying anti-discrimination intent is to treat people based on their skills and abilities etc, not based on the circumstances of their birth, and discriminating based on caste is clearly not within that intent.

The argument is not that caste is the same as race but that the use of caste as a marker is an additional burden placed ONLY on Indian employees and is therefore based on race or national origin. If you promote only upper-class Indians and no lower-class Indians while promoting other races regardless of caste then you are discriminating against Indians because other races/national origins do not have to clear the additional caste hurdle.

> Of course, IMHO, the underlying anti-discrimination intent is to treat people based on their skills and abilities etc, not based on the circumstances of their birth, and discriminating based on caste is clearly not within that intent.

This is what really bugs me about DEI policies and the people who advocate for them. A lot of comments seem to say "well, caste isn't a protected class so they didn't know what to do," which to me means "the company isn't afraid of getting sued for explicit discrimination because it isn't illegal, so no one is going to do anything."

HR is not interested in making things more diverse, or helping the oppressed, or any other "good thing" that DEI claims to do. They are interested in preventing lawsuits. It is disgusting to me that so many people seemingly know this full well and still advocate for DEI policies as if their HR department was founded by MLK.

> A lot of comments seem to say "well, caste isn't a protected class so they didn't know what to do," which to me means "the company isn't afraid of getting sued for explicit discrimination because it isn't illegal, so no one is going to do anything."

The company is probably also afraid of getting sued for firing the Indian person doing the discrimination that's not explicitly prohibited. With the right presentation, that looks like discrimination based on national origin, because only Indian origin people would be fired for caste discrimination.

Sure, I completely understand that. But a wise man once said:

I think we agree and I appreciate the insight. I am just very against deceptive advertising, and the way people advocate for DEI policies seems very deceptive to me.

Yeah, I think we agree. HR is likely to follow the explicit portions of the law, and not follow the intent, and that's part of what makes DEI policies often feel hollow or performative. I had to take a 'managing within the law' course given by HR at a big corp once, and it was immensely clear what they were most concerned about, and also immensely clear that I didn't want to be associated with being in management ;) From the HR perspective, their job is to reduce employee lawsuits, and managers are their tool to gather information so that HR can do their job effectively. I'd rather just be in charge of computers and not people, thanks.

The rough equivalence in american terms is probably someone from a well established New England family discriminating against an underprivileged southerner assuming both are white.

If you’re not Indian you don’t have a caste. Discrimination against you would be covered under other forms of discrimination (national origin, religion, color, etc..).

Maybe university-pedigree in the US?

"Ivy league" isn't quite as closed as the caste system, but multi-generational matriculation is at least perceived as common, pop culture equates attending one of a select number of universities with success/intelligence/power/wealth, and 8/9 SCOTUS Justices graduated from 2 law schools. You also get a hierarchy of social standing with Ivy league at the top, community colleges and no-college at the bottom, and some arcane ordering of various public and private institutions in between which you need to be a cultural insider to parse.

My understanding is that non-Indians are simply outside the caste system entirely. So to the extent that there are Indians who view themselves as better than non-Indians, that's less caste discrimination and more good old fashioned racism.

Do you know of any Indians who treat all non-Indians as inferior? My understanding is that non-Indians are judged based on their skin color. That is most certainly racism, but not based on nationality.

Another thing that puzzles me is how you differentiate caste discrimination from racism. The underlying motivations are different. But the treatment, politics and tactics used are almost the same in both cases. I'm curious about your perspective on these.

Personally I think they're the same - equally abhorrent, and people who act that way should be shunned from the industry entirely (there's a comment I made I think a week ago saying basically the same thing).

Legally though, racism == illegal discrimination while caste discrimination == legal discrimination.

It might be!

I'm not a lawyer, and have no idea if there is already precedent in the US specifically regarding castes, but there is a motion that national origin covers ancestry.

It's entirely possible that the legal department in the story above thought it was a cut and dry case and that's why they pushed hard to shut it down before it became one.

Yeah it sounds like legal saw it as cut and dry at least that he could be fired (and possibly that they also had a requirement to do so), while HR folks were making nonsensical arguments of the kind we're seeing here from non-lawyers.

It’s not that it is or it isn’t. The US legal system is based on precedent so if there’s little history of previous cases where this was decided then it’s very hard to know how it will go in court.

Everyone loves citing precedent but nobody wants to be the first one to try and set it.

It's an open legal question for state and federal courts today, so it makes sense companies are struggling with it. The legal language is ambiguous at best, and corporate lawyers/HR exist to mitigate exposure and not take a moral high ground.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/u-s-civil-r...

My understanding of the situation is that Western countries/companies don't usually have protected class status on basis of caste. Those protections exist for race, gender, age etc.

Ok are there also specific legal protections for Eye color, Hair Color, presence of Freckles, etc? Does every possible way to discriminate need to be clearly spelled out for it to be illegal?

Your question seems to stem from the belief that discrimination is illegal, which it is not. Discrimination is completely legal, including in hiring practices, as long as you're not discriminating against a protected class (either directly or by proxy). That's why the classes are explicitly enumerated, because if it's not in that list you can discriminate based on it.

If you want to open a shop and put a sign out that says "No customers with blue eyes permitted" you're completely within your right to do so. But let's say you discriminated against some other form of eyes, that maybe disproportionately affected groups of a particular race or national origin, that would be illegal.

Quibbling with your hypothetical: blue eyes are disproportionately possessed by people of a particular race

But most people of that race have non-blue eyes.

Still probably enough to fall under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

In practice, in the US, the categories you listed have all been used as proxies for race and/or ethnicity. Making a claim of discrimination based on proxy characteristics isn't always clear cut, but it sticks often enough to make companies cautious of it.

But yeah, fundamentally, in the American system, something needs to either explicitly or implicitly be a protected class. Otherwise it's legal to discriminate based on that characteristic. Plus the list of protected classes varies by jurisdiction.

Discrimination against eye color would definitely be forbidden as discrimination against race; you can't ban everybody except those with blue eyes without having a racially disparate impact. This is probably true of those other physical characteristics too.

But speaking more generally, the principle in America is that if something isn't forbidden, then it is permitted. You could probably get away with some nonsense like "Don't hire anybody who owns a red car, because red car owners are too impulsive and hot headed"

Yes, and by the same token, discrimination on the basis of caste would likely be judged to have a disparate impact based on nationality, race, and religion (against Hindus / Indians), since such discrimination won't impact people of other races. We just don't have actual precedent about it yet, but any company that doesn't take action over it is playing with fire.

Thinking about it, astrological sign is probably safe; it shouldn't correlate with any protected class.

Yeah, I can't think of anywhere in the US this would overlap with a protected class - so long as it was consistently applied. If someone says they discriminate based on your sign, it would warrant a very close look to be sure they aren't actually only checking the birthdates of people of certain protected categories.. this sort of red herring discrimination does happen, but if it was truly and consistently based on someone's sign, that would likely be defensible everywhere in the US.

No, there are not. (In the USA) You are legally allowed to discriminate based on non-protected classes as long as the non-protected class is not being used as a proxy for a protected class.

I was trying to find out if you could really discriminate based on freckliness and before my attention span terminated I found this interesting list:

https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/employmen...

[Edit/spoiler: does not cover freckles!]

Both the manager and the victim were part of the same minority as far as the law was concerned.

/IANAL

> If he was white this would have been dealt with sooner.

I think that if we more or less accurately map the situation into an analogous one involving the class system among whites in North America, then the "lower caste" white person would not even be working there.

I thought this too. “White” has a lot of gradients in the US

> HR absolutely struggled with the issue. The HR folks tasked with dealing with discrimination issues largely had spent their time constructing company wide emails and classes that revolved around white folks discriminating against others / concepts of privilege, absolutely froze when faced with a discrimination issue outside that stereotype.

Cue the pro DEI (i honestly don’t know what it’s called anymore) people claiming this wasn’t “real DEI”.

Not sure what point you're trying to make here. Are you arguing that companies shouldn't have DEI initiatives because they didn't help sufficiently in this case? Do you interpret this as evidence that DEI is somehow bad?

Maybe "no true Scotsmxn" etc

Lol. I think it'd have to be "Scotsperson" or "Scotshuman" or "Scotsfolk" - the X is usually reserved for a vowel that indicates masculine or feminine, like the super popular "latinx" that's totally used by more than just rich white liberals.

"Scotsmxn" just reads to me as "Scots-mexican".

Haggis tacos!

Fortunately you can just use "Scot" :-)

I don’t think this is some sort of malicious conspiracy or evidence of anti whiteness or whatever. Processes are created for the common case and when there is an uncommon scenario, it is new territory for everyone involved and someone has to be responsible. In most corporate environments, nobody wants to be that person so inaction is generally the norm unless the course of action is straightforward or has precedent.

It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

That's... Exactly the opposite of a blind spot in intersectionality. The idea that those in the intersections of marginalized groups suffer more doesn't come from some bizarre belief that those at the top mistreat them twice as much. It comes from recognizing that more people feel comfortable mistreating them.

It's well-documented at this point that black women in the USA during slavery were mistreated just as much by white women as white men, despite the weight of patriarchy causing white women to be mistreated by white men as well: oppressor in one situation, oppressed in another.

Intersectionality is calling out that those differences are present within groups, and that no analysis based on only a single axis can ever explain the full situation.

Agreed. In tech especially, certain minority groups (East and South Asians) are over represented so our processes must evolve to deal with the situations that result from them.

I'd rather the processes evolve to treat all discrimination on factors such as race or caste as bad, regardless of the race or caste of the people doing the discriminating.

you may be thinking of something different from intersectionality.

this situation is a perfect example of one of the most basic foundational concepts of intersectionality.

- person A is discriminated against because of some trait

- person A may use whatever power they have to diminish another person because of some trait their own group has historically oppressed.

discrimination isn’t a direct straight line. it’s much more complicated, it intersects in many strange ways.

That’s the theory, which, if you actually took to its logical conclusion, would result in treating and evaluating every individual as an individual, and the entire concept of group identity as a short-hand mechanism for assigning “intersecting identities” would have to be abandoned.

That’s not how it is applied in practice.

It does not logically follows at all. Nothing in what previous poster said prevents analysis of group behavior or treatment. It does not make it impossible to talk about race or gender or age - it only makes it less naive.

It makes it impossible to assign an individual identity — and evaluate individual behavior and status — as merely a function of their coarse-grained group membership.

It does not make it impossible at all. And it also does not need to. You can talk about how groups are influenced or how they interact without making all the interaction to be result of "merely" just that.

It does not follow logically but it still is prudent to do exactly that for reasons that intersectionality doesn't have a perspective on.

> ... the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

I think this is a textbook description of intersectionality[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

> It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

what's really bleakly funny is that you're right - that's how it's taken, but that's actually a major _point_ of intersectionality.

Well, "DEI" in the end is the neoliberalization of (the capitalist-corporate-compatible parts of) intersectionality, so it's not really surprising that something of significant value was lost in the appropriation.

How does one "neoliberalize" intersectionality? What parts of intersectionality are "capitalist-corporate-compatible"?

I'd imagine this type of situation could also be especially tricky since both sides of it have _some_ claim to minority/victim status.

Not that it isn't still fairly clear what needs to happen, but it's not hard to imagine how even doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons could end up spun as if it's a squabble over a prayer room or something, like "clueless white HR department fires productive manager after disrespecting his cultural and religious background. When will they ever learn??"

True. This explains maybe the first 5 minutes of the issue. In practice, HR usually leans on Legal for these types of questions. It likely boiled down to “do we want to be sued by a whole team/department because of a bad manager doing unethical thing? Or do we want to get sued by that one manager?” They had to weigh the risk of each since it probably wasn’t clear either way which was the legal thing to do (much like the debates here). They chose wisely in terms of risk and that’s why it came off as “legal’s” choice.

From what I saw I don't think it was malicious at all either. I think the HR team really just sort of froze for a while and didn't know what to do when faced with something new to them.

The frustrating thing for everyone is that it was an obvious case of discrimination and HR stalled for a long time. I don't want to get into details but it played out more like HR had a playbook that was stupid simple and suddenly the role players weren't what they expected and they didn't act.

Meanwhile everyone knew it was discrimination.

I'm a white dude, and had an incident a number of years ago in which a group of Indian contractors basically didn't want to work with me because I was a white dude. Used a number of slang racist terms in my direction. I didn't make a stink about it because I was a consultant just there on a short-term project, but it was memorable. As another commenter suggested, even the whole "white people" branding that happens in social media is comical, given centuries of one white group looking down on another white group. I'm glad to see this kind of social dialog about racism / classism in all of its forms and think it is very worthwhile to realize that it isn't just about the stereotype of white (males) hating on everyone else as is generally portrayed.

In the UK, class and ethnicity and accent intersect to create some similarly “invisible to HR” discrimination situations between people who would otherwise be lumped together as white.

Could you explain what you mean, a bit more?

Class discrimination is a big thing, and it’s related to accent discrimination and somewhat to ethnicity too. There is no shortage of stereotypes associated with regional accents (apologies, but to illustrate: cockney = untrustworthy; West Country = unsophisticated; Yorkshire = blunt, miserly; RP = haughty). Accent is judged alongside class (which I won’t attempt to define here). Ethnicity comes into the picture with groups such as travellers (who have only recently been recognized as an ethnic group) and showmen (who disclaim being one), and Jewish ethnicity is also often ignored as “just another kind of white” (see David Baddiel’s book Jews Don’t Count). Then there are Scottish and Welsh people and maybe even sub-national groupings like Cornish, where ethnicity and accent and class interact in complex ways.

These groupings have fuzzy edges and can be hard to disentangle as identity markers (and thus hard to make anti-discrimination rules against), which is fertile ground for under-the-radar discrimination.

The UK has multi-dimensional racism!

The UK has racism/tribalism built in. It started there and worked upwards. The founding Anglo-Saxons are the Angles and the Saxons, two competing and merged races. The word England means land of the Angles.

The class system overrides any racism, you are judged on much more than your race. Where you were born, your education (what school and university you went to), your friends, where you live now (by area name and distance to better spots), your family connections, your accent and word choice, your dress and behaviour (manners and mannerisms), your job history, the clubs you belong to, and much more.

If you work with some people or someone really cares about you, they'll do homework on you to find out all this stuff.

The UK has mapped out discrimination far deeper than american style racism. There are many more ways to slice up your image than just tribalism and ethnicity.

We have this in the US as well. People with a southern drawl may be thought of as country bumpkins and whatnot.

Some (most?) of humanity's constant behaviors over our lifetime as a species is pretty sad.

I remember reading an article by someone from the UK who loved that in the US you could move somewhere new an “be someone else”.

I had no idea what he meant until I visited the UK and some locals explained to me the scale of associations / assumptions involved based on many factors.

I don't understand how you can be so dismissive of HR talking about discrimination while at the same time praising legal for firing someone for discrimination, and compensating people for being discriminated against.

What would you like HR to do about caste-based discrimination? Apparently not send emails, or mention it in classes? You just want them to go straight to firing?

A lot of people are frustrated because if you ask anyone who works in HR at a company with DEI policies, they would say that they are "committed to diversity and inclusion and helping the oppressed" and whatever else they were trained to say. But given what seems like a textbook example of oppressive discrimination, they throw their hands up and say "well, we don't know what to do because the law says we don't have to do anything." Are we really still supposed to believe they're "committed" to anything other than getting paid?

From parents comment I understand: the emails and classes were apparently only addressing white people who discriminate and did not address cast-based discrimination. HR did nothing about the cast-based discrimination. And so parent is dismissive of HR. Only legal took any action there.

The commenter was saying that the classes and emails were geared towards evil whites, not caste issues. That is, they had no idea of how to approach the topic because they (probably?) had no idea about what caste is.

Maybe deal with it the same way you would with any other discrimination situation?

"You just want them to go straight to firing?"

Assuming it is clear cut discrimination, yes. Especially when it's a manager doing it.

ironic how discrimination classes kinda discriminated against other minorities by focusing mainly on white people. this has to be a The Office plot line

Curious, why did HR "struggled with the issue", and why it was a brave thing to decide that it was discrimination? I hope it's not the so-called multiculturalism.

Not sure why the question, an honest one, got down voted. My assumption was that discrimination is bad, no matter which culture it comes from. So, the HR should investigate or intervene per my assumption. And then per my experience with the western movement, people hesitate to judge other cultures because of the multiculturalism, hence my hope it's not that.

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