Seattle could become the first city to ban caste discrimination
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The biggest one to me is the sex discrimination across dev and qa, with a women making up the vast majority of qa even though they graduated with the same degrees as the men from the same Indian universities.
Even Indian men that I respected on multiple levels, when they get on an interview with a women they are overly harsh in ways they were not with men. So much so that I stopped interviewing all together. I reported to HR and they of course didn't know how to handle it. It really makes me sad.
I try to talk to my Indian colleagues about this and they stay extremely tight lipped about this for a multitude of reasons. I applaud this action. This shit has to stop, leave it in India, America is better than this.
Discrimination is fractal. All interview should be truly double-blind.
https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-term...
The rest of your comment is fine but you can say it without throwing an entire country under the bus.
Guess what, the US is currently literally allowing for caste discrimination. So maybe it’s not better than this. Not yet.
India is not dealing with this issue, America is.
Lmao - clearly never been to india. Where do you think this comes from?
Dealing as in working on it, not dealing as in enduring.
India is not dealing with caste discrimination? Is this a joke?
India has implemented incredibly wide-reaching and aggressive policies to both combat present-day casteism and remediate the effects of past/historical casteism.
Yes, caste discrimination still happens in India - that's why it remains an ongoing effort with a multi-pronged approach. But it's very much an issue that is actively being addressed at nearly every layer of society, to a degree that would be inconceivable in the US or Europe.
Honestly, if you compare the tangible and concrete steps to combat casteism that India has undertaken (a currently active effort) to the incredibly milquetoast anti-racism efforts within Europe (for example), it makes the latter look like mere lip service by comparison.
In America companies, women who struggle to find software engineering roles due to discrimination are often able to get lower-paid roles in QA where they are less likely to be pre-judged for not looking like what people think engineers look like. The result is that 38.8% of American QA testers are women, compared to 14% of software engineers.
I wonder how much that has to do with the hiring managers also being women. (For the places where that’s the case.)
Fields that hold fixed-mindset beliefs, where success in the field is attributed to innate talent, "being smart" or other unchanging characteristics, have significantly more discrimination against women and traditionally-marginalized racial groups than do fields that believe success relies on hard work and practice: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1261375
Unless sitkack thumbed their comment into an iPhone while simultaneously driving drunk and having unprotected sex with a prostitute, "extremely reckless and dangerous" is an awfully weird commentary on their post.
To quote:
The biggest one to me is the sex discrimination across dev and qa, with a women making up the vast majority of qa even though they graduated with the same degrees as the men from the same Indian universities.
Also, you wrote:
Nothing to do with casteism.
It is not casteism. It is cultural.
About "extremely reckless and dangerous": On HN, each time casteism is the topic, it evokes strong, emotionally defensive responses from Indian-descent people (both nationals and the diaspora). Something that I often see repeated: "Oh, you just don't understand." "Oh, you cannot understand this ${thing} in our ancient culture." It's hard to understand if you don't ask. Yes, you may perceive their asking as a slight, but in many cases they are making an effort to learn more about this complex social issue. I see similar reactions during discussions about transgender rights and Black Lives Matter _in the United States_. There seems to be a small, vocal minority that wants to deny these are real, very serious, and important social issues that need our attention.
When a non-Indian descent person sees what they perceive as casteism or sex discrimination towards Indian descent people, how would you like them to raise the issue with you?
What does it mean for something to be fractal in this sense?
There's a famous old Emo Phillips joke about this problem, which goes as follows. Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
A common example is women discriminating against women co-workers by gossiping and backstabbing them in the social aspect of the workplace. We may not see that it is discrimination (on the basis of gender) because it's women doing their thing.
In the Deaf community, we experience discrimination every day from those who are hearing. Then there is a big one against people who identify as "D" deaf [those who identify with the Deaf community as an identity] and those who identify as "d" deaf [those who identify as having an impairment]. Those within the deaf community additionally discriminate those who aren't "deaf" enough, and then in turn, even discriminate against deaf who are mentally handicapped.
I notice this too. It's like someone brings up caste discrimination online (somewhere like teamblind) and a bunch of people come out of nowhere and say "that isn't real". Isn't very convincing to say the least
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/caste-is-no...
> "the vast majority of high paying jobs are still in the hands of the top three castes."
> As India transforms, one might expect caste to dissolve and disappear, but that is not happening. Instead, caste is making its presence felt in ways similar to race in modern America: less important now in jobs and education, but vibrantly alive when it comes to two significant societal markers — marriage and politics…
> Inter-caste marriages in India are on the rise but still tend to be the province of the liberal few. For much of the country, with its penchant for arranged marriages and close family ties, caste is still a primary determinant in choosing a spouse…
…and a bit more. Why do you believe caste discrimination isn’t real? That seems like a strong stance.
Why you might find people being defensive on this thread is that it might feel galling to be talked down to by Americans on this subject. The Indians on this thread, like me, have never thought about caste and yet they’re being told to stop being casteist, to fight casteism etc by people who found out about it 10 minutes ago. For others, being told about casteism makes them feel bad because it’s a reminder that India isn’t as great as it could be, it’s not the land of equality and opportunity that we’d like to believe it is.
Not saying they’re right to feel that way, because we must do our part regardless of what others say. But it just gives you their perspective, so you might understand.
yet, right ?
Just so many Indians in the US makes this evident to me
Anyway, nobody likes others shiting on their country, but no need to gaslight or minimize
That's how a lot of us Indians feel when Americans talk about caste discrimination.
Yes, it is absolutely real.
No, you probably don't understand at all how it works. It is kind of darkly hilarious to me that a comment from some guy saying "There are lots of Indians in Seattle, and they seem to stick together. I really don't know about the dynamics of the caste system..." is the second most upvoted comment on this discussion.
Yes, it is exhausting for us to teach you about thousands of years of history and how they contributed to discrimination. Go read up a few history books if you really want to know.
His writings are mostly in English and present a deep study of the subject, especially given that it affected him personally.
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Reservations are not equivalent to affirmative action in America. Dr. Ambedkar was the Chairman of Constitutional Drafting Committee. In popular imagination, he is often called the author of the Indian constitution. Reservations are a small part of it.
> He was the Indian equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King.
I understand that you are trying to make the context relatable to an American audience but I find this framing rather grating. I don't mean any disrespect to Dr. King but this is selling Dr. Ambedkar short.
Well, I am trying – what about you?
Go add some more history sources to mine in the comment below that's asking for them!
where do you see caste discrimination show up ?
The main issue is that a good chuck of tech folks upvoting and making this a big don't want to understand. They want to use this as an issue to not let Indians get promoted to managerial positions instead of them. It becomes easier now to say "hey, Indians are casteist, don't make them a managers'.
It's similar to how there is always mass confusion around here for the requirements for scouting for local applicants for work visas vs green card applications.
They don't seem to be looking for facts, that's why the discussions are so strange with real experiences downvoted, and some vague notions of high rates of caste discrimination in the US are upvoted.
I am honestly not sure why Indians would not become managers. A lot of Indian managers have existed in the companies I've been at.
This is not politics or history, or even western thinking. It is fundamentally unfair and unjust. Treat others as you would like to be treated. This concept of justice is not foreign to any country or belief system as far as I am aware, please correct me if I am mistaken here. But every culture has ways and means by which laws, norms and traditions have been established that subvet the most basic senses of justice anyone can have.
I do not need to understand the history between tutsi and hutu in rwanda or serbs and bosnians or native and white americans in latin america or black and white people in the US.
Again I ask, unless you are arguing to justify the injustice, why is the reason behind it unjust?
I would say that I personally don't think any generalizations about "indians in seattle" or elsewhere is correct but individual experiences are not to be ignored either.
I don't see why HR and EEOC won't treat this like any other type of discrimination.
Matter of fact, I don't think seattle should need to ban caste discrimination. It is already illegal at the federal level!
I get what you’re saying - it’s just discrimination like any other discrimination and all discrimination is outlawed implicitly. I mostly agree. I just wouldn’t want this to become the first and only thing that people think about while trying to mediate relations between Indians.
Why would a European think an American would possess a gun in their country? And how would they get it there through customs - it’s not an idea? And a gun is a lethal weapon - is the caste system?
Sorry, I’ve spent a bit of time in Europe (including living for a stint). I’m also from a part of the US that has plenty of firearms. I just can’t make sense of this metaphor.
Yeah, you know how stuff works in Europe, so this transparently sounds like nonsense to you. Similarly, the OP's assertion that caste and sex discrimination is "rampant" among Indians in Seattle sounds like nonsense to me.
> And a gun is a lethal weapon - is the caste system?
Definitely, in a bad way. People have been murdered in India over inter-caste marriages.
> I just can’t make sense of this metaphor.
I'll try to explain it point by point:
- Caste-based discrimination is a terrible thing that happens all the time in India, similar to how gun violence is a terrible thing that happens all the time in the US.
- But if a European said to you "You Americans in my country are super argumentative! You seem to be ready to pull a gun on each other all the time against each other, it's just like what I read in the paper!", you'd think it was nonsense that was basically stereotype-matching.
- Similarly, I find OP's comment about rampant caste discrimination nonsensical because it relies on simplistic stereotyping.
You are also not obliged to teach people anything, but as you've seen the people will judge you based on the information presented. Not contributing to the narrative only leads people to base judgement on the supplied information.
Most of us in the West never wanted anything to do with caste! This is a uniquely Indian problem which requires Indian efforts to fix, this isn’t something that can be passed off to western social justice movements to solve for you.
I don't pass off racism or gun violence as "a uniquely European problem which requires European efforts to fix". I study the nuances and try to help where I can.
You should think about doing the same.
It makes for uninteresting discussion of the misgivings of different countries when the first thing you're able to reach for is "well what about colonialism?"
It's mainly meant as an illustration of the OP's "We never wanted Problem X, take it back to your country!" argument, which is simplistic and uninteresting.
It seems that it’s an older generation thing. The younger ones don’t care about caste at all but if their parents ask about their friends they will lie, because their parents care a lot about caste.
And while caste is illegal in India. It’s such a big country it’s difficult to enforce. So it’s still rampant outside of the big cities.
I used to donate to a charity which builds wells in India for small villages to ensure they have safe clean drinking water. They supply the materials but everyone in the village must contribute to building it and everyone must have access regardless of caste. If the village does not agree they won’t help.
I can’t remember what the charity was called :(
The caste system was outlawed ages ago. It very much is illegal.
What exactly do you think is outlawed?
There is more to the story and that's a good read, but in practice you can see cast discrimination still a lot in India, as I figured out recently when I have been a few weeks in the country.
> The caste system was outlawed ages ago. It very much is illegal.
As you'll note, the actual prohibition is on a narrow class of discrimination. That is what I was trying to emphasize. I live in India and am very much aware of the discrimination that still exists.
I never said it wasn't still practiced. Just that its much more observed outside of the big cities than in it.
What others have been trying to explain to you is that only caste-based discrimination was banned, not the caste system itself.
Because they go on to say that the ban hasn't been very effective, you seem to miss that first point and start arguing that you weren't saying discrimination doesn't exist, which isn't addressing the intention behind what they were saying.
I never said the caste system was abolished or doesn't exist. And I never mentioned 'untouchables'. It seems those replying and refuting anything I say are in favor of the caste system and want to keep it, which is utterly horrible.
If you cannot discriminate against caste, the caste serves no purpose, because you're effectively saying people are equal. But writing anti descrimination laws into the constitution obviously doesn't help society move away from it, especially when its so engrained into elders, or people who live outside the big cities.
You literally said:
> The caste system was outlawed ages ago.
> It seems those replying and refuting anything I say are in favor of the caste system and want to keep it
This is one hell of a take. How the fuck do you fix something if you keep pretending it's already fixed.
> If you cannot discriminate against caste,
There is no law criminalizing discrimination. People discriminate and face discrimination every single day.
> people who live outside the big cities.
I've lived in the third and fourth largest cities in India and seen discrimination with my eyes.
In my last comment I said exactly that. Being outlawed does not mean it’s abolished. Something can be illegal and people still do it. People still commit murder and that’s been outlawed for like ever. So it can’t have been abolished if it still exists.
> How the fuck do you fix something if you keep pretending it's already fixed.
At no point did I say it’s a solved problem. My very first comment I said it happens outside the big cities more than the big cities. I never said it doesn’t happen.
You know. I heard a saying once: “people outside America know more about America than Americans know about America” it seems like the same is true here.
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After the British came the caste system got worse. They used the caste system in their government and caused a lot of people to get upset.
We could literally blame all of India’s current caste issues on the British.
The government should be demolishing the caste system entirely based on the little I know from the people I’ve spoken to. It causes more harm than good. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is outlawed.
I don't think this is a fair characterisation. I have never heard of anyone wanting to stop this. If you mean CRT, that is something different, or at least the versions of it that are causing pushback are different.
More broadly, books like Lies my Teacher Told Me have pointed to the long history of numerous failings of our history curriculum.
We never got to be anywhere near the slave quarters, and it was never once mentioned that dozens of black people were brutally slaughtered there with their heads put on pikes at the entrance.
There has never in the history of the United States been a curriculum containing CRT at the K-12 level because children don't have the background and capacity to understand it.
And by bringing it up at all, you're proving that you don't either.
Indian movies became almost unwatchable lately. It's getting more and more extreme.
This book will help you give some context though
How can I or anyone prove a negative? I can only offer my life experiences as a non-high caste Indian whose both sides of the family eat meat, that caste never ever comes up with any of my Indian coworkers, managers, friends or family. Nor has anyone ever mentioned to me that they experienced issues because of their caste. In rural India and among older folks caste is more important, but in America it's pretty rare for people to care about caste. Any discrimination must be dealt with, but I don't like the generalization on HN than Indians are casteist.
The initial example I gave was this: "caste discrimination exists". The response I see is "oh no that isn't real".
That's like someone saying "mass shootings occur in the USA" and me saying "oh no those aren't real"
A white American could say "racism is a thing of the past or is an issue somewhere else, because I don't experience it on a day to day basis". That's what your reply makes me think of
> How can I or anyone prove a negative? I can only offer my life experiences
You're trying to use your own experience to speak on someone else's behalf with respect to discrimination that you've admitted to never experiencing. Even trying to prove a negative in this context is missing the point entirely
You get it. This is exactly the fear I have -- that clueless Americans will use an "Indians are casteist" excuse to justify not hiring us to management or positions of power.
There are already "keep it in India" comments on these threads that are going unmoderated, which would be totally unacceptable in any other context.
I'd posit that forming an opinion based on what you read on Blind isn't going to be accurate let alone nuanced.
You have to attack it at the root and get these people to change themselves, and that's basically also impossible.
But from a practical perspective all of this is already done and kept on the DL even before the law was in place. The social pressure already stops the blatant treatment from occurring.
We are rationalizing creatures, not rational creatures. Once racism, sexism or caste discrimination stop being strategic, people stop buying into them. The book "Pax Ethnica: Where and How Diversity Succeeds" describes several instance where this worked. Voluntary legal protection of minority rights by a historically-dominant group has repeatedly dismantled long-standing ethnic conflicts.
>We are rationalizing creatures, not rational creatures. Once racism, sexism or caste discrimination stop being strategic, people stop buying into them.
Sure but the point is, it will never be "not strategic".
It's up to us to be that countervailing social condemnation. Even imposing that cost of making up a totally different reason raises the cost of discrimination, and raising the cost of something means people will do it less.
But let's disregard that. For this specific case you can't even know who to socially condemn. If the law can't determine it how can you?
Just be careful about generalizing a country of 1.4 billion people. Someone more ignorant will automatically assume that all Indians are the same and they all believe in caste system.
> but you are generalizing way too much by saying "My Indian Colleagues" ... I will probably be tight lipped in front of you
All OP said is their Indian colleagues are tight-lipped about caste, which it sounds like you would be too. I'm not sure why you feel that's unfair generalization. OP isn't claiming they all support it, just that they're silent about it.
OP is making sweeping generalizations. Another example: All women in QA. So what ? May be because women find it easier to start with QA (lower barrier to entry) and has less demanding work. Sure, some of it may be cultural but tieing to casteism is a stretch.
OP is talking not just about casteism but also about sexism, and in the US this would be considered a badly sexist remark. Why do you assume that women seek jobs with a lower barrier to entry and less demanding work?
QA has ALL women is not same as All Women do QA.
Disclaimer: I'm speaking as a Scandinavian with no knowledge of this situation in India. I can only share what we have learned here, as I think it could help explain some of the reason why it ended up this way.
This could be an example of gender inequality. We had the same issue in our countries where the women chose jobs with lower barrier to entry with more dependability and stable work hours. The reason was that they had (and some still do) a lot of responsibilities outside work to take care of their family.
There was also a cultural thing where men didn't feel "manly" enough when they took time off work to take care of the children. The government provides a long maternal/paternal leave, and made an equal part of it reserved to men and women. That quickly changed the culture where it became more acceptable for men to take time off work to raise children.
It turned out that women actually wanted the same careers as men :-) The expectations from society made it hard for them, and when those expectations changed the pattern also changed.
Sure, we still have some types of work that are dominated by women, but it is increasingly their own choice. We are not finished yet, and there is still work to do, but the gap is closing.
From my experience, it seems that female developers in my country go through a different path. Instead of going to a lower entry job, they frequently start as regular developers and often end up as managers and other positions of influence.
I think it is distracting.
What we should talk about, and what we can talk about, is the inacceptable behavior of (some) people, in this case (some) Indians in the US work place.
Shouldn't we be talking about it then? Openly? Educating others.
> I hate the caste system
This is where being tight lipped doesn't make sense. It falls under the "it's our problem so you can't talk about it". If it's a bad system then let it be just that, why defend it by not talking about it?
A similar analogy would be police doing brutal/illegal things and defending each other. If you're a cop and you hate that, then being tight lipped about the "internal problems and complexities" only keeps the problems going.
> All women in QA. So what ?... Sure, some of it may be cultural but tieing to casteism is a stretch.
There should be equal ratios of women in Dev vs QA for all races. Sure maybe saying casteism is the root cause is too much, but denying it is also wrong. It's like saying racism is never a factor. It's not 100% the factor, but it's definitely a portion of a problem.
I guess... we should talk about it and learn - and not be afraid.
I agree with everything you said, but just a note that OP was talking about sex and caste discrimination as separate things, not conflating them as your parent implies.
From OP:
> The biggest one to me is the sex discrimination across dev and qa
> There should be equal ratios of women in Dev vs QA for all races
But it is flawed - it could be easily argued that this group of people are way more sexist than others which could account for that ratios being off vs inherently Caste.
It isn't a generalization to point out that there's something strange when the distribution is skewed that strongly considering that men and women are generally equal. Some slight bias is understandable, but the larger the deviation gets, the more unrealistic it is. There is nothing inherent about being a woman that would lead to them unanimously choosing to go with a lower barrier to entry and similarly there is nothing inherent about being a man that would lead to them not choosing said lower barrier and easier work.
So, every race other than Indians can't understand basic sentences.
"OP is making sweeping generalizations."
Wait.. didn't you just do that.
The ones from the higher castes (which are the most likely to be wealthy enough to come here) are the ones favored by the system and are more likely to approve of it.
I have no experience regarding Indian womens' attitudes.
Let's review the facts.
Technology firms in India have a better female to male staff ratio than the tech giants of Silicon Valley [1]. India has a much better male-to-female ratio compared with the U.S. Engineering male-female ratio in India is 1.96 as compared with 4.61 in the U.S. [2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2...
[2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/engineering-...
What India Can Teach Silicon Valley About Its Gender Problem https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/
https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-sk...
The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are first generation immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe.
While hiring in America must provide equal opportunities, there is no requirement that American companies not discriminate when sponsoring visas.
Just because there are more women in engineering doesn't imply that there isn't a pay gap, or that they're assigned to tasks of equal urgency
Indian here, in India, and here are my anecdotal experiences in decade+ experience
1. Worked with a tech team of 10 with no females, for over 8 years. Manager hired one once HR pointed it out categorically to him. Even she didn't last. Super co-incidentally, she was in QA. I should mention that she wasn't the problem.
2. Worked with design teams in 3 companies, the ratio of females was never more than 2:8 with respect to males.
3. Newly married women generally find it really hard to get back into workforce since it is expected that they will soon be planning a child and hence require a paid maternity leave. HR is explicity told about this by management.
4. Even unmarried ones are usually asked about their marriage plans when getting interviewed.
I would like to add, there is a dearth of skilled talent too with respect to women. Along with the lot less opportunities available to women for higher education, lot many women in India only join workforce to get more qualified for arranged marriages - "having working life" is somehow always in demand, higher skills or salaries do not matter to suitors usually - it is usually expected in both families that males will likely earn more than females so much so that the ones looking for prospective brides do not go for ones earning more than the prospective groom - something that perhaps works as a motivation for some women to not to vie for higher compensation jobs. This of course ends up making them more dependent on their spouses for money matters.
Again, this is not a commentary on all women or all men either but just a perspective of someone on the ground, in India.
Broadly speaking, closer gender representation in STEM is positively correlated with sexist discrimination counterintuitive though it may seem: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
"women in countries with higher gender inequality are simply seeking the clearest possible path to financial freedom. And typically, that path leads through STEM professions."
But rather than listening to anecdotes, I'll listen to evidence, which also indicates that tech at best does not discriminate against women and likely discriminates in favor of them.
Wrong. 74% of women say they have experienced gender discrimination. This is not measuring discrimination, this is measuring perceptions of discrimination - which is a substantially different thing than actually measuring discrimination through things like anonymized applications, or sending identical applications with different genders. Imagine I had an orchestra. I poll them about gender discrimination, and loads more men say they experienced gender discrimination in hiring. But when we switch to blind auditions, men actually fared worse than women. Which is more compelling evidence?
Perceptions of discrimination could be caused by all sorts of things, like a media ecosystem fiercely promoting the idea that women are being discriminated against in tech - which doesn't always match reality. For instance, Google was constantly said to have been paying women less than men, until they actually studied their salary disparities and found men were underpaid: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
However, you do raise a good point. The fact that so many women believe they are being discriminated against could very well be part of suppressed representation of women in STEM. The fact that perceptions of discrimination are so strong could dissuade women from entering the field, even though there's little evidence for actual discrimination in tech.
> That's some twisted logic there.
I prefer the term "counterintuitive". And the world works in ways, many of which are counterintuitive. Another famous example - poverty trap, where people are incentivized to stay poor when you offer them means tested welfare. While each of the pillars of such programs (means testing, helping poor etc) sound good in isolation, they have a devastating impact in practice. Moynihan (a liberal, fwiw) was skewered when he suggested as such.
Many fields that were once dominated by men are now either at parity, or even majority women. The fact that freedom from sexism stopped displacing women into CS doesn't seem like much of a bad thing.
Such a convenient explanation... CS is one of the highest paid professions, and women are taking advantage of lack-of-sexism and choosing to stay out of CS... because umm... they don't need the money? You should consider speaking at the Grace Hopper Conference, because there's lots of women there that haven't been told this truth.
As I stated in my previous comment, it's because other high paying industries stopped being sexist against women, and then the women that would have been pushed out of those industries and into CS can now study and work in the field of their choice. Nowhere did I write that "they don't need the money", and I even said that they were choosing other high paying fields once medicine, law, etc. stopped enforcing overtly sexist policies against women. Discussions are more productive when you engage with what other commenters are writing instead of your own inventions.
Obviously if a choice is starving vs CS, most women would prefer CS. That’s the choice for many women in Iran (most equal country in CS) or India. That’s not choice for most women in US or Europe. We are talking averages here - obviously there are a lot of women much more motivated by money than average men.
If I poll orchestra members and a lot more men say the face discrimination in hiring, but when I conduct blind auditions men do even worse what does that tell me? Or tells me that their perceptions of discrimination are out of line with the reality of discrimination.
If Indian companies have incentives to keep them in-house, that simple structural difference would completley chaange the numbers.
I'm not sure we havr "facts" (numbers) that are immune to these discrepancies.
That solution works in situations where performance is individual, the standards are largely agreed-upon and the access to training & opportunities are equally-accessible. That's why it was so effective for orchestras.
Unfortunately, computer science education remains one of the most discriminatory part of our industry, and the decades of discrimination mean people's resumes and post-education training vary already.
And finally, what makes a developer effective varies by team and context, and we don't have any consistent way to judge those things.
Luckily, there are plenty of techniques that can successfully address bias even under those situations. They just tend to be harder to sell to anxious people who want to stay centered in the majority, because they all require admitting that discrimination exists.
the problem is certain groups thrive on the American's lack of information about Indian society to spread their misinformation as truth. Caste, being a complex issue, has been reduced india to rural areas. Any cases about caste favoritism or discrimination area dealt with public outcry and government laws. Meritocracy is the currency in the new Indian tech space.
Caste as portrayed by American newspapers and "human rights" agencies is that every Hindu (they single out, even though caste problem exists in all religions in India Pakistan Bangladesh etc) comes with caste lense, which is untrue. There has been a deliberate attempt to make Brahim = white so that US left liberals can easily make oppressor-opressed connections. Reality is way different and complex but nobody wants to read sources. In many parts lower castes are in high power, and they exert atrocities on everyone else - other lower castes and higher castes. Whole India is riddled with examples like that. Person in power exploits poor person. Caste is just a tool. Again, with public outcry and strict laws, it has been relegated to deep rural areas of India. You won't find it easily in cities. What all this points to ? This is an attempt to dehumanize hindu population, attack hindu tech workers (who are micro minority in USA) and erode any goodwill around India.
Take this article for example, it doesn't go into the Dalit activists obvious misinterpretations but paints Rajiv Malhotra as devil incarnate. Propaganda pieces rarely show their teeth this easily. Any follower of reuters will form their opinion by reading such propaganda piece.
Salvatore Babones, american statistician warned about same thing -
Salvatore Babones | Demonising A Democracy? | India Today Conclave 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGkFwDk7TUQ .
For a western audience, India is becoming a fascist state even though ground reality is entirely opposite because they are surrounded by media reports which say so. If you repeat lie long enough, it becomes the truth.
Newspeak™ terms like 'cis' should be kept out of the general discourse, they have no place in a society where people live and thrive based on what binds them together. This type of language only serves to divide and create more 'us versus them' which may be a boon for those who want to push identity politics but is a bane for the rest of society.
The biggest problem - the structures meant to solve the problem don't know what to do
I've noticed that there are lots of teams that are primarily Indian folks and this is true not just of the contractors and India based teams. I really don't know about the dynamics of the caste system and whether not they are at play within MSFT, AMZN or other Seattle/tech companies, but just like most (all?) ethnicities there is certainly a tendency to stick together and live in the same areas / work on the same teams from what I've seen.
On a mostly unrelated note, Seattle proper (as I mentioned, I live in a suburb which is an affluent one) has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless/drug problem is very bad and the local government seems so entirely incompetent to do anything other than woke signaling.
You can see the same effect in the Indian diaspora in America as well. I'm having trouble finding stats on this, but by and large it's also highly educated, from the upper crust of society in India, overwhelmingly Brahmin and many groups (eg. Gujaratis) are statistically overrepresented compared to the Indian population at large.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/nri/us-canada-news/gujar...
My friend is Brahmin but non practicing. For her it's just something she is proud of and a lot of upper caste Indians end up going to the US for school because they didn't get into IIT. There are big differences between the older and younger generations but I wonder if maybe the immigrants from India come here with kind of their own distinct culture where caste is a part of identity so not having that caste makes you an outsider here. idk =/
1. I don't mean to lean into any negative connotations of the term, quite the contrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmopolitanism
I just came back from attending a conference in the US. I stopped by san francisco to visit a friend before going to DC for the conference. I hadn't been in DC before but visited California 10 years ago. I was surprised by how pervasive homelessness and drug use was in both places too, especially San Francisco where it definitely felt like things took a turn for the worse. Even in DC there were guys just collapsed on the sidewalk, not sure from drug use or whatever (there were people there who called an ambulance). People also just didn't seem very happy in general, although I could be imagining that since I was only there for a few days. In any case it was very surprising and not quite what I expected.
I don't mean to be unduly harsh (yet probably will come across that way anyway) but did we have to drag that into this conversation? I have lived in Seattle my entire life, was born in Ballard, and raised two kids here. It's getting kind of frustrating that every time my hometown comes up, someone inevitably mentions this without bringing up any of the complexities as to why. (For one, it would be nice if your suburb, nominally one of Seattle's regional partners in the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, would actually do their part and construct some social services for various groups.)
Our mayor, who lives half-time in Bellevue I hasten to point out, is busy saying it's all the Council's fault and the Council passes budget items and ordinances that the mayor simply ignores. Meanwhile, every city in the region is busy shoving everyone who looks like they earn less than $75,000 per year over to Seattle and then crying about how Seattle is "doing nothing".
The Council is attempting to do something good, so sure, let's bring up the massive social services crisis that's by no means unique to Seattle or Puget Sound, but probably looks like a Seattle-specific problem from a perch on the Eastside.
Credit where credit is due, the east side has way nicer roads. Money helps, I suppose.
And yeah, agree with you and the parent poster - the issue isn't unique to Seattle, local areas aren't doing enough, and housing has not met demand.
Someone have never driven down Avondale or West Lake Sammamish.
Maybe because it is true and that’s hard for you to face?
I didn’t grow up in Seattle, but I lived in the city for 25 years. The problems have only exponentially increased over the last decade. The pandemic didn’t help things either.
For all the posturing, Seattle doesn’t ACTUALLY want to fix anything. They want to do things that get them karma on social media, that keep politicians getting re-elected. Politicians, churches, average citizens, doesn’t matter. A dramatic change is needed in Seattle to make it better for everyone involved, but I don’t see that happening in my lifetime.
I moved to NYC and couldn’t be happier. I’m genuinely of the opinion that Seattle, Portland, SF, etc are broken and any comments which try to downplay that are only making things worse in the long run.
That is so easy to disprove. SF spends 1.1B on homelessness (more than 50K per homeless person). Federal government spends 6-700B on medicaid (health services for poor). California's 2022-23 spending plan provides over $25 billion from the General Fund for human services programs.
Maybe, you can complain that that spending is "inefficient", but that becomes a political barb-trading after that.
The city council has been trying to fix the issue, but had been stalled by the mayor, stalled by other cities in the region, and stalled in how they can build systemic fixes.
I went up to Seattle recently and spent an evening running around Belltown. Not the nicest area of the city but also not the worst. I lived there for years. It was fine. I did see and interact with homeless people and I wouldn't be surprised if some were high.
Still better than any night out on the Eastside
It’s interesting though, if I’m hearing you correctly you are indeed basically saying that you do become desensitized to the ambient homeless through exposure over time. This is assuming that a person without any media exposure at all would still find the homeless situation shocking and unpleasant to be around, which I imagine you wouldn’t disagree with?
“Unpleasant to be around” — I personally find lots of folks unpleasant to be around; the homeless fall somewhere in the middle of the scale. I’m far less concerned with their drug use than with the intoxication of people owning and operating cars, for example. I know far more people negatively and physically impacted by DUI than by random assault by the homeless.
I’m also less bothered by the existence of folks without homes than I am by folks who — upon registering their own discomfort with the situation — seek to move the problem out of view rather than addressing the root cause.
The process you’re seeking to describe as a “desensitization” is instead a growing comfort with a larger swath of communities than folks who don’t live in such cities are fortunate enough to encounter. In reality, it would seem that desensitization actually occurs when folks are exposed to endlessly “othering” media, with very little personal experience to speak of.
Policing has taken a similar path from “community engagement based decision making” to “birds eye statistical algorithmic policing”. It’s going about as well as addressing the actual causes of homelessness.
“This is assuming that a person *without any media exposure* at all would still find the homeless situation shocking”
How could a hypothetical person without any media exposure at all be informed by the extensive media coverage?
I’m trying to think of another scenario where such a hypothetical person might exist, but my imagination fails me.
I.e. the negative feeling one gets when one is in a city with people living in tents as they do in Seattle today is not necessarily strictly or even primarily due to media consumption, because (I assert) a theoretical human unexposed to media would still have a qualitatively-same instinctive negative reaction. Do you disagree? If so I am interested in why you disagree.
For example, if you somehow talked an orthodox Amish person into visiting Seattle with you (and perhaps had them read a few books about what cities are like in general first), they would still be shocked by the tent areas and find them unpleasant, despite never being exposed to whatever news outlets you consider inflammatory, immoral, incorrect, etc (and I do agree that all news outlets are all of these things, I personally avoid the stuff).
Relatedly, if you then asked the Amish person if they would prefer to stay in Seattle and help try to fix the problem, or to just return to their Amish village and ignore the problem, I think they would 100% of the time go with the latter? Are they wrong?
My position is that people who do not want to do the work needed to actually combat homelessness -- not simply shift it around -- should move out of the city. They are a selfish drain of city resources, demanding with their greater personal resources that ever greater public resources be spent on their personal peace of mind. A peace of mind that comes at the expense of additional resources directed at actually addressing the issues, long-term.
City life and its advantages are guaranteed to nobody. You have to contribute to your community in order for it to improve. Same with rural life, just in another direction.
But to return to your initial point about a visiting Amish -- the Amish have an existing modern culture and plenty of exposure to media. The real test would be a member of an uncontacted tribe.
Should such a person suddenly find themselves downtown, which do you think they would find more "shocking and unpleasant" -- the group of people living communally and nomadically, or the individual folks in giant metal machines spewing cancerous fog into our shared atmosphere, so they can get to work on time?
I find it an interesting thought experiment.
We today are culturally massively(!!!) more similar to preindustrial Germany than to hunter gatherer tribes, and the orthodox Amish are at least abstractly aware of modern technology existing in the outside world. Jumping all the way to hunter gatherers drags in a huge amount of unnecessary confounding factors. Yes, quite obviously, hunter gatherers would be more surprised by cars than by tent people. I believe the Amish would see cars as dirty mechanized wagons, whereas hunter gatherers would see them as (evil?) magic. Also, one can be shocked by more than one thing at a time, and the presence of one type of shock does not invalidate the others.
Just because homelessness is not the worst modern problem, does not mean it is not a problem. The fact that it is a recent problem here in America (to the degree we see it today, anyway) suggests that it may be more tractable than, say, cars or industry (which I don't disagree are also problems).
I agree that people who do not want to contribute to a community should leave. There is an interesting symmetry here though - do you feel the same way about non-native (to the city) homeless? Are the homeless contributing? Or are they exempt from this requirement? I assume you will say they are exempt or that they are contributing in some way, and if you don't mind I am interested to hear your reasoning.
To be clear about the whole Amish/uncontacted tribe/et all scenarios -- the point I intended (but perhaps did not make) was that I'm not especially interested in what hypothetical people think about anything. They don't exist. Every single real world example suffers from problems in the vein of those present with the Amish example. Kowtowing to the needs of hypothetical people has, historically, caused far greater harm than good.
To your questions -- my beliefs in this arena largely boil down to this: each member of a community has an inherent responsibility to contribute that which they are able, both in terms of ability and in terms of resources. No more, but also no less.
The reason this responsibility exists is that every member's success is inextricably linked with their community -- because success (beyond sheer survival) is measured by community. One cannot exist without the other -- and a high tide lifts all boats. In our current global system, living outside of any community is, practically, impossible -- so the responsibility is inherent.
Homeless are not exempt, but consideration would be made for the distinction between folks of comfortable means versus those living on a day-by-day basis. One group has resources and ability in excess of their needs. Another group lacks the resources to sustain ability. To lift them up is to lift the community. Sure some folks would refuse to change in accordance with societal standards -- but a lot less than you might expect, once the barriers of social shame, inefficient and needlessly cruel bureaucracy, and infantilization are removed. And yes, were we to implement this tomorrow, the above wouldn't happen overnight. The point is consistency and transparency in service of making everyone understand that they the individual is part of a greater whole.
Which is to say: I believe that the more one contributes to a community, the more the community becomes what it's meant to be: a collection of disparate people making up a symbiotic human ecosystem.
Obviously this system assumes folks acting in good faith, which feels lacking at the moment. But I'm hardly alone in believing that lack is due in large part to the current lack of everyone having skin the game, due to policies pushing problems back and forth, costing everyone money and attention, and accomplishing nothing but creating frustrated factions.
Hope that clarifies my position!
Framing it as desensitization isn't quite right. That implies that the city folk are mistaken in their perceptions and can't see how bad or dangerous their surroundings are. The city folk have a more correct view of the city than suburbanites and out-of-towners.
If anyone is desensitized to homelessness in the city, it's the people who no longer treat the homeless as people imo.
(sorry for the delayed reply - I would've preferred to be prompt to keep things conversational. But HN said I was going too fast and blocked me from commenting for a while. Which makes me think I got muted due to flagging or something. I posted 3 replies here about Seattle and got immediately hit with it).
By desensitization, I mean with respect to the negative instinctive feeling an unacclimated human has when they are in such an environment.
So then, you are saying that city folk eventually stop feeling this feeling, and it starts to feel normal (again, purely at an instinctive feelings level, not saying city folk start to think it is “okay” that people are homeless).
Agree that people living in a place always have a more accurate view on its qualities than outsiders do, and also agree that dehumanizing the homeless is an even greater degree of desensitization.
I wonder then if the normal feeling that comes represents the instinct actually turning off, or the instinct being habituated and simply no longer noticed by the conscious mind? If it’s the latter, then could this result in long term increased mental stress for people living in such cities? That sort of tracks…
A man bashed in the head of a female Amazon software engineer in Seattle and last I checked, they were considering letting him go free.
If you think crime and punishment are related somehow then please be more explicit as to how that helps because I don’t follow.
Seattle, which is "soft on crime", is a relatively safe city with lower rates of violent crime per capita than Phoenix, Des Moines, Denver, Corpus Christi, and more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
But getting back to my original question, I seriously doubt "tough on crime" policies in Redmond were implemented to help the homeless. More likely, they were implemented to keep poor people away.
My theory is that most people complaining about homelessness in cities like Seattle don't actually care about the homeless people. What they care about is that they have to see homelessness. So long as homelessness isn't visible then it's not a problem and whether that's done through charity or relocation or incarceration is irrelevant.
But I hope I'm wrong! I'd like to believe people aren't that cruel, so if Redmond has a solution that is compassionate and helpful I would genuinely love to know what they're doing.
Seattle ranks 77th when you sort by that column!
I live in a cosmopolitan city in India. I am an “upper caste” Hindu. I have been brought up in a relatively liberal environment and have not experienced much first hand caste-based discrimination (because of my sheltered upbringing no doubt). I have always thought of my family as liberal.
A few years ago, I wanted to marry a girl who was out of my caste. My family did not accept her immediately. They never uttered the word “caste”, but made snide remarks about “her community”, and about how “our community” is full of “ambitious intellectuals” and hers is not (implying moral superiority to ambition and intellect). They had not even met her. They just knew her surname and had seen pictures. Made me wonder where all of these assumptions came from.
She was not privy to these conversations but she realised that something was not right, and asked me if caste was being an issue.
And that’s when it struck me that maybe it was caste that was being the issue. My mind swirled with nasty thoughts for a few weeks. “Should I marry this girl who is outside of my caste?”, “What if no one accepts me? I’ll be alone”, etc. For someone who is fairly liberal, well educated, and well travelled, I was shocked at the kind of thoughts appearing in my mind. They were more powerful than I ever thought they could be.
Thankfully, due to my meditation practices, I had developed the ability to “witness” my thoughts without simply giving in to them. That way, I could let my thoughts flow, and wait for my fear to pass. After the fear had passed, my mind would settle down and I’d think rationally again.
What’s the point of this anecdote? I had an important realisation. It is quite possible that the things we call “casteism” is nothing but a flavour of the fear of abandonment, or the fear of being expelled from society by not conforming to societal standards. I realised that the standards can be absolutely absurd, but it is the mere fear of being abandoned by society that can make a human being conform and commit the most ridiculous actions. All out of fear.
Take whatever conclusion you may from this. It is an insight into the mind of someone who never thought would discriminate on the basis of caste, and yet my mind veered into that abyss, if only for a short duration. I escaped and lived to tell the tale. Thanks for reading.
This really isn't in the spirit of HN.
"Woke" is just the latest term for social justice. There are people who don't want a society that is just but they can't say it in the open (as much) any more, so they come up with euphemisms. The previous was "politically correct."
It is too ambiguous to be about anything in particular, so we should just talk about the real issues specifically and in depth. If it is an issue to be against caste reforms, discuss that, don't just call someone woke and close the book.
It is also a bit of a dog whistle even if accidentally, since it isn't actually about any specific issue, but people can still identify that they are against it. Call something "woke" and suddenly people who never cared about the issue before will have a problem with it.
Language is weird though, the word has evolved a weird meaning and been co-opted by political agendas, so it is just nice to not drag that shitshow into real discussions as well.
There are also reasonable and good people who have legitimate disagreements about what a just society looks like and don't appreciate the "you're either with us or against us" attitude you're projecting.
For example, I can be 100% on board with treating everyone respectfully and equally under the law while still thinking it's harmful to try to erase the contributions of good people from centuries past on the grounds that they weren't good enough by our modern standards. That's the kind of thing that I label "woke cancellation", and you'll never persuade me that judging a historical figure based on our modern values is just.
I have heard people who believe we should tell the whole truth about historical figures like Thomas Jefferson, who raped a teenage slave he owned & perpetrated genocide of Indigenous people, or Christopher Columbus, whose contemporaries condemned the genocides he committed, but that isn't "cancelling" anyone: it is just no longer being willing to lie for the comfort of the powerful.
Otherwise I agree with roguecoder. Telling more of the truth about people and situations is to the benefit of history and civics. It shows us that flawed people can lead, and it shows us that our present leaders and politicians may have serious flaws, but that doesn't mean they aren't effective leaders. It just means they have stuff to work on, and we shouldn't okay whatever they do as long as it is to our benefit (i.e. the ends don't always justify the means).
If this were the goal, I would embrace it wholeheartedly. I have no problem with historians telling true stories in all their messy details, and I'm fine with removing historical figures from pedestals and showing how they were flawed humans just like those we have today.
What I strongly object to is that in most cases telling and learning from the truth is obviously not the goal: see the massive witch hunts surrounding James Webb. It was never important whether or not the accusations against him were correct, the important thing was to drag another name through the muck in order to score virtue points in modern politics.
The attitude driving most of these incidents isn't one of respectful-but-full disclosure, it's more reminiscent of people in the Middle Ages digging up and mutilating corpses to make a political or religious point.
Parents are mostly exposed to the hateful heretic-burning historical revisionism, not the careful, constructive, academic approach to telling the full story. When the kids come home saying that they learned X, Y, or Z about a historical figure, the parents assume (right or wrong) that they're being fed the hateful garbage that they see in the public sphere, so they lash out at the curriculum.
Some in the Left use that as evidence that conservative parents are hateful and (to quote OP) "don't want a society that is just", but what actually happened is that the parents were never given the opportunity to engage with the full story: they were taught the saintly version in school and then in later life exposed to the demonic version. As far as they can tell those are the only two choices they're being offered.
I think the lesson to pull from all of this is to try not to be a demagogue, and do your best to communicate in such a way that you can't be misinterpreted or misquoted as a demagogue.
It shares a word with a modern broad concept of shunning, but shouldn't be confused with it. It certainly doesn't relate to broad discrimination or "woke cancellation."
My favourite example about this is from a (for the lack of better word) sub-religion named "Lingayats". It traces origins to a philosopher named Basavanna. He wanted a community sans discrimination so that every one from regardless of caste would be treated equally. And yet here we are, after hundreds of years, where there are 50+ castes/sub-castes in Lingayats too.
I think there's two sides of caste. One is the socio-economic and the other is religious. It's very very hard for me to make a generality about the Hindu religion but my understanding is that (at least from what I have seen in one specific location) Hindu priests and religious leaders had to be Brahmin. It seemed like cleaniness, washing, and purity for things like pooja were taken extremely seriously. I don't see how you can hold those beliefs and not be exposed to the concept of caste. I know Hinduism has many sects and Brahmin is not even the only upper caste, so there might be other views and I have seen non Brahmins claim to be priests, etc. But at least mainstream, traditional Hinduism seemed like caste was a part of it. I would also distinguish that in India, a lot of Brahmin priests were actually poor so it's not necessarily higher in socio-economic status.
I would be interested in hearing other perspectives though on views of caste because I definitely don't know a lot about Hinduism.
Things obviously changed.
How could they sustain 50+ castes/sub-castes?
This isn't really true. Castes and sub-castes are endogamous. But the groups are large enough that members wouldn't really have any discernable familial ties with majority of the group.
Sometimes clans have expanded themselves by basically recruiting distant relatives who have a different surname. Offering them food or money to change their surname to the clan name.
The word you're looking for is sect.
Any name that is overtly Sanskrit in origin and invokes some Hindu god(dess) is a tell-tale of upper-caste origin. Sometimes the name embeds the caste itself. This rule works across the North-South divide in India.
North Indian examples: Dwi/Tri/Chaturvedi, Bharadvaj, Mukherji, Chatterji, Bandhopadhyay, Bhattacharya
South Indian examples: Iyer, Iyengar, Rao, Murthy, Murali, Srinivasan, Vasudevan, etc.
Furthermore, are you claiming that a Bhattacharya or an Iyengar is not of an upper caste, or that their first/surnames are not explicitly Sanskrit in origin?
I don't claim to generalise—there are always exceptions to the rule.
- Iyengar is not of Sanskrit origin. On the other hand the unambiguously Dalit surname Chamar is.
- First names are dictated more by fashion than by caste. And the names of deities are used across castes. The idea that first names are markers of caste will sound patently absurd to anyone living in India.
- Rao and Murthy are used across castes. No South Indian will mistake them for caste markers.
> I don't claim to generalise
Really? Because "is a tell-tale of upper-caste origin" and "This rule works across the North-South divide in India" sound like generalizations to me.
Do you really think propagating these misconceptions is productive?
You are cherry-picking examples from my list to prove a point.
Furthermore, the etymology of 'Iyengar' is contested, and possibly cognate to the Sanskrit 'ārya'.
Perhaps I should clarify: there are always exceptions to the rule. However, I resolutely assert that Sanskrit-derived first and last names are markers of upper-caste ancestry. Yes, there are people of lower-caste with Sanskrit-derived names, and there are people with Dravidian/tribal names from so-called higher castes. That said, the latter is a highly unlikely combination.
I am pointing out that the generalizations you made don't even hold in the small examples that you came up with.
> I resolutely assert that Sanskrit-derived first and last names are markers of upper-caste ancestry.
and
> there are people of lower-caste with Sanskrit-derived names
These both can't be true.
> Dravidian/tribal names
I don't understand this bizzare conflation of Dravidian with tribal. What does tribal even mean in this context?
So no, please don't do it by North/South India etc., You go state by state and learn about common upper class surnames. To pick a Maharashtra sized hole in your rule, how would you categorise Chitpavan brahmin's surnames? Godbole, Phadke, Godse etc., don't even trace their origin to Sanskrit.
Here's a list of Members of Parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_17th_Lo... The ones with names like Yadav and Singh are pretty obvious. But scroll to southern states, and the exercise gets practically impossible.
Among others, Singh is used by Rajputs, Yadavs, Brahmins. That is without even going into Sikhs of all castes.
This is indeed the only way to go about the task. Go state by state and learn about names/surnames. You'll see a pattern emerging.
That said, in India caste (varna and jati) correlate with genetic clusters that have maintained for millennia by higher levels of endogamy than, say, Ashkenazi Jews:
“What the data were showing us was that the genetic distinctions among jati groups within India were in many cases real, thanks to the long-standing history of endogamy in the subcontinent. People tend to think of India, with its more than 1.3 billion people, as having a tremendously large population, and indeed many Indians as well as foreigners see it this way. But genetically, this is an incorrect way to view the situation. The Han Chinese are truly a large population. They have been mixing freely for thousands of years. In contrast, there are few if any Indian groups that are demographically very large, and the degree of genetic differentiation among Indian jati groups living side by side in the same village is typically two to three times higher than the genetic differentiation between northern and southern Europeans. The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations.”
Excerpt From Who We Are and How We Got Here, Chapter 6, “The Collision That Formed India” by David Reich
Outside the US, I've seen companies with a diverse work force implement "english only" policies in the office.
I've had the same experience. It's very weird when you realize you've been hired into such an ethnic enclave in which you aren't that ethnicity, and then learning that your boss's boss is looking for a way to trade you to another team without ever meeting you, mere days after you joined. Thankfully that trade went through and I ended up on a less racist team..
> By admitting to eating meat, the tech worker had exposed himself as a member of an oppressed caste, or a Dalit, formerly known as an “untouchable,” in the social hierarchy that is pervasive in South Asian countries.
(EDIT: if the article and allegations are true)
I say the following as an outsider, an American, and with the utmost respect for other cultures and their right to dignity and the integrity of their traditions within our society:
Jesus Christ. What the fuck is wrong with this person.
This is an unacceptable behavior, and it should be banned as a condition of entry to the country. This supposedly enlightened and woke country. Although this is a cultural tradition -- and it's not our place to judge what may or may not go on in India -- all humans are equal here, and this tradition should not be allowed in the United States.
(EDIT: Maybe this story is a false flag, maybe this is all fake, to justify layoffs, purges, etc... but if not, the above is my opinion as an anon.)
Or, we could embrace everyone, establish equal rules for participation in our society and show them a better way. I think this “Jesus Christ” you invoke would agree.
If some Indian were to ask me if I eat meat, I wouldn't immediately associate malice with that enquiry. Talking about food back home, is a common source of connection for a lot of the Indian diaspora.
Does it? I personally know several exceptions to this "rule" - and they are pretty open about it. It's not some closeted meat-eating thing.
Not eating meat however is a strong signal though, which is what typically the questioner wants to know.
I also personally know several counter-examples to this rule.
If meat/no-meat is the only signal people are using, there must be a lot of false positives and negatives. Or my sample of the population is somehow atypical.
Meat/no-meat is the most common signal, certainly not the only one, surname would be another, language (ethnolect or dialect) is sometimes another.
There are no perfect methods short of asking, some older people and more overtly racists (even they aren't aware) straight up do ask.
Also most racists only really care whether you are their caste or not, it doesn't matter what you actually are, so classification into their group or not is easier than do it precisely.
The thing is, there's no master text (unlike Indian constitution) that one can consult and conclude "Brahmin == no meat". Someone would cite a scripture from an ancient Hindu text (for example, Rigveda, or Manu Smriti etc.,) and draw a conclusion, however the same text might as well contain a scripture few pages down that says exactly the opposite.
Conflating the two is probably where the confusion in this thread stems from.
This is nonsense. The majority of Indians, upper caste or otherwise eat meat. Vegetarians make up less than 2% of the population of my home state.
I have no trouble believing that Indians abroad act out their casteist bigotry in vile ways. But when I read something that gets the details so wrong, I start to wonder how much of it is just made up.
You would be wrong. There is absolutely no way to tell a person's caste based on where they come from.
> surname
Surname could be an indicator but that doesn't need questions about diet.
I know people who were raised in vegetarian Hindu households in India who became beef lovers after they moved to the US. I'm skeptical that questions about diet are particularly useful for a would-be caste discriminator.
Wikipedia links says 20 to 39 percent of Indians are vegetarian. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country#Dem...
Another complexity is, different levels of vegetarians. One who eat egg only. One who eat fish only. Or chicken only, no mutton. Or no pork. Or never beef. Or any combination. Or depends on season, day, weather, people. People might be secretly eating meat without telling parents or family.
Although your statement may be completely true, less than 2% vegi, (stereotypes) for South Indian states, Bengal, Orissa etc.
Yes, Punjabis are very caste aware in USA, Jatt & such, and that absolutely come into play here in California while making social connections, gathering, groups. At works, retail locations, hiring, Punjabi owners care less about caste & more about cost.
Sure, fewer Brahmins have reservations about eating meat as compared to a few decades ago, but they are nowhere near the majority of all Brahmins.
And "all Brahmins eat meat at their household" is categorically false!
And this is not what the OP claimed.
EDIT: Nope can't edit that. HN doesn't let me.
But I agree with you. By putting that statement in quotes, I implied that the OP had said that. And they didn't. Wasn't fair of me to do that. Apologies.
The other question I've heard being asked of Indians is "what is your full name?" as most upper caste Indians indicate their caste in their surname/family name. If your surname isn't upper caste, you are likely to be silently dropped in many social situations.
So someone who eats meat and doesn't have an uppercaste name is a lower caste. However since some upper castes do eat meat the surname question gets them through.
The color of your skin is the third SELECT. At some point all of it seems like a DB query.
In many localities and apartment complexes across India you will find it difficult to get houses because of these simple questions. A brief stint in Bangalore was eye opening with real estate agents being super frank about caste specificity.
This question may get different answers based on season, day, time, or even people around, or even meat options. Navratre no mean, no meat on sundays, Tuesday, Saturday, or such. No meat in front of parents or relatives. No meat if preparing for some big exam. No meat if it is pork or beef. Chicken, egg, fish ok.
Negative caste discrimination is banned by law since 1948 in India while US was in a sad era regarding Human egality, even legally.
Edit:typo
Should we talk about how equally they treated Native Americans? (they've slaughtered 99% of them and stolen their land which they continue to live on and enjoy as their own).
And remember, they're going to teach the world about human rights and equality!
Now, let me tell you what Indians do make fun of. If you are a hardcore vegetarian, meat eating Indians will make fun of you calling you "Grass Eater" as a joke among friends. But that is not too different than American culture as well. Even the legendary Arnold Schewarnegger in the movie "Escape Plan" said "You hit like a vegetarian".
That's simply incorrect. Meat consumption correlates strongly with caste and the traditional reason is that it's a signifier of high social and religious purity. The American equivalent to this is teetotalling which is more prevalent among high social status Protestants. (essentially the US Brahmin class).
And even today of course vegetarianism has the same function. Vegetarians in the WWest as well as India are still more affluent and educated and it's a sign of civilized behavior, self-discipline, moral status etc. Arnold, as a bodybuilder (derogatory term "meathead" is no accident) may be rich but as an actor isn't a traditional upper class member.
The journalist may have attempted to "simplify" the anecdote instead of explaining all these details, but ended up screwing it up. To anyone who's Indian this comes across like it's "fake news", whatever their intention maybe.
Americans already have enough damaging stereotypes of Indians, it would be nice if reporters were careful reporting subtle problems instead of editorializing everything to fit their audience.
I had one co-worker who would brag that he isn't discriminative to anyone, except other Indians. We (non-Indians) would kind of have a response of "ah ha ha ha yea... you could do that we can't".
Because of course as team members who aren't minorities we can't be found to do any of that stuff, but there's plenty of minorities who have taken over in discriminating against others based on their own cultural criteria and seem to get a pass.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong in being able to identify certain groups. The issue is when the identification is followed by a different behavior.
I can identify different breeds of cats but it doesn’t mean I will mistreat bengals.
There is zero evidence that caste is a causal factor in the US, in the sense that those of lower castes can have signigicant discrimination imposed on them by upper castes. Of course there will be many casteist Indians in the US. There are many in India, so moving to the US will not make their numbers zero. But their ability to impose casteist discrimination in the US is pretty close to zero.
I moved to the US 40 years ago, have dozens of Indian friends, but have never heard of even a single significant case. There is a grand total of one case (the Cisco one) in court, and that's still to be decided.
As another commenter said, it's a sort of "fractal" discrimination.
The plaintiff in that case is presumably putting forward evidence, so "zero evidence" is putting this rather strongly. You say that you've never witnessed it, but I've never witnessed overt racial discrimination and I don't try to claim that therefore such things don't happen.
Here's what I see every time this topic comes up: I read plenty of horror stories from victims and from non-Indian witnesses, and plenty of fervent denials from admittedly-upper-caste Indian Americans. Could there be some massive astroturfing campaign propping up false anecdotes? It's conceivable. But a much simpler explanation is that there are lots of lower-caste people who are discriminated against and lots of upper-caste people who are blind to it or won't admit they perpetrate it.
In general, when weighing evidence, negative evidence cannot be given the same weight as positive evidence.
For example, I have never seen an elephant in the wild, but it would be a very foolish process that takes my testimony as proof that elephants are extinct in the wild without at least listening to the people who claim to have seen elephants in the wild. A more likely explanation for my negative evidence is that I have never been in an elephant's natural habitat.
In the same way, if there are lots of voices saying that caste discrimination happens and lots saying that it doesn't, it would be irrational to listen to the negative evidence to the exclusion of the positive evidence.
I don't feel bad about objective moral superiority. Just beacuse the caste system is ingraind in Indian culture doesn't mean it should be respected or allowed.
Your sentence is what a typical fence sitter would say, where they think you can go through life not offending bad people and thinking that makes you tolerant.
I don't think castes are spreading ideologically outside of India. A lot of Indian immigrants in the US completely ignore caste once they get here.
One problem is that the upper castes benefit from the system. They're sometimes wealthier and speak better English, so it's easier for them to immigrate and become managers at companies.
It's almost a meme on HN that people primarily make friends at work. Do you think Indian professionals don't do that?
Indians born in India 90% of the time want to marry indian only, maybe by choice or by parent's or society's pressure. That too in same religion and caste.
Like I said in my original comment, caste mostly doesn't matter when hiring at work, but people don't marry out of caste, religion. Intercaste Love marriages happen, no doubt, but maybe in a single digit percentage in USA in Indians.
First few generations still know & believe in caste for matrimonial. Brahmins, rajpur, jatt etc still is the factor. The third or fourth generation born starts paying minimal attention to caste when finding love.
People can practice their religion however they want, but it is also entirely fair to judge religions on the basis of the actual impact they have on the societies where they are dominant. I certainly do with Evangelical Christianity & its support of racism, classism, and sexism.
I saw this post on blind a couple months ago where a woman engineer reported her manager to hr because he asked her if she was married point blank. Most of the top voted comments were really nasty towards her, calling her mentally ill etc. I have other examples on top of this from work or uni but this was the most poignant one
Then I saw this* article like a week later, good read
* https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/world/asia/india-single-w...
* https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/world/asia/india-single-w...
> Many landlords see renting to single women alone or in groups (and single men, to a lesser extent) as a risk — to the stability of families, to the reputations of neighborhoods.
Yeah, no. Landlords don't like renting to single people of either gender. The rental listings usually say Families only or No bachelors. I don't know from where the author got the idea that single men are less likely to be seen as a risk. But that doesn't match my lived experience of more than 7 years in Bengaluru . In one particular instance though, the landlord was willing to rent to spinsters but not to bachelors.
Indian women face plenty of structural issues and discrimination. But this particular issue is not gendered. And it is disingenuous that the article tries to spin it that way.
It is good to see Seattle stand up for what is right here.
Supporting Hindu nationalism is not required to support Hinduism any more than supporting Zionism is required to support Judaism.
- How is this implemented? - How is caste defined under American law? - Is there an enumerated list of all castes? - How does one demonstrate under American law that person A is of caste X and person B is of caste Y? - How is caste "assigned"? - Can one switch castes? Is ones caste immutable? - Does one register a caste like a political party?
This feels like a massive green field of legal questions under Western law.
What matters is that the person who did the discrimination based it on the perceived characteristic of the person they discriminated against.
to put it differently, if you don't actually belong to "race x", but fulfill someone's stereotype about "race x", you can still become a victim of racial discrimination.
the exact nature of what race or caste is, doesn't matter at all - it's the intent to exclude people based on one's preconceived notions of caste/race that does.
If someone believes that you’re a gay Dominican, but you’re actually a straight Puerto Rican, it’s not relevant. The action is the tort.
Don't know the actual proposal here, but almost certainly adds "caste" to the list of protected classes. Although it appears that "ancestry" is already an explicit protected class here: https://www.seattle.gov/civilrights/civil-rights-enforcement...
> - How is caste defined under American law? - Is there an enumerated list of all castes?
The US is a common law system, so the answer is "it doesn't matter, it's up to court interpretation."
> - How does one demonstrate under American law that person A is of caste X and person B is of caste Y?
This starts to get to the heart of the matter, what does a plaintiff have to show to be able to demonstrate discrimination on the basis of caste. My guess is that caste discrimination is already effectively covered by existing protected classes, but trying to convince a judge that the fact pattern is working towards establishing caste to thence be used for discrimination is likely to be exceedingly difficult at present. Add in "caste" as an explicit protected class, and, well, the plaintiff's job is much easier.
> - How is caste "assigned"? - Can one switch castes? Is ones caste immutable? - Does one register a caste like a political party?
These are all more or less irrelevant for the purposes of discrimination. It's the defendant (alleged discriminator)'s belief of the plaintiff's caste that matters. If that belief is incorrect, but was still used for the purposes of discrimination, it's illegal.
1. Indian legal and governance systems maintain a list of recognized castes , these exists for reservation for government jobs, loans, elected seats[4] university admissions or promotions in government companies/departments - there are many problems with the list (outdated, lot of politically influenced changes ... )
2. Caste is hereditary, caste originated from family profession , somewhat akin to occupational surnames in some western countries like Smith [1]. Indian surnames also can indicate caste, the Self-Respect Movement from last century in the South evolved to drop surnames to reduce discrimination [2], and many people in parts of the country ended up use mononymous names.
3. Switching castes while occasionally practically possible was extremely hard, in the traditional orthodox system caste can be lost but not switched, typically lost when the parents are from different castes marry. In practice changing your profession or your son's profession would be the way to switch.
Education and vocational training however was denied back in olden days to keep it hereditary if you couldn't prove your caste background [3] you wouldn't be able to get a teacher or be apprenticed under a master. If you could get away by lying about it or someone from that caste vouched for you then yeah it could be changed.
4. Caste based registrations are a thing in India, mainly used to claim affirmative action in government
5. There is case law in Indian Juriprudence albeit in a different framework. Legal affirmative action frameworks(not the same as anti discriminatory approach in U.S law) are fraught with problems - Indian law has tons of problems of enforcing equitably.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Occupational_surnames
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Respect_Movement
[3] A poignant story on this topic from mythology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekalavya
[4] Election candidates in some areas are reserved to specific caste categories to represent the population better.
85% of college grads with autism are unemployed. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-college-grads-with-au...
What the ADA requires is that a company make accommodations for specific disabilities, in both interviewing and the job itself, to ensure the ability being screened for actually is relevant to the work. https://www.hireautism.org/resource-center/interview-accommo... has examples of accommodations you may request.
"Getting questions ahead of time" and "perform an at-home work sample" are the two I've seen have the most success in our field. Being able to communicate effectively on Zoom is often a part of our day-to-day work in remote positions, especially as either a junior engineer learning or a senior engineer effectively mentoring junior engineers, but being able to type in front of other people is only relevant in shops that practice pair programming and outside of incident scenarios we almost always know what we are about to work on.
In all these kinds of Multinational companies and even more so in startups (new or old) never see any 'caste' aspect being played out.
If it is there it may be happening in more bottom of the rung companies where meritocracy is not really thing during hiring and then when planning for growth of the employees. In these places one would also typically see 'company veterans' who have minimal tech skills but hold power positions.
Also, the article is not factually correct - being non-vegetarian does not indicate that one is from lower caste. Infact in eastern part of India people from 'higher caste' eat meat and fish.
India also has substantial population of non-vegetarian, only 19% are vegetarian https://twitter.com/Stats_of_India/status/158333113506020556...
Imagine how so many things are designed for right handed person and most of us never see that issue which left-handed people face on day-to-day basis.
That is why when you have discussion on caste-discrimination, you have so many upper caste indians defending with sort of "It does not exist anymore"
Its a legit vice in Indian community and I understand most liberal indians dont practice it. But by denying its existence, you are doing a greatest disservice to the community.
This was written in the law at the time of the formation of republic, as a temporary measure to uplift the lower castes. But no party in power has even talked about removing these even 75 years later, because you know.... Votes!!! It would be a political suicide for a party to undo these reservations.
Now I'm not against giving reservations to weaker sections of the society. But these must be based on economic status, not caste. There are many cases where even the third generation is taking benefits. I personally know a few where the be grand father retired from a plush govt. job that he got under reservation, the father is currently in a top bureaucratic job and the kids are getting reservation seats in medical college admissions. This makes 0 sense. This is only giving rise to more division among caste lines as the upper caste feel like being discriminated against.
I'm not sure why people would aspire to that.
The fact that a small minority is able to corner the benefits of reservation when the overwhelming majority is left out is not a pursuasive argument that reservations are no longer necessary.
(Citations for the efficacy of affirmative action: https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/02/granting-women-a-com... Bonus! It also improves the collective outcomes.)
But upper castes are in denial about how caste plays out in the rest of India.
They will claim it was something in the past. Wrong. Upper castes still often whisper about so and so being a *** (impolite way of referring to someone of a lower caste), or about such and such work (e.g. cleaning dishes) being the work of a *** and not a Brahmin like themselves.
Some now claim that caste was created by the British.
Wrong. Al Biruni (traveler from Persia) in 1020 wrote in Tarikh Al-Hind (History of India) about how when there was a communal meal in the village, a barrier needed to be put up between people of lower castes and people of upper castes.
My own personal experiences with caste (as someone exposed to it very late in life) were described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31035615
This stigma attached to caste, eating meat, is real among upper class Indians, especially Brahmins (me), and this needs to be put up as an issue, to hold a mirror to this community.
Many many Indians of these upper castes, especially if they're not meat-eating, tend to be conservative in their cultural and religious values. They disapprove of American culture. They consider meat eating a sin. Some, or many of this upper caste group will support the current Indian government's policy against meat eating. These people live in a bubble.
About caste in India, my upper caste has been discriminating over the lower castes for more than a thousand years. And growing up we never once had these conversations, either at school or around the dinner table. These traits are ingrained in me, and one way I handle it is by embracing Americanism, and minimizing contact with Indian cultural groups (i'd be an oddball politically anyway). 70% of India is not upper caste. Only now are Dalits (lower castes) waking up in India . And I had to remind my vegetarian wife, 70% of India is meat eating (which she was reluctant to accept) - so you want to judge 70% of Indian people?. She grew up in a Brahmin area of Bangalore where most of her school mates were Brahmins, I grew up in a catholic school where most of my classmates were meat eating Christians. Such factors can dictate cultural attitudes. (I've managed to tutor her well, and bring her around). Many ancient religious texts mention our gods feasting on meat, beef, etc. Yet we act as if we are some holy sacred shit. I've debated disowning my caste (brahmin) but that would offend my SO. Thankfully my 2 kids are a healthy mix of American questioning of such bullshit, and non-religious.
The only defense I can offer is that Indians operate with a mob-mentality - too timid to standup and take a bold stance, and secondly it takes a generation to wear down this kind of ingrained thinking. Critical thinkers we are are not, especially in our personal lives, we tow the line, the existing lines. We're not trailblazers. Our excellence is within the straitjackets of corporate structure, within already established frameworks. The desensitized, one-dimensional corporate American culture is fertile ground for our achievements.
We lead our lives inside the elite tech bubbles, where all that matters is academics, tech elite jobs, and toxic out-dated traditions. We politely smile, but in private within our upper caste living rooms, our families look down on 'other' cultures for their meat consumption, for sexual openness , for the lack of 'spiritual enlightenment' etc.
I welcome this naming and shaming of my community. This flaw in our community should be brought out and talked about. That's healthy.
American Indians are Native Americans. You're an Indian American.
Edit: replace lethargic with cathartic
But I've also worked with a few dudes who think I'm going to agree with them, and those dudes have said things to me that make my jaw drop. So even here, because I work in tech, I've had to make the choice: do I go along with it? Or do I try to mitigate the power they have to make their beliefs a reality for the people they pre-judge?
If we don't speak up when it happens, it becomes the standard we walk past. But if we do, we're burning the bridges that could help us in the face of racism and bullshit here.
Let me get this straight: You are wondering why people work for companies like Google, Microsoft, VmWare or Adobe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta
Today, it evolved into nepotism and corruption.
Video evidence of personal interactions is very hard to collect in Washington state because it is a "two party consent state"[1]. And people's personal behavior changes when they know they are being recorded[2][3].
I think a better solution to this is to get US Federal "Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964" updated[4] to include caste based discrimination as that will bring this issue to national attention and hopefully enable other people that are not being directly affected by this discrimination to be cognizant of it. Once enough people become aware of the problem then it will start changing the US culturally and societal accepted behaviors which is the only real way to stop this type of discrimination. Of course while dreaming of a better and brighter future I might as well add the removal of all cliques to the list as they are another form of discrimination.
[1] https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/washington/washington-recor.... [2](2014) https://hbr.org/2014/09/how-being-filmed-changes-employee-be... [3](2019) https://www.bodycamera.co.uk/blogs/news/what-is-the-observer... [4](2021) https://harvardlawreview.org/2021/06/title-vii-and-caste-dis...
Sincerely,
By another immigrant.
Castes of Minds https://a.co/d/b55ZoJ9
"Allen die zich in Nederland bevinden, worden in gelijke gevallen gelijk behandeld. Discriminatie wegens godsdienst, levensovertuiging, politieke gezindheid, ras, geslacht of op welke grond dan ook, is niet toegestaan"
I assume the US Constitution does not?
Congrats, you get the good kind of discrimination in tech.
I mean the kind that doesn't need affirmative action
>Han Chinese is pretty over represented at a lot of tech companies
Yeah exactly
Probably because both the Han and Anglo Saxon cultures are investing techs in trillions?
This seems to be fabricated to push an agenda. The vast majority of Indians of all religions and castes eat non vegetarian food.
> By admitting to eating meat, the tech worker had exposed himself as a member of an oppressed caste
This is backwards. Most upper-caste people eat non-veg food, and continuing to be pure-veg is viewed as being behind the times in urban India. On the contrary, I know many people who started eating non-veg food because they didn't want to be seen as prudes.
> dominant castes are unwilling to eat with those from oppressed castes
I'd believe it if someone told me IITians didn't eat with those from other universities. Or that 2nd gen Indian-Americans didn't eat with 1st gen immigrants. But this sort of thing is practically unheard of. Our Indian circle is pretty huge, and I haven't ever even so much as heard a whisper about this.
> Cisco
Might be that such stuff is prevalent in certain companies. I don't know anyone at Cisco, so I won't know. It must suck to have caste follow you from your rural town in India. But, these stories sound pretty cherry picked to me.
I find that Americans have some bizzare views and opinions about India. Like they read some colonial era British report about the nation, watched slum dog millionaire and that's it. India has changed an insane amount since independence, and it has changed even more than that just in the last 20 years.
I consistently find that HN threads about India are among the lowest quality of discourse on this forum. Highly opinionated while still being misinformed. The worst combination.
> Kshama Sawant
if you know, you know....... why am I not surprised
It's so bizarre to read HN articles and comments on caste and they feel surreal. I think there is a certain section of HN'ers who make a big deal of this and upvote nonsense posts so it helps them compete against Indian Americans for promotions to managerial positions.
For disclosure, I am not a high caste Indian, and both sides of my family eat meat.
Does this belligerant ignorance extend to IRL interactions (maybe more polite). The HN discourse on India and related topics is giving me a serious feeling of Gell Mann amnesia.
The lack of intellectual rigour and over generalisation of a few cases has been making me adjust my priors on the weight of any discussion here on other unfamiliar topics which can't be proven to be objective fact.
A lot of the supposed cases of casteism seem to be willful ignorance of linguistic/regional/other cliquey behaviour that is common among Indians (and the rest of humanity). This makes it hard for me as an Indian who hasn't worked/lived in America to actually judge if these people actually know what they are talking about.
I usually leave it at "this is piece is terrible. India is a vast civilization. The problem is nuanced and if you ever have an hour & an open mind, then I could run you through the reasons."
I have no idea if the conservatives on the SCOTUS would permit caste discrimination as a sincerely held religious belief, or if they consider only Christian religious beliefs as sincere.
Sadly this is about the only thing that Seattle knows how to do anymore; the politicians know that it keeps them elected.
You can find beef too in many parts of southern India, but it will most likely to be buffalo meat. Kerala has all sorts of meats iirc.
Edit: typo
Not addressing the homeless and crime issues is a kick in the face to us tax payers in her district. Not to knock on the caste system policy but there’s biggest issues to tackle before anything else. Just my .02
Property and violent crimes have both been stable at less than half the level from the 80s.
In fact, we're seeing record low property and violent crime rates. The last couple years have seen some uptick from the record lows of the 2010s, but Seattle is much safer than it was at basically any time in it's past.
The statistics just don't back up your story.
You can't legislate bigotry out of a bigot, but you can minimize the suffering they cause other people. This is what anti-discrimination laws aim to do.
No, guys, it’s fine. This OSS a great thing to have all kinds of diverse problems of all the different cultures from everywhere all at the same time.
Think about how many white Americans will be able to see that this is wrong, when they think anti-Blackness is a matter of culture and assume people who speak African-American Vernacular English are less educated.
When we have a mix of problems, we can build large enough anti-discrimination coalitions to make none of those discriminatory beliefs advantageous to hold.