California moves closer to historic caste discrimination ban | Hacker News Reader

California moves closer to historic caste discrimination ban

reuters.com

19 pointstestrun14 comments

Should the permitted traits by which the state and employers discriminate be a whitelist rather than blacklist?

What makes some choice, any choice, a discrimination? What makes a discrimination a caste discrimination?

Imagine a scenario where someone, say, A accuses of his/her higher ups for a caste discrimination. Here, A is denied a promotion, or given average rating in perf reviews, or given average bonus/stock refresh, or is not put on a nice project. Here, A can accuse of his/her boss of caste discrimination, as long as A and A's boss are Indians, even though A's boss never ever broached about A's caste.

Haven't we seen situations where people are denied promotions, are not given great rating, are not given great bonuses? Of course, if X is a minority, and X's boss is white, one can accuse X's boss of racism. What if X and X's bosses are Chinese? What if companies implement curving for ratings and bonuses? After all, some people in the group can always complain about some or another discrimination, even though curving imposes choices.

The same way we deal with the situation if the boss was white and the employee was black, or if the boss was a man and the employee was a woman. You look for patterns of behavior, and incriminating statements. It's a hard standard to prove, but it's not like this is some unheard of precedent. Caste discrimination is just racism that's just a little harder to spot.

How does caste work in America? Can't you just say you were from a different caste?

Vice, of all places, has a great article about it. The answer is that the folks who wish to discriminate by caste have a variety of ways to determine what your caste is. FTA:

Indians will not ask outright what caste you are, as it’s seen as overly discriminatory, but they use more subtle methods to identify your place in the caste structure.

“Sometimes they ask, ‘Are you vegetarian?’ If you say yes, they ask are you vegetarian by birth or by choice, before getting into which village you come from, because sometimes the village gives up your caste,” Sam said.

Another method described to VICE News is the pat on the back to see if the person is wearing a Juneau, a sacred white thread typically worn by the upper castes in India.

Higher-caste Indians will also search social media accounts to ascertain a job candidate’s religious views or diet.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azjp5/silicon-valley-has-a-...

teachrdan man that does sound terrible. Who are these people who are doing that? Do you know them committing this personally? Or any other proof? Such actions should be called out. Hope it's not just a made up story, lifted from one place, and pasted in all other places. Otherwise it will be Goebbels-style peddling of lies, to make a community look bad. A lie told a 1000 times starts to be treated as truth, because everyone tells the same lie. So for your own sake, I hope you are not being Goebbels!

If they ask if you're vegetarian, say no. If they ask what village you're from, say Los Angeles.

How is this not a self-inflicted injury?

Makes me wonder if you get a pat down in Utah for long johns. It would explain a lot.

Caste generally doesn’t work very well in urban areas even in India. It’s just that it’s so ingrained in many people they’re just not going to lie about it.

Good news. Let us all ban discrimination by any form (e.g intra religious such as sunni/shia) which are not covered by a simple blacklist (which may not be backed by data).

Good luck detecting this in a reliable, objective manner. Have you ever listened to a conversation between two such people trying to detect caste/sectarian status? Much less a culture very foreign to most Californians, particularly attorneys, juries, and judges.

It will be an uphill battle simply to dislodge all the existing caste-based structures that have been erected throughout Big Tech.

So you are telling me we have no data yet decided to go ahead with a bill?

Why not just blacklist ban any discrimination not related to job performance?

How many in this group know that Prime Minister Modi is also OBC? Or that President Draupadi Murmu is SC/ST?

There's very popular assumption in the media that only "upper caste" people are "Hindus" and that OBCs/SC/STs disrespect is far too prevalent.

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