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Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

Are the Indians in NA somehow fundamentally different? It isn't like we've left the rest of our social/cultural practices and ills behind upon moving to the West. Thus it makes sense that if there's evidence of caste based discrimination at the highest levels of education in India, there is likely such discrimination in Indian communities in the West too.

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One important difference is that Indo-Canadians make up about 5% of the Canadian population. It would be surprising if the higher caste subset of that 5% was capable of suppressing access to tenure-track positions across the board. Moreso if it's extended to NA, as the number is ~1.5% in the US. Less if I'm supposed to assume that people from India prefer to work for other Indians, or if Indians are overrepresented in CS academia positions.

I also tend to imagine that those in academia are considerably more likely than the general population to reject racism.

Knowing how those in positions of power can gate keep, yes, those higher caste Indians could easily block tenure. Especially since non-Indians propably cannot really spot the caste based component of those actions.

I'd like real numbers, but I've come across, a disproportionate number of people in interreligious, inter-ethnicity marriages, and presumably inter-caste marriages, except that I can't really tell one's caste unless they have a caste based lastname, and I know that name is associated with a caste.

I've heard of numerous cases where Indian-Americans didn't know their caste until they were asked about it by people not of Indian origin, who seemed to have the 4 caste + outcastes model in their heads, which barely maps to how caste is understood in modern India.

(Parents came here from India in the 1970's).

This may also differ by generation.

> Are the Indians in NA somehow fundamentally different?

I am not denying the presence of discrimination in North America. I believe it exists.

Yes. They are fundamentally different because they are a super minority and hence any kind of discrimination is unlikely to have any measurable impact.

For example imagine people who have tattoo on right hand discriminating against people who have tattoo on their left hand or people who are members of Libertarian party discriminating against members of green party.

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