Comment by chargingmarmot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chargingmarmot | Hacker News Reader

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The bill is opposed by the Hindu American Foundation. They give their rationale for opposing the bill in:

https://www.hinduamerican.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/HAF...

They claim:

"We share the admirable goals of protecting civil rights and eliminating all forms of prejudice and discrimination, including based on caste. As such, the question is not whether we deal with allegations of caste discrimination, but how. If and when caste discrimination allegations emerge, they should be adjudicated under the existing protected class of ancestry, just as the state of California did in California Department of Fair Employment Housing v. Cisco Systems, Inc."

In https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u0jxQY_cLti2XP3nEw0d9OBa... they state:

"There is only one legal case on the issue of caste-discrimination in the United States to date. It involves an allegation of caste-based discrimination in the US."

and give some facts related to that case.

( from https://www.hinduamerican.org/press-statements )

So, the problem is also the fact the whole concept of caste, not just discrimination based on it, risks being painted in a bad light.

I am reading between the lines so. Would be a stretch to speculate about the caste make-up of said association?

Some information about the caste according to the Hindu American Foundation a few years back:

>In 2010, HAF issued a report titled "Hinduism: Not Cast in Caste" alleging that Christian missionaries were able to push their proselytizing agenda only because of the prevalence of caste discrimination in India; it went to argue that caste cannot be considered to be an intrinsic definitional aspect of Hinduism—due to a lack of theological sanction in its most sacred texts—and urged for reforms led by Hindus themselves. This led to a flutter in conservative Hindu circles of India and the next year, HAF toned down their report; they cautioned against the trend of passing resolutions against caste discrimination adopted by various global organizations and held caste to be an internal affair of a sovereign India. HAF has since portrayed castes as occupational guilds which had brought stability to premodern India before being reified under British colonialism; it has vehemently opposed drawing parallels between caste-discrimination and racism, and even any depiction of the caste-system as a rigid birth-determined pyramid of hierarchy.

They started off fighting against the caste system, until the elites in India told them no. Ever since, they've minimized the impact the caste system had and still has -- not just in India.

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