Yeah, high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1, so most students miss out on reconstruction, and pretty much no curricula will talk about the explicit race discrimination in the GI bill/redlining.
What high school students curricula are you following?
All of those topics were covered where I went.
Though interestingly, the ones I do also tend to get across the point that caste discrimination was made illegal in India, and never tend to go into much explicit detail on how just because something is illegal, it doesn't mean it isn't done/is regularly enforced.
> high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1
I very, very highly doubt that. In terms of US history, this period covers several important topics:
* Reconstruction
* Settling of the American West
* Rise of the Granger and later Progressive movements
* Burgeoning immigration to the US, and all the tensions that result from that
* Second Industrial Revolution, which also fuels the Gilded Age and labor movements
* Beginnings of American imperialism (and somewhat ironically, the end of it... the US becomes pretty uninterested in territorial expansion almost immediately after experiencing its first major bout of imperial expansion in the Spanish-American War).
It's possible that you just don't remember what you learned in US history classes in this time period, but completely excising a quarter of the country's history would be rather surprising, especially when it's the part of the history that covers both the biggest shift in self-image (from an agrarian country distancing itself from world politics to an industrialized powerhouse increasingly engaged in world politics) and the development of mass political consciousness worldwide in the late Long 19th Century.
I was really interested in history (so presumably I paid attention) and my education mirrors his. I went to a good public school in a state that people who are looking to lie with statistics in order to make a politically charged point like to hold up as a pinnacle of educational achievement. Pretty much any topic that someone who is a big proponent of government solutions to problems might find troublesome got glossed over as quickly as possible.
Thankfully I lucked into the English section taught by the female equivalent of Ron Swanson who made us read books that covered the Jim Crow south and the Indian wars. Looking back she was obviously a bull #### and rightfully had a bone to pick when it came to mistreatment of demographic groups under color of law.
I can't parse your second sentence. I went to high school in Chicago, in the 1990s. Everything 'jcranmer mentions mirrors my own experience. We definitely didn't skip from the Civil War to WW1.
This varies massively by school or district. I teach history to undergrads, and some of them come in having had entire high school classes on the history of civil rights--these students are usually either from majority-black districts, or from elite private schools. Others had history classes that don't even acknowledge that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.
Corpos naturally have split personalities, but it wasn't "Google's plan". Mid-level people proposed it and high-level people blocked it.
What's not often said clearly is that corpos don't want social justice which might come at the cost of rancor, they want "DEI PR" that they can charge to the marketing budget.
In other words, they want the low-hanging fruit they can get by having recruiters source employees from more places, and artists and photographers draw multicolored graphics, and asking people to be less cruel when all other tradeoffs are neutral,and if that makes the world more fair, that's great.
But they management won't allow anything that risks disrupting the moneymaking operations, regardless of long term potential benefits (which almost certainly don't exist -- racism exists because it works, locally, for economic and social benefits, not because people are moustache-twirling comic-book supervillains).
This is why free markets alone can't solve injustice, and broader social movements are the tool that works.
I noticed the text of your comment ins grey, which means someone downvoted you. I disagree on first take of your comment, because QA to me doesn't represent a lower-tier of anything. It's a tech job. Women being in tech is good. Indian people being in tech is good. Will you share a bit more about your thinking? Why do you see this as being discrimination?
Sidenote: I once glanced around a team I was working on a few years ago and found most of the product/program managers were gay or lesbian. Didn't strike me as discrimination, since there are, of course, gay and lesbian hardware engineers, gay and lesbian software engineers... it just happened that we all found each other on a particular team.
So that's why I think that's what's going on here, but I'm eager to hear your thoughts, as they differ from mine.
The comment is only at zero, it means nothing. I made no qualitative statement about QA being beneath anything.
Most developers equate QA is beneath them. I also think QA is just as valid and not beneath dev, but I have also held nearly every roll in modern software companies. How we view QA doesn't mean that is how the tech job market sees it. Pay is lower, qual is lower and at companies that have a sizeable Indian workforce, I have witnessed that QA heavily skews female.
I didn't even notice until I have been on interview loops with Indian men that I thought were nice and that I had professional and personal respect for and this weird tiger came out when it came to interviewing women (for dev roles) that didn't come out when interviewing men. This is just anecdotal, not all not all.
This comment itself is going to get flagged or downvoted, but I can't put a caveat on every sentence.
> A couple of women who I knew had studied STEM subjects but had changed their career trajectory after graduating, explained the systemic sexism that women face in universities in India which deterred them from pursuing it any further.
And then I see those pressures in the hiring loop (for devs), we didn't interview QA, it would make sense that they get pushed into QA or get pushed out entirely.
Sexism in tech is much stronger than men realize, women are fully aware.
I think the status quality of jobs is an interesting aspect of discrimination. Why do certain jobs have higher or lower status? If the perceived status of various jobs was flatter, would various discriminatory schemes (intentional or not) continue to operate? Would differences in income persist?
My hypothesis is that demographic clusters of people within certain occupations are in part affinity and in part discriminatory which operate as a yin-yang.
Another hypothesis is that the existence of under-represented demographic segments in certain fields of study/occupation such as STEM means that the over-represented demographic segments are under-represented in other fields. Changing representation has classically focused on importing under-represented folks into high status fields. This effectively overstuffs some fields which decreases effectiveness. A better approach would be to make the other fields more attractive/high status so that the over-represented demographic segments in fields like STEM grow interest in other fields.
My hypothesis has always been that job status is largely driven by compensation and difficulty obtaining the position. If these are the drivers, I don't know how you would equalize status without overturning the job market at Large
One aspect I've noticed throughout my career is that the engineering problems QE engineers face are generally more straightforward, with well-defined parameters, and common patterns. The skills required to be a successful QE engineer require, generally, less breadth and depth of expertise than some other disciplines of engineering. I think it's a natural landing place for people who know how to write some code, but struggle to view problems at multiple levels of abstraction.
At least partly. When I was starting out, I would apply to dev positions only to get offers to interview for lower-paid QA positions. After changing to a gender-neutral nickname and removing all female-identifying terms from my resume, I got the interviews for dev positions.
You claim "at least partly" and then proceed to prove it with anecdotal evidence. You'd need to prove it with a study similar to the ones that send identical CVs to companies, just changing one thing, which is what they want to discover if there's bias against.
Obviously not, see my other comment. Anecdotal evidence is part of the evidence, it doesn't allow you to claim part of the explanation is your anecdotal evidence.
Every number is a number, including zero. Therefore some number of members of any given group have been discriminated against. Therefore any group is indeed discriminated against. You can't argue with objective mathematical proof.
Slightly more seriously, if someone is discriminated against for being part of a group, you don't get to appeal to the fallacy of composition applied to all groups in order to claim that there is no discrimination against that individual. Yes, yes, you're not actually writing out that argument, you're just leaving its ingredients lying around next to a naked flame.
I am not obliged to defend every statement I make with a study for my thoughts and experiences to be worth sharing. Also, anecdotal evidence is evidence. Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.
In any case, I have done the five minutes of googling you seem to want. Biases in evaluating resumes based on gender and other such factors are not new nor unknown: here is an early study from 1986[1], 1988[2], 1999[3], 2001[4], 2007[5]. Feel free to visit google scholar and look more studies by yourself.
You can sure share your thoughts, and I can share my thoughts on whether you're correct, I'm just pointing out it's not proven your personal experience proves discrimination is part of the explanation.
None of those studies support your original claim. They support the more broader claim that women are discriminated in the job market.
> Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.
Sorry, a single data point, by itself, when you share it attempting to generalize, is worse than worthless, since it can be terribly misleading.
I see why you may think that way, but I don't think you're right.
I guess for you it's a given QA jobs are "inferior" to SWE jobs. I guess you believe the articles you linked proof women tend to get "inferior" jobs just because they're women? (I haven't read the articles, although I believe this to be true).
I just can't make the jump that this applies to QA jobs (granting they are "inferior"). That would imply "inferior" jobs are always overrepresented by women, and there are counterexamples to this, by almost any definition of "inferior".
So talking about generalities, there are plenty of statistics that show that women have lower paying jobs and get paid less even for the same jobs. We can argue about the reasons but the fact that they are paid less has been shown many times, so if you are disputing it you should be provide some compelling evidence.
So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
> We can argue about the reasons but the fact that they are paid less has been shown many times, so if you are disputing it you should be provide some compelling evidence
I state I believe this is true in one of my previous comments.
> So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
This could be, but you need something else to prove it, otherwise lower paying jobs with different distributions than the job market distribution are always root caused in discrimination, is this your argument? There are many high paying jobs that result in a huge selection bias with respect to employees, just because many people simply don't want to put the hours. And thus discrimination is not the whole story in these cases. It may be the case in QA teams though (or part of the story), I'm simply saying it needs more research.
Nevertheless this hasn't been my point, my point is simply a single data point by itself can't be used to account for part of the explanation.
> So talking about generalities, there are plenty of statistics that show that women have lower paying jobs
Yes, that's not disputed by anyone serious.
> and get paid less even for the same jobs.
Also yes, but only if you don't account for hours worked and experience. A Harvard study found that after accounting for both the type of job and hours worked [1]. Google actually found women were paid more than male employees working the same job [2].
In short, the pay gap definitely exists in the sense that women's average pay check is less than the average man's. But there's not much evidence of discrimination in pay. Men make more because they work different jobs, work longer hours, and stay in their field for longer.
Also,
> you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
One, this isn't calling QA "inferior". Compensation is not a moral judgement of work. Pointing out the fact that coding isn't a requirement explains why there's a larger potential labor pool and thus lower pay. My first job in QA was doing manual testing, following a script of things to check on canary and staging builds. I was paid $12.50 an hour. This wasn't some moral judgement about the value of this job, it's the fact that pretty much anyone could do it so there's no reason to offer more than minimum wage.
The average salaries in QA are noticeably lower than those in SWE, so those are indeed "inferior jobs" - i.e. less attractive, and pushing some group from one to the other would be discriminatory because it would underpay that group.
Good, did I deny this? I'm simply asking for proof and saying what has been provided in this thread is insufficient.
By the way, lower salary doesn't mean "inferior", there are very high paying jobs, very stressful, that I wouldn't want, and work life balance is a huge component of a job.
Interestingly, when those resume studies are more narrowly focused on Silicon Valley tech firms women experience a significant bonus relative to men [1].
One way to look at it is that the disparity may be a symptom of complicated cultural biases, and we may not know the specific reasons. Since there’s nothing gender or sex related to doing the job of QA, then if the disparity actually is measurable and widespread, it does reveal cultural bias. This is currently true for nurses and for elementary school teachers in the US, for example.
It’s important to note that this can happen without individuals who have any overtly “sexist” behavior at all. It can be the result of cultural attitudes and not prejudiced hiring practices. This is why using the word “sexism” on it’s own might not be the best word for it, even if it’s technically true. Perhaps better terms are “cultural sexism”, or “cultural bias”. I’m sure there are better terms. The problem with using the bare word “sexism” is it tends to be accusatory and out people on the defensive, where the issue may literally be with all of us.
The question you need to be asking is the opposite: how can you demonstrate that bias has been eliminated? Sex bias was absolute and baked into law 100 years ago, and it has been slowly getting eliminated, but there has not been any point in time where we can demonstrate it’s gone, precisely because we have evidence it’s not gone yet. (Pay gap still exists, gender disparities between schooling and employment still exist, etc.)
We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.
This page for cultural bias is as good any any other definition for my purposes here, which was purely to say that “cultural bias” is less inflammatory than “sexism”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_bias
> The question you need to be asking is the opposite: how can you demonstrate that bias has been eliminated? Sex bias was absolute and baked into law 100 years ago, and it has been slowly getting eliminated, but there has not been any point in time where we can demonstrate it’s gone, precisely because we have evidence it’s not gone yet. (Pay gap still exists, gender disparities between schooling and employment still exist, etc.)
I don’t understand the meaning of the term “sex bias”. So it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.
> We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.
Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards? What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times?
> I don’t understand the meaning of the term “sex bias”.
This and “cultural bias” and “sexism” are all pretty well established terms you can Google, and are taught in social studies and history courses.
Sex bias means a cultural bias or prejudice based on someone’s sex. I’m using sex here more or less interchangeably with gender right now, but there are times where that distinction matters.
> it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.
There’s no question about whether sex bias has existed, nor whether society wants it to stop existing. Those are facts not being debated. The primary example I had in mind when I said 100 years is women’s suffrage: the right to vote. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage) When women were legally barred from voting, or owning land, or initiating divorce, those things were sex based biases. Women gained the right to vote in the US a while ago, but it took longer before women started to appear in C-level corporate roles, that is still changing today.
> Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards?
Please read the link I posted. Cultural bias is about having ingrained prejudices in large social groups. It can be, but is not primarily about people from different cultures in the sense of, say, Indians vs Americans. Indians have certain cultural biases, Americans have their own separate cultural biases. The idea that nurses should be women is an example of a cultural bias.
> What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards
The goal is to remove bias and prejudice that is hurting certain categories of people, preventing them from having equal access to opportunity to improve their lives, and to make decisions about people based on their interests and abilities, and to establish and respect some basic human rights across the board. I don’t know what you mean by “imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times”, but this sounds like a straw man and that you’re skeptical. It might be described as imposing minimum uniform standards, perhaps.
I will turn your question back on you: what is the alternative you’re suggesting, do you support having different standards for men and women in QA? Why or why not? Do you support the idea that a woman developer who writes the same quality of code and works as hard and has the same level of experience as her male coworker should be paid the same amount?
> Ah, it sounds like you may need to study a little history if you’re curious about these terms.
I am a mind in thrall to delusion.
> Sex bias means a cultural bias or prejudice based on someone’s sex.
Using the word “prejudice” to define “bias” doesn’t help me to understand the term.
> Cultural bias is about having ingrained prejudices in large social groups.
Okay, so different people having different assumptions which they use to judge phenomena.
> The goal is to remove bias and prejudice that is hurting certain categories of people, preventing them from having equal access to opportunity to improve their lives, and to make decisions about people based on their interests and abilities, and to establish and respect some basic human rights across the board.
There are lots of things that lots of people will tell me are hurting them. Personally, I don’t care about any of them. But how do you prioritize one claimed hurt over another?
> but this sounds like a straw man and that you’re skeptical
Probably, I was just guessing.
> I will turn your question back on you: what is the alternative you’re suggesting, do you support having different standards for men and women in QA?
I don’t really care. The hiring/promoting practices of 2022 American QA departments doesn’t interest me. Let the Harvest Gods have their day.
> Do you support the idea that a woman developer who writes the same quality of code and works as hard and has the same level of experience as her male coworker should be paid the same amount?
Depends on the context. Does disqualifying the woman help me to get what I want, then I’m all for it. Otherwise, I don’t care.
How do you know it is "cultural bias" and even if it is why do you think it is a problem? It could be that men and women have natural different disposition to work in certain fields, it might be that even in fields where it is balanced it is the "cultural bias" that make it balanced rather than the natural disposition. I don't understand how something like that can even be proved, how do you control for all the parameters? I also don't understand why we should strive for balance? what is wrong with each group, whether grouped by sex or race or age or whatever else being specialised in different fields on average?
Because gender disparities are changing every year (very quickly in historical terms), and because they are different from country to country, that rules out the possibility that the cause has anything to do with intrinsic differences between men and women, it disproves the idea that there’s a “natural disposition” that is purely based on sex, at least as the primary reason for the distribution today. There might be some natural disposition, but you can’t know what it is until the known, demonstrated cultural biases have been eliminated, and the ratios of men and women settle and stop changing, and women agree that things are fair. Moreover, there is a long history of people claiming “natural dispositions” based on sex that have been subsequently proven false, which means you have the burden to demonstrate why your idea of a natural disposition is somehow different from the previous claims. To date there is no evidence to back up the idea that men & women have any differences in their interest & ability to write software based on sex. There are differences in attitudes, and differences in how many people study and seek such jobs, but those differences are linked primarily to changing social norms, i.e. cultural bias, and have never been shown to be sex based.
> It could be that men and women have natural different disposition to work in certain fields
It could also be, and happens to be more likely, that cultural biases cause sex or gender preferences. If that’s case, then the problem is that insisting there could be sex based differences, when in reality sex based differences may be too small to even measure, may be a self-reinforcing cultural bias. Instead of assuming that bias doesn’t exist and demanding someone prove that it does first, we need to be assuming it exists and actively asking the question how can we get rid of it and then prove that we got rid of it. After all, we know for a fact it used to exist in the US, we know for a fact that it exists today in certain countries, and we can’t show that it ever got completely solved, because it never did yet.
> I also don’t understand why we should strive for balance? What is wrong with each group, whether grouped by sex or race or age or whatever else being specialised in different fields on average?
You might be making assumptions here about what the goal is. The goal is to eliminate prejudices that are actively harmful. The World Health Organization, for example, talks about why it’s important to eliminate these prejudices. https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender
> because they are different from country to country, that rules out the possibility that the cause has anything to do with intrinsic differences between men and women, it disproves the idea that there’s a “natural disposition” that is purely based on sex, at least as the primary reason for the distribution today.
The numbers may be going down in some fields, but that does not mean empowerment is the cause. And in case my point wasn’t clear, your link is not evidence that the distribution is sex based, it is proof that the number of women in STEM fields today is not primarily based on sex. The fact that it was higher and went down within a single generation proves it’s changing for social reasons and cannot be a “natural disposition”. Our biology didn’t change dramatically in 30 years, right?
I’m rather skeptical that it’s truly “broad” in historical terms, it’s still changing much too fast. I’m skeptical that trend for 1 or 2 decades is likely to continue and not change direction again, since it’s already changed direction in the last century. Women going into STEM went way up from the 40s to the 80s. In computer science it’s gone down since the 80s in the US, while in India it’s continued going up, and even exceeded 50% one or two years. The numbers in the US vary wildly from field to field, it’s different in CS than it is in biology or math. All of this is further undeniable proof that today’s causes are primarily social and not sex based.
The deeper problem with this article is that it flirts with some vague concept of different interests between men and women without addressing the well known fact that social norms influence interests. You simply cannot separate attitudes from cultural biases, it’s not possible, and it’s either ignorant or willfully misleading to suggest otherwise.
The truth is that there are no studies (that I'm aware of) that research into whether there's sexism in QA. So the answers to your question are going to be filled with speculation.
There's no sexism until I see a study, and I'm not doing a study if there's no sexism. Doing a study at all when there are no previous studies would be a clear case of anti-male bias.
Of course. Women are not physiologically better at QA than other roles in tech companies. That's it. That's 100% of the information required to determine that this is the result of sexism.
However, a lot of people seem to think that describing reality is an insult to them, so I have to explain further - this is a result of systemic sexism starting at early childhood. It starts with what toys children are given to play with. It continues via socialization in schools. It's propagated via every surprised face when a woman shows up to learn about technology. No individual person involved in the process might have any malice at all. It's the result of entire systems of behavior, no individual part of which can be described as "the problem". You might call it systemic sexism.
You don't have to be able to explain the entire method of operation to see the result. Is there a statistical difference in outcomes between groups that isn't explained by a difference between the groups? Then there's a systemic bias at work.
>Of course. Women are not physiologically better at QA than other roles in tech companies. That's it. That's 100% of the information required to determine that this is the result of sexism.
Car mechanics aren't all women, even though women's hands fit much better into all those tiny spaces in the dashboard and engine bay? Sexism
Nurses aren't overwhelmingly male, despite the fact that a significant part of the job is wrangling patients, who overwhelmingly skew obese? Sexism
I was trying to show by example that grandparent's definition of sexism is ridiculously expansive to the point of choking out all other dimensions of life.
I chose them as two things that don't often get cited as evidence of sexism (though mechanic isn't so dirty a job, and isn't dangerous at all. I have more personal awareness if mechanics, so that's what I chose.)
Unless they can back up those claims with evidence, like male nurse resumes receiving fewer callbacks than identical women's resumes, then there's no basis to their claims.
Nope. That's exactly my point. The fact that they aren't somewhere around 50% is sufficient to show it. Filtering does not happen solely at the interview. It happens at hundreds or thousands of steps along the way. It's a systemic problem.
Go ahead, do your study. You'd probably find that most hospitals have a slight preference for male nurses as they're trying to increase their diversity for all the practical benefits it brings. (Yes, diversity has a lot of practical benefits. Having people with a lot of different backgrounds around significantly improves the odds of having someone around who can successfully interact with a person no one else can.)
So if hospitals, theoretically, have a slight preference for male nurses in hiring right now... Why are they so uncommon? Because there are fewer candidates.
Hiring isn't "the problem". No one thing is "the problem". There's no bad guy to blame. No evil cabal. You don't need to get upset every time someone points out a systemic bias.
You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
> You'd probably find that most hospitals have a slight preference for male nurses as they're trying to increase their diversity for all the practical benefits it brings. (Yes, diversity has a lot of practical benefits. Having people with a lot of different backgrounds around significantly improves the odds of having someone around who can successfully interact with a person no one else can.)
This is illegal hiring bias. It doesn't matter if a company thinks it'll perform better, it's against the law. If a company finds that male salespeople make more sales, are they justified in turning away women?
No? You write that hospitals are discriminating against women because they want to increase their representation of men. I respond saying this is illegal (because it is).
>Hiring isn't "the problem". No one thing is "the problem". There's no bad guy to blame. No evil cabal. You don't need to get upset every time someone points out a systemic bias.
>You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
But who are you to say that the way a thing is done by everyone, everywhere, is out of whack? Perhaps you (and I) just don't have full knowledge of all motives and incentives?
This whole discussion misappropriates the term 'sexism' to make it meaningless just like racism has become a meaningless term.
How is it anything other than out of whack if observed reality isn't statistically aligned with potential? Simple economics tells us that we get the best outcomes by aligning those. (And... motives and incentives are part of the systemic biases. As I said, you don't need to identify them to observe their results.)
Also, did you know that language changes? It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
Except "fixing" this problem involves deliberate hiring bias. As per your other comment [1], the solution involves direct sexism in the form of gender discrimination in hiring. Direct sexism, in order to fix the "sexism" that most normal people just call "choice" is not something many would support.
>How is it anything other than out of whack if observed reality isn't statistically aligned with potential? Simple economics tells us that we get the best outcomes by aligning those. (And... motives and incentives are part of the systemic biases. As I said, you don't need to identify them to observe their results.)
The set of all relevant characteristics to evaluate 'potential' is either infinite or approximates infinite on the scale of human lifetimes and capabilities, not least of all because 'potential' is also the evaluation of that infinite list of characteristics across an infinite list of possible uses of one's time within some moral framework that must be used to determine which is the optimal solution. The practical implication is that 'statistical alignment with potential' is a fantasy, and anyone who indulges it will spend all their time trying to figure out how to amass and analyze the relevant information (and no time accomplishing anything else), which we can hopefully acknowledge is not the best use of potential.
>Also, did you know that language changes?
Please, don't be snide.
>It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
It's a good word to describe forms of bias because its prior meaning gets people's attention, because it is a word that means something that needs to be fixed. The extent of 'systemic sexism' far outpaces 'sexism', meaning that the first use will necessarily eclipse the second, eventually taking away the shock value and, in the meantime, it removes the significance of what was once an unambiguous and damning word. It is a loss of linguistic clarity for political expedience.
> I was trying to show by example that grandparent's definition of sexism is ridiculously expansive to the point of choking out all other dimensions of life.
People don't fit into the workplace based upon their physiological capability to grasp the highest role. You need more information than that to determine systemic sexism.
People have free will, life circumnstances seperate to corporate goals and a nature.
You can track a bias towards food and water that starts from birth and runs through all of society. We don't explain the lack of people in deserts as systemic waterism. Why do we see women working voluntarily with women in some roles as sexism when it has happened since the beginning of time?
The systematic worldview breaks down when it hits the nature of people. We aren't all pawns in a corporate game 24:7, so there are many reasons for people to work they way they do. One would hope they are freely choosing their work roles and not living their lives according to the dictats of gender equality statistics.
There are people in QA who are Patel. We have women from India who work at all levels, from ED to L1. All pillars are necessary.
The biggest problem I've encountered is that they are sometimes socially isolated because Western colleagues don't know how to approach them, when they're really easy to talk to and have a lot to say!
I'm afraid there is none. Also its better if people from the west do not try to draw parallels with their experiences and culture. It simply doesn't match. This would help you understand the caste system and once you do, you would literally see it in any place where Indians live/work. The revelations would be mind boggling for sure.
For ex, if there are a bunch of Indians in a work place and a few of them are from lower caste, they will not be invited for lunches, dinners or any socialising event by their upper caste counter parts. Implicit untouchability.
I have read that in the US tech companies this is far too common and since their white (only white specifically. Because they don't care about what their black/asian/latino colleagues think.) colleagues don't understand caste, there are no repercussions for any discrimination.
Any suggestions on how an European can tackle this? I now have quite a bunch of Indian collegues, and while I know what the caste system is and how it sucks, it is all just theory for me. If women are cut short in meetings I see it and can do something. If all Indians are excluded, or all Blacks, Asians,..., I see it and can do sometjing. Well, in theory. But of it is only affecting a sub-set of a group that is completely indistinguishable from the rest, it gets close to impossible. Plus, it feels like a really sensitive topic. Just wondering, not that I encountered a situation like that so far, or rather not that I saw one for what it was.
I don't buy this...even if white people don't understand caste, they would still understand random team members not being invited to group events and perhaps try to find out why it happened that way.
"Etymology
The term patel derives from the word Patidar, literally "one who holds (owned) pieces of land called patis", implying a higher economic status than that of the landless,[6] ultimately from Sanskrit paṭṭakīla,[7] with the ending -dar (from Sanskrit "धार" - supporting, containing, holding) denoting ownership.[8]"
I am a Director-Level in Engineering/QA/Quality Engineering. I currently lead a team where our ratio of Female Indian women is higher than any other engineering group at the company. Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of has had a higher ratio of females, but not necessarily of any specific background.
My N=1 experience is that this can be related, but not always directly about discrimination or sexism. I would need to include cultural oppression, personal confidence, and others to accurately reflect a summation. I do not doubt that bias or discrimination exist, just that I culturally do my best to have a positive influence.
A few years ago I wanted to understand better, so I asked for feedback from a previous amazing Indian female SDET (whose husband is the CTO of one of the big retail chains). She explained a lot to me about how a woman's position being higher than a mans was culturally challenging. She also had self-doubts about her ability to thrive in a mostly-male driven engineering organization. I worked with her on a transition into a Development team, and the resistance came mostly from her fears of cultural bias and discrimination. The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position.
The bias and discrimination exist, but localized, the teams I've worked with are always very supportive and welcoming.
I was test manager (never again) on a large enterprise system (never again) and half of our QA team offshore in India were all females; I didn't reflect on that at the time.
It's an open secret that multinational companies preferentially hire women in India to pad their global engineering diversity statistics without having to conduct affirmative action in America where it would generate negative press.
An all-female offshore team is pretty extreme though.
> Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of had had a higher ratio of females
Positive discrimination is also discrimination, why not look for the same ratio as the job market has? Over hiring from an underepresented group necessarily means lowering the competence, unless you purposely interview a disproportionate number of individuals from the underepresented group, is this what you have done?
Edit: needing to interview a disproportionate number of individuals to be able to overhire from an underepresented group without affecting performance is just a straightforward statistical fact assuming the same competence across all groups.
True, although this is similar to what I described, I guess the distinction is purposely imbalanced and accidentally imbalanced. However I think the latter is less likely, the post I replied to originally mentioned doing this consistently across teams. Maybe the pool in QA is imbalanced? In that case we should compare to other QA teams to see if avensec is indeed an outlier. avensec made it seem like they was an outlier, and everybody in these comments is acting like this is the case. So I lean on the side of the pool being balanced.
I'm trying to understand how this is achieved in practice, however I haven't got a good answer yet.
Ever noticed how among professional bowlers, there are fewer conventionally fit guys?
Why is that? You'd think they'd have the same ratio of fit guys as the rest of professional sports by your logic.
Or.
Is it because the current highest earning professional bowler has a lifetime career winnings of $5 million by 2019? Since he turned pro in 1980. So if you can, you play something else.
Similar thing is going on here. There aren't people gunning for QA jobs specifically, there are people gunning for software related jobs in certain companies. People will get various offers from various companies for various positions. And the position you get is a reflection, in part, of the best offer for the best position the best company gave you.
So while the entire pool may have applied for the QA job, some of the people who were given offers got better offers from better companies and/or for better positions.
And let's not forget there could also be a variation of the Dead Sea effect going on. Where those who aren't Indian women get promoted or transferred out of QA at a higher rate, leaving more Indian women in QA. So you have twin effects going on. Where Indian women are getting accepted into QA positions more than other positions and Indian women being passed over for promotions and transfers keeping them in QA positions.
A much more likely explanation on the bowling thing is that physical fitness is not required to be a good bowler. Consider:
-There are lower-paying sports where fitness does matter, and they all have fit athletes at the top.
-There are way more conventionally fit folks than there are pro athlete slots; It's not like the select few fit people in the world are being exhausted before they can fill the ranks of all professional athletics.
You're throwing 12 - 16 pound balls about 16 mph in a way that causes the ball to spin. That takes a decent amount of arm and upper body strength to do it well consistently. Some amount of fitness is required.
If bowling paid like the NBA, you'd see very few non-fit pro bowlers.
At $5 million over 42 years, you bowl because you like it, not because it makes money. People who are fit but are otherwise not good enough to play high-paying professional sports can probably find better paying jobs elsewhere.
Professional bowling is populated by the people it is populated with partly because this is as good or better an option than others that they have.
I said you don't see "conventionally fit" guys. You inferred my claim was that physical fitness was not required.
And the reason I used bowling is because it is a physical sport. And with physical sports, better overall physical fitness can give you an edge.
Hell, even in chess they're beginning to consider how physical conditioning impacts performance.
But now you're kind of at the point of arguing the metaphor. There are more desirable positions in software development and less desirable ones. And everyone is applying for everything. And if one group is cut off from the more desirable ones, they will start to become over-represented in the less desirable ones.
There's nothing on the GP about positive discrimination.
If you hire based only on competence, you will probably get more people that suffer discrimination than the average. The stronger the discrimination, the higher the odds.
Good team mates. This is non existent in India. A woman in a management position has much harder steps to reach there and will be impossible if she is from a lower caste.
I think it's more mocking the oversimplification of complex problems.
That though caste discrimination causes significant harm and problems in the Indian and Indian diaspora communities, not every, "bad thing", stem from caste discrimination in specific.
The idea that sexism and other terrible things can be prevelant issues that need to be addressed better but they are not necessarily related to caste.
I know nothing about the parent or their experience [edit: and thanks to the parent for posting this]. I do know that commonly, people in positions of power (managers or people in the majority) believe the following but it's often not true; that is, the signal is always same, but not the reality. That is, the signal is meaningless as an indicator of the underlying situation, but when I find myself thinking it, it is potentially a signal that I'm missing something.
> "I ... have a positive influence." [note: not what the parent actually said; it's abridged for my example]
> "The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position."
> "I asked for feedback from ..."
A cause is that the people in a vulnerable position, the people who actually have the experience and know if you are having a positive influence or if they are accepted, don't have a voice, a safe way to speak about their experiences. Just saying 'you are safe', 'I support you', etc., doesn't make it so. Just having a conversation doesn't mean you know.
A useful rule for me is that if everything I hear feels relatively comfortable, then I am not hearing nearly everything.
We've all been in situations where someone invites us to be open and frank (especially your boss!): How do you respond? You know that many say it without meaning it - because it's polite, or it's in the HR training, or because they don't seriously considering what they are asking for. You know that some even say it to trap you, and some say it because they want to openly and frankly tell you something - and they do, ignoring what you said and then going on a rant. Some mean it but then can't handle it; they hear something disruptive to their worldview or needs (such as a stable, stress-free team or family), and react poorly, ignore it, or they bury their alarm and carry it around, associating it with you, degrading the relationship. Really, how often do you hear that invitation and then actually speak openly and frankly?
Now imagine that it's about a highly inflammatory topic which has yielded bad results throughout your life, about which you carry a lot of trauma. It might be a relatively new experience to the person in power, but to the vulnerable person it's something they've dealt with daily, they have ways to cope without dealing with it afresh all the time, and they've tried that conversation many times with little success. Just imagine your boss invites you to speak openly and frankly about politics or Donald Trump, and you might have an idea.
It's not hopeless, but there is an art and there are techniques for making it work, and plenty of expertise is available now that can guide people who are truly serious about hearing uncomfortable things.
As the parent, just wanted to give a quick reply with thanks.
My reply here is meta given the topic, but I almost didn't submit my original comment because I've seen how these threads go. Any additional information in my comment would lead to even more complexity/areas to pick apart. Less information becomes easy targets for flame. I can understand why the talk was pulled, because they often seem to result in negative PR, more than any potential positive influence. I felt the same with submitting my comment.
Thank you for offering positive suggestions and discussion to the topic.
Yes, and I hope it was taken as discussion. I am not even making suggestions to you, not knowing anything about you, your employee, or the situation. I do not for a moment think that I do know based on a couple paragraphs on the Internet.
Thanks for submitting your comment. It's so valuable to have someone openly discuss these things.
cultural oppression - that might have been a valid reason many decades ago but not these days.
Most of the men on H1B visa get married and their spouses arrive on dependent H4 visa. They cannot work with H4 visa (they can work with EAD these days though). Usually, there are a few years gap by the time they get back to workforce.. and what is the easiest field to enter without any programming skill? QA testing !! There are literally hundreds of QA training institutions who train home makers on QA testing and place them in a QA testing role (sometimes inflating the resumes with fake experience).. And there are other subtle reasons like low confidence level, assuming developer roles are more stressful with long hours of coding, cultural bias to focus more on family than career, etc. Outside the fancy startups and tech companies, QA testing is very slowly moving from manual to automated testing. So, it is still one of the easy entry points to the IT industry.
> cultural oppression - that might have been a valid reason many decades ago but not these days.
Most of the men on H1B visa get married and their spouses arrive on dependent H4 visa.
So why aren’t the women arriving on H1B visas and their spouses on dependent H4s?
Women are generally under represented in IT. And usually there is a high level of hesitation, fear-of-unknown-foreign-land among young women when they travel alone from home country to any other country. Things are changing fast though.
Yes, there are levels of QA. But QA, at its most difficult is also software development, but for the most part, is not.
I would say, that on average, QA is a lower skilled profession than software development. If I were to make an analogy, QA is the nurse to the developer's doctor.
And, yes, it is a lower tier. You hire developers before QA and fire QA before developers. But, like you said, it deserves respect. Just like all professions. And I'd say that a competent QA staff is the sign of a successful organization. Because while you can have your developers test, it's better to move those responsibilities off their plate so they can focus on their core work. Just like you could have your employees take out the trash and sweep up, but once you're beyond the "5 people in a garage" setup, you're going to hire a cleaning service.
To the point of the higher up comments.
It is an issue. Even if QA were more difficult, challenging, etc than development, we can't get around the fact that it is perceived as supplemental to development. It is a place where organizations put people who want to be developers but the organization doesn't want to be developers. Or a dumping ground for 1x developers. And it seems, a way to tweak diversity numbers without actually doing anything.
While it pays less I don't think I'd ever state that it's "lower tier". If QA is an integral part of your process, that the customer pays for, then you don't disparage people doing the necessary work.
As commonly implemented, it’s certainly a less-skilled job with a lot of banal repetition, tedious procedure, and not much scope for or need of original thought.
As one familiar with the Indian education system (which is heavily rote-based and does not generally encourage understanding-based learning, especially before the tertiary level) and the mentality it produces in comparison with the western mind, I would say (and please don’t misunderstand me; I’m making a dispassionate assessment of why it might be so, not whether it should or should not be so) that this is actually a pretty good match, and it would not surprise me—nay, I would expect—to find Indians and especially Indian women fitting in better into that style of QA department than into other fields such as development; and when you have a large fraction of people who think in such-and-such a way, it will tend to be self-reinforcing and -perpetuating. (This is also a significant factor in why these sorts of effects in how you think as a whole have a habit of lingering for a generation or two after transplantation into another country.)
Because for us Westerners this form of discrimination is, well, invisible. It is based on subtle things we don't see. It stays within a group, that to us, seems completely homogenous. Plus, how many Westerners actually are aware the Indian caste system exists at all?
men discriminating and harrassing women? Sexism, check.
White discriminating people of color? Racism, check.
One Indian being a dick to another Indian? A personal thing between those two people. Only that ot is not, it is so much more, we Westerners just don't see it. And since we don't see it we have a pretty solid chance of intervening on the wrong side, if we intervene at all.
Agree there is a ton of nuance, at vmw I didn't notice it till I heard about it, then I did, but like you said its really hard to know how to intervene
Effectively, the idea was "Don't be a dick." That is a reason right there where a person can intervene if they are in a position to do so. However, the issue as you raise it is that this is not a law.
There are laws about sex, racism etc that can help people in low power situations exercise some power. But we don't have that equivalent knowledge/ability regarding caste.
Correct. Until I read feminist theory, QA is relatively easy job, good pay and anyway I hate coding. After I read, its deep rooted institutional bias against women to not be allowed to work in high paying, high prestige software development jobs.
Interesting fact: Talk to Indian upper caste women who claim to be feminists about caste; you'll be shut down quickly. I have had countless arguments only to be named "mansplainer". The activism from powerful groups will flow in the same social structure which does not affect their power.
This sounds extremely similar the ~century-ago situation in American feminism. Lesser right for women of "lesser" racial, religious, social, etc. backgrounds were, ah, not much of a concern.
It's also the same the other way around: a lot of male anti-racism activists / communists / etc were very sexist. Some still are. I still think it's nice that feminists are, today and historically, generally ahead of the curve when it comes to these things.
Quite a few people who are into the "revolution" stuff are there because of the associated macho masculinity. It's no coincidence that Che Guevara is such a popular icon.
Generally speaking, the more authoritarian someone on the left is, the more likely they are to be sexist. Stalinist tankies are the rock bottom.
Hell, I have had conversations with my immigrant mother-in-law where she complains later immigrants hang out only with each other, only speak their own language and should be deported.
In her own language. Just after she's asked us to take her to her ethnic group gathering that is pretty much her only social outing...
Hypocrisy has many shades and people compartmentalise attitudes with issues.
I actually had a pretty balanced department that only slightly favors women. As a male QA/QE I tend to hire for detail orientation with a back up of actually caring, and a level of either assertiveness or grit in holding the line.
Anecdotal survey of 10 years of QA, and I haven't found any corrrlation with sex and QA, except that women have tended to be easier to work with on average, and the men I work with are either really good, or meh. Amusing historical point though: programming was considered women's work originally.
There are no magnitudes. One person’s sorrow doesn’t diminish another’s.
> indians who have a 99 percent employment rate and some of the highest salaries
Ah, got it. Because some Indians do well none of them have any legitimate claims or qualms. Quite literally a racist surmisement, but at this point I should not be surprised.
What makes you think you're qualified to make such a blanket statement? Especially since caste discrimination is pervasive in India and immigrants tend to bring their culture with them.
I just don't think you could know this, and I wonder what else might be motivating you to make vast generalizations about things you don't know.
You're just one person. It's obvious that you don't personally know about caste discrimination in all of the United States. If you had data it would be another matter, but you presented none and I'm pretty sure it's because you have none.
It's not a subjective matter, it's just transparently absurd.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? Your posts in this thread have been way over the line, and you've unfortunately done posted this way to other threads too. We ban accounts that do that.
On a topic like the current one, if you want to share some of your own experience and cut out the swipes and putdowns of others, that would be fine. Otherwise it's best not to post.
Okay dang i will go ahead and read the guidelines. Sorry for being passionate and being myself, i will try to be someone else. Thank you for not banning my account even though I get ruthlessly downvoted for speaking my opinion and will never hit my karmic goal of being able to downvote posts.
It seems that, in some cases, immigrants import their biases with them, and stick to them instead of adopting cultural aspects of their host countries. This can, in a sense, make them less open minded and tolerant than non-immigrants. You can see examples of this all the way back to Gean immigrants to Russia and South America.
I have no problem with this, after all immigrants are by no means obliged to be assimilated. It becomes a problem when politics come to play. E.g. Turkish nationalism, Erdogan has pretty solid approval ratings among German based Turks. This doesn't affect German culture much, so. In case of Indian nationalism, heavily leaning on India's caste system, it is different. Indian immigrants tend to end up in managemebr positions more often than, e.g., Turks do. So they affect company policies and culture more. And in the case of caste discrimination, something most non-Indians have a hard time understanding, it can co-opt whole organisations. And in the case of social media it can have a massive impact on culture in general.
That's why those talks, like the cancelled one at Google, are so important.
> Erdogan has solid approval ratings among German based Turks
This is nothing unusual for emigrants to support the preserving, conservative and strong-arm political position for their former home countries because many feel obligated to do so.
The demographics of formerly rural Turks that immigrated to Germany is also relevant but I think the feeling of obligations for such "defensive" choices is a main driver. You can see this trend with a lot of immigrants, Turks are just an example here.
It's also common among Russians, but having witnessed it personally more than once, I don't think it's the case of "obligations". Most of those people sincerely believe in all that propaganda their mother country churns out.
If you’re a Dalit, you’d know. As I mention in the post, membership to a caste is granted by birth. If both your parents are Dalit, you’re a Dalit too.
How do others know: it’s not obvious. Dalits either change their last name to something common enough to not have any caste indicator. They’d avoid any discussion on caste. So effectively, they hide but there are some who don’t and keep their last name. Still, not every other Indian could tell, but a more caste conscious Indian who belongs to the same region can tell. On top of it, it’s common among Indians to just plainly ask other what their caste is.
Note that there are other 'cues' as well that casteists use to identify your caste, such as the food you eat (veg/non-veg), the social rituals/ceremonies or religious practices you engage in. In fact, you'd see enough Brahmins (in the US!) wear the scared thread[1] and embrace the entire identity of being at the 'top' of the caste system that knowing that you are a non-brahmin is sufficient for them to treat you as a Dalit.
We have that same view in software engineering as well. s/Brahmins/FAANGs and s/Dalit/Non-FAANG. Not saying it's everywhere but it exists, even on these very forums. How is one from a coding school or bootcamp ever to be seen as an equal to those that took a traditional route?
For the most part, people treat people equally but I've seen this kind of behavior on here and in person on a few occasions.
The difference with caste is that caste is inherited. If you wear rose-coloured glasses, you can assume that hiring at FAANG is merit based and a non-FAANG can move to FAANG if they want. That’s not possible with caste.
Wrong, I wear the thread the same reason a Sikh wears a turban or a Muslim woman wears a niqab/burka. Wearing a sacred thread has about as much relation to condoning/accepting caste discrimination as wearing a niqab has to terrorism, but these kinds of bigoted ignorant comments are exactly why Google was right in not allowing the talk to happen.
Many Brahmins I know don’t wear it. So how is it a caste marker? Heck I wear it only during certain ceremonies. So the point the gp was making about people wearing the sacred thread condoning the caste system and discrimination is patently false and bigoted.
Only members of the KKK wear a hood, and all members of the KKK tautologically support racism.
Presumably it is possible to be Brahmin, without supporting caste discrimination.
A better analogy would be: Do you feel it should be illegal to mention have a degree from Yale or Harvard? They're both markers of status, and people absolutely discriminate based on that, but I don't think "I have a degree from Harvard" automatically makes you complicit in that.
To the Brahmin, wearing the thread comes with religious obligations. Committing oneself to those religious obligations needn’t have anything to do other castes.
> Are you saying that you'd stop being a Hindu if you give up your Brahmin identity?
Surely there are many kinds of Hindus? To each community what’s important is different? And an answer to this question also depends on how the individual makes sense of his religion?
While jati as a feature of the Indian landscape has persisted for a few thousand years, I believe jati and religion/theology are orthogonal. You can belong to caste x and any religion y in the sub-continent. But as it happens, when one talks about being anti-caste today many times it is to call out and disparage one’s Hindu identity. This makes any conversion about caste extremely muddled, with folks arguing past each other.
> I believe jati and religion/theology are orthogonal. You can belong to caste x and any religion y in the sub-continent.
My comment was in response to the parent who brought in the word religion into the discussion, as some means of justification of inheriting the religion of their parent is the same as inheriting the caste. ...and now here you claim that they are orthogonal. How very convenient.
This is exactly the kind of deflection used to 'muddle' the conversation, as you put it.
If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ? If one can follow the hindu religion without identifying with caste why do Indian Hindus still hold on to their caste identity ?
It is easy to say the conversations get 'muddled' without bothering to learn why the thing under discussion even exists !!
None of this is new. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar wrote about this decades ago and yet, here we are, with google claiming the same thing you are -- that talking about caste somehow ends up being Hinduphobic.
> and now here you claim that they are orthogonal. How very convenient.
By that I meant for some group and people jati intersects with particular theologies and for others it doesn’t. What does that say about jati and theology?
> If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ?
Million dollar question. Why do some identities persist and others don’t? For jati, endogamy plays a significant role and it will disappear with the current out marriage rate in a century (that’s of course being optimistic). Making it about Hinduism or Brahmins will not get rid of jati. TN has the lowest ICM in the country despite a 100 years of non-Brahmin movement.
> It is easy to say the conversations get 'muddled' without bothering to learn why the thing under discussion even exists !!
Lol, let’s just say we read different things about the subject or even read the same things and come to different conclusions.
> that talking about caste somehow ends up being Hinduphobic.
If it ends up disparaging people with Hindu religious identity, one could argue its Hinduphobic (which happens sometimes with these conversations).
> If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ? If one can follow the hindu religion without identifying with caste why do Indian Hindus still hold on to their caste identity ?
Social status for some and Reservation benefits for others.
That’s not true. Many other castes used to have their own thread ceremonies and wear it. In TN at least, I can think of the Chettiars and Nadars who did a 100 years ago, and who rid themselves of it after concerted efforts by the Justice Party.
Example: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_elderly_Chettia...
Some Nairs wear it as well. Wearing the thread is not a “privilege” afforded to only Brahmins, although now in popular imagination it has become their identifier.
Wanted to correct one part of what you said: The thread is not exclusive to Brahmins[1]
I know people who identify as Kshatriyas and Vaisyas wear it. It is just that almost all brahmins do it and the practice has reduced or stopped in the other two varnas.
And from what I see, he didn't compare the thread to burqas. He compared the calling of the thread as sign of discrimination to calling the turban as a sign of terrorism. There is a difference.
It doesn't matter what reasons you have. What matters is the consequence of your behavior, namely, it is visible difference between castes, which makes discrimination easier and avoiding discrimination harder.
All previous fights against discrimination shared one phenomenon: priveledged start to whine that they are reverse-discriminated. And at some point they probably are discriminated against. But the funny thing, that without their cooperation in a fight against discrimination there are no other way to win but to discriminate in reverse.
And your comment show that you are not concerned in a slightest about discrimination. Tradition is more important to you than people.
> It doesn't matter what reasons you have. What matters is the consequence of your behavior, namely, it is visible difference between castes, which makes discrimination easier and avoiding discrimination harder.
Not unless I go running around naked
> And your comment show that you are not concerned in a slightest about discrimination. Tradition is more important to you than people.
How exactly do you infer that? You don’t know me. I care about discrimination just as much as the next person. What I don’t care much for is rank identity politics disguised as benevolent activism spewed from a non-existent moral high ground.
1. You show that you care about tradition. And you show not a slightest attempt to care about people. Words reflect mind. Not perfectly, but there is one more consideration:
2. I heard a lot from privileged. I said some of that talk myself, and I know how mind must work to say it. I changed myself and rejected my priviledge, my mind works in different ways. I do not belive my reasons to do something anymore, I have found then the only sensible way to judge my inclination to discriminate is to assess my actions and their consequences. In my previous conment I applied the technique to your actions as you described them. It is possible that you lied, but I believe it is unlikely.
> What I don’t care much for is rank identity politics disguised as benevolent activism spewed from a non-existent moral high ground.
You are angry, Jupiter, therefore you are wrong.
When you switch to an emotional talk, it seems to me to be an additional bit of evidence, that you are lying to yourself about how you care about people and discrimination. It is a very predictable reaction.
Believe it or not .. casts are carried by Christian [0] and Muslim families converted generations ago .. upper cast by choice and forced on lower cast [1]
What makes you think that? People everywhere try to get an advantage on others why would they suddenly change in silicon valley? If anything, i think it would be worse because it's so competitive.
> Why do they do this, and what do they hope to gain out of asking that question?
Answer is a bit twisted. Lot many just ask as a innate curiosity and to find a cultural base to connect with someone new and not exactly for any sinister reasons. There are like thousands of sub religions, cultures, languages in India that it helps people sometimes to know which caste a person belongs to level with them. Not exactly something to be proud of but happens.
At the same time, lot many are orthodox and do ask to get a perspective into someone’s personality and culture to find a stereotype they can base their decisions on - for ex- inside interviews, business meetings etc.
If you were born outside of India, it would be pretty much like any other national /racial identity -- inferred from family (based on family names for instance). Like mentioned in the GPs write-up:
> Unlike race, it’s easier to hide your caste, especially in a new country. Many dalits change their official last name to something common enough that it’s hard to identify them.
There's touches of that elsewhere too (hiding race or ethnicity with a name change.) I have an extremely unusual surname in Canada, and most North Americans don't recognize it as European in origin, which has led to assumptions in the past. My grandfather said he considered changing it to something English in the 50s, but ultimately he kept it. I know that, at least historically, some Christian Arabs, Jewish people, probably others, have adopted "white" names upon immigrating, too.
Quite a few essentially had Americanized (or for Canada... idk, Canadized? Anglicized? somebody tell me the best word for that :) ) names forced on them upon immigration.
My mother's ancestral Norwegian last name wouldn't have worked particularly well in English, my own last name of Danish origin survived unscathed for obvious reasons.
I used to wonder if the name Yingling was Asian, but it turns out to be the same as Yuengling the beer, which is an odd but phonetically correct rendering of Jungling with the umlaut. ("Youngling")
Wang is also an unrelated surname in Sweden and Norway. It is a variant spelling of the name Vang which is derived from the Old Norse word vangr, meaning field or meadow.
Germany and Netherlands
Wang is also a surname in the German and Dutch languages. The name is derived from Middle German wang/ Middle Dutch waenge, which is literally "cheek". However, in southern German, its meaning, "grassy slope" or "field of grass", is similar to the Scandinavian surname."
Ah, like how in my home country, it’s a ‘well known fact’ that people lower on the economic ladder like to give their children foreign sounding names, whereas people that are well off give their children traditional, and even double traditional names.
That's common but sometimes the cause is not what you would think.
In Spain there are many people with foreign or uncommon names... that are also biblical names. Abraham, Sarah, Aaron, Jonathan or Josuah (Josué) were unheard half a century ago. Now they're usual.
Why? In part, because Evangelical missionaries were more successful in poor quarters, specially among gypsies.
Also there's the famous actors thing. But now Vanessa also sounds natural enough.
During that time the civil servants working at the registry had ample provision to decide what names would or wouldn't fly, and many made up their own rules. This led to quite different rules in different parts of Spain.
That being said, these were civil servants under a fascist catholic dictatorship, so you can imagine that the range went from "only catholic saint names in spanish" to "if it sounds spanish-enough to me I'll allow it". Foreign names (John) were not allowed in most cases, just like they didn't allow names in any of the other languages of spain such as Joan (catalan), Jon (vasque), Xoán (galician).
Do they choose names that are Brahmin or generic names that can't be associated with caste, including non-Indian names?
If the latter, is it reasonable to assume that Brahmins in power are likely not only discriminating against those who are Dalit, but also discriminating against those that they know are not Brahmin (Indians and non-Indians) in favor of Brahmins?
I wish it were that easy. First of all lying like that is near impossible unless you know every single thing done in a Brahmin household, you'll be caught eventually.
In a workplace setting, you might be boycotted but if this were in India, you have a high chance of getting murdered brutally.
Dalits get killed for just riding a horse, walking through upper caste residential streets and many normal things. In this scale a Brahmin name would be deadly
Great question. It will be any upper caste who are above Dalits. There is no one perpetrator here but all of them. The main point to note is that the caste hierarchy is sacred and will be enforced by endogamy (arranged marriages) and other occupational rules.
You will be shown your place very very quickly. Love marriages are quite deadly and parents killing their own children and the lower caste grooms are extremely common. You can search for "honour killings in India".
Please read "Annihilation of Caste" by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Its around 50 pages of an undelivered speech, later published.
If you want to learn about caste, please make sure not to ask for explanations from an upper caste person. This is extremely important!!
Ambedkar said similar things to muslims as well, you can stop hating on Hindus. Hinduism does not condone honour killings, it’s a cultural thing. The amount of hate and comments from you is appalling, while everything you say is not wrong but please be civil.
hating on Hindus? I'm not sure what's hateful here for describing actual events. The ones receiving the caste oppression are also Hindus. Dalits are not Hindus you mean?
The parent comment died while I typed my response, so I'm just throwing it here to elaborate on your comment:
I'm not Indian, but I read a lot about this when the Cisco stuff came out. The gist that I picked up from interviews with Indians dealing with this was that there is A LOT of cultural background that you'd be very unlikely to know if you hadn't grown up in a certain caste.
A (likely shitty) analogy: You can learn about WWII all you want, but unless you were deployed it would be hard to fake that you were at a specific battle or did a specific training. There's probably minute details that were not written down, but people who were there would casually know. There may be habits or turns of phrase that would have been picked up. Maybe a certain landmark or destroyed thing that had a funny nickname. Maybe it's knowing a certain soldier or commander by a nickname that hasn't made it into the history books. "Oh you trained at X? Man I loved tuna Tuesdays even though noone would touch the stuff. Do you remember when private Y did..."
Through casual conversation, it's very difficult to keep the ruse up. Now if the interlocutor is actively trying to root you out its basically impossible. In the interviews I was listening to, the best case scenario was that the higher caste member came away not knowing what caste your from, but definitely knew you were not a Brahmin... Because if you were, you'd casually bring up X, Y, and Z and use these phrases and these gestures and and and...
The claims made in this post are in dire need of citations, and don't strike me as believable. And just FWIW, most first-generation Indians in America couldn't give two shits about the caste system.
Highly agree on your second point, many first generation born south Asians I work for or work with that grew up within the suburbs couldn’t care less caste and simply don’t relate or identify with their parent’s generation and caste affiliation, they just want to be seen as American and are treated as such.
Only older heads who immigrated here are the lions share of individuals perpetuating this caste based discrimination. Please state your sources if you disagree with my assessment of first generation born Americans of South Asian descent working in big tech and Silicon Valley.
In my admittedly limited experience, people born to Indian parents in the US don't care about caste unless they are Brahmin, in which case, they'll be taught their caste rituals. Indians recently arrived from India care a lot more because reservation (think affirmative action by caste) and Hindu nationalism have become a big deal in Indian politics.
Only Brahmins are authorized to carry out certain religious activities in Hinduism. So if a Hindu wants to conduct those activities at their house in the US, they ought to fetch a Brahmin. That could be the reason why some Brahmins still stick to their identity.
Hindu nationalism has the most support from Upper castes. The majority of Hindus in the west anyway support RSS and in the west they become champions of minority rights and anti-discrimination. A majority of Indians who come to the west are also mostly Upper castes because unlike the gulf which give the job to all strata of people, only high profile people are given visas which happen to be high castes because generationally they hold the majority of the country wealth. So how is your statement many Indians who come to the US care about caste due to reservation even make sense?
> So how is your statement many Indians who come to the US care about caste due to reservation even make sense?
Your comment supports my observations. The newly-arrived Indians really don't like reservation and therefore care about caste. Second generation non-Brahmins in the US don't care about caste because it doesn't affect them.
No, I mean first generation born on American soil as American citizens which is distinct from first wave of immigrants from a specific country of origin. Their children are first generation born American, second generation in America.
Well, we are in the comments for an article which exactly disproves your point. You say Indians don't care about caste but I want to see some intercaste Indian couples and Indians without caste surnames among your "first-generation" Indian Americans.
Plenty of those, and inter-racial Indian marriages among friends who happen to be upper-caste exist. You're either not a first-generation Indian (seems likely) or you're seeing the story you believe in. And FWIW, even my dad's expat friend circle from IITB has people from all different caste backgrounds as extremely close friends, though you might cynically argue that IIT is an even higher caste.
> Dalits get killed for just riding a horse, walking through upper caste residential streets and many normal things. In this scale a Brahmin name would be deadly
India is a big country. Where in India is this a common practice?
This will happen in any part of the country Dalits exist. So all of it.
The oppression will be localized to that region. Like in southern states there is no ritual where a from rides a horse. So this won't happen there. But in a lot villages in Tamil Nadu Dalits are not allowed to wear footwear while crossing an upper caste St. They have to carry it on their heads. Please Google for these if they are mind boggling
Apparently (from a cursory Google search) it seems that members of some castes (the higher ones, apparently? maybe just the highest?) are typically vegetarian.
'Vegetarian' diet in according to Indian system the regular vegetarian diet+ dairy. They drink milk and may consume other dairy products like curd and ghee. Some Brahmins do not eat garlic and onion.
Not necessarily. The so called warrior (and "upper") caste members have been eating meat for centuries. Brahmins (the priests) are supposed to be vegetarian. They are also supposed follow few other rules. These "sacrifices" allow them in forming better connection with gods.
If you see Indians in KFC asking for vegetarian choices, you can guess that they are upper caste. Alternatively, if you see Indians speak of animal rights, while wearing leather bags/ belts or shoes you could also guess from that.
Almost all upper castes are vegetarians. Brahmins definitely will be vegetarians. There will be exceptions for first generation immigrant kids I suppose.
That's not an easy thing to do as you will be easily identified. However, there is a market for getting identified as "lower caste/tribe" as it bags you affirmative action benefits.
Your write-up is quite simplistic and hence is very much open to misinterpretation by non-Indians.
I highly suggest that you consult the works of Patrick Olivelle and Susan Bayly to get at the real History of "Caste" (Varna vs. Jati etc.). That way you can present what is actually stated in the Hindu Scriptures vs. Their misinterpretation and later practice within Indian Society.
Recent scholarship suggests that the discussion of varna as well as untouchable outcastes in these texts does not resemble the modern era caste system in India. Patrick Olivelle, a professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions and credited with modern translations of Vedic literature, Dharma-sutras and Dharma-shastras, states that ancient and medieval Indian texts do not support the ritual pollution, purity-impurity as the basis for varna system. According to Olivelle, purity-impurity is discussed in the Dharma-shastra texts, but only in the context of the individual's moral, ritual and biological pollution (eating certain kinds of food such as meat, urination and defecation). In his review of Dharma-shastras, Olivelle writes, "we see no instance when a term of pure/impure is used with reference to a group of individuals or a varna or caste". The only mention of impurity in the Shastra texts from the 1st millennium is about people who commit grievous sins and thereby fall out of their varna. These, writes Olivelle, are called "fallen people" and impure, declaring that they be ostracised. Olivelle adds that the overwhelming focus in matters relating to purity/impurity in the Dharma-sastra texts concerns "individuals irrespective of their varna affiliation" and all four varnas could attain purity or impurity by the content of their character, ethical intent, actions, innocence or ignorance, stipulations, and ritualistic behaviours.
Olivelle states:
Dumont is correct in his assessment that the ideology of varna is not based on purity. If it were we should expect to find at least some comment on the relative purity and impurity of the different vamas. What is even more important is that the ideology of purity and impurity that emerges from the Dharma literature is concerned with the individual and not with groups, with purification and not with purity, and lends little support to a theory which makes relative purity the foundation of social stratification.
The people i have referenced are experts/scholars in this field (and non-Indians to boot) so you can be sure that it is as close to factual as you can get. The Wikipedia page contains links to their papers/books which you can refer for edification.
> The people i have referenced are experts/scholars in this field (and non-Indians to boot) so you can be sure that it is as close to factual as you can get. The Wikipedia page contains links to their papers/books which you can refer for edification.
What are the cliff notes, because every time I bring this up here one gets accused of being a bigot and missing the nuances of what is essentially nepotism and racism that gets a pass because A: Indians make up an inordinate amount of CEOs in Tech, and B: Well, we've always done this and anything deviation from this brings everything else into question.
I worked in the health sciences before and I saw a lot of this, and got so fed up with just abjectly horrible most workers were who got a pass because of their surname. It's odd, my colleague was a MSc in Microbiology and was Indian, too, but we both had to claw our way into the Industry (in different fields) and she was always worried he H1 Visa would be the only thing that kept her in the US.
My only conclusion was she wasn't a high ranking member of the caste system which is why she was just as hungry as us undergrads in the 2008 financial crisis. She ended up quitting her role in a Govt agency, and did her PhD last we spoke.
My advice is to use your commonsense. Almost all of what you have seen/experienced can be explained by one Human Animal trying to "eat" another within our Cultural/Social frameworks using whatever means is available at hand. Thus you can have Nepotism, Favouritism, Spitefulness, Back-stabbing, Victim role-playing etc. You have to figure it out based on the person and the context. Don't jump to preconceived notions like Casteism which has a very low probability amongst educated Indians.
PS: The study of the subject itself is fascinating and you can start with the wikipedia page i have referenced and then follow the links from there.
Why do people refuse to face Reality? We are just Biological Animals with a Complex Social Structure called "Civilization" which is but just a veneer.
Reminds me of one of my favourite passages from The Sea-Wolf by Jack London;
“Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”
He shook his head slowly, pondering.
“I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.”
He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added:
“It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.”
“Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,” I laughed.
“Quite so,” he said. “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.”
“Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution.
“More freely, because it costs you nothing.”
“And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted.
“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.”
I'm neither a racist nor a bigot, I'm trying to move past the significance of race by addressing it head on and I've had working relationships and friendships with both groups of people which is why I hold the viewpoints that I do about the seemingly paradoxical nature of the discussion.
But I guess you just proved my initial point, and you're right: we won't because you resort to accusations without answering difficult questions.
> What are the cliff notes, because every time I bring this up here one gets accused of being a bigot and missing the nuances of what is essentially nepotism and racism that gets a pass because A: Indians make up an inordinate amount of CEOs in Tech, and B: Well, we've always done this and anything deviation from this brings everything else into question.
So you have admitted to already having a track record of being called as one.
>I have such a low estimation of Indian culture over all
>but somehow Judaism and the Indian caste system
Both the above lines speak volumes about your worldview or lack thereof. This is classic bigotry and racism. The rest of your comments are all meandering vitriol against anything and everything.
>That way you can present what is actually stated in the Hindu Scriptures vs. Their misinterpretation and later practice within Indian Society.
Whether or not Hindu scriptures really support these practices is a matter for believers, the concern here is how it's actually practiced in the real world and the resulting discrimination harming actual people.
The issue is that Indian (or Indian-American) workers are bringing these prejudices into American workplaces. People in Indian workplaces know about these issues, non-Indians in American workplaces very likely don't, which allows the discrimination to go unchecked.
I am not sure if you have rad Beautiful Tree by Dharampal. It has interesting info about Indian education during and before british occupation. There were large number of shudras and other castes(which he assumes in dalits) involved in various subjects. Like Malabar data from 1821, other castes where marjorly learning about Medicines, Astronomy. Which is kind of unheard before independence.
Malabar data is not proper one to study this because the Malabar region or present Kerala region didn't have a proper 4 caste system. Anyone, not Brahmin was Shudra and hence the rigid system like the north was never there. When north had manusmirthi the one in Kerala was Shankarasmrithi that had only Brahmin and the rest Shudras.
Two quibbles. First, the Rigveda itself didn't separate castes into hierarchical varnas - that was more of a later vedic thing. Second, jatis aren't exactly sub-varnas. Some jatis span across varnas (e.g. because their members engage in both farming (shudra) and soldiering (kshatriya)), and particularly in South India the jati system exists even though the varna system has only been incompletely applied (a lot of regions in South India don't really have any defined varnas outside of Brahmins).
This is likely an example why it may not always be a great idea to discuss politics at work. I know a lot of us have strong personal opinions on a lot of subjects, but making sure everyone on my team aligns with my beliefs is likely not conducive to teamwork. Quite the opposite.
If I was not an IC now, I would definitely be trying to cut discussions like that in a bud.
Except racism (and "caste-based discrimination" is also racism) shouldn't be considered "politics", everybody should be able to agree that it doesn't have a place in a modern company.
I'd posit that 99.999% of people agree racism is bad. It's mostly when the definition gets muddied and expanded that people start disagreeing and it becomes political and touchy.
I don't think it's a matter of definition. Unless you mean "it's not racism when I say it. When I say it it's just a fact".
Whether they use the N word, or saying "being on time" is "whiteness", racism is always defined as "not what I'm doing".
Actually the only real definition of racism I would say is "mentioning race in any way, except the way I do it".
For your 99.999%, I would say that WAY more than one in a hundred thousand would overtly say that their group (race, religion, skin color, gender) is "better" than another. Especially as you leave western countries.
Though in some countries their racism doesn't even place themselves at the top.
27% of Americans say that homeopathy is an effective treatement. I've never met anyone who would admit to this. I know someone who believes in crystals and fortune tellers though.
I don't know how many people are pro-racism, but it's not three orders of magnitude less than people who believe in the power of nothing.
I think the problem is - and that is likely what OP was referring to - that if everything is racism then nothing is racism. And if being on time is racist, I guess everything already is racist.
It is an odd frame of mind.
>>> For your 99.999%, I would say that WAY more than one in a hundred thousand would overtly say that their group (race, religion, skin color, gender) is "better" than another. Especially as you leave western countries.
Is it possible you are conflating racism with xenophobia ( which has slightly expanded to include foreigners )?
No, I'm not conflating. Especially when referring to those (like I mentioned) who don't place themselves at the top. That's the opposite of xenophobia, if anything.
I'm saying one in a hundred thousand is too few. The US has more than 3000 people who judge even by phrenology, I'm sure.
Apart from the morality of the situation, the fact is that racial discrimination in the workplace is illegal in the US (and rightly so, in my opinion). Whether caste discrimination is a form of racial discrimination is the subject of current litigation in California. Given that there are legal requirements the company needs to stay in compliance with, this is squarely outside of "politics at work".
This is likely the only reasonable counter to my opinion so far. That said, is caste of a racial nature? To my understanding it really more of a social construct more tied to ethnicity.
To be clear, race is also socially constructed; they're different cultures' ways of stratifying social categories. That said, all that matters for the law in this case is what the courts say.
It's okay to just admit you don't know something. Here's the American Anthropological Association's public outreach site on the subject, so you can catch up on the relevant science.
This may be where the disconnect is. The definition I provided was from a biology domain and not from humanities domain ( not that there no attempts to do the same in biology ). This is not discredit anthropology as it is a fascinating study. I just do not think it is relevant here.
I do happen to think that, where there are clear physical differences ( gasp ) between white and black people, it may be a good idea not to try to cover it with yet another social construct. Unless, naturally there is a disagreement that there are real physical differences ( for example, if we wanted to move from skin pigment, there are documented issues that affect black people more than whites ). Are those issues racist?
That said, it is somewhat interesting that the main quote on the website provided does not come from a renowned representative of the group, but relatively unknown historian ("[Racism] is not about how you look, it is about how people assign meaning to how you look"). Quite frankly, that is not racism. That is otherism and it goes back to the previous comment about how the waters and definitions are muddied further to pigeonhole something for one reason or another.
To be blunt, there is a good reason for a society ( and its members ) to not be focused on race, but pretending race does not exist is a disservice to that society as it is hiding the reality from its members.
Maybe I am approaching it the wrong way. Maybe I should try Socratic method here.
All of your concerns and questions are addressed in the website, which I recommend that you explore more in depth. The site is not purely from a cultural anthropology point of view, but physical anthropology, as well. As such, it addresses genetics and health issues.
I am mildly amused that you decided to skip over the questions and refer me back to the website, which I already indicated am not perceiving as an authority on the matter.
Still, as a show of good faith, I did just that. Needless to say, I was not impressed, but I would be more than happy to discuss my contentions.
Separately, I also allowed myself to dig deeper under ESI-0307843 that funded this project and one of the first things that came up was an evaluation of the website.
You will note that under 'expectations not fulfilled' some complaints do stand out(1):
-"There are no clear definitions of terms or comparisons of biological race v. social race, ethnicity, etc"
-"I expected to find more scientific studies about races, at least as a complement."
-"Maybe some more information about the concept of ethnicity and 'clear' definitions"
-"I expected a professional explanation given to a public audience as happens with so many effective professionals associated with museums, freshman teaching or public programs in the social sciences and humanities."
-"Everything was about self-reflection and self-confirmation about American
conceptions and categorization. I expected a step beyond that."
-"I expected to find a mention of R. Lynn's Race Differences in Intelligence
(Washington Summit Publishers, 2006) for an important exposition."
According to people like Robin DiAngelo, white people are inherently racist, as she wrote in her book White Fragility.
It’s difficult to say that we can all agree to not be racist when some ideologues from whom’s political ideas companies base DEI initiatives on claim that racism is an immutable characteristic that many of us are born with.
These people often use Trotsky's definition of racism which means they can't be racist towards White people. We should all stop using the word because it means something different to extremists. "Racial bigotry" makes much more sense.
Having public messaging about negative social behavior often results in more of the negative behavior. Studies suggest lots of media about school shootings results in more school shootings. Similarly, messaging about getting help to reduce self-harm results in more self-harm. DARE resulted in no reductions in drug use.
If the people creating these programs/talks don't understand this, they don't deserve the platform. And if they do understand it, they are evil and intentionally trying to make race/bigotry tensions worse. In cases such as this where the relevant psychology of the issue is essential to the career, I tend to assume the worst of anyone doing it.
So the problem shouldn't be discussed? So for security vulnerabilities, disclosing them allows them to be exploited. So 0-days and their corresponding patches shouldn't be discussed or released?
Why is it an exception and why is it not politics? Can you define politics and tell me why "cast-based discrimination" does not overlap with that definition?
I think that discussing caste-based discrimination is great for a western company to do. Especially one with a lot of Indian workers. Most western workers/managers have little understanding of this topic, and will probably miss it if a coworker is being discriminated against because of their caste. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
No. Everything is politics. You just happen to be too close and emotionally invested to see it as such. It is fine to hold strong opinions and consider some items 'obvious' or even 'inalienable', but pretending those are all not just a temporary set of values we agreed on as a society is silly.
edit: Even saying 'I am apolitical' is a political statement.
Everything may have a political lens with which it can be viewed, but that doesn't make literally everything "political" in the typical usage of the word. Are all workplace conflicts political? Is all unethical workplace behavior political? Is failure to follow IT security guidelines in the workplace political? It's possible to confidently answer "yes" to all of these questions with the right logical contortions, but at that point we'll have reached reductio ad absurdum.
When you manage a group of people that have to work together while trying to maximize workplace outcomes within existing legal framework, organizations have a professional motivation to cover topics like workplace fairness, bias, respectful behavior, etc.
We are actually in agreement. What we don't seem to agree on is that easiest way for a corporations to avoid this particular pitfall is by not being anywhere near it. Especially in 2022.
> What we don't seem to agree on is that easiest way for a corporations to avoid this particular pitfall is by not being anywhere near it.
I think we disagree in that I don't believe many of these issues can be avoided. If you're seeing caste-based discrimination in your workplace (for instance, just to use an issue that isn't legally mandated to address), any attempt to avoid it is a tacit endorsement of the practice. There are no sidelines upon which to stand.
Do we need every mega-corporation to weigh in on every social issue globally? The thing I like most about work is that its a relatively diverse group of people working together on shared goal. People have known for a long time that work should be professional and you should avoid politics and religion. But I guess people have to relearn these lessons every few decades.
They don't have to weigh in. But, if few Indian managers discriminate against Dalits, how are their non-Indian peers and managers supposed to correct that discrimination if they don't even understand what are castes? This isn't political, it's professional: US laws and Google policies forbid discrimination, and so people need to be trained in understanding what discrimination looks like. You don't categorize "security awareness training" as political either.
> US laws and Google policies forbid discrimination
Does U.S. law have precedent for discussing caste?
There is a case for typing the lowest-caste Indians, the Dalits this cancelled talk was meant to discuss, as a race and thus protected class under U.S. and Californian law. But I don't know if this is legally precedented.
Isn't racism fundamentally a type of caste/class discrimination? Not as well defined castes like seen in India, but "black people" are discriminated as a result of slavery, "asians" as a result of mass immigration. To the point where in many countries you were not allowed or able to marry outside your "caste", had different rights than locals/whites etc. People today don't feel racism as caste discrimination, but to say that there's no precedent in the West is being pedantic IMO.
The word you are looking for is bigotry. That's the generalized equivalent of racism. Thing is, bigotry in general isn't illegal. Specific kinds of bigotry are in regards to hiring though. Racism is one of them. But caste isn't.
A lawyer might be able to make the claim that it would fall under "national origin or ancestry" since, to my knowledge, caste is hereditary and hard to change.
But if so then that makes these kinds of talks all the more important. Because it helps Americans recognize a form of illegal discrimination they would otherwise not recognize.
Being hereditary is necessary but not sufficient for a grouping to constitute a race. Blond hair and blue eyes are hereditary, but blue eyed people aren’t a different race.
“Race” is a fuzzy concept but generally distinguishes people of different ethnic origins. Indian castes aren’t different races—low caste and high caste Indians can come from the same ethnic group. It’s more like the European distinction between nobility and commoners. That’s also hereditary, but it doesn’t define different races.
Proportion of steppe/Aryan origin varies among caste groups (some places as you go farther from cow belt that were subject to Brahminization or like Kashmir are exceptions to this, however this doesn’t mean all Hindus in Kashmir were Brahmins regardless of what certain recent films might claim on the subject) Physiognomy as some of the British attempted is not a golf way to go about studying it (see Native American skulls as to why, brachycephaly etc can be influenced by environment over generations) Markers like sickle cell trait (which I possess incidentally) are almost always found among aboriginal/tribal lower castes . It seems that story of “dasas” and Nishadas largely matches up with being forced into lower caste hood or untouchability as a result of losing wars.
It might not be considered "racism", as such, in the same way that discrimination against women is not necessarily racism.
But it certainly seems like caste would be a protected characteristic under California law--"Race, Color, National Origin, or Ancestry" are protected characteristics. Caste seems to obviously fall under ancestry.
'Racism' is absolutely a caste system, since the fundamental point of a caste system is to proportion resource and opportunity between breeding pools, however devised those are. The differentiator is simply the terms used to draw these boundaries. Which matters because different terms, say religious terms vs medico-scientific terms, resource different graphs for further narrativization. Jewish folk from Europe know full well the difference between being narrativized according to religious lines and according to medico-scientific lines, neither even approaching something like true or right. Black folk in America have been hounded about their medico-scientific distinction from the get-go, right down to the resurgence of heritable IQ and multi-regional emergence theory today.
Because your caste isn't a race. Caste is just taking the class system further. That's why its bigotry but not racism. I've no idea why people seem to want to extend racism to mean all of these things when there already exists a word for it.
Arguably it’s not protected right? Caste is more or less like the old European class distinction between royals and commoners. Nobody contends that lower caste people are a different race than higher caste people. (And I would argue it would be problematic to try and reframe caste distinctions in racial terms.) As far as I know, class discrimination isn’t illegal in the US.
Not under "race", but CA law lists "ancestry" as a protected characteristic. I'm having some trouble understanding how caste discrimination is anything other than ancestry discrimination.
> But, if few Indian managers discriminate against Dalits, how are their non-Indian peers and managers supposed to correct that discrimination if they don't even understand what are castes?
Shouldn't the managers and decision makers be aware of the local customs, cultural issues and employment laws in the region they manage? You really think it's appropriate for some white American manager to lecture his Indian subordinates after spending a few hours in training?
That's their job. If they don't like it, they aren't fit to do it. If managers could only come from the exact same background as their subordinates, globalization would be screwed.
>You really think it's appropriate for some white American manager to lecture his Indian subordinates after spending a few hours in training?
Yes. Ethnic discrimination is absolutely unacceptable in any American workplace, full stop. There is no room for cultural relativism here. To imply otherwise (e.g. “it would be inappropriate for a non-Indian manager to tell off their subordinate for being caste-ist”) is itself extremely racist.
How exactly would you determine that a manager is acting against an employee under them due to an internal caste bias and not due to lack of performance or insubordination (or whatever other valid grounds there are for acting against an employee)?
There's no silver bullet. It's equally hard to determine when a manager is acting against subordinates because of petty grudges, or when a manager is acting against subordinates because they're bad at effectively telling subordinates what they want. I think that's kinda the job you sign up for when you choose to join higher-level management.
Caste-based discrimination would be a pretty serious charge against a manager, surely sufficient grounds for termination. We need to have a talk of how we are going to determine when it's happening if we are seriously considering policies to act against it.
If a manager is acting against an emoloyee, someone should ask very pointed questions why. If caste might be at play, yes, saidanager ahould get a very stern talk from his superiors and HR explaining how this behaviour is unacceptable.
Again, how is that determined? Do you assume that a caste angle might be at play every time the manager is upper caste and the employee's of lower caste? Do you wait for the manager to be stupid enough to outright utter a casteist slur at the workplace?
As a manager, if you see one of your directs singeling out one of his emoloyees, it is your job to find out why. That includes talking to the employee. And because caste is so hard to grasp for non-Indians talks like the one cancelled by Google are so important.
Maybe I have a different view on that, we German's are quite sensitive when it comes to anti-semitism. And as woth caste, if religion is never openly discussed, I have no idea how to spot a jewish co-worker. If that jewish co-worker would complain about about being discriminated, it's more than reasonable to follow up. Same goes for caste. It is up to the employer to create an environment where employees can raise those kinds of concerns openly, most fail. Honestly trying so actually goes along way.
>As a manager, if you see one of your directs singeling out one of his emoloyees, it is your job to find out why
You are just saying that it is the job of the super-manager to find out why without answering how the job is supposed to be carried out. The manager says he is acting against the employee because of their lack of performance or insubordination. The employee says the manager is discriminating against them based on caste. You're the super-manager, what do you do?
Oh, you have talks with everyone involved. You consult HR. You get to the bottom of it. When you did, and it turns out that it was in fact discrimination, terminating the discriminating manager might be an option.
Not sure what a "super-manager" is supposed to be. Everyone reports to someone, even the CEO reports to the board. And the board reports to the shareholders. If a company cannot figure out cases of discrimination it is already screwed.
In real life, so, the disriminated party either gets a transfer or a generous severance package. Even if the discriminating manager gets fired. Nobody likes people that make waves.
> You really think it's appropriate for some white American manager to lecture his Indian subordinates after spending a few hours in training?
If he/she sees a clear violation of discrimination laws/policies, then yes! Although "lecture" wouldn't be the best start. Asking questions to the alleged discriminator would be a better way forward. Find out what happened and why, and ask multiple people for their input. Start by assuming innocence and let evidence prove otherwise, not the other way around.
The truth about a given situation is not completely inaccessible to people without "lived experience". That's why words are so powerful - when used truthfully and in good faith, they enable to bridge gaps where we lack that personal experience, and make accurate judgments.
> when used truthfully and in good faith, [words] enable us to bridge gaps where we lack that personal experience, and make accurate judgments.
That's why learning to express ourselves well, and listen well (including empathetically) is so important to a functioning society.
As a society, we need a restored faith in the power of words to communicate any truth (including truths people erroneously say are "inaccessible apart from lived experience") and be understood by those who will listen well.
The problem isn't that truth is unknowable or incommunicable, the problem is that not enough people are speaking it, and of those who are, many don't speak intelligently and/or intelligibly. And not enough of those who listen do so carefully, thoughtfully, and empathetically.
> Shouldn't the managers and decision makers be aware of the local customs, cultural issues and employment laws in the region they manage?
Google is a US company. In the US, the "local custom and employment law" is that companies don't accept caste based discrimination. (It's also technically illegal in India). I think not only is it appropriate for a white American manager to lecture Indian subordinates about stopping caste based discrimination, it's an obligation to do so and fire the subordinates if they continue.
Because race really matters when your worldview is all about creating post-facto equity between races, not equal treatment and opportunity.
When you have an a-priori assumption that every difference in outcome is due to oppression of some sort, the argument is over -- you've already allowed that discrimination on any basis is OK, as long as it's against whoever you've labeled the "oppressor" group.
As a final coup de grace, you can label anyone who disagrees as an "oppressor" (or at least "fragile") without engaging their argument -- it's all circular reasoning supported by an ad-hominem fallacy.
Respectfully, you didn't really answer my question at all. The question, which I'll phrase slightly differently, is "why can't a person who's not from a particular race or group (i.e., an outsider) observe that people in that group are treating each other poorly, unfairly, or unjustly?"
What you said, on the other hand, is a bunch of familiar, well-worn complaints dating back to the 1990s from privileged white people who think they're being oppressed, even though that's not even the subject.
Discrimination against protected classes is illegal. For example, until somewhat recently it was legal to discriminate based on someone’s sexual orientation (don’t ask, don’t tell).
Case law matters, and caste seems to not have clear answers as to whether it qualifies. If caste is considered equivalent to race, it would.
We don't need them to weigh in on social issues, but we do need them to not be part of the problem. E.g. if a company of Google's size had an issue where Indian employees tended to prevent qualified candidates from being hired because they were lower-caste, then that would both be a problem for Google (because they would be missing out on labor) and those being discriminated against.
I’m wondering what you mean by weighing in globally. Do you mean publicly, or internally within the global google employment base? Google is big enough that I’m not sure public/internal can really be teased apart, but I guess intention might matter.
Regardless, I’ve come to realize that not talking about politics and religion doesn’t make political or religious action and impact go away, it just stays insidious.
Yes, we do need that, at least in the USA. The last 42 years of politics have neutered the federal and state governments when it comes to any kind of social issue. The only institutions that get respect are The Military, churches, very rich (and therefore very intelligent) men, and some big companies. The US government has so many checks and balances that virtually nothing has gotten done in years.
This is what happens when a for profit company LARPs as an ethical one. On one hand they talk about diversity and on the other they desperately hire people they can pay less from areas of the world where "diversity is our strength" isn't really the norm. So in the end the company makes more money thanks to the cheap labor and it becomes even less inclusive and diverse.
That's pretty harsh. Google would have no trouble hosting a police reform discussion because they have no local PD fearmongering through highly dependent local media. They do have a number of employees who could be made uncomfortable by a discussion of caste. That's hypocrisy. That's doing the easy things. But it isn't an indictment of for profit enterprise.
> importing ethnicities means importing their ethnic conflicts too, always
Is there evidence for this? Couldn't null be valid: those choosing to emigrate are most likely to be willing or wanting to leave that nonsense behind?
Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values. Plenty of Indians emigrate while leaving their caste identity, and any will to act on it, behind. There may remain implicit biases. But these can be aspired to be corrected versus assumed to be the default.
> Plenty of Indians emigrate while leaving their caste identity
Caste is something most Indians grow up with, you dont really lose it just because you go to another country. Most kids of these Indians fortunately dont really care about caste.
>Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values.
"Caste" as being your ring in the social hierarchy is present in almost any culture or civilization, and prejudiced treatment of people in either higher or lower social rings is definitely (in my opinion) a part of American culture. This country definitely offers special treatment and privilege to those in higher "castes"... Hell, even just having a Southern accent in America will grant you a prejudiced treatment in many settings.
Indeed and in 19th century New England there was actually a term "Boston Brahmin." It was also based on surname and social standing. The term is still used, often in articles discussing people from white well-to-do, old money New England families.
"those choosing to emigrate are most likely to be willing or wanting to leave that nonsense behind"
In the modern, technologically connected world, it is much harder to leave nonsense behind. Even if you move to the other side of the world, you will still be exposed to your home country's politics through easily obtainable TV channels and through your Internet acquaintances on worldwide social networks. In a way that was impossible in 1920 or 1820.
That's might have been true of the more "enlightened" Indian engineers who immigrated to Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s. There were also ambitious Indians who liked the old ways but lacked the opportunity to engage in such discrimination until they adapted or the opportunity eventually arose.
Either way, as more and more of a certain ethnicity/race enter a country for the purposes of bettering their financial prospects, many of these immigrants reinvent the social dynamics of their origin country. This is how enclaves are created. And while many of the "enlightened" Indians have left behind explicit caste discrimination, they didn't leave other practices behind either ( e.g. parental authoritarianism, arranged marriages, etc.).
A different geography doesn't necessarily produce a different worldview. Every immigrant arrives with his own family values, religious dogmas (or lack thereof), and modes of thought that lead to these aforementioned conflicts.
> Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values
If we're excluding slavery as a de facto caste system, then sure. However certain behaviors being antithetical to our founding values doesn't make them easily solvable problems.
> If we're excluding slavery as a de facto caste system
I agree that caste and slavery have overlap, but banning slavery was about making our country more in line with its founding values. America is an evolving project, not a single point in time.
We still have a long way to go, and are regressing in many ways of late, but still more in line with those values than we were at the founding.
So which way do you want it then? Multiculturalism, with all the "nonsense" that comes from those cultures, or do you just want every brown person to come to america and start acting white?
I thought one of the big benefits of multiculturalism (that all big businesses love to tout) is how it brings diversity of cultural values to the workplace. Well I guess mission accomplished because now you've got the indian caste system in the workplace.
> “We also made the decision to not move forward with the proposed talk which — rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness — was creating division and rancor,” Newberry wrote.
This doesn't surprise me one bit. Even on HN, every thread on this topic turns into a flame war with a bunch of people crying racism/religionism. How dare we discuss something we don't fully understand? How dare we criticize another culture when we have our own problems? It's the same arguments every time, and then the article ends up flagged to death.
The role of caste within the US is a super important conversation to have, and every resident of the US is entitled to participate, but there are a lot of people with a vested interest in shutting it down and the tools to do so.
Having stayed in Columbia TN for a decent while, I can tell you that the legacy is alive and well. Really, visit if you ever drive by - the confederate headquaters is in an anti-bellum house where they give tours, and they never say anything bad about the social dynamics of the past. It really leaves an elephant in the room, when they are selling battle flags in the gift shop embroidered with things like history not hate.
I think OP's point is those revering confederates today aren't confederates, they're something else. Sort of like how we term neo-Nazis separately from the historic Nazis.
You're right, or at least I think so yeah- and that point is definitely precise. From the years I spent in the area and outside of Nashville though, I'm not so sure that the sons and daughters of the confederacy as it is referred to all think of themselves as a part of the union. I'm pretty sure of the opposite for a few people in my mind rn. Don't take absolutes away from what I'm saying, this is just my experience.
Aside: The largest minority in Columbia besides black Americans were Indian Americans and immigrants. I didn't have any insight into how they saw the caste system, but living in that city probably gives them a unique viewpoint that might be worth asking about should you have the chance. I wish I had.
I assumed they meant the Confederate States of America. Which was founded on principles that some humans are less than others. Burn that shit down (again).
That quote from the article gave me pause. It sounds like an admission that they wanted the good PR from having a caste bias speaker, but when having a conversation on a difficult topic actually became difficult, they backed down.
Maybe, Google, instead of just giving up you should be asking why a speaker on Dalit rights and inclusion is causing "division and rancor" in your community? Or is that also a difficult conversation you'd rather not have?
> Maybe, Google, instead of just giving up you should be asking why a speaker on Dalit rights and inclusion is causing "division and rancor" in your community? Or is that also a difficult conversation you'd rather not have?
The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes.
These discussions need to be done with some strict moderation and sensitivity, usually with actual historians who can properly contextualize the issue. If all you're doing is bringing in "activists" from a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well.
Not the OP, but I think the same principle applies. Whenever you accuse an entire race of something (as opposed to isolating your criticism to individuals or even systems), you’re engaging in racism, and this is unfortunately common in DEI trainings and among “race activists”. I don’t think strict moderation is necessary in the general case (especially since a lot of the most credentialed people who would moderate are themselves the sort of race activists who agitate)—rather, I think we’ll work through it in time.
It is a shame though that we were on this path toward a post-race world and then some of us abruptly reversed course and dragged the whole nation with them, setting us back decades.
After Trump's nativist rhetoric, a steady stream of police brutality against black men like George Floyd making national news, and a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo, I agree we've been set back decades. But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists. Woke activists might make some white people more uncomfortable than tiki torch-wielding Caucasians chanting "Jews will not replace us" or Dylann Roof shooting up a black church, but that doesn't make them comparable in any way.
> After Trump's nativist rhetoric, a steady stream of police brutality against black men like George Floyd making national news
The media coverage of police brutality against black men predated Trump's candidacy and it was entirely falsely predicated: the media cherry-picked instances in which black people were killed by police (or rather, those instances were plastered on the front page of national outlets for weeks while egregious killings of white people would rarely break into national news at all where they would be footnotes), which gave the impression that only black people were being killed by police or that police killings of black people were more egregious--neither of which are true.
> a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo
Yeah, this is precisely why we shouldn't legitimize extreme, racial politics or political violence. Every thinking person saw this coming and warned about it (e.g., "we shouldn't engage in racial politics because it's going to embolden and swell the ranks of white-supremacist types").
> But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists
Of course, but woke activism is the only kind of racism that is still regarded as legitimate (i.e., we even allow our most influential institutions to preach it), and by tolerating it we (1) legitimize racism generally (2) allow it to drive a right-wing reaction. The most effective way to treat right-wing racism is by dismantling left-wing racism and re-establishing a liberalist orthodoxy.
Racists on both sides like to frame this as a dichotomy between left-wing racism and right-wing racism, but the only dichotomy is racism vs egalitarianism. Left- and right-wing racism are just two sides of the same coin.
You're blaming left-wing rhetoric for right-wing violence. That doesn't compute. The voices shaping the narrative on the right have agency. They are not puppets of the left, and they don't get to simply point at woke Twitter and say, "They made me do it."
There is a rot in American culture that is giving rise to anti-democratic and racist violence, it needs to be rooted out, and it has found shelter and succor not in radical university campuses or woke social media, but in right-wing America.
It’s not “blame”, it’s looking at causality to try to understand how to get us out of this mess. I’m looking at why race ideologies (and violence) have exploded over the last decade in the same way we would look at the causes of a crime surge.
It doesn’t absolve individuals, but it gives the rest of us an idea about where to focus our efforts: on the influential institutions who are driving race ideology on the left and right. It’s better to plug the leak than try and save the boat by scooping water out.
Anyway, right-wing violence isn’t the only threat—left wing people campaign against liberties (especially free speech and equality) and they have their own violence (nationwide riots, property damage, assaults, and even the occasional terrorism). Moreover, left-wing people have their own anti-democratic bent: the “not my president” stuff in 2016 and calls for revolution, agitating for and rationalizing political violence, etc. I’m not comparing left-wing and right-wing sins, but rather noting that we want to defend against both and mercifully the solution is the same: deradicalize institutions.
>It’s not “blame”, it’s looking at causality to try to understand how to get us out of this mess. I’m looking at why race ideologies (and violence) have exploded over the last decade in the same way we would look at the causes of a crime surge.
If that's the time frame you're predicating your analysis of race politics in America on, you're not the non-partisan analyst you think you are. Racist mobilization of white Americans started well before Obama's 2nd term, well before Ferguson, MI and Baltimore, ML.
I didn't used to, but after seeing how noxious communities get when you normalize the kinds of reflexive confrontationalism and assumptions of bad faith you find online I changed my tune. I haven't seen a single place improve once people start treating and talking about structural discrimination as some sort of original sin that individuals need to repent and seek absolution for. It's generally much more useful to focus on individual behaviors people are engaging in and pointing out the ways in which they are helpful or unhelpful at creating an inclusive community.
> The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes.
I agree. Maybe a more precise way to think about this is that they’re only on the “right side” of the issue to the extent that “the other side” is “Israeli settlement policy” rather than “Jews” or “the existence of Israel as a state”.
Would you dismiss Martin Luther King as an “activist”?
But your point is in some ways valid, as it’s important to be able to see Israel through the lens of colonialism and to show that the state’s brutality applied to brown people of all faiths, including Jews.
I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic. I actually think equating the brutal behaviour of the Israeli government with Judaism is the real anti-semitism. The Tora has exactly zero passages about it being OK to murder children or sterilise black Jewish women.
The central issue with discussions about Israel is a failure to differentiate Israel (the state and government) with Judaism (the religion) with Jew/Hebrew (the ethnicity).
(And yes, I realize Israel is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, but to a first order approximation and given current political dynamics... it's not)
Given that there are relatively few states with as intertwined religions and historical atrocities perpetrated against their people, it makes sense the ability to talk about this is underdeveloped.
> failure to differentiate Israel (the state and government) with Judaism (the religion) with Jew/Hebrew (the ethnicity)
That has not been my experience. AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush. Jewish people have been severely oppressed for centuries, and the state of Israel has been attacked repeatedly. The response has been a strong emphasis on solidarity and mutual support, which is generally laudable, but in some this manifests as militant intolerance of even the tiniest deviation from the (insiders') conventional position. Unfortunately, those few - and I know most Israeli and Jewish people are much more open minded because that has been their tradition for millennia - often end up controlling the debate.
>AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush
This is clearly a defense tactic used to avoid criticism and I see it employed heavily by apologist. Criticism in general should be embraced, as nothing is perfect and we can always improve. But in this case, they are well aware of their wrongdoing, which is why they employ such tactics.
> Criticism in general should be embraced, as nothing is perfect and we can always improve.
Honestly it depends on how that criticism is framed and who it's being directed towards. It reads differently if the criticism framed as "I care about you and want you to do better" versus "I dislike you and have developed a narrative that justifies mistreating you." It also matters whether the criticism is directed as feedback (e.g. "When you do X it makes me feel Y and I think doing Z would be better") vs. directed towards a third party to intervene in a prosecutorial way.
It isn’t enough to focus criticism against a specific individual or narrow group. You also have to consider whether the criticism is justified or echos specific stereotypes
For instance, there’s many who feel that some of the criticism against Barack Obama was racist. Not because it isn’t ok to criticize a US president but because prior presidents hadn’t been treated similarly/held to the same standard
What if someone has consistently criticized other people or governments for comparable behavior? In my experience, it makes absolutely no difference. Even international organizations with rock-solid records of speaking out all over the world get the same treatment. What's the excuse then? It's just guilt by association, only it's not even real association, from people who absolutely should know better.
Not sure whether you meant to respond to a different comment (mine didn’t say anything about “excuses”), but assuming this was meant as a reply…
You clearly have one/several specific organizations in mind, but I’ll point out that my comment was about the content of criticism rather than the track record of the group making it. Track record gives a hint of whether someone might be acting in bad faith, but it is perfectly possible for someone to usually offer fair assessments but let their prejudices slip though with regards to members of one minority group or another. In fact, some would argue that everyone has such blind spots and that they can only be mitigated, but never eliminated.
Not sure I understand your point about guilt by association, but if you are arguing that using the same talking points as a known racist shouldn’t make others suspect you of being a racist… then I think we’re probably going to disagree.
> if you are arguing that using the same talking points as a known racist shouldn’t make others suspect you of being a racist
That is a (very) thinly veiled version of exactly the tactic we're talking about, and I probably shouldn't engage with it, but ... who says something doesn't affect whether it's true. Why is the demand for perfection - dare I say purity? - so one sided, and limited to certain topics? If a racist says that it's wrong to assault peaceful pall-bearers at a funeral for a journalist who was already a victim of a highly questionable military action ... well, they're right. One should of course be careful not to validate anything else the racist might say, or to let them shift focus/proportion beyond where it belongs, but rejecting truth because it was stated by The Wrong People is exactly what the racists themselves like to do (not to mention every authoritarian of every stripe). It's not reasoned ethical debate. It's pure blind partisanship, which is not healthy even in an otherwise good cause. Set aside the ad hominem and guilt by association. Consider whether something is true no matter who says it, and whether its truth suggests change.
Blowback validates the wordlviee hardliners are selling; in a different context, that was pretty central to al-Qaeda’s strategy, where provoking blowback was a way of selling their clash of civilizations narrative.
Hardliners of all stripes tend to recognize and actively exploit blowback.
> AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush.
Ironically, that often results in Jewish people being disproportionately tarred as anti-Semites, because they have specific and knowledgeable criticisms that they're not willing to just let go of.
> The Tora has exactly zero passages about it being OK to murder children
Now, go and crush Amalek; put him under the curse of destruction with all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. - 1 Samuel 15
That's one example. The old testament claims God commanded the total extermination of multiple nations competing with the Israelites [1]. This extermination is celebrated to this day during the Purim festival [2]. When someone mentions Judeo-Christian morality, know that the first part of that duo is not remotely "turn the other cheek" - it is literally old testament.
Here's some classic leadership from Moses. Numbers 31:17
"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves"
And from the Big Guy Himself, Deuteronomy 20:
"As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves [...] However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites"
Does that count as one isolated instance, or six?
(Just btw: I offer the above merely as a counterexample to a rather glaring claim, not as a criticism of Judaism. Just because I was taught as a small child, by christians, that everyone who disobeys god deserves to die, and if they don't it's solely due to his mercy, doesn't mean everybody contextualizes these passages that way. Also, the term "murder" is slippery because it isn't a synonym of "kill". If you argue an instance of slaughtering people is justified or legal, you can make it "not murder" by mere definition.)
I think you've inadvertently made the case for cancelling the "activit talk".
If for example you had a talk in Google Israel that presented the discrimination against Israeli arabs in modern Israel, I suspect you'd get a decent turnout and positive response (especially as Tech is unusually left leaning).
If you had a talk that mentioned colonialism (like you do in your post) you'll just get people fruitlessly arguing with each other ("This is our land from 2,000 years ago, the arabs are the colonists", "This is our/your land thanks to a UN decision, settlements that go beyond the 1948/1967 borders are colonialism", "All you jews are colonists").
You'd just end up further dividing your employees into hostile groups, even if they were previously able to work together (by just being silently tolerant of each other's opinions).
> I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic.
I think this one is a problem "on both sides".
There are some on the Israeli side that will try to silence criticism by equating it to antisemitism.
There are some antisemites that will express themselves in the form of "reasonable criticism".
There are some that will innocently make some criticism that seems reasonable to them, but due to ignorance of the situation or facts, lack of nuance or just the difficulty of communicating cross culturaly via a limited medium end up with sometimes that seems antisemitic when examined at depth by "the other side".
And no matter which way you go, it is very hard to tell where you are.
a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well
Why do we owe this degree of sensitivity to some types of bigot but not others? Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? The realpolitik answer is that Google isn't dependent on the work of klansmen and gaybashers but they are dependent on the work of casteists, and throwing them out the door would hurt their bottom line.
>Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral?
Who says there’s no need to be careful? Almost every discussion about “big tech censorship” has been people crying that they are no longer allowed to be bigots on the timeline.
Who says there’s no need to be careful? Almost every discussion about “big tech censorship” has been people crying that they are no longer allowed to be bigots on the timeline
Sure, but that's coming from the bigots, not the company executives.
> Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral?
This is imposing the cultural dynamics of American racial politics onto an issue with a completely different historical and cultural context. I wasn't talking about people who are expressing a belief of castes being inferior, I was talking about activists who depict a religious group and other castes in a specific light based on a factually inaccurate and outdated reading of history. Hence why I used the world "perspectives" and not "beliefs."
I've been to about 3 of these Equality Labs workshops and just gave up on them because in each one they were throwing around "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" level disinformation about Hinduism, and specific Brahmin groups particularly, while basically shouting down anyone saying things that disagree with their framings of historical events or philosophical references.
I've been to about 3 of these Equality Labs workshops and just gave up on them because in each one they were throwing around "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" level disinformation
Ah, I see how it could cause problems with that type of "equality lab". The equality, discrimination, etc training I've had was very different, and boiled down to "here is a list of behaviors; if you do any of them or anything like any of them your ass is fired."
> I've had was very different, and boiled down to "here is a list of behaviors; if you do any of them or anything like any of them your ass is fired."
Yeah this is good in general but needs tempering through a bit of conflict resolution/appeal process built in. Discrimination issues can often just be the result of misinterpretations and blind spots people have, especially when bridging cultural divides. There's some stuff that crosses a clear red line, but most behaviors are subtle and often unintentional and the approach to dealing with them productively should more closely resemble relationship/marriage counseling or the sorts of reconciliation processes they do in post-conflict zones.
The ones I went to involved being told I needed to make "anti-casteism" part of my identity and pick arguments with my aunts and uncles when they make 'problematic' statements. And it then came with a side of misquotes of The Bhagavad Gita and selective quotations out of the Manusmriti to argue that simply identifying yourself as a Hindu is inherently discriminatory and violent towards lower castes. As a history major and religious studies minor in college I took issue with just about every historical and theological "fact" they brought up but didn't think it was worth arguing. But there was nothing particular to the organization we were in and no specific instances of issues reported internally by anyone so I had a hard time understanding why this was happening.
There's a particular historical narrative among certain political movements in India that depict Brahmins as basically collaborating to institute a conspiracy to to impose a caste hierarchy across all of Indian society for millennia. It's a very simplistic and one-sided reading of Indian history and Hindu philosophy, but it has gained a lot of traction within social justice/DEI spaces and particularly with groups that are more focused on pushing an ideological project.
It would be analogous to having a Louis Farrakhan disciple on to talk about being Muslim in the workplace. There are many better people to raise those issues who will bring them without the side of eliminationist rhetoric. It's one thing to meme about people with privilege or be dismissive in a casual context, but at the workplace (or really any public venue) that sort of talk is just mean. It's especially frustrating because this discrimination actually is a blight on Indian society (though most of the issues in the US are in the realm of microaggressions rather than structural or overt discrimination). But that doesn't excuse just peddling nonsense in response.
The ones I went to involved being told I needed to make "anti-casteism" part of my identity and pick arguments with my aunts and uncles when they make 'problematic' statements
I admire that you kept your composure in the face of such ludicrous demands. An employer has to be insane to think they can even suggest how I should interact with my own family.
This wasn’t an employer, it was a volunteer effort by a Hindu group to organize legal representation for Syrian refugees caught up in Trump’s Muslim ban. There were a few people on the committee who were really intent on spending time doing stuff like this instead of connecting people to legal resources they needed.
The group has, since, dissolved for obvious reasons.
In the same way that in the 90s you could not have immediately started having every major company start celebrating gay pride.
Cultural change takes time.
When you still have a practice occurring among over a billion people you can't simply throw it out and declare everyone doing it a bigot. You have to transition in steps and get buy in.
Put another way, you wouldn't march single handedly into Saudi Arabia and tell them Islamic law is dumb and they are dumb for following it.
The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes.
The roots of this behavior as well as the fear of this behavior lie in a logical fallacy called composition, which is spelled out at the Nizkor Project (a site on the history of the Holocaust):
> The first type of fallacy of Composition arises when a person reasons from the characteristics of individual members of a class or group to a conclusion regarding the characteristics of the entire class or group (taken as a whole). More formally, the "reasoning" would look something like this.
> Individual F things have characteristics A, B, C, etc.
> Therefore, the (whole) class of F things has characteristics A, B, C, etc.
Just because the Israeli government is highly repressive towards the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and treats non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel proper, does not mean that all Jews around the world share this behavior. Similarly, just because some Arabs have carried out acts of terrorism does not mean most Arabs approve of terrorist attacks on civilian populations. These notions can certainly be extended to caste conflicts among Indian peoples.
For example, Jews and Muslims live side-by-side in New York City in relative peace and harmony, as do European and Arab descendants.
The reason for this is that the American tradition of strict separation of church and state prevents any one religious group (or ethnic class) from seizing political power and using that power to repress other groups. This is one American tradition that the rest of the world would be wise to embrace, if they wish to minimize such conflicts.
> Just because the Israeli government is highly repressive towards the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and treats non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel proper, does not mean that all Jews around the world share this behavior.
This is a rather hilarious statement as almost no one believes that. You are committing the same fallacy that you repudiated.
Anyway inference is kind of predicated on guessing with some facts isn't it? If Israel is "the only democracy in the middle east", and they elected a government that is openly apartheid, and commits atrocities the jewish people themselves have been victim to, doesn't that make the whole of Israel's voters complicit?
If Israel (and Saudi Arabia) were to adopt American democratic norms than all members of their population (by which I mean, populations under their military control) would have a right to vote in national elections, yes? So everyone in the West Bank and Gaza would get one vote, same as everyone in Israel proper, for electing members to the national legislative body. Perhaps some degree of federation (as with American states vs American federal) would be appropriate.
Now there was a period in American history when only white male landowners really had opportunity to vote, but that notion has been soundly repudiated, hasn't it? Even then there was a significant group who advocated for the expansion of voting rights to all. See composition fallacy again.
Similarly, the right to emigrate or own land would not be restricted to members of certain religious groups (imagine if that was the case in the United States!). Hence Israel doesn't actually meet the basic requirements of 'democratic norms and values', does it - and nor does Saudi Arabia. Curiously however, these two states are often referred to as "America's closest allies".
As far as repression, well the targeted assassination of an American-Palestinian journalist in Jenin is just one more example of this. See also the targeted assassination of a Washington Post op-ed columnist Jamal Khashoggi, ordered by Mohammmed bin 'Bone Saw' Salman in the Saudi embassy in Turkey, for comparison.
> American democratic norms [meaning] all members of their population (by which I mean, populations under their military control) would have a right to vote in national elections
Since when can non-citizens vote in US national elections? Let alone people living in Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever else is/was under US military control.
I think you'd want to look at the definition of who is and who isn't a citizen, and what constitutes a nation-state. Clearly everyone in the West Bank is under the control of the Israeli state, and the same is more-or-less true of Gaza. Palestinians in these regions are not immigrants, they're citizens under any rational view of what a citizen is, and hence deserve the right to vote in Israeli national elections.
A valid comparison would be claiming that Native Americans were not citizens of the US government and hence had no right to vote for members of Congress, wouldn't it?
Notice that you completely dodged my question. There are lots of non-citizens living in the US who cannot vote. And during the US military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan none of the people living there were granted voting rights. Hell, look at how many senators Puerto Rico and Guam get
Nobody born in the United States lacks the right to vote in U.S. elections. I don't see how that's dodging the question; clearly visitors don't have the right to vote, and immigrants have to go through a legal process to obtain citizenship to obtain the right to vote.
To be more specific, my view is that all people born in the West Bank/Gaza/Israel should have the right to vote in Israeli elections, and Palestinians outside Israel should have the same right to emigrate to Israel as New York Jews do. Some will disagree, but that's basically how the American system works, and I think it's a better system.
If you think that anyone can simply emigrate to the US and then just go through some straightforward process to obtain the right to vote... you may be a bit out of touch with how the US immigration system works these days.
Further, there's been plenty of people born in and living in the US (under your definition of "a country includes any territory under its military control") who weren't able vote in US elections. There's residents of US territories who are technically citizens but cannot vote unless the migrate to the mainland. And the US has never granted voting rights to people living in countries under US military occupation.
Clearly not all Jews in Israel believe that Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians etc. should be treated as second-class citizens. I'm also not sure that religious identity is to be viewed as 'racial identity' unless you want to revive the definition found in the German Race Laws of the 1930s.
> I'm also not sure that religious identity is to be viewed as 'racial identity' unless you want to revive the definition found in the German Race Laws of the 1930s.
Personally, I'd suggest using the definitions that people use for themselves. And if you do that, you'll find that there are both religious and ethnic components.
That's definitely a genuine factor. But much the same blasts of hot indignation were released when, for example, people in the US tried to address domestic racism in the era between the end of WWII and the Civil Rights Act. And by and large there wasn't any threat of a serious backlash against most of the US' white majority. Instead the anger was driven by the desire to go on being racist without facing criticism for it, or sometimes more by just "but ... but ... I'm the sympathetic Main Character!" attitudes. Clearly both causes are at work to some extent in the backlash against discussions of caste in the USA. It would be wrong to suggest that South Asians or people of South Asian descent in the US are in as secure a position as most of the white population is and was. But I have to say that, without being really familiar with the situation, to me it looks as if it's mostly the latter at this time.
> It would be wrong to suggest that South Asians or people of South Asian descent in the US are in as secure a position as most of the white population is and was.
People in upper castes may be that secure in their communities, which might be what matters.
This quote from the article best summarizes similar efforts, even outside of Google,
>> Longtime observers of Google’s struggles to promote diversity, equity and inclusion say the fallout fits a familiar pattern. Women of color are asked to advocate for change. Then they’re punished for disrupting the status quo.
I'm not a big culture warrior, but I believe that if as a company you choose to do a thing, you do it fully, from top to bottom.
Yet the outcome described is exactly what you get when you have {status quo} + {new initiative from leadership} + {failure to dedicate time and resources to following up and implementing}.
People are always going to be resistant to change. Middle management is especially resistant to change, not unreasonably.
Consequently, effective change takes follow-through, verification, reminders, and eventually termination to actually implement. Otherwise, everyone shrugs their shoulders and returns to what they've always done... and punishes whoever is still dancing off the beaten path.
There's an archive link to the article below; apparently that's exactly what happened:
> "According to Gupta’s letter and Soundararajan, the decision to cancel the talk came from Gupta’s boss, Cathy Edwards, a vice president of engineering, who had no experience or expertise in caste."
And, another excerpt:
> "To Soundararajan, Google was long overdue for a conversation on caste equity. Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told The Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.”
Soundararajan said Pichai has not responded to letter she sent him in April. Google declined to comment."
Clean your own house before pointing at your neighbor's dirty yard...
Large private sector corporations are by definition vehicles of economic exploitation on a massive scale. Why do we expect them to sincerely do anything to reduce other forms of exploitation?
Let's be real here. The talk was likely scheduled by a moral individual which thought the topic important. Then controversy began and middle management was made aware to this. Guess what happened next?
It's not that Google gave up. They were never going to allow it to begin with and the organizer likely just hoped it would fly under the radar.
Exactly. Anyone who thinks that if tomorrow most everyone woke up with a position against anything Google currently "stands" for that they wouldn't immediately flip to be in line with it is kidding themselves.
99% of corporate DEI initiatives are performative in nature. I realized it when the majority of companies were pushing employees to read a book on systemic racism written by a white woman who was obviously using it as an advertisement for her corporate consulting and training business.
Whenever differences - actual or imagined - between different groups are discussed, two major things happen.
First, some members of group found at a disadvantage are upset. This is regardless of how many other members of that group express that they themselves are not. You can dispute facts, but you can't deny people's feelings.
Second, the disadvantage is then used by some people to justify something that fits their agenda, prejudices of beliefs, whether it makes sense or not.
So I can hardly blame anyone responsible for managing a huge number of people of avoiding sensitive topics. Besides, a corporation is not exactly the place to discuss these things: they need to be dealt with as a society in general. If you try to introduce these topics into your workplace, you might even achieve the opposite of what you want, because people will do whatever you expect them just to keep their jobs, but won't change their opinion because their manager told them to, or because they attended a workshop where it was explained to them that their culture is inferior, for example.
>The role of caste within the US is a super important conversation to have, and every resident of the US is entitled to participate, but there are a lot of people with a vested interest in shutting it down and the tools to do so.
I don't believe HN's current moderation policies/leadership make this the place to have that conversation though. Participate in good faith all you want, you'll still earn a ban/warning for "arguing" if you piss off the right people.
Last time I saw a big thread related to the topic there were super deeper threads of people just straight up calling each other slurs. They probably would have been flagged, but the threads were just so deep you wouldn’t see that unless you’re intently following the thread.
>Last time I saw a big thread related to the topic there were super deeper threads of people just straight up calling each other slurs.
I hope you didn't take my comment is advocating for that. I can't really comment on a thread I didn't see.
>They probably would have been flagged, but the threads were just so deep you wouldn’t see that unless you’re intently following the thread.
Sounds like pointless name calling. That said, my original point that HN is not a good place to have these discussions stands. Unfortunately this community is for sterilized technical discussion, anything with spice or flavor isn't permitted.
>It is permitted, but it’s important to tread carefully
How so? You can't say what you mean here, you're forced by moderation to be dishonest and sterilize everything. Nuance is only rewarded if you're nuanced about the right side.
>is respectful of other points of view.
Again, this is not in any way consistently applied. If you disagree with the majority here no amount of nuance will save you from ban/rate limit.
It is not possible with HN's content moderation. These are deep social topics that require delving into historical truths, ones that are inappropriate for a forum that mainly discusses JavaScript frameworks.
Yeah, giving the power of censorship to the masses leads to the opposite of free conversation. And these particular masses do indeed like to flag anything they disagree with.
And that message, "You're replying too fast, slow down". Lol. What duplicity.
I've slowly come to the conclusion that it's a form of opinion-shaping. A huge number of people aren't particularly interested in what's true, they're interested in what's _popular_.
For argument's sake let's assume it's 80/20, with 10% on each side of a topic very passionate for their side. By banning and/or rate-limiting the 10% you dislike in any issue you can sway the 80% to follow the other side thus "manufacturing" the consensus.
I don't think there's any distinction to be made between what's "true" vs what's "popular" when it comes to online discourse unfortunately. Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug, especially when combined with votes, flagging and reports.
I was going to comment the same thing but then realized the parent comment is listing the tactics people use to shut down the conversation, not their own personal opinions.
The point being made is that people who don't want this conversation in public (i.e. people in favor of and/or who benefit from the caste system) will flood the comments with this type of rhetoric which instantly turns the conversation into to a flame war rather than a helpful discourse on how to improve things.
The fact that you and I both instinctively fell for this reaction is evidence that parent is quite correct in the effectiveness of this tactic.
> will flood the comments with this type of rhetoric which instantly turns the conversation into to a flame war rather than a helpful discourse on how to improve things
> every thread on this topic turns into a flame war with a bunch of people crying racism/religionism
Is there a term for shutting down a discussion by turning the belligerence to eleven? Such that people outside the discussion tune out not the views of those being belligerent, but the discussion itself?
Trolling, or a specific case of it? I think of trolling as disruption, and it is commonly used to shut down discussions and attack good faith community (i.e., where people disagree, listen, tolerate, and support each other's right to hold and express differing opinions). This is one application of it.
>"Is there a term for shutting down a discussion by turning the belligerence to eleven?"
We really need one, because it's a known phenomenon without a known label. If we can't assign a word or phrase to it, we'll struggle to communicate the concept to others when we see it happening. That, in turn, makes calling this behavior out monumentally more difficult and far less likely to succeed in pressuring people to stop. Imagine if we didn't have the term "ad hominem" and how much more difficult it would be to confront someone making such underhanded attacks in arguments. It would be a lot more difficult to discredit the person, despite recognizing what they are doing.
Topic dilution is the closest thing I can think of that's already been coined. Rather than participate in good faith, the actors bring up some hot topic like racism, and off it goes until it's a full-on flamewar, or people drop out, or mods shut it down.
> 2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit.
> 5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal', 'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.
> 18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'
I'm still astounded by how consistently contemporary defenses of Apartheid blamed the objections to it on "anti-Boer bigotry" in order to derail the conversation.
belligerence is a bourgeois and pearl-clutchy way to dismiss desperate people writing text on the internet as a part of their struggle to improve the horrible material conditions of their lives and the lives of the people they love. it’s easy to be sophisticated when everyone else is effectively your slave because you happened to be born higher up in the global supply chain. belligerent is how Marie Antoinette would have described people who don’t want to want to be told to eat cake.
> every thread on this topic turns into a flame war with a bunch of people crying racism/religionism
Isn't that the first step in the flame war, attacking, dismissing, and blaming one side (and before they even say something)? How will someone with a good faith interest in discussing concerns about racism or religionism act, seeing this comment - they will feel shut down, and like they won't be heard and will be attacked. There's already no room for those discussions.
There is a lack of trust - a situation that is the goal of people trying to disrupt open societies and the trolls that help them. Whatever we say or do, the primary goal needs to be to build trust. People who are alarmed act badly - that's why trolls try to alarm people (even if they aren't quite conscious of how it works). Even when people are acting badly, if you can build their trust then very often the situation will improve.
It would be extremely valuable to society to find a way to conduct constructive conversations; I think we are improving, but not nearly quickly enough.
> It would be extremely valuable to society to find a way to conduct constructive conversations
It's tough.
I mean this sincerely - It requires heavy moderation.
The government can uphold a free speech ideal, but the good conversations happen in bubbles where someone can't create a burner account and start talking shit as loud as anyone else.
Some years ago, Christopher Hitchens gave a talk about free speech. It's very compelling. Nobody yelled "FIRST!" over him, cause it wasn't an Internet comment thread.
Maybe we should distinguish between free speech and "free-for-all" speech. I'll listen to Hitchens saying we have the Right To Read about Holocaust deniers, but I don't want any given thread to be over-run by the same Holocaust deniers.
Is there a Wikipedia list of obscure 'race'-isms? I find reading about other cultures or other time period's biases to be informative and wonder what the common elements might be.
Off the top of my head, issues I can think of where an outsider may be oblivious between the "sides" are:
Indian caste
Japanese Barukumin caste
Protestant/Catholic in Europe
Jewish people in Europe/US/USSR
English Class System, or Southern/Northern
Jim Crow, or North/South or Midwest Vs coastal, WASPs, or Nativism.
Bad analogy. A person’s deeply-held belief that a given religion is true, and calling others to that belief, is not the same as saying “you were born of a lower caste and should never be able to escape that.”
Of course, it goes without saying, perceiving you belong to the true faith does not justify violence or discrimination. But faith-based identification is not analogous to a caste system.
Are we going to lightly dismiss the prosecution of polytheists in many Islamic countries?
>Of course, it goes without saying, perceiving you belong to the true faith does not justify violence or discrimination. But faith-based identification is not analogous to a caste system.
They were clearly talking about faith-based discrimination. Why would you assume that they were talking about faith-based identification, especially given the context?
Lumping in hindu castes, Christian denominations, and Jewish people in what I assume is the beginning-mid 20th century, makes no sense. Yes, it all falls under xenophobia, but the impact are wildly different.
ZeroGravitas is asking people to come up with a list of situations that fall under xenophobia. I do not see them implying that those issues are related or comparable.
Regional elitism in the USA is definitely a form of soft caste system. If you are from the upper East coast or the West coast you are a member of a higher caste than if you are from the interior, and inside the US there are definitely smaller caste differences.
The South gets it the worst. When I was in college (University of Cincinnati) engineering students from the South were sometimes encouraged to lose their Southern accents because it made them sound "stupid." I heard a few stories about this.
I live in the Midwest in Michigan, and I can’t say that I feel like I’ve been treated as a lower caste in the Midwest. We have some wonderful learning institutions, such as the University of Michigan, and a lot of talented and individuals.
This is maybe the strongest out-group bias in elite circles in the US currently. I believe that is largely because it is acceptable, or even required, in the current elite ideologies that dominate corporate and academic entities currently. And they hate to have it pointed out.
I've thought for a long time that woke could get actual traction by being more woke and extending the concept of "-isms are not okay" to include American caste and regional elitisms and classism that isn't about race.
A course on recognizing bias against lowland Southerners would be funny but not wrong or inappropriate and you'd see plenty of rich coastal fragility on display.
Classism and regionalism are absolutely huge in this country, especially when those on the receiving end are not in a racial minority.
But what would people do if there were no easily identifiable out groups to stereotype and mock?
As someone who grew up in the Deep South but studied and worked on the east coast for many years, I can confirm this to be 100% true.
At a past job, I worked for a company headquartered on the upper east coast, but which had opened a "tech hub" in the mid-sized Southern city where I lived at the time. Some of my co-workers had fairly pronounced Southern accents and people in the home office would regularly laugh and make fun of them during meetings. And after I put in my notice, the tech lead on the project I was on declared, completely unprompted, during a completely unrelated call that "we haven't had any issues with code quality or anything, but Southerners are just slow. That's just how they are. It's the culture." I think that I will regret for the rest of my life not telling him to go eff himself right then and there.
And I wish I could say that that was an exception to my experience elsewhere, but while living on the east coast I heard more offhand comments about "stupid Southerners" than I can count, often followed by an awkward "I mean, not you of course, you're different". Interestingly, many (but not all) of the same people who think it's funny to beat up on the South are also the most likely to make impassioned performative declarations of support for every DEI initiative they come across. The level of cognitive dissonance required to maintain that kind of mindset must be intense.
For what it's worth, the stereotype of the "stupid Southerner" in America got started due to an absolutely massive hookworm infestation, "an average of 40% of school-aged children were infected with hookworm". The crazy thing is that it has handled a century ago yet the stereotype and prejudice still linger.
> On October 26, 1909, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease was organized as a result of a gift of US$1 million from John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The five-year program was a remarkable success and a great contribution to the United States' public health, instilling public education, medication, field work and modern government health departments in eleven southern states.[45] The hookworm exhibit was a prominent part of the 1910 Mississippi state fair.
> The commission found that an average of 40% of school-aged children were infected with hookworm.
> The level of cognitive dissonance required to maintain that kind of mindset must be intense.
Holding and advancing multiple deeply contradictory ideas is something humans are very good at.
I've come to believe that most people spend very little time asking if their ideas are reasonable. They just believe what they need to believe to fit into a group. It's more about group membership signaling than anything else.
Primates will choose social connection over food, so it's not surprising that we'll also choose social connection over rationality.
The common element is always in-group vs. out-group (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group). It doesn't have to be based on race or ethnicity, it can also be e.g. Democrats vs. Republicans in the US, supporters of different football clubs etc. etc.
I nearly listed football/sport team support but thought it might be too out there a reference for most people. Now I'm wondering how global such sporting based rivalries are, and if they always originally grew from one of the others.
Not to be confused with the Romanian people - i.e, people from Romania. (Though some of the Roma people can obviously also be Romanians!).
EDIT: I absolutely condone discrimination, but I think for the people that live in areas with very visible Roma people, it's kind of obvious why.
At best, you'll just see them begging on the streets. At worst, you'll experience getting hounded down by them, getting robbed, or your property looted. Mostly just an issue in larger cities, and it used to be much worse 10 years ago.
We had this one older Roma guy that would have his usual spot, and he'd sit there and beg all day long. Rain, snow, or wind - he'd always sit there. In the end, he became a fixture in the city scenery.
But one particular winter got really bad, and some senior citizen offered him their apartment (rent-free) for a couple of months, as they were away for the winter. He passed away a couple of years later.
(From the us) I went to school with a Hungarian who couldn't understand why we were confused about his jokes - they were based around body building so that his arms could become "gypsy killers". He was such a nice guy, it seemed really discordant. This is an anecdote of the kind of cultural exchange we have.
I knew a similar guy, but he was Spanish and his catchphrase was “Moor killer” which was just really odd to me, given the Reconquista ended a very long time ago, but he says a lot of terms/cultural aspects still exist from then.
I live in a country with two large-ish gypsy areas, and we have a lot of people who are very loud about their rights and discrimination against them...
...somehow none of those people actually live anywhere near them.
There really is discrimination against them, but on the other hand, the system (police, courts, politics) allows them to do all the shitty stuff they're stereotyped by.
Of course your message was followed with people accusing the whole culture of robbing people. It's quite interesting how if you switched any other culture this would be downvoted to hell, but the moment we talk of Romani people, the most strong worded racist comments are just accepted. I guess we still have work to do.
It's the pattern seeking part of your brain doing it's thing. Negating it with virtue signalling won't make it go away.
Go to police.hu and every time you see someone with the family name Balogh | Góman | Lakatos, you drink. I guarantee you will be dead from alcohol poisioning in an hour or two.
I don't know if the Indian caste thing should be considered obscure. There are 1.3 billion Indians. By number of people affected it might be one of the more important conversations in the world today.
I think discussions of "obscurity" are always relative to the audience in question, so while I highly doubt caste discussions would reasonably be considered obscure in India (or within the Indian diaspora), I (a non-Indian) had certainly never heard of casteism abroad until I saw submissions on HN discussing it at Cisco.
Not sure how the Sámi people are treated in Sweden, Finland, or Russia - but here in Norway there has indeed been a long history of discrimination against the Sámi.
But tbh, it's just half a century ago that pretty much all people from Northern Norway were discriminated against, in the southern parts. Which is why most people moving south were recommended to change accent - fast. More so if you wanted to work in any client/customer-facing job...
Back to the Sámi - unfortunately there are still shitty people out there that feel the need to voice their opinion if they see Sámi people wearing traditional clothing. But it should also be said that there's conflict within the Sámi community, which also comes down to what type Sámi you are (sea/coast Sámi vs hill/raindeer). Most of the real conflicts in any case revolve around land/areal usage.
Sure - traditionally the Sámi people have been divided into two groups: Those that have lived around / near coastlines ("sea Sámi"), and those more inland (typically just "Sámi", or "reindeer Sámi", "hill/mountain Sámi".
In short, the coastal Sámi people have made their living off fishing, farming, and similar activities.
On the other hand, those living inland have mostly made their money off reindeer husbandry. Reindeers will forage over a large area, and in Northern Norway / Sweden / Finland / Russia that includes large tundra and hilly places - so many of Sámi involved in that trade would trek over and live in these areas.
With that said, these days I think only 5%-10% of Sámi have reindeer husbandry as their main profession.
But the vast majority of conflicts between Sámi people and the rest usually comes down to the reindeer. Since the reindeer need a huge area to graze on, it tends to become a problem for companies wanting to develop the area for industry.
Just recently our supreme court decided that a wind farm had been bult in conflict with cultural landscape of local Sámi people. Reindeer husbandry is a cultural heritage activity, and thus protected. The area reindeer graze on, is thus a cultural landscape, and also protected.
The intra-Sámi conflicts, from what I've seen and heard, boils down to either things related to the reindeer industry - or I guess elitism from the "true" Sámi people toward the coastal Sámi people.
The word you need is “xenophobia” (hate of the others, of those who are different). Race is a limited, artificial concept and by focusing on it we miss the forest for the trees. Xenophobia is as old as humanity and can be based on anything: physical features; ideas, religions, languages, family ties, etc.
Not as much of a day-to-day issue for the newest generations but French Canada vs. English Canada (historically "Lower Canada" vs "Upper Canada", which shouldn't be relevant but some people still use the old labels an excuse for casual 'race'-isms as you call it).
The youngest French Canadians generally speak English. However the oldest generations (50+ or 60+ depending on the region) couldn't and mostly still can't due to the way the system was set up. And since a lot of companies came from either the US or the rest of Canada, they had no hopes in climbing ranks or being competitive as businesspeople. There are some records of French Canadians being sent to unusually harsh missions during the great wars too.
There are casual insults such as calling French Canadian "frogs" and English Canadians "square heads" still in use today.
It is still present even in tech companies where English speakers are sent to client meetings as it is sometimes perceived "rude" to sent someone with a French accent to the front.
These days, it's mostly about not extending the classic "warm Canadian welcome" to the other category. But in some situations, it can get more serious.
(That being said, in 2022 it does not really compare to some of the other examples listed above.)
These are not obscure at all! Especially the last one. See the intercepted phone calls from the security service of Ukraine, the level of Russian racism is beyond what I could imagine prior to Feb 24. It is worse than whatever the Red Army did in WW2, and almost reaching the level that the Nazis showed.
Russian Nazism is very real, leads to rape, murder, forced deportation and torture.
In Russia (and also Ukraine and Belarus), it's more often the Caucasian people these days. And I don't mean the weird American synonym of "white", but actual people from the Caucasus - Chechens, Ossetians, Armenians, Georgians etc.
> Soundararajan appealed directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who comes from an upper-caste family in India, to allow her presentation to go forward. But the talk was canceled, leading some employees to conclude that Google was willfully ignoring caste bias.
> Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told The Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.”
Sounds like Mr. Pichai has some explaining to do...
I doubt it. In fact attrocities on brahmins is rarely discussed [1]. Infact his state TamilNadu there is a strong anti-brahminism sentiment in political sphere. This is one of the reason why lot of upper-caste men/women go outside India.
Don’t assume guilt based on association or membership to a class. Thats a form of discrimination too. Pichai is brahmin so he has some explanation to do—> no he doesnt. Its like asking any white man to explain why us cops are killing black folks.
It's rather you to work on the explaining there. Pichai isn't claiming to be unaware of how caste politics may work. I think it's not only OK but desirable for companies to stop ruining the workplace with societal politics. There is a law and public debates for castes and how to address the (no doubt existing even outside India) problem.
Prompting an employee of a tech company, even its CEO, reminding the audience of its ethnical background is what i find suspect.
I don't think workplaces should operate outside of and without influence from society. They're just a group of people in a building (metaphorical or otherwise).
> There is a law and public debates for castes and how to address the (no doubt existing even outside India) problem.
That's kinda part of the problem. In India there are laws dealing with caste based oppression and discrimination (how well they are enforced is another story). But in most other countries such laws do not exist. And caste-based discrimination is exceptionally easily and silently accomplished because for a vast majority of Indians, your last name gives away your caste.
That's right, in the West at wide they roll up to anti discrimination laws, agreed they probably don't tackle the very specific problem castes pose, I would much rather have anti discrimination encompass them in a more generic form to tackle all forms of discrimination based on "classes" than making it an indian caste problem. I fail to see how the unambiguous distinction in names makes the problem solving any easier, it isn't only about identification, and if that identification is used to implement quotas or whatnot, since that's how companies then read the law, it will 1/ create a new problem, 2/ suddenly see a lot of people change their name for "business" purposes.
While I am in favor of generic anti-discrimination laws, I don't think they can be generic and target caste based discrimination. Let me give you an example:
A hiring manager, gets two resumes. Both are equally qualified. He glances at one, see's the last name and decides on the spot to not hire him. Because of caste.
If he's slightly clever, he'll atleast schedule an initial call with the candidate before inventing a reason to reject him. How does a generic anti-discrimination law identify this as an instance of caste-based discrimination?
Exactly as it would "just" solve the use case without getting into the castes system specific worry.
E.g:
Candidate selection should be based on the skillset and fitness of individuals for the scope of work/description, without discrimination attriuted to personal affiliation, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation, difference, + "group identity", . The employer would thus commit infringement if when faced with two somewhat equals in fitness candidates he folds some individual based on gender or whatever else that falls into personal, group identity factor or affiliation to a certain group. I think it covers the caste system issue we see at the workplace without having to talk about castes in the legislation, and the benefit is that it allows the text to cover other group identifications.
Btw we have other avenues, anti discrimination is one that covers shutting down labelled candidates. Nepotism is described as favoring relatives or friends, just add "or group identified with" to it and boom that covers the caste system issue (and beyond). I'm no legalist so of course I'm not drafting a clear definition of group identity but you get the idea, i hope.
I suspect we are stuck on this because on some side we have identity politics and quotas advocates wanting the legislation to accommodate their wishes, hence forbidding group identified favoritism in the law. This avenue is being at best ignored as a potential simple solution, at worst battled against with teeth and nails for other unrelated motives.
>According to Gupta’s letter and Soundararajan, the decision to cancel the talk came from Gupta’s boss, Cathy Edwards, a vice president of engineering, who had no experience or expertise in caste.
Nothing abot this is puzzling. beneath the surface of Google's attempts to "look happy", there is a huge amount of resentment between individuals, and between individuals and leadership. Even when I joined in 2007 it was noticeable, but by the time I left (the second time) in 2019, it was painfully obvious.
Sundar's goal has been to smooth over this resentment and prevent events that would exacerbate it. That often occurs by cancelling a venue for discussion/healing. GOogle sort of evolved itself into a state of weaponized progressivism, and is now realizing just how unrealistic its naive view of using technology to transform the world for good was, and how it needs to turn into everything that it said it wasn't to continue to succeed in the face of more determined competitors.
That has nothing to do with it. There's no tolerable level, but more is still worse than less, and GP's point means more people with a direct vested interest in calling for change.
Oh while we are on this topic there are branches within Brahmins and each group gets to feel superior to other Brahmins because reasons.
In some regions, there were also some devout worshippers of one God that take adverserial position about worshippers of another God (Shiva versus Vishnu)
Luckily most of these (I think) are on their way out and don't manifest in professional workplaces of today.
These tendencies must have definitely shaped careers and unfairly disadvantaged people as recently as a couple of decades ago.
Google outsources more than people realize. A lot of things happen out of India. The minimum amount of customer support that Google provides happens out of India. The mystery account bans, that sometimes get a lot of attention, happens out of India.
I guess toxic is an adjective with a similar meaning, but a worse connotation in my view. Both words imply that she is to be avoided, and she will probably have some difficulty finding a new job after her very-public departure from Google.
Which would give grounds on the hiring manager front for investigating one's employer for de-facto blacklisting.
Which is illegal.
Just because someone points out the elrphant in the room at a workplace does not make them "radioactive". Quite the opposite. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Organizing a labor protest because of unfair working conditions, or as an attempt to unionize, is "protected" by US regulations (not necessarily laws).
Organizing a labor protest because of a (real or perceived) culture of sexual harassment is not. If she had a valid and provable claim of wrongdoing, she should have approached an attorney and sued Google to elicit change (and maybe some compensation). I believe I read that her protest was staged to "bring awareness" to the issue. If you were an employer (regardless of your views on the topic), would this be okay with you?
The same thing goes for trying to organize a meeting with a speaker who will talk about the caste system in Silicon Valley. Yeah, caste == bad, but is the employer obligated to host such a meeting (at their expense)? Obviously she could rent a venue and invite others to the presentation on their own time, but why must Google submit to her demands for them to pay for it?
>Organizing a labor protest because of unfair working conditions, or as an attempt to unionize, is "protected" by US regulations
>Organizing a labor protest because of a (real or perceived) culture of sexual harassment is not.
...Pardon me, but do you not consider a workplace wherein sexual harassment is implicitly encouraged or tolerated to the point that someone feels the need to clarify or remind others this a workplace to not be a subset of unfair working conditions? I do. Generally it is something that hardly needs explaining in the majority of places I've been, but in the places that needed it, it was needed. It can be overdone. Given recent history on Google however, I'm willing to entertain the benefit of a doubt.
>The same thing goes for trying to organize a meeting with a speaker who will talk about the caste system in Silicon Valley. Yeah, caste == bad, but is the employer obligated to host such a meeting (at their expense)?
Does the employer outsource a sizable chunk of business to somewhere where these concerns are valid? Is management composed of people to whom these concerns should apply? If yes, then absolutely.
Look, the bigger a collective unit of humanity you are, the higher my standards go. Everyone individually is prone to their own vices/biases/fallibilities/etc... but the entire point behind collectives is that not all component members are hopefully having an evil day at the same time. So on average, behavior should tend away from blatant unethical or immoral behavior. This is doubly important, because group behavior is indicative of culture of the constituent parts.
I understand there are some people who look at businesses as nothing but profit engines. I don't. If your business ends up perpetuating discriminatory practices because there is some executive at the top who is a caste-ist bastard, and you've got boots on the ground attestating that yes, that tendency shines through to them numerous enough, then it is absolutely a valid expenditure of our collective society's time.
Should it eclipse everything else? No not necessarily. Is there a point where one needs to rein it in? Who should be entrusted with that decision?
Certainly not those in power/up top. There are fewer of them, and the power they wield taints their impartiality. It is most safely ensconced amongst your workers.
If one person asks for it, say no. Two or three do, start paying attention, possibly escalate. If it is worth your people's time to hear this person out, it is worth your time.
Beside's which, as a leader, you are best thought of as a cache. If you haven't formed a stance or policy in it, do the expensive operation, then cache the result.
Boom. Done. Everybody's happy. Ignoring the potential problem won't make it go away.
Bottom up, not top down. Telling the bottom to chill out because Fearless Leader would never let anything improper happen is about the most unamerican thing I can possibly imagine... Nevermind the biggest bloody lie out there.
In short; I tend to disagree with your standpoint. My job isn't to optimize your accountant's profit figures, it's to make sure that signals get handled so the people doing the real work can concentrate on that. The profit will generally take care of itself.
People are complicated. Those that think they've simplified them enough are inevitably due for a refresher in human nature.
Only if someone is dumb enough to document in an email they’re firing her for speaking out. In the real world if you spend your whole workday investigating and criticizing your employer, you’ll eventually no longer work there. They’ll find cases where you missed deadlines, bad performance reviews, etc.
Question from a layman. How does one know that someone is from another caste? If I was someone from India, how would I know what caste my fellow Indian is from? Is there some kind of code? Or where you are from?
Your parents tell you your caste. You can also get a caste certificate from you local municipal office which helps you take advantage of some perks if you belong to a "lower" class.
Generally you wont be able to figure the caste of someone but there are clues like skin color, fairer skin generally is "upper" caste, sometimes your surname also gives away your caste.
Unfortunately some Indians specially from the "upper"caste take this very seriously and think they are superior compared to other Indians.
The point where caste defines purity. Classism is a separate axis from the notion of religious purity that is a fundamental part of caste (which is effectively an amalgamation of the two). As such, the closest "reference point" for a U.S. citizen is the attitudes held by antebellum slaveowners regarding race. You can't comprehend the sort of...emotions that inspire the strict anti-miscegenation of racism or caste-ism, from a lens of "knighthood in the olden times".
Nevermind that one can be "knighted" - the idea that one could be "brahminated" is no different from thinking one could be "whited" in the antebellum south. (And no, the "honorary whiteness" given to certain asian ethnicities is not akin to "whiting" - it's merely defining a subdivision of a caste to be slightly higher than the other lower castes)
At no point. Indians have a distorted view of caste because of 400 years of British invasion after 500 years of Islamic invasion.
Since economic mobility was greately reduced because of economic stagnation caused by centuries of invasion, they re-applied the originally profession-based caste system using racial discrimination brought to India by the Mughals and the British.
If we're being strictly anthropological Western 'racism' is a type of caste system but all caste systems have the trait of assigning better or worse outcomes to disparate breeding pools, however defined, and re-enforcing breeding rights on some level. Almost all human societies are caste systems of some sort since the introduction of farming at least, and from a more modern perspective is a composite of multiple, simultaneous caste systems (usually referred derisively as 'isms').
fair skin thing is nonsense. I'm a Tamil Brahmin (Brahmin being the highest caste) and I'm one of the darkest skinned people in India. Most of my friends are far darker than most Indians from North India. It's much easier to identify through surname (Pichai I'm pretty sure is a brahmin surname), but certain states like Tamil Nadu banned surnames for this reason. If people ask me my surname, it is T. Every government document has T as my surname, I just go with that
Well it is a stereotype, and they are often true, but not always.
eg, in TN, the average brahmin or upper class individual will be fair-skinned while the lower class one would be dark skinned.
I guess up in the North, this does not hold.
> but certain states like Tamil Nadu banned surnames for this reason.
The govt did not ban it. It was more a social movement where one was looked down upon (and even discriminated against for showing they belonged to the higher castes). That's why there are still folks who continue to keep 'Iyer' in their name.
Well if Surnames are banned, why is the name Pichai still used? Genuinely asking. I also see tons of engineers from Tamil Nadu in the US with last names Iyer and Iyengars.
It wasn't banned. It was one of the side effects of the popular Self Respect movement which saw most people switch to patronymical last names from caste-based last names.
Ofcourse the Iyers and Iyengars wouldn't switch because they had more to lose than they gained from hiding their caste identity (they are the so called upper castes who have traditionally held a much priviledged position).
Unfortunately, it has to be. If you want to decrease the effects of centuries of oppression, the oppressed have to be given a giant helping hand. Which is done by both the union and state governments in India in the form of reservations for people belonging to oppressed castes. Now this is a controversial subject, because there are people who have abused the reservations system, but overall I am of the opinion that it is a much needed system. The only way to enforce that only the oppressed castes get these benefits is to officially recognize castes and issue certificates attesting this.
Usually you know someone's caste from their last name.
I am someone who was not given a caste-based last name because my parents were influenced by a regional movement against caste. (I didn't even have a last name to begin with but eventually added a non caste-based one to avoid visa issues.) Whenever I traveled by train and chatted up with a co-passenger, almost surely they would ask my name and would never be satisfied with just knowing my first name. They would get visibly confused when I would tell them I didn't have a last name.
Edit: Curiously, based on the last name of the person (Soundarajan) whose talk got cancelled, I would actually have guessed that they were upper caste (Brahmin - the highest).
I’m curious: would you say the absence of a surname implied anything about caste? I’ve dealt with the children of people with leprosy (mostly SC, with a little ST and OBC) in the vicinity of Hyderabad, and it wasn’t dreadfully uncommon for their parents or grandparents to have no surname on their Aadhaar card, at least, and perhaps even a few of the children.
(In Telangana, surnames are almost exclusively used as just an initial preceding the given name, and sometimes that’s even all that ends up on official documentation.)
I don't know, in my personal case, this was definitely a regional movement - with plenty of upper caste families also giving their children no surname or a generic non-caste based ones. That is why you will see a lot more "Kumars" and "Anands" and "Ranjans" and "Jyotis" from Bihar than from other parts of the country.
As far as I know (from some coworkers) they do.
But last name is only the first step/flag in identifying to which caste person belongs. Sorry, I don't remember exact details, but there some additional steps like special clothes I think?
For the same reason that I, a white English-speaking person, am not going to be able to fool a British old-money old-boys club that I have the same cultural background that they do.
> Whenever I traveled by train and chatted up with a co-passenger, almost surely they would ask my name and would never be satisfied with just knowing my first name.
What happens of they find out you’re a lower caste, so they just stop talking to you, talk down to you, etc.?
I don't think any of those things are true. Indians in general are hyper "hierarchy" aware (not just with respect to caste btw). They just feel the need to know how to place you.
I'm also not lower caste (or particularly upper caste for that matter) and my parents were doctors, so my family was relatively well-off in a very, very poor part of India, so almost all other social indicators would tell them to place me higher in social status. So, the experience of others would vary.
> Edit: Curiously, based on the last name of the person (Soundarajan) whose talk got cancelled, I would actually have guessed that they were upper caste (Brahmin - the highest).
This is most likely because her parents/grandparents changed to using patronymical last names, precisely to avoid this problem. There was a very popular movement in South India (particularly the state of TamilNadu), called the self-respect movement, which a large part of society (except for the upper castes - who had a lot to lose), adopted.
This is why my own name does not give away my caste. Because my grandfather switched to patronymics from the existing caste based last names.
That NPR story was great, thanks. The transcript is definitely worth reading for anyone curious about this.
In a nutshell, people can sometimes tell by your last name, and if they can’t, they will ask you questions about your background, such as what town and/or neighborhood your family is from, until they figure it out.
In one example in the story, a guy is outed as a Dalit by a coworker who knew him from college.
Outing a co-worker is pretty mean. And asking all kinda of private background questions in order to judge someone's social standing and treat them accordingly is intrusive and bigotted. As usual, racists are more often than not mean bigots.
It is somewhat different if you grew up in the caste system, and the discriminatory behaviour was just ingrained. If you start falling back to that based on, e.g., surname it's hard to avoid. Actively seeking information you can use to treat people like shit is a different level all together!
> And asking all kinda of private background questions in order to judge someone's social standing and treat them accordingly is intrusive and bigotted.
This also happens in the west and it's not caste-related. Go to a suburban barbecue or something, and observe: people will ask what you do for a living, which neighborhood you live in, how long have you been living here, where did you originally come from, and so on. Often they are doing this kind of small talk just so they can figure out where you are on the social totem pole.
That problem and increasing intercaste marriages is why casteism is dying in many parts of India. The new generation doesn't know how to determine the caste and are generally not interested. Most of the system in large parts of the country will die out with the previous generation.
Aside from last names, diet is a big giveaway. If someone is vegetarian, it is highly likely that they come from the so called "upper" castes. In certain interpretations of Hinduism, which are now becoming the dominant ones in India, meat is considered polluting. If you eat meat, you are dirty, and this "dirtiness" is at the root of why some castes are still considered untouchable.
Here in New Delhi, people will straight up ask you, especially if they're older.
Trying to get a house in Delhi as a single, straight male is an exercise in discrimination 101. Landlords will ask you if you drink alcohol, eat meat, have female friends, belong to a non-Hindu religion (especially if you're muslim), your caste, and heck, even what city/state you're from.
My friends have been denied housing simply for being from a state with a somewhat poor reputation. Some were denied because they were lawyers AND from a specific caste (the landlords feared that my friends would somehow take over the property through legal shenanigans). And I won't even get into how hard it is for a muslim male to find housing in India, especially outside of big cities.
So much of this simply never gets talked about in Indian society. But its just accepted as something that happens. Sometimes feel that we're developing backwards as a society.
It's true in places you mentioned from even my understanding from multiple people. But it's the same in the whole of India is not correct, as Kerala comparatively has very less problems like this. It's actually surprising for people from Kerala to even know such issues still exist even in metro cities of other states. True that it makes sense to generalize your comment as Kerala is just 2.5 - 2.7% of the Indian population.
It varies from place to place. For example, people are segregated by caste in many places. In other cases, it's easy to identify from surname. But there is one method that you should be aware of - it's more relevant to silicon valley. There are a lot of cases where it's not immediately possible to distinguish caste from name or looks. People from all castes look more or less similar. In such cases, the caste believers would do covert background research. That might be from your social media profile, public and political connections or even professional service records. There are also cases where they make the determination based on subtle differences in traditions (like marriage ceremonies or celebrations, clothing styles etc). And then there are some obnoxious methods like patting someone on their back to see if they wear a 'sacred thread' under their shirt.
In many regions / castes, the last name is specific to a caste. Also sometimes you can tell by appearance, e.g. I can often recognize Brahmins from my ancestral region just by looking at them.
That said, one of the reasons I'm really skeptical claims that casteism is widespread in Silicon valley is that I have a last name that's caste-ambiguous (could be anything from dalit to brahmin) and yet I've never been asked my caste. So it's rather bizarre that casteism could be so widespread without me having ever encountered it.
"rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness — was creating division and rancor"
Insert every social movement in the last 10 years. Absolutely hilarious that a company that goes out of it's way to participate in the US culture war identifies an actual systemic issue in the country where the CEO just happens to originate from, it is suddenly a divisive action to make half baked hyperbolic social statements.
As a leftist, one of the things that gives me pause about identity politics and the language of identity divorced from class struggle is how easily it is repurposed by reactionaries:
> But Google employees began spreading disinformation, calling her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders, documents posted on Google’s intranet and mailing lists with thousands of employees.
I don't have a solution, just a depressing observation.
You see weird reaction in debates about feminism. People go along with the belief that men and women are the same. And then use that to justify male anger about unfairness by just parotting the same talking points. When actually feminist could always accept that there were differences and that was the point. But the argument changes at different levels of abstraction. It's confusing. Individuals should be treated the same, but are different statistically and in aggregate.
People see that "men and women are different" is used as justification for prejudice (like a person not getting a chance because people of the same sex did rarely have success previously). Which sucks and people feel its unfair. And when trying to conceptualize that unfairness into words, their contra opinion sometimes ends up being "so man and women must be equal" instead of "a persons sex does not justify prejudice".
Peoples feelings about fairness and justice are always valid, but hell, many people suck so hard at putting it into words.
It's definitely frustrating. Culture, religion, sexual orientation, skin color, and politics often get combined into one, so it becomes impossible to criticize particular cultural or religious practices and beliefs without getting jumped on as racist or ignorant. This strategy of calling someone anti-X is a great way to end actual discussion about specific issues.
What wasn't clear to me was whether they were claiming that her ideas about caste equality were specificall anti-hindu, or if it's just an ad hominem attack to try to shut her down.
The talk should have allowed to go through. The post I think said it right, people wanted to shut it down and the only way to do it is to discredit the speaker because they know there is truth to the arguments.
However we should step back and think about how important it in the American context. What purpose is that talk going to serve? I don’t know if it does anything other than satisfying esoteric learning needs of a few. It may be an issue in he US but the problem may be among single digit or double digit individuals at best. Is it worth spending cycles on it?
Racism and bigotry are worth addressing at all levels, IMO. But I question your assumed figures: surely there are a lot more than 99 Indians of lower castes that are affected by caste-based bigotry in the US?
idk woke people are obsessed with protecting very small minority groups. in fact often the smaller the better in terms of virtue signaling points.
so it just goes to show how hypocritical Google is being when they are mega woke on every other facet. probably because their ceo harbors a like for the caste system
Google is the largest purveyor of information across the world. Having policies that deal with caste would seem to require making its American employees and managers aware and mindful of it, no?
Even directly in USA Google (and other companies) employ very many Indians. The stats that I can find about Google say that in their USA offices 42% of them are Asian, and out of those the general tech industry stats tell me that roughly 40% would be from India, so caste might be relevant to something like 15% percent of the workforce; and I have no stats on caste distribution but if I guess that disadvantaged castes might be 1/3 of that i.e. 5% then that is a larger group than African Americans which are 4.4% in Google USA.
~70% of eng is Asian within SV. About half are Indian. Other half is Chinese.
It’s a very prevalent problem. A lot of people come from India and keep their cultural values - including caste discrimination.
It’s a small issue in the general US but a huge issue within SV. Same as any Asian topic tbh. Most Asians don’t exist outside the coasts - yet we talk about their issues cause they’re in important cities in significant numbers.
>> discredit the speaker because they know there is truth to the arguments.
Source please.
>> the problem may be among single digit or double digit individuals at best.
Why do you think it's in single or double digit "at best"? This is a huge problem in India and moving to US doesn't make a racist person inclusive automatically.
There's a lot of bias in the tech industry, not just caste. if your company is sufficiently large it will have various HR policies on this and in my experience they will enumerate the kinds of discrimination they don't tolerate.
Here's an exercise for you: go through the list of US protected classes [1] and see which ones are explicitly stated and which ones aren't. It's actually enlightening. For example, I don't think I've ever seen ageism specifically called out.
As for the impact of the Indian caste system in US tech, I can't really comment on that. It's not my lived experience. I've worked with many Indians. No idea what their castes were. Saying that, just like racism I find it incredibly plausible that if you grew up in such a system, the effects are pervasive and linger.
So should Google allow such a talk? That's a difficult question. It's clearly a divisive issue. It reminds me of Meta telling employees to stop talking about abortion [2]. Now that issue probably doesn't lead to workplace discrimination (alleged or actual) although you might be able to argue that your political views could hurt you. There's something to be said to keeping your political views to yourself, particularly at work.
I imagine (but, again, don't know from experience) that this might be on the level of racial discrimination in the US workplace. So it seems worth examining. I imagine to mahy outsiders it might not look "real" because at the end of the day they're all Indians (which, to be clear, is also a form of racism).
Is a talk the best way to handle this? I honestly don't know. I can sympathize with avoiding divisive issues and also with the desire of a company to cover their ass and not create an HR nightmare. I really wonder if this ends in a lawsuit.
First off, activism is uncomfortable - it’s about changing the status quo and anyone who benefits will take issue with it even if they don’t actively perpetuate the system. MLK wasn’t met with open arms; he was harassed, arrested and ultimately assassinated.
Personally I’ve worked with many Indians too and I have never heard anyone one of them bring up caste; but I’m not Indian, so why would they?
A better benchmark is how many people of lower caste have you talked to and how do they feel about it? It may be the case that the structures of American Indians have already expunged all the lower caste Indians from your workplace.
Age discrimination is illegal by statute - the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. If you haven't seen that, it might give you pause about whether you have enough information about this subject to form an informed opinion.
> For example, I don't think I've ever seen ageism specifically called out.
Ageism is illegal in the US, however the way the law is written it specifically only protects people over 40. I've always personally theorized that this is why tech ageism tends to start affecting people in their 30s, so that it doesn't wait until it's illegal and gets the job done of oppressing more senior employees earlier on.
Google has cancelled many discussions about various bias; their "Talks" have not been thought-provoking or even relevant for some years now, probably since middle management from other mediocre companies percolated the organization.
I observed it multiple times during CS graduate school. An Indian high caste classmate refused to let his roommate sleep in the same bedroom. The higher caste guy told us that his roommate is of lower caste. The other poor guy ended up very obedient and sleep in the couch for 2 years. They have a group of high caste guys and talk sht about a few fellow low caste guys in the class
"If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem." - Dr. B R Ambedkar said this in 1916 [1]. The surprising incident in US was predicted more than a century ago.
For more context, Dr. B R Ambedkar was the main architect of the constitution of India. He also formulated the affirmative action for Dalit representation, called the reservation system. He was one of the so called Dalits who faced extreme caste discrimination in India despite his brilliance and all his achievements. There are documented instances where upper caste government officers refused to touch files that he signed. The discrimination was so bad that he and 500K of his followers converted to Buddhism.
These days, some sections treat him like an ideological revolutionary (sort of like marxism or leninism). Many are openly calling for replacing his ideas with those from manusmriti - an ancient text that is a huge source of racism and misogyny in India. Hope this gives you some insight into the problem.
> The surprising incident in US was predicted more than a century ago.
That's my question: was this in US? Because in US if anyone pulls that kind of shit you head straight to the dean's office and address the problem. 2 years sleeping on a couch because of your roommate's conceit? It boggles the mind.
It is indeed US. Well for some reason the guy did not complain. I might exaggerate it a bit - the guy slept elsewhere as well but in this very dormitory he only slept in bedroom when the other guy is not home
One of the funniest parts of our HR training at my employer was "If someone does something you don't like, first talk to them and tell them you don't like it."
High caste people in India will often find ways to casually mention their caste in conversation, sometimes within minutes of meeting someone new. Its reflexive - like subtly turning your wrist to show off a new watch.
And I have no data to corroborate this, but I've felt caste chauvinism increase in the last few years.
There's a broad trend in the rise of populist ethnocultural nationalism around the world, which usually brings with it a revival of all kinds of discriminatory outlooks because they're "traditional".
I forget what the concept is called, but I will call it something like emigrant conservatism, where emigrants bring essentially a snapshot of their culture from when they emigrate, and that snapshot remains fixed - they don't feel American, so they don't integrate into American cultural norms, and they don't have much active interaction with their previous home's culture which is constantly progressing.
Well. I am from an NIT in India and upper caste groupism is super common there. Of course to an outsider it seems like these are guys from the same high school and same hostel hanging out, but in reality it is mostly upper caste Brahmins in those high schools as well who end up continuing their groupism and favoritism in college and beyond. The same groupism exists even today - decades later. You see the same upper caste brahmins hanging out in the US together still in their close knit groups.
That is a very poor argument to backup your claim. Not is it just anecdotal, why do you even assume that everyone else has the same experience as you do? Reports and statistics are much more believable. I cited a report. Do you have anything of equal stature to counter it?
Think about the “MeToo” movement, do you think it was nonsense before? Obviously until this movement there aren’t any sources.
In this case believe it or not, it’s a personal anecdote and true story. I’m not interested in revealing the identity or source in case of internet violence
Okay fair enough :) but some people on HN blame entire people or religion as if they are the perpetrators. Like it’s affecting my mental health, can’t stop thinking of people blaming my religion for it. I am sad
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 372 ms ] threadIndeed, suggesting that deep-seated structural racism is far from a uniquely American problem also makes some people upset.
All of those topics were covered where I went.
Though interestingly, the ones I do also tend to get across the point that caste discrimination was made illegal in India, and never tend to go into much explicit detail on how just because something is illegal, it doesn't mean it isn't done/is regularly enforced.
I very, very highly doubt that. In terms of US history, this period covers several important topics:
* Reconstruction
* Settling of the American West
* Rise of the Granger and later Progressive movements
* Burgeoning immigration to the US, and all the tensions that result from that
* Second Industrial Revolution, which also fuels the Gilded Age and labor movements
* Beginnings of American imperialism (and somewhat ironically, the end of it... the US becomes pretty uninterested in territorial expansion almost immediately after experiencing its first major bout of imperial expansion in the Spanish-American War).
It's possible that you just don't remember what you learned in US history classes in this time period, but completely excising a quarter of the country's history would be rather surprising, especially when it's the part of the history that covers both the biggest shift in self-image (from an agrarian country distancing itself from world politics to an industrialized powerhouse increasingly engaged in world politics) and the development of mass political consciousness worldwide in the late Long 19th Century.
Thankfully I lucked into the English section taught by the female equivalent of Ron Swanson who made us read books that covered the Jim Crow south and the Indian wars. Looking back she was obviously a bull #### and rightfully had a bone to pick when it came to mistreatment of demographic groups under color of law.
What's not often said clearly is that corpos don't want social justice which might come at the cost of rancor, they want "DEI PR" that they can charge to the marketing budget.
In other words, they want the low-hanging fruit they can get by having recruiters source employees from more places, and artists and photographers draw multicolored graphics, and asking people to be less cruel when all other tradeoffs are neutral,and if that makes the world more fair, that's great.
But they management won't allow anything that risks disrupting the moneymaking operations, regardless of long term potential benefits (which almost certainly don't exist -- racism exists because it works, locally, for economic and social benefits, not because people are moustache-twirling comic-book supervillains).
This is why free markets alone can't solve injustice, and broader social movements are the tool that works.
Sidenote: I once glanced around a team I was working on a few years ago and found most of the product/program managers were gay or lesbian. Didn't strike me as discrimination, since there are, of course, gay and lesbian hardware engineers, gay and lesbian software engineers... it just happened that we all found each other on a particular team.
So that's why I think that's what's going on here, but I'm eager to hear your thoughts, as they differ from mine.
Most developers equate QA is beneath them. I also think QA is just as valid and not beneath dev, but I have also held nearly every roll in modern software companies. How we view QA doesn't mean that is how the tech job market sees it. Pay is lower, qual is lower and at companies that have a sizeable Indian workforce, I have witnessed that QA heavily skews female.
I didn't even notice until I have been on interview loops with Indian men that I thought were nice and that I had professional and personal respect for and this weird tiger came out when it came to interviewing women (for dev roles) that didn't come out when interviewing men. This is just anecdotal, not all not all.
This comment itself is going to get flagged or downvoted, but I can't put a caveat on every sentence.
https://feminisminindia.com/2020/03/02/sexism-in-engineering...
> A couple of women who I knew had studied STEM subjects but had changed their career trajectory after graduating, explained the systemic sexism that women face in universities in India which deterred them from pursuing it any further.
And then I see those pressures in the hiring loop (for devs), we didn't interview QA, it would make sense that they get pushed into QA or get pushed out entirely.
Sexism in tech is much stronger than men realize, women are fully aware.
I think the status quality of jobs is an interesting aspect of discrimination. Why do certain jobs have higher or lower status? If the perceived status of various jobs was flatter, would various discriminatory schemes (intentional or not) continue to operate? Would differences in income persist?
My hypothesis is that demographic clusters of people within certain occupations are in part affinity and in part discriminatory which operate as a yin-yang.
Another hypothesis is that the existence of under-represented demographic segments in certain fields of study/occupation such as STEM means that the over-represented demographic segments are under-represented in other fields. Changing representation has classically focused on importing under-represented folks into high status fields. This effectively overstuffs some fields which decreases effectiveness. A better approach would be to make the other fields more attractive/high status so that the over-represented demographic segments in fields like STEM grow interest in other fields.
A single anecdote is sufficient to merit "at least partly."
You can say it's not generally proved. But it also wasn't a universal claim.
Do you realize how absurd language would be if what you claim is true? For example:
- Is is true latino men are discriminated against when applying for florist positions?
- Yes, it happened once.
Literally any group would be "party discriminated" in every possible scenario according to how you define "at least partly".
Slightly more seriously, if someone is discriminated against for being part of a group, you don't get to appeal to the fallacy of composition applied to all groups in order to claim that there is no discrimination against that individual. Yes, yes, you're not actually writing out that argument, you're just leaving its ingredients lying around next to a naked flame.
Entirely seriously, here is your proof:
https://www.r-bloggers.com/2019/12/modeling-salary-and-gende...
Now switch to some other attempt at distraction via reducio of the actual argument.
In any case, I have done the five minutes of googling you seem to want. Biases in evaluating resumes based on gender and other such factors are not new nor unknown: here is an early study from 1986[1], 1988[2], 1999[3], 2001[4], 2007[5]. Feel free to visit google scholar and look more studies by yourself.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022103186... [2] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.5... [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018839203698 [4] https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0022-4... [5] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-23339-007
None of those studies support your original claim. They support the more broader claim that women are discriminated in the job market.
> Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.
Sorry, a single data point, by itself, when you share it attempting to generalize, is worse than worthless, since it can be terribly misleading.
I guess for you it's a given QA jobs are "inferior" to SWE jobs. I guess you believe the articles you linked proof women tend to get "inferior" jobs just because they're women? (I haven't read the articles, although I believe this to be true).
I just can't make the jump that this applies to QA jobs (granting they are "inferior"). That would imply "inferior" jobs are always overrepresented by women, and there are counterexamples to this, by almost any definition of "inferior".
So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
I state I believe this is true in one of my previous comments.
> So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
This could be, but you need something else to prove it, otherwise lower paying jobs with different distributions than the job market distribution are always root caused in discrimination, is this your argument? There are many high paying jobs that result in a huge selection bias with respect to employees, just because many people simply don't want to put the hours. And thus discrimination is not the whole story in these cases. It may be the case in QA teams though (or part of the story), I'm simply saying it needs more research.
Nevertheless this hasn't been my point, my point is simply a single data point by itself can't be used to account for part of the explanation.
Yes, that's not disputed by anyone serious.
> and get paid less even for the same jobs.
Also yes, but only if you don't account for hours worked and experience. A Harvard study found that after accounting for both the type of job and hours worked [1]. Google actually found women were paid more than male employees working the same job [2].
In short, the pay gap definitely exists in the sense that women's average pay check is less than the average man's. But there's not much evidence of discrimination in pay. Men make more because they work different jobs, work longer hours, and stay in their field for longer.
Also,
> you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
One, this isn't calling QA "inferior". Compensation is not a moral judgement of work. Pointing out the fact that coding isn't a requirement explains why there's a larger potential labor pool and thus lower pay. My first job in QA was doing manual testing, following a script of things to check on canary and staging builds. I was paid $12.50 an hour. This wasn't some moral judgement about the value of this job, it's the fact that pretty much anyone could do it so there's no reason to offer more than minimum wage.
1. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_genderga...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
By the way, lower salary doesn't mean "inferior", there are very high paying jobs, very stressful, that I wouldn't want, and work life balance is a huge component of a job.
1. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Gender-and-Race-Prefer...
One way to look at it is that the disparity may be a symptom of complicated cultural biases, and we may not know the specific reasons. Since there’s nothing gender or sex related to doing the job of QA, then if the disparity actually is measurable and widespread, it does reveal cultural bias. This is currently true for nurses and for elementary school teachers in the US, for example.
It’s important to note that this can happen without individuals who have any overtly “sexist” behavior at all. It can be the result of cultural attitudes and not prejudiced hiring practices. This is why using the word “sexism” on it’s own might not be the best word for it, even if it’s technically true. Perhaps better terms are “cultural sexism”, or “cultural bias”. I’m sure there are better terms. The problem with using the bare word “sexism” is it tends to be accusatory and out people on the defensive, where the issue may literally be with all of us.
How do you know this to be true?
> cultural bias
What definition are you using for this term?
Goto LinkedIn and search for QA engineers in Indian cities. I think that should be a very good proof for you
We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.
This page for cultural bias is as good any any other definition for my purposes here, which was purely to say that “cultural bias” is less inflammatory than “sexism”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_bias
I don’t understand the meaning of the term “sex bias”. So it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.
> We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.
Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards? What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times?
This and “cultural bias” and “sexism” are all pretty well established terms you can Google, and are taught in social studies and history courses.
Sex bias means a cultural bias or prejudice based on someone’s sex. I’m using sex here more or less interchangeably with gender right now, but there are times where that distinction matters.
> it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.
There’s no question about whether sex bias has existed, nor whether society wants it to stop existing. Those are facts not being debated. The primary example I had in mind when I said 100 years is women’s suffrage: the right to vote. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage) When women were legally barred from voting, or owning land, or initiating divorce, those things were sex based biases. Women gained the right to vote in the US a while ago, but it took longer before women started to appear in C-level corporate roles, that is still changing today.
> Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards?
Please read the link I posted. Cultural bias is about having ingrained prejudices in large social groups. It can be, but is not primarily about people from different cultures in the sense of, say, Indians vs Americans. Indians have certain cultural biases, Americans have their own separate cultural biases. The idea that nurses should be women is an example of a cultural bias.
> What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards
The goal is to remove bias and prejudice that is hurting certain categories of people, preventing them from having equal access to opportunity to improve their lives, and to make decisions about people based on their interests and abilities, and to establish and respect some basic human rights across the board. I don’t know what you mean by “imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times”, but this sounds like a straw man and that you’re skeptical. It might be described as imposing minimum uniform standards, perhaps.
I will turn your question back on you: what is the alternative you’re suggesting, do you support having different standards for men and women in QA? Why or why not? Do you support the idea that a woman developer who writes the same quality of code and works as hard and has the same level of experience as her male coworker should be paid the same amount?
I am a mind in thrall to delusion.
> Sex bias means a cultural bias or prejudice based on someone’s sex.
Using the word “prejudice” to define “bias” doesn’t help me to understand the term.
> Cultural bias is about having ingrained prejudices in large social groups.
Okay, so different people having different assumptions which they use to judge phenomena.
> The goal is to remove bias and prejudice that is hurting certain categories of people, preventing them from having equal access to opportunity to improve their lives, and to make decisions about people based on their interests and abilities, and to establish and respect some basic human rights across the board.
There are lots of things that lots of people will tell me are hurting them. Personally, I don’t care about any of them. But how do you prioritize one claimed hurt over another?
> but this sounds like a straw man and that you’re skeptical
Probably, I was just guessing.
> I will turn your question back on you: what is the alternative you’re suggesting, do you support having different standards for men and women in QA?
I don’t really care. The hiring/promoting practices of 2022 American QA departments doesn’t interest me. Let the Harvest Gods have their day.
> Do you support the idea that a woman developer who writes the same quality of code and works as hard and has the same level of experience as her male coworker should be paid the same amount?
Depends on the context. Does disqualifying the woman help me to get what I want, then I’m all for it. Otherwise, I don’t care.
Because gender disparities are changing every year (very quickly in historical terms), and because they are different from country to country, that rules out the possibility that the cause has anything to do with intrinsic differences between men and women, it disproves the idea that there’s a “natural disposition” that is purely based on sex, at least as the primary reason for the distribution today. There might be some natural disposition, but you can’t know what it is until the known, demonstrated cultural biases have been eliminated, and the ratios of men and women settle and stop changing, and women agree that things are fair. Moreover, there is a long history of people claiming “natural dispositions” based on sex that have been subsequently proven false, which means you have the burden to demonstrate why your idea of a natural disposition is somehow different from the previous claims. To date there is no evidence to back up the idea that men & women have any differences in their interest & ability to write software based on sex. There are differences in attitudes, and differences in how many people study and seek such jobs, but those differences are linked primarily to changing social norms, i.e. cultural bias, and have never been shown to be sex based.
> It could be that men and women have natural different disposition to work in certain fields
It could also be, and happens to be more likely, that cultural biases cause sex or gender preferences. If that’s case, then the problem is that insisting there could be sex based differences, when in reality sex based differences may be too small to even measure, may be a self-reinforcing cultural bias. Instead of assuming that bias doesn’t exist and demanding someone prove that it does first, we need to be assuming it exists and actively asking the question how can we get rid of it and then prove that we got rid of it. After all, we know for a fact it used to exist in the US, we know for a fact that it exists today in certain countries, and we can’t show that it ever got completely solved, because it never did yet.
> I also don’t understand why we should strive for balance? What is wrong with each group, whether grouped by sex or race or age or whatever else being specialised in different fields on average?
You might be making assumptions here about what the goal is. The goal is to eliminate prejudices that are actively harmful. The World Health Organization, for example, talks about why it’s important to eliminate these prejudices. https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender
There is a broad trend that as women are more empowered, they are less likely to go into STEM: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
I’m rather skeptical that it’s truly “broad” in historical terms, it’s still changing much too fast. I’m skeptical that trend for 1 or 2 decades is likely to continue and not change direction again, since it’s already changed direction in the last century. Women going into STEM went way up from the 40s to the 80s. In computer science it’s gone down since the 80s in the US, while in India it’s continued going up, and even exceeded 50% one or two years. The numbers in the US vary wildly from field to field, it’s different in CS than it is in biology or math. All of this is further undeniable proof that today’s causes are primarily social and not sex based.
The deeper problem with this article is that it flirts with some vague concept of different interests between men and women without addressing the well known fact that social norms influence interests. You simply cannot separate attitudes from cultural biases, it’s not possible, and it’s either ignorant or willfully misleading to suggest otherwise.
Presumably you wouldn't know without a study, thus you do the study.
Often perpetuated by women as well as men, so this isn't man-blaming.
And having a few token women in dev doesn't change the situation so much as it cements the status quo in place.
However, a lot of people seem to think that describing reality is an insult to them, so I have to explain further - this is a result of systemic sexism starting at early childhood. It starts with what toys children are given to play with. It continues via socialization in schools. It's propagated via every surprised face when a woman shows up to learn about technology. No individual person involved in the process might have any malice at all. It's the result of entire systems of behavior, no individual part of which can be described as "the problem". You might call it systemic sexism.
You don't have to be able to explain the entire method of operation to see the result. Is there a statistical difference in outcomes between groups that isn't explained by a difference between the groups? Then there's a systemic bias at work.
Car mechanics aren't all women, even though women's hands fit much better into all those tiny spaces in the dashboard and engine bay? Sexism
Nurses aren't overwhelmingly male, despite the fact that a significant part of the job is wrangling patients, who overwhelmingly skew obese? Sexism
I chose them as two things that don't often get cited as evidence of sexism (though mechanic isn't so dirty a job, and isn't dangerous at all. I have more personal awareness if mechanics, so that's what I chose.)
Go ahead, do your study. You'd probably find that most hospitals have a slight preference for male nurses as they're trying to increase their diversity for all the practical benefits it brings. (Yes, diversity has a lot of practical benefits. Having people with a lot of different backgrounds around significantly improves the odds of having someone around who can successfully interact with a person no one else can.)
So if hospitals, theoretically, have a slight preference for male nurses in hiring right now... Why are they so uncommon? Because there are fewer candidates.
Hiring isn't "the problem". No one thing is "the problem". There's no bad guy to blame. No evil cabal. You don't need to get upset every time someone points out a systemic bias.
You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
This is illegal hiring bias. It doesn't matter if a company thinks it'll perform better, it's against the law. If a company finds that male salespeople make more sales, are they justified in turning away women?
>You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
But who are you to say that the way a thing is done by everyone, everywhere, is out of whack? Perhaps you (and I) just don't have full knowledge of all motives and incentives?
This whole discussion misappropriates the term 'sexism' to make it meaningless just like racism has become a meaningless term.
Also, did you know that language changes? It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31604394
The set of all relevant characteristics to evaluate 'potential' is either infinite or approximates infinite on the scale of human lifetimes and capabilities, not least of all because 'potential' is also the evaluation of that infinite list of characteristics across an infinite list of possible uses of one's time within some moral framework that must be used to determine which is the optimal solution. The practical implication is that 'statistical alignment with potential' is a fantasy, and anyone who indulges it will spend all their time trying to figure out how to amass and analyze the relevant information (and no time accomplishing anything else), which we can hopefully acknowledge is not the best use of potential.
>Also, did you know that language changes?
Please, don't be snide.
>It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
It's a good word to describe forms of bias because its prior meaning gets people's attention, because it is a word that means something that needs to be fixed. The extent of 'systemic sexism' far outpaces 'sexism', meaning that the first use will necessarily eclipse the second, eventually taking away the shock value and, in the meantime, it removes the significance of what was once an unambiguous and damning word. It is a loss of linguistic clarity for political expedience.
What makes you think it isn’t?
People have free will, life circumnstances seperate to corporate goals and a nature.
You can track a bias towards food and water that starts from birth and runs through all of society. We don't explain the lack of people in deserts as systemic waterism. Why do we see women working voluntarily with women in some roles as sexism when it has happened since the beginning of time?
The systematic worldview breaks down when it hits the nature of people. We aren't all pawns in a corporate game 24:7, so there are many reasons for people to work they way they do. One would hope they are freely choosing their work roles and not living their lives according to the dictats of gender equality statistics.
The biggest problem I've encountered is that they are sometimes socially isolated because Western colleagues don't know how to approach them, when they're really easy to talk to and have a lot to say!
What does this mean? I thought Patel was a surname.
For ex, if there are a bunch of Indians in a work place and a few of them are from lower caste, they will not be invited for lunches, dinners or any socialising event by their upper caste counter parts. Implicit untouchability.
I have read that in the US tech companies this is far too common and since their white (only white specifically. Because they don't care about what their black/asian/latino colleagues think.) colleagues don't understand caste, there are no repercussions for any discrimination.
"Etymology The term patel derives from the word Patidar, literally "one who holds (owned) pieces of land called patis", implying a higher economic status than that of the landless,[6] ultimately from Sanskrit paṭṭakīla,[7] with the ending -dar (from Sanskrit "धार" - supporting, containing, holding) denoting ownership.[8]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patel
My N=1 experience is that this can be related, but not always directly about discrimination or sexism. I would need to include cultural oppression, personal confidence, and others to accurately reflect a summation. I do not doubt that bias or discrimination exist, just that I culturally do my best to have a positive influence.
A few years ago I wanted to understand better, so I asked for feedback from a previous amazing Indian female SDET (whose husband is the CTO of one of the big retail chains). She explained a lot to me about how a woman's position being higher than a mans was culturally challenging. She also had self-doubts about her ability to thrive in a mostly-male driven engineering organization. I worked with her on a transition into a Development team, and the resistance came mostly from her fears of cultural bias and discrimination. The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position.
The bias and discrimination exist, but localized, the teams I've worked with are always very supportive and welcoming.
An all-female offshore team is pretty extreme though.
Positive discrimination is also discrimination, why not look for the same ratio as the job market has? Over hiring from an underepresented group necessarily means lowering the competence, unless you purposely interview a disproportionate number of individuals from the underepresented group, is this what you have done?
Edit: needing to interview a disproportionate number of individuals to be able to overhire from an underepresented group without affecting performance is just a straightforward statistical fact assuming the same competence across all groups.
I'm trying to understand how this is achieved in practice, however I haven't got a good answer yet.
Why is that? You'd think they'd have the same ratio of fit guys as the rest of professional sports by your logic.
Or.
Is it because the current highest earning professional bowler has a lifetime career winnings of $5 million by 2019? Since he turned pro in 1980. So if you can, you play something else.
Similar thing is going on here. There aren't people gunning for QA jobs specifically, there are people gunning for software related jobs in certain companies. People will get various offers from various companies for various positions. And the position you get is a reflection, in part, of the best offer for the best position the best company gave you.
So while the entire pool may have applied for the QA job, some of the people who were given offers got better offers from better companies and/or for better positions.
And let's not forget there could also be a variation of the Dead Sea effect going on. Where those who aren't Indian women get promoted or transferred out of QA at a higher rate, leaving more Indian women in QA. So you have twin effects going on. Where Indian women are getting accepted into QA positions more than other positions and Indian women being passed over for promotions and transfers keeping them in QA positions.
-There are lower-paying sports where fitness does matter, and they all have fit athletes at the top.
-There are way more conventionally fit folks than there are pro athlete slots; It's not like the select few fit people in the world are being exhausted before they can fill the ranks of all professional athletics.
If bowling paid like the NBA, you'd see very few non-fit pro bowlers.
At $5 million over 42 years, you bowl because you like it, not because it makes money. People who are fit but are otherwise not good enough to play high-paying professional sports can probably find better paying jobs elsewhere.
Professional bowling is populated by the people it is populated with partly because this is as good or better an option than others that they have.
I would speculate that most top tier bowlers do have the arm and upper body strength to do it well.
They also have a variety of body-fats and other attributes that don't particularly impact performance.
>If bowling paid like the NBA, you'd see very few non-fit pro bowlers.
Why do you think that would be the case if it doesn't impact performance?
If chess paid like the NBA, we still wouldn't expect top players to look like NBA athletes.
And the reason I used bowling is because it is a physical sport. And with physical sports, better overall physical fitness can give you an edge.
Hell, even in chess they're beginning to consider how physical conditioning impacts performance.
But now you're kind of at the point of arguing the metaphor. There are more desirable positions in software development and less desirable ones. And everyone is applying for everything. And if one group is cut off from the more desirable ones, they will start to become over-represented in the less desirable ones.
If you hire based only on competence, you will probably get more people that suffer discrimination than the average. The stronger the discrimination, the higher the odds.
That though caste discrimination causes significant harm and problems in the Indian and Indian diaspora communities, not every, "bad thing", stem from caste discrimination in specific.
The idea that sexism and other terrible things can be prevelant issues that need to be addressed better but they are not necessarily related to caste.
> "I ... have a positive influence." [note: not what the parent actually said; it's abridged for my example]
> "The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position."
> "I asked for feedback from ..."
A cause is that the people in a vulnerable position, the people who actually have the experience and know if you are having a positive influence or if they are accepted, don't have a voice, a safe way to speak about their experiences. Just saying 'you are safe', 'I support you', etc., doesn't make it so. Just having a conversation doesn't mean you know.
A useful rule for me is that if everything I hear feels relatively comfortable, then I am not hearing nearly everything.
We've all been in situations where someone invites us to be open and frank (especially your boss!): How do you respond? You know that many say it without meaning it - because it's polite, or it's in the HR training, or because they don't seriously considering what they are asking for. You know that some even say it to trap you, and some say it because they want to openly and frankly tell you something - and they do, ignoring what you said and then going on a rant. Some mean it but then can't handle it; they hear something disruptive to their worldview or needs (such as a stable, stress-free team or family), and react poorly, ignore it, or they bury their alarm and carry it around, associating it with you, degrading the relationship. Really, how often do you hear that invitation and then actually speak openly and frankly?
Now imagine that it's about a highly inflammatory topic which has yielded bad results throughout your life, about which you carry a lot of trauma. It might be a relatively new experience to the person in power, but to the vulnerable person it's something they've dealt with daily, they have ways to cope without dealing with it afresh all the time, and they've tried that conversation many times with little success. Just imagine your boss invites you to speak openly and frankly about politics or Donald Trump, and you might have an idea.
It's not hopeless, but there is an art and there are techniques for making it work, and plenty of expertise is available now that can guide people who are truly serious about hearing uncomfortable things.
My reply here is meta given the topic, but I almost didn't submit my original comment because I've seen how these threads go. Any additional information in my comment would lead to even more complexity/areas to pick apart. Less information becomes easy targets for flame. I can understand why the talk was pulled, because they often seem to result in negative PR, more than any potential positive influence. I felt the same with submitting my comment.
Thank you for offering positive suggestions and discussion to the topic.
Thanks for submitting your comment. It's so valuable to have someone openly discuss these things.
Most of the men on H1B visa get married and their spouses arrive on dependent H4 visa. They cannot work with H4 visa (they can work with EAD these days though). Usually, there are a few years gap by the time they get back to workforce.. and what is the easiest field to enter without any programming skill? QA testing !! There are literally hundreds of QA training institutions who train home makers on QA testing and place them in a QA testing role (sometimes inflating the resumes with fake experience).. And there are other subtle reasons like low confidence level, assuming developer roles are more stressful with long hours of coding, cultural bias to focus more on family than career, etc. Outside the fancy startups and tech companies, QA testing is very slowly moving from manual to automated testing. So, it is still one of the easy entry points to the IT industry.
So why aren’t the women arriving on H1B visas and their spouses on dependent H4s?
I would say, that on average, QA is a lower skilled profession than software development. If I were to make an analogy, QA is the nurse to the developer's doctor.
And, yes, it is a lower tier. You hire developers before QA and fire QA before developers. But, like you said, it deserves respect. Just like all professions. And I'd say that a competent QA staff is the sign of a successful organization. Because while you can have your developers test, it's better to move those responsibilities off their plate so they can focus on their core work. Just like you could have your employees take out the trash and sweep up, but once you're beyond the "5 people in a garage" setup, you're going to hire a cleaning service.
To the point of the higher up comments.
It is an issue. Even if QA were more difficult, challenging, etc than development, we can't get around the fact that it is perceived as supplemental to development. It is a place where organizations put people who want to be developers but the organization doesn't want to be developers. Or a dumping ground for 1x developers. And it seems, a way to tweak diversity numbers without actually doing anything.
As one familiar with the Indian education system (which is heavily rote-based and does not generally encourage understanding-based learning, especially before the tertiary level) and the mentality it produces in comparison with the western mind, I would say (and please don’t misunderstand me; I’m making a dispassionate assessment of why it might be so, not whether it should or should not be so) that this is actually a pretty good match, and it would not surprise me—nay, I would expect—to find Indians and especially Indian women fitting in better into that style of QA department than into other fields such as development; and when you have a large fraction of people who think in such-and-such a way, it will tend to be self-reinforcing and -perpetuating. (This is also a significant factor in why these sorts of effects in how you think as a whole have a habit of lingering for a generation or two after transplantation into another country.)
men discriminating and harrassing women? Sexism, check.
White discriminating people of color? Racism, check.
One Indian being a dick to another Indian? A personal thing between those two people. Only that ot is not, it is so much more, we Westerners just don't see it. And since we don't see it we have a pretty solid chance of intervening on the wrong side, if we intervene at all.
Effectively, the idea was "Don't be a dick." That is a reason right there where a person can intervene if they are in a position to do so. However, the issue as you raise it is that this is not a law.
There are laws about sex, racism etc that can help people in low power situations exercise some power. But we don't have that equivalent knowledge/ability regarding caste.
I also think it's counterintuitive to fixate on this stuff. It doesn't have to be sexism- it could be a fluke.
Generally speaking, the more authoritarian someone on the left is, the more likely they are to be sexist. Stalinist tankies are the rock bottom.
In her own language. Just after she's asked us to take her to her ethnic group gathering that is pretty much her only social outing...
Hypocrisy has many shades and people compartmentalise attitudes with issues.
I actually had a pretty balanced department that only slightly favors women. As a male QA/QE I tend to hire for detail orientation with a back up of actually caring, and a level of either assertiveness or grit in holding the line.
Anecdotal survey of 10 years of QA, and I haven't found any corrrlation with sex and QA, except that women have tended to be easier to work with on average, and the men I work with are either really good, or meh. Amusing historical point though: programming was considered women's work originally.
Would you similarly reject the hardships of a successful black American? If he's facing such animus, why do you think it stops elsewhere?
FYI, there are studies [1] and a lawsuit [2] documenting caste discrimination in America.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_discrimination_in_the_Un...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-lawsuit-idUSKBN2423...
There are no magnitudes. One person’s sorrow doesn’t diminish another’s.
> indians who have a 99 percent employment rate and some of the highest salaries
Ah, got it. Because some Indians do well none of them have any legitimate claims or qualms. Quite literally a racist surmisement, but at this point I should not be surprised.
What makes you think you're qualified to make such a blanket statement? Especially since caste discrimination is pervasive in India and immigrants tend to bring their culture with them.
I just don't think you could know this, and I wonder what else might be motivating you to make vast generalizations about things you don't know.
It's not a subjective matter, it's just transparently absurd.
I'm not going to ban your account right now but we need you to read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules if you want to keep posting here.
On a topic like the current one, if you want to share some of your own experience and cut out the swipes and putdowns of others, that would be fine. Otherwise it's best not to post.
I have no problem with this, after all immigrants are by no means obliged to be assimilated. It becomes a problem when politics come to play. E.g. Turkish nationalism, Erdogan has pretty solid approval ratings among German based Turks. This doesn't affect German culture much, so. In case of Indian nationalism, heavily leaning on India's caste system, it is different. Indian immigrants tend to end up in managemebr positions more often than, e.g., Turks do. So they affect company policies and culture more. And in the case of caste discrimination, something most non-Indians have a hard time understanding, it can co-opt whole organisations. And in the case of social media it can have a massive impact on culture in general.
That's why those talks, like the cancelled one at Google, are so important.
This is nothing unusual for emigrants to support the preserving, conservative and strong-arm political position for their former home countries because many feel obligated to do so.
The demographics of formerly rural Turks that immigrated to Germany is also relevant but I think the feeling of obligations for such "defensive" choices is a main driver. You can see this trend with a lot of immigrants, Turks are just an example here.
https://thelit.substack.com/p/dalit-101
One question I've always had is, how do you know you're Dalit if you were born outside of India? How do others?
Especially, say, when meeting other Indians in some tech company in the US?
How do others know: it’s not obvious. Dalits either change their last name to something common enough to not have any caste indicator. They’d avoid any discussion on caste. So effectively, they hide but there are some who don’t and keep their last name. Still, not every other Indian could tell, but a more caste conscious Indian who belongs to the same region can tell. On top of it, it’s common among Indians to just plainly ask other what their caste is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanayana
For the most part, people treat people equally but I've seen this kind of behavior on here and in person on a few occasions.
Non-Brahmin Hindus are not allowed to wear the sacred thread.
Turbans and burqa do not have such intra-religious restriction.
Comparing the sacred thread to turbans/ burqas is a false comparison.
But only Brahmins have the right to wear it.
Wearing a "sacred thread" in a society that wants to eliminate caste based discrimination is promoting and condoning discrimination.
As an extreme example, how is this different from a klan member choosing to wear a "hood" in public.
Presumably it is possible to be Brahmin, without supporting caste discrimination.
A better analogy would be: Do you feel it should be illegal to mention have a degree from Yale or Harvard? They're both markers of status, and people absolutely discriminate based on that, but I don't think "I have a degree from Harvard" automatically makes you complicit in that.
A college degree is earned, a Brahmin caste status is inherited much like the klan claiming supreme status by blood.
> Are you saying that you'd stop being a Hindu if you give up your Brahmin identity?
Surely there are many kinds of Hindus? To each community what’s important is different? And an answer to this question also depends on how the individual makes sense of his religion?
While jati as a feature of the Indian landscape has persisted for a few thousand years, I believe jati and religion/theology are orthogonal. You can belong to caste x and any religion y in the sub-continent. But as it happens, when one talks about being anti-caste today many times it is to call out and disparage one’s Hindu identity. This makes any conversion about caste extremely muddled, with folks arguing past each other.
My comment was in response to the parent who brought in the word religion into the discussion, as some means of justification of inheriting the religion of their parent is the same as inheriting the caste. ...and now here you claim that they are orthogonal. How very convenient.
This is exactly the kind of deflection used to 'muddle' the conversation, as you put it.
If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ? If one can follow the hindu religion without identifying with caste why do Indian Hindus still hold on to their caste identity ?
It is easy to say the conversations get 'muddled' without bothering to learn why the thing under discussion even exists !!
None of this is new. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar wrote about this decades ago and yet, here we are, with google claiming the same thing you are -- that talking about caste somehow ends up being Hinduphobic.
By that I meant for some group and people jati intersects with particular theologies and for others it doesn’t. What does that say about jati and theology?
> If they are orthogonal, why does caste still even persist ? Why is the notion of caste still held on to ?
Million dollar question. Why do some identities persist and others don’t? For jati, endogamy plays a significant role and it will disappear with the current out marriage rate in a century (that’s of course being optimistic). Making it about Hinduism or Brahmins will not get rid of jati. TN has the lowest ICM in the country despite a 100 years of non-Brahmin movement.
> It is easy to say the conversations get 'muddled' without bothering to learn why the thing under discussion even exists !!
Lol, let’s just say we read different things about the subject or even read the same things and come to different conclusions.
> that talking about caste somehow ends up being Hinduphobic.
If it ends up disparaging people with Hindu religious identity, one could argue its Hinduphobic (which happens sometimes with these conversations).
Social status for some and Reservation benefits for others.
Just because I bear a name commonly used by people of my community, does not make me complicit in the ills of the community I belong to.
Or are you also judging a person by their surname?
Why should this be a right?
Inherited "wealth" is not considered a unrestricted right in many societies.
The wealth tax is a great example of how society regulates "concentration of power" through inherited wealth.
Caste based inheritance of wealth has no such regulation.
Soundarapandian Nadar of Justice Party (and after whom Pondy Bazaar is named) campaigned in the Nadar community to get rid of the thread: https://alchetron.com/W-P-A-Soundarapandian-Nadar
Some Nairs wear it as well. Wearing the thread is not a “privilege” afforded to only Brahmins, although now in popular imagination it has become their identifier.
What we need is a system based on laws with checks and balances that ensures the poor and the marginalized get their fair shake?
I know people who identify as Kshatriyas and Vaisyas wear it. It is just that almost all brahmins do it and the practice has reduced or stopped in the other two varnas.
And from what I see, he didn't compare the thread to burqas. He compared the calling of the thread as sign of discrimination to calling the turban as a sign of terrorism. There is a difference.
[1] https://www.firstpost.com/india/hinduism-denies-spiritual-ri...
That's the comparison.
>know people who identify as Kshatriyas and Vaisyas wear it
I know but all Brahmins wear the sacred thread.
False. I may have only anecdotal evidence, but even one counter-example renders your statement incorrect.
It doesn't matter what reasons you have. What matters is the consequence of your behavior, namely, it is visible difference between castes, which makes discrimination easier and avoiding discrimination harder.
All previous fights against discrimination shared one phenomenon: priveledged start to whine that they are reverse-discriminated. And at some point they probably are discriminated against. But the funny thing, that without their cooperation in a fight against discrimination there are no other way to win but to discriminate in reverse.
And your comment show that you are not concerned in a slightest about discrimination. Tradition is more important to you than people.
Not unless I go running around naked
> And your comment show that you are not concerned in a slightest about discrimination. Tradition is more important to you than people.
How exactly do you infer that? You don’t know me. I care about discrimination just as much as the next person. What I don’t care much for is rank identity politics disguised as benevolent activism spewed from a non-existent moral high ground.
1. You show that you care about tradition. And you show not a slightest attempt to care about people. Words reflect mind. Not perfectly, but there is one more consideration:
2. I heard a lot from privileged. I said some of that talk myself, and I know how mind must work to say it. I changed myself and rejected my priviledge, my mind works in different ways. I do not belive my reasons to do something anymore, I have found then the only sensible way to judge my inclination to discriminate is to assess my actions and their consequences. In my previous conment I applied the technique to your actions as you described them. It is possible that you lied, but I believe it is unlikely.
> What I don’t care much for is rank identity politics disguised as benevolent activism spewed from a non-existent moral high ground.
You are angry, Jupiter, therefore you are wrong.
When you switch to an emotional talk, it seems to me to be an additional bit of evidence, that you are lying to yourself about how you care about people and discrimination. It is a very predictable reaction.
“Caring” about tradition (whatever that means) is equivalent to being complicit in social ills. Ok got it.
No you didn't.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_among_South_Asi...
[1] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/kevins-murder-...
Why do they do this, and what do they hope to gain out of asking that question?
Related question -- I would have thought that high-tech Indians in Silicon Valley would detest a system like that. Is that not the case?
Answer is a bit twisted. Lot many just ask as a innate curiosity and to find a cultural base to connect with someone new and not exactly for any sinister reasons. There are like thousands of sub religions, cultures, languages in India that it helps people sometimes to know which caste a person belongs to level with them. Not exactly something to be proud of but happens.
At the same time, lot many are orthodox and do ask to get a perspective into someone’s personality and culture to find a stereotype they can base their decisions on - for ex- inside interviews, business meetings etc.
> Unlike race, it’s easier to hide your caste, especially in a new country. Many dalits change their official last name to something common enough that it’s hard to identify them.
My mother's ancestral Norwegian last name wouldn't have worked particularly well in English, my own last name of Danish origin survived unscathed for obvious reasons.
>"Europe
Scandinavia
Wang is also an unrelated surname in Sweden and Norway. It is a variant spelling of the name Vang which is derived from the Old Norse word vangr, meaning field or meadow.
Germany and Netherlands
Wang is also a surname in the German and Dutch languages. The name is derived from Middle German wang/ Middle Dutch waenge, which is literally "cheek". However, in southern German, its meaning, "grassy slope" or "field of grass", is similar to the Scandinavian surname."
Guess the country :)
In Spain there are many people with foreign or uncommon names... that are also biblical names. Abraham, Sarah, Aaron, Jonathan or Josuah (Josué) were unheard half a century ago. Now they're usual.
Why? In part, because Evangelical missionaries were more successful in poor quarters, specially among gypsies.
Also there's the famous actors thing. But now Vanessa also sounds natural enough.
Actually not even foreign names. IIRC only names that were insulting or prone to be laughed at were forbidden.
That being said, these were civil servants under a fascist catholic dictatorship, so you can imagine that the range went from "only catholic saint names in spanish" to "if it sounds spanish-enough to me I'll allow it". Foreign names (John) were not allowed in most cases, just like they didn't allow names in any of the other languages of spain such as Joan (catalan), Jon (vasque), Xoán (galician).
If the latter, is it reasonable to assume that Brahmins in power are likely not only discriminating against those who are Dalit, but also discriminating against those that they know are not Brahmin (Indians and non-Indians) in favor of Brahmins?
Do you need identifying papers?
Is there a big market for forgeries?
Dalits get killed for just riding a horse, walking through upper caste residential streets and many normal things. In this scale a Brahmin name would be deadly
You will be shown your place very very quickly. Love marriages are quite deadly and parents killing their own children and the lower caste grooms are extremely common. You can search for "honour killings in India".
Please read "Annihilation of Caste" by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Its around 50 pages of an undelivered speech, later published.
If you want to learn about caste, please make sure not to ask for explanations from an upper caste person. This is extremely important!!
Example of this enforcement: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-15997648
I'm not Indian, but I read a lot about this when the Cisco stuff came out. The gist that I picked up from interviews with Indians dealing with this was that there is A LOT of cultural background that you'd be very unlikely to know if you hadn't grown up in a certain caste.
A (likely shitty) analogy: You can learn about WWII all you want, but unless you were deployed it would be hard to fake that you were at a specific battle or did a specific training. There's probably minute details that were not written down, but people who were there would casually know. There may be habits or turns of phrase that would have been picked up. Maybe a certain landmark or destroyed thing that had a funny nickname. Maybe it's knowing a certain soldier or commander by a nickname that hasn't made it into the history books. "Oh you trained at X? Man I loved tuna Tuesdays even though noone would touch the stuff. Do you remember when private Y did..."
Through casual conversation, it's very difficult to keep the ruse up. Now if the interlocutor is actively trying to root you out its basically impossible. In the interviews I was listening to, the best case scenario was that the higher caste member came away not knowing what caste your from, but definitely knew you were not a Brahmin... Because if you were, you'd casually bring up X, Y, and Z and use these phrases and these gestures and and and...
Only older heads who immigrated here are the lions share of individuals perpetuating this caste based discrimination. Please state your sources if you disagree with my assessment of first generation born Americans of South Asian descent working in big tech and Silicon Valley.
Your comment supports my observations. The newly-arrived Indians really don't like reservation and therefore care about caste. Second generation non-Brahmins in the US don't care about caste because it doesn't affect them.
India is a big country. Where in India is this a common practice?
This may sound uneducated, but do Indians in the US only eat Indian food? How would someone know if you rotate through different cuisines every day?
I highly suggest that you consult the works of Patrick Olivelle and Susan Bayly to get at the real History of "Caste" (Varna vs. Jati etc.). That way you can present what is actually stated in the Hindu Scriptures vs. Their misinterpretation and later practice within Indian Society.
Excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism) :
Recent scholarship suggests that the discussion of varna as well as untouchable outcastes in these texts does not resemble the modern era caste system in India. Patrick Olivelle, a professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions and credited with modern translations of Vedic literature, Dharma-sutras and Dharma-shastras, states that ancient and medieval Indian texts do not support the ritual pollution, purity-impurity as the basis for varna system. According to Olivelle, purity-impurity is discussed in the Dharma-shastra texts, but only in the context of the individual's moral, ritual and biological pollution (eating certain kinds of food such as meat, urination and defecation). In his review of Dharma-shastras, Olivelle writes, "we see no instance when a term of pure/impure is used with reference to a group of individuals or a varna or caste". The only mention of impurity in the Shastra texts from the 1st millennium is about people who commit grievous sins and thereby fall out of their varna. These, writes Olivelle, are called "fallen people" and impure, declaring that they be ostracised. Olivelle adds that the overwhelming focus in matters relating to purity/impurity in the Dharma-sastra texts concerns "individuals irrespective of their varna affiliation" and all four varnas could attain purity or impurity by the content of their character, ethical intent, actions, innocence or ignorance, stipulations, and ritualistic behaviours.
Olivelle states:
Dumont is correct in his assessment that the ideology of varna is not based on purity. If it were we should expect to find at least some comment on the relative purity and impurity of the different vamas. What is even more important is that the ideology of purity and impurity that emerges from the Dharma literature is concerned with the individual and not with groups, with purification and not with purity, and lends little support to a theory which makes relative purity the foundation of social stratification.
The people i have referenced are experts/scholars in this field (and non-Indians to boot) so you can be sure that it is as close to factual as you can get. The Wikipedia page contains links to their papers/books which you can refer for edification.
What are the cliff notes, because every time I bring this up here one gets accused of being a bigot and missing the nuances of what is essentially nepotism and racism that gets a pass because A: Indians make up an inordinate amount of CEOs in Tech, and B: Well, we've always done this and anything deviation from this brings everything else into question.
I worked in the health sciences before and I saw a lot of this, and got so fed up with just abjectly horrible most workers were who got a pass because of their surname. It's odd, my colleague was a MSc in Microbiology and was Indian, too, but we both had to claw our way into the Industry (in different fields) and she was always worried he H1 Visa would be the only thing that kept her in the US.
My only conclusion was she wasn't a high ranking member of the caste system which is why she was just as hungry as us undergrads in the 2008 financial crisis. She ended up quitting her role in a Govt agency, and did her PhD last we spoke.
PS: The study of the subject itself is fascinating and you can start with the wikipedia page i have referenced and then follow the links from there.
This sums up your world view. I am sitting here thinking we are all debating with someone who wants to improve society for all humans...
Reminds me of one of my favourite passages from The Sea-Wolf by Jack London;
“Do you know, I sometimes catch myself wishing that I, too, were blind to the facts of life and only knew its fancies and illusions. They’re wrong, all wrong, of course, and contrary to reason; but in the face of them my reason tells me, wrong and most wrong, that to dream and live illusions gives greater delight. And after all, delight is the wage for living. Without delight, living is a worthless act. To labour at living and be unpaid is worse than to be dead. He who delights the most lives the most, and your dreams and unrealities are less disturbing to you and more gratifying than are my facts to me.”
He shook his head slowly, pondering.
“I often doubt, I often doubt, the worthwhileness of reason. Dreams must be more substantial and satisfying. Emotional delight is more filling and lasting than intellectual delight; and, besides, you pay for your moments of intellectual delight by having the blues. Emotional delight is followed by no more than jaded senses which speedily recuperate. I envy you, I envy you.”
He stopped abruptly, and then on his lips formed one of his strange quizzical smiles, as he added:
“It’s from my brain I envy you, take notice, and not from my heart. My reason dictates it. The envy is an intellectual product. I am like a sober man looking upon drunken men, and, greatly weary, wishing he, too, were drunk.”
“Or like a wise man looking upon fools and wishing he, too, were a fool,” I laughed.
“Quite so,” he said. “You are a blessed, bankrupt pair of fools. You have no facts in your pocketbook.”
“Yet we spend as freely as you,” was Maud Brewster’s contribution.
“More freely, because it costs you nothing.”
“And because we draw upon eternity,” she retorted.
“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.”
>I have such a low estimation of Indian culture over all
>but somehow Judaism and the Indian caste system
This tells us all we need to know about you and your opinions. It is just classic baiting engaged in by Racists and Bigots.
I don't think we can have any profitable discussions now.
But I guess you just proved my initial point, and you're right: we won't because you resort to accusations without answering difficult questions.
> What are the cliff notes, because every time I bring this up here one gets accused of being a bigot and missing the nuances of what is essentially nepotism and racism that gets a pass because A: Indians make up an inordinate amount of CEOs in Tech, and B: Well, we've always done this and anything deviation from this brings everything else into question.
>one gets accused of being a bigot
So you have admitted to already having a track record of being called as one.
>I have such a low estimation of Indian culture over all
>but somehow Judaism and the Indian caste system
Both the above lines speak volumes about your worldview or lack thereof. This is classic bigotry and racism. The rest of your comments are all meandering vitriol against anything and everything.
>I'm neither a racist nor a bigot,
Does not compute.
Whether or not Hindu scriptures really support these practices is a matter for believers, the concern here is how it's actually practiced in the real world and the resulting discrimination harming actual people.
That's why i said in another comment that it makes sense to discuss this in the Indian Workplace more than the American Workplace.
The issue is that Indian (or Indian-American) workers are bringing these prejudices into American workplaces. People in Indian workplaces know about these issues, non-Indians in American workplaces very likely don't, which allows the discrimination to go unchecked.
That is THE assumption which is being challenged; the reasons in my other comments.
I feel sad and sorry.
Like all unjust discrimination, this one triggers on things one has no control over. Doing that to others is completely unacceptable.
If I was not an IC now, I would definitely be trying to cut discussions like that in a bud.
Whether they use the N word, or saying "being on time" is "whiteness", racism is always defined as "not what I'm doing".
Actually the only real definition of racism I would say is "mentioning race in any way, except the way I do it".
For your 99.999%, I would say that WAY more than one in a hundred thousand would overtly say that their group (race, religion, skin color, gender) is "better" than another. Especially as you leave western countries.
Though in some countries their racism doesn't even place themselves at the top.
27% of Americans say that homeopathy is an effective treatement. I've never met anyone who would admit to this. I know someone who believes in crystals and fortune tellers though.
I don't know how many people are pro-racism, but it's not three orders of magnitude less than people who believe in the power of nothing.
It is an odd frame of mind.
>>> For your 99.999%, I would say that WAY more than one in a hundred thousand would overtly say that their group (race, religion, skin color, gender) is "better" than another. Especially as you leave western countries.
Is it possible you are conflating racism with xenophobia ( which has slightly expanded to include foreigners )?
I'm saying one in a hundred thousand is too few. The US has more than 3000 people who judge even by phrenology, I'm sure.
Why is that relevant to the discussion?
The issue is that any and everything can be claimed to be racist, and therefore transferred to your special pre-political exemption.
Now, if were to look for a biological definition from Webster(1), race would be defined as:
a group within a species that is distinguishable (as morphologically, genetically, or behaviorally) from others of the same species
How is skin color not a distinguishable trait?
Now.. it might not be politically polite thing to say, but it does not change the outcome here.
1:https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race
https://understandingrace.org/
I do happen to think that, where there are clear physical differences ( gasp ) between white and black people, it may be a good idea not to try to cover it with yet another social construct. Unless, naturally there is a disagreement that there are real physical differences ( for example, if we wanted to move from skin pigment, there are documented issues that affect black people more than whites ). Are those issues racist?
That said, it is somewhat interesting that the main quote on the website provided does not come from a renowned representative of the group, but relatively unknown historian ("[Racism] is not about how you look, it is about how people assign meaning to how you look"). Quite frankly, that is not racism. That is otherism and it goes back to the previous comment about how the waters and definitions are muddied further to pigeonhole something for one reason or another.
To be blunt, there is a good reason for a society ( and its members ) to not be focused on race, but pretending race does not exist is a disservice to that society as it is hiding the reality from its members.
Maybe I am approaching it the wrong way. Maybe I should try Socratic method here.
Are there black people?
Still, as a show of good faith, I did just that. Needless to say, I was not impressed, but I would be more than happy to discuss my contentions.
Separately, I also allowed myself to dig deeper under ESI-0307843 that funded this project and one of the first things that came up was an evaluation of the website.
You will note that under 'expectations not fulfilled' some complaints do stand out(1):
-"There are no clear definitions of terms or comparisons of biological race v. social race, ethnicity, etc" -"I expected to find more scientific studies about races, at least as a complement." -"Maybe some more information about the concept of ethnicity and 'clear' definitions" -"I expected a professional explanation given to a public audience as happens with so many effective professionals associated with museums, freshman teaching or public programs in the social sciences and humanities." -"Everything was about self-reflection and self-confirmation about American conceptions and categorization. I expected a step beyond that." -"I expected to find a mention of R. Lynn's Race Differences in Intelligence (Washington Summit Publishers, 2006) for an important exposition."
(1)https://www.informalscience.org/sites/default/files/RaceWebs...
Can you show me the same good faith and engage in a frank and honest intellectual debate?
It’s difficult to say that we can all agree to not be racist when some ideologues from whom’s political ideas companies base DEI initiatives on claim that racism is an immutable characteristic that many of us are born with.
If the people creating these programs/talks don't understand this, they don't deserve the platform. And if they do understand it, they are evil and intentionally trying to make race/bigotry tensions worse. In cases such as this where the relevant psychology of the issue is essential to the career, I tend to assume the worst of anyone doing it.
If you're seeing discrimination in the workplace then it's no longer about politics, it's about the workplace and professionalism among staff.
edit: Even saying 'I am apolitical' is a political statement.
When you manage a group of people that have to work together while trying to maximize workplace outcomes within existing legal framework, organizations have a professional motivation to cover topics like workplace fairness, bias, respectful behavior, etc.
I think we disagree in that I don't believe many of these issues can be avoided. If you're seeing caste-based discrimination in your workplace (for instance, just to use an issue that isn't legally mandated to address), any attempt to avoid it is a tacit endorsement of the practice. There are no sidelines upon which to stand.
Does U.S. law have precedent for discussing caste?
There is a case for typing the lowest-caste Indians, the Dalits this cancelled talk was meant to discuss, as a race and thus protected class under U.S. and Californian law. But I don't know if this is legally precedented.
A lawyer might be able to make the claim that it would fall under "national origin or ancestry" since, to my knowledge, caste is hereditary and hard to change.
But if so then that makes these kinds of talks all the more important. Because it helps Americans recognize a form of illegal discrimination they would otherwise not recognize.
“Race” is a fuzzy concept but generally distinguishes people of different ethnic origins. Indian castes aren’t different races—low caste and high caste Indians can come from the same ethnic group. It’s more like the European distinction between nobility and commoners. That’s also hereditary, but it doesn’t define different races.
But it certainly seems like caste would be a protected characteristic under California law--"Race, Color, National Origin, or Ancestry" are protected characteristics. Caste seems to obviously fall under ancestry.
https://thewire.in/caste/cisco-case-caste-discrimination-sil...
Shouldn't the managers and decision makers be aware of the local customs, cultural issues and employment laws in the region they manage? You really think it's appropriate for some white American manager to lecture his Indian subordinates after spending a few hours in training?
This article concerns caste discrimination in the United States.
Yes. Ethnic discrimination is absolutely unacceptable in any American workplace, full stop. There is no room for cultural relativism here. To imply otherwise (e.g. “it would be inappropriate for a non-Indian manager to tell off their subordinate for being caste-ist”) is itself extremely racist.
Again, how is that determined? Do you assume that a caste angle might be at play every time the manager is upper caste and the employee's of lower caste? Do you wait for the manager to be stupid enough to outright utter a casteist slur at the workplace?
Maybe I have a different view on that, we German's are quite sensitive when it comes to anti-semitism. And as woth caste, if religion is never openly discussed, I have no idea how to spot a jewish co-worker. If that jewish co-worker would complain about about being discriminated, it's more than reasonable to follow up. Same goes for caste. It is up to the employer to create an environment where employees can raise those kinds of concerns openly, most fail. Honestly trying so actually goes along way.
You are just saying that it is the job of the super-manager to find out why without answering how the job is supposed to be carried out. The manager says he is acting against the employee because of their lack of performance or insubordination. The employee says the manager is discriminating against them based on caste. You're the super-manager, what do you do?
Not sure what a "super-manager" is supposed to be. Everyone reports to someone, even the CEO reports to the board. And the board reports to the shareholders. If a company cannot figure out cases of discrimination it is already screwed.
In real life, so, the disriminated party either gets a transfer or a generous severance package. Even if the discriminating manager gets fired. Nobody likes people that make waves.
If he/she sees a clear violation of discrimination laws/policies, then yes! Although "lecture" wouldn't be the best start. Asking questions to the alleged discriminator would be a better way forward. Find out what happened and why, and ask multiple people for their input. Start by assuming innocence and let evidence prove otherwise, not the other way around.
The truth about a given situation is not completely inaccessible to people without "lived experience". That's why words are so powerful - when used truthfully and in good faith, they enable to bridge gaps where we lack that personal experience, and make accurate judgments.
That's why learning to express ourselves well, and listen well (including empathetically) is so important to a functioning society.
As a society, we need a restored faith in the power of words to communicate any truth (including truths people erroneously say are "inaccessible apart from lived experience") and be understood by those who will listen well.
The problem isn't that truth is unknowable or incommunicable, the problem is that not enough people are speaking it, and of those who are, many don't speak intelligently and/or intelligibly. And not enough of those who listen do so carefully, thoughtfully, and empathetically.
Google is a US company. In the US, the "local custom and employment law" is that companies don't accept caste based discrimination. (It's also technically illegal in India). I think not only is it appropriate for a white American manager to lecture Indian subordinates about stopping caste based discrimination, it's an obligation to do so and fire the subordinates if they continue.
When you have an a-priori assumption that every difference in outcome is due to oppression of some sort, the argument is over -- you've already allowed that discrimination on any basis is OK, as long as it's against whoever you've labeled the "oppressor" group.
As a final coup de grace, you can label anyone who disagrees as an "oppressor" (or at least "fragile") without engaging their argument -- it's all circular reasoning supported by an ad-hominem fallacy.
What you said, on the other hand, is a bunch of familiar, well-worn complaints dating back to the 1990s from privileged white people who think they're being oppressed, even though that's not even the subject.
Case law matters, and caste seems to not have clear answers as to whether it qualifies. If caste is considered equivalent to race, it would.
Regardless, I’ve come to realize that not talking about politics and religion doesn’t make political or religious action and impact go away, it just stays insidious.
It's not about Google weighing in. It's about Google being aware of these problems, and doing the work to keep those problems out of its workplace.
It’s called “leadership.”
Is there evidence for this? Couldn't null be valid: those choosing to emigrate are most likely to be willing or wanting to leave that nonsense behind?
Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values. Plenty of Indians emigrate while leaving their caste identity, and any will to act on it, behind. There may remain implicit biases. But these can be aspired to be corrected versus assumed to be the default.
One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Irish_Americans_in_...
Caste is something most Indians grow up with, you dont really lose it just because you go to another country. Most kids of these Indians fortunately dont really care about caste.
One may not lose it. But one can reject it. That's the gist of my implicit biases line.
"Caste" as being your ring in the social hierarchy is present in almost any culture or civilization, and prejudiced treatment of people in either higher or lower social rings is definitely (in my opinion) a part of American culture. This country definitely offers special treatment and privilege to those in higher "castes"... Hell, even just having a Southern accent in America will grant you a prejudiced treatment in many settings.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin
and
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/2006/05/15/the-new-brahmins/
and
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/03/what-s-a-boston-...
In the modern, technologically connected world, it is much harder to leave nonsense behind. Even if you move to the other side of the world, you will still be exposed to your home country's politics through easily obtainable TV channels and through your Internet acquaintances on worldwide social networks. In a way that was impossible in 1920 or 1820.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/sinn-féin-raised-12...
Either way, as more and more of a certain ethnicity/race enter a country for the purposes of bettering their financial prospects, many of these immigrants reinvent the social dynamics of their origin country. This is how enclaves are created. And while many of the "enlightened" Indians have left behind explicit caste discrimination, they didn't leave other practices behind either ( e.g. parental authoritarianism, arranged marriages, etc.).
A different geography doesn't necessarily produce a different worldview. Every immigrant arrives with his own family values, religious dogmas (or lack thereof), and modes of thought that lead to these aforementioned conflicts.
> Caste has no place in America. It's antithetical to our founding values
If we're excluding slavery as a de facto caste system, then sure. However certain behaviors being antithetical to our founding values doesn't make them easily solvable problems.
> If we're excluding slavery as a de facto caste system
I agree that caste and slavery have overlap, but banning slavery was about making our country more in line with its founding values. America is an evolving project, not a single point in time.
We still have a long way to go, and are regressing in many ways of late, but still more in line with those values than we were at the founding.
I thought one of the big benefits of multiculturalism (that all big businesses love to tout) is how it brings diversity of cultural values to the workplace. Well I guess mission accomplished because now you've got the indian caste system in the workplace.
To be clear, are you talking about open immigration? Not that it’s truly open or easy to immigrate, but you seem to be hand waving in that direction.
What do you think should be done about this? It’s not clear to me that closing borders somehow fixes anything.
This doesn't surprise me one bit. Even on HN, every thread on this topic turns into a flame war with a bunch of people crying racism/religionism. How dare we discuss something we don't fully understand? How dare we criticize another culture when we have our own problems? It's the same arguments every time, and then the article ends up flagged to death.
The role of caste within the US is a super important conversation to have, and every resident of the US is entitled to participate, but there are a lot of people with a vested interest in shutting it down and the tools to do so.
I think OP's point is those revering confederates today aren't confederates, they're something else. Sort of like how we term neo-Nazis separately from the historic Nazis.
Aside: The largest minority in Columbia besides black Americans were Indian Americans and immigrants. I didn't have any insight into how they saw the caste system, but living in that city probably gives them a unique viewpoint that might be worth asking about should you have the chance. I wish I had.
Maybe, Google, instead of just giving up you should be asking why a speaker on Dalit rights and inclusion is causing "division and rancor" in your community? Or is that also a difficult conversation you'd rather not have?
The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes.
These discussions need to be done with some strict moderation and sensitivity, usually with actual historians who can properly contextualize the issue. If all you're doing is bringing in "activists" from a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well.
It is a shame though that we were on this path toward a post-race world and then some of us abruptly reversed course and dragged the whole nation with them, setting us back decades.
The media coverage of police brutality against black men predated Trump's candidacy and it was entirely falsely predicated: the media cherry-picked instances in which black people were killed by police (or rather, those instances were plastered on the front page of national outlets for weeks while egregious killings of white people would rarely break into national news at all where they would be footnotes), which gave the impression that only black people were being killed by police or that police killings of black people were more egregious--neither of which are true.
> a resurgence of white nationalist terrorism like the recent shooting in Buffalo
Yeah, this is precisely why we shouldn't legitimize extreme, racial politics or political violence. Every thinking person saw this coming and warned about it (e.g., "we shouldn't engage in racial politics because it's going to embolden and swell the ranks of white-supremacist types").
> But the blame doesn't lie with overzealous woke activists
Of course, but woke activism is the only kind of racism that is still regarded as legitimate (i.e., we even allow our most influential institutions to preach it), and by tolerating it we (1) legitimize racism generally (2) allow it to drive a right-wing reaction. The most effective way to treat right-wing racism is by dismantling left-wing racism and re-establishing a liberalist orthodoxy.
Racists on both sides like to frame this as a dichotomy between left-wing racism and right-wing racism, but the only dichotomy is racism vs egalitarianism. Left- and right-wing racism are just two sides of the same coin.
There is a rot in American culture that is giving rise to anti-democratic and racist violence, it needs to be rooted out, and it has found shelter and succor not in radical university campuses or woke social media, but in right-wing America.
It doesn’t absolve individuals, but it gives the rest of us an idea about where to focus our efforts: on the influential institutions who are driving race ideology on the left and right. It’s better to plug the leak than try and save the boat by scooping water out.
Anyway, right-wing violence isn’t the only threat—left wing people campaign against liberties (especially free speech and equality) and they have their own violence (nationwide riots, property damage, assaults, and even the occasional terrorism). Moreover, left-wing people have their own anti-democratic bent: the “not my president” stuff in 2016 and calls for revolution, agitating for and rationalizing political violence, etc. I’m not comparing left-wing and right-wing sins, but rather noting that we want to defend against both and mercifully the solution is the same: deradicalize institutions.
If that's the time frame you're predicating your analysis of race politics in America on, you're not the non-partisan analyst you think you are. Racist mobilization of white Americans started well before Obama's 2nd term, well before Ferguson, MI and Baltimore, ML.
I agree. Maybe a more precise way to think about this is that they’re only on the “right side” of the issue to the extent that “the other side” is “Israeli settlement policy” rather than “Jews” or “the existence of Israel as a state”.
But your point is in some ways valid, as it’s important to be able to see Israel through the lens of colonialism and to show that the state’s brutality applied to brown people of all faiths, including Jews.
I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic. I actually think equating the brutal behaviour of the Israeli government with Judaism is the real anti-semitism. The Tora has exactly zero passages about it being OK to murder children or sterilise black Jewish women.
The word means basically nothing on HN, outside it’s use in political slurring.
(And yes, I realize Israel is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, but to a first order approximation and given current political dynamics... it's not)
Given that there are relatively few states with as intertwined religions and historical atrocities perpetrated against their people, it makes sense the ability to talk about this is underdeveloped.
That has not been my experience. AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush. Jewish people have been severely oppressed for centuries, and the state of Israel has been attacked repeatedly. The response has been a strong emphasis on solidarity and mutual support, which is generally laudable, but in some this manifests as militant intolerance of even the tiniest deviation from the (insiders') conventional position. Unfortunately, those few - and I know most Israeli and Jewish people are much more open minded because that has been their tradition for millennia - often end up controlling the debate.
This is clearly a defense tactic used to avoid criticism and I see it employed heavily by apologist. Criticism in general should be embraced, as nothing is perfect and we can always improve. But in this case, they are well aware of their wrongdoing, which is why they employ such tactics.
Honestly it depends on how that criticism is framed and who it's being directed towards. It reads differently if the criticism framed as "I care about you and want you to do better" versus "I dislike you and have developed a narrative that justifies mistreating you." It also matters whether the criticism is directed as feedback (e.g. "When you do X it makes me feel Y and I think doing Z would be better") vs. directed towards a third party to intervene in a prosecutorial way.
For instance, there’s many who feel that some of the criticism against Barack Obama was racist. Not because it isn’t ok to criticize a US president but because prior presidents hadn’t been treated similarly/held to the same standard
You clearly have one/several specific organizations in mind, but I’ll point out that my comment was about the content of criticism rather than the track record of the group making it. Track record gives a hint of whether someone might be acting in bad faith, but it is perfectly possible for someone to usually offer fair assessments but let their prejudices slip though with regards to members of one minority group or another. In fact, some would argue that everyone has such blind spots and that they can only be mitigated, but never eliminated.
Not sure I understand your point about guilt by association, but if you are arguing that using the same talking points as a known racist shouldn’t make others suspect you of being a racist… then I think we’re probably going to disagree.
That is a (very) thinly veiled version of exactly the tactic we're talking about, and I probably shouldn't engage with it, but ... who says something doesn't affect whether it's true. Why is the demand for perfection - dare I say purity? - so one sided, and limited to certain topics? If a racist says that it's wrong to assault peaceful pall-bearers at a funeral for a journalist who was already a victim of a highly questionable military action ... well, they're right. One should of course be careful not to validate anything else the racist might say, or to let them shift focus/proportion beyond where it belongs, but rejecting truth because it was stated by The Wrong People is exactly what the racists themselves like to do (not to mention every authoritarian of every stripe). It's not reasoned ethical debate. It's pure blind partisanship, which is not healthy even in an otherwise good cause. Set aside the ad hominem and guilt by association. Consider whether something is true no matter who says it, and whether its truth suggests change.
Hardliners of all stripes tend to recognize and actively exploit blowback.
Ironically, that often results in Jewish people being disproportionately tarred as anti-Semites, because they have specific and knowledgeable criticisms that they're not willing to just let go of.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-labour-antisemitism-ac...
> Jewish Voice for Labour tells EHRC that Jews almost five times more likely to face antisemitism charges than non-Jewish members
Now, go and crush Amalek; put him under the curse of destruction with all that he possesses. Do not spare him, but kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey. - 1 Samuel 15
That's one example. The old testament claims God commanded the total extermination of multiple nations competing with the Israelites [1]. This extermination is celebrated to this day during the Purim festival [2]. When someone mentions Judeo-Christian morality, know that the first part of that duo is not remotely "turn the other cheek" - it is literally old testament.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_warfare#Wars_of_ex...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalek#Jewish_traditions
"The Holy Quran Experiment": https://youtu.be/zEnWw_lH4tQ
"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves"
And from the Big Guy Himself, Deuteronomy 20:
"As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves [...] However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites"
Does that count as one isolated instance, or six?
(Just btw: I offer the above merely as a counterexample to a rather glaring claim, not as a criticism of Judaism. Just because I was taught as a small child, by christians, that everyone who disobeys god deserves to die, and if they don't it's solely due to his mercy, doesn't mean everybody contextualizes these passages that way. Also, the term "murder" is slippery because it isn't a synonym of "kill". If you argue an instance of slaughtering people is justified or legal, you can make it "not murder" by mere definition.)
In fact in Jewish tradition Amalek remains a force to this day.
If for example you had a talk in Google Israel that presented the discrimination against Israeli arabs in modern Israel, I suspect you'd get a decent turnout and positive response (especially as Tech is unusually left leaning).
If you had a talk that mentioned colonialism (like you do in your post) you'll just get people fruitlessly arguing with each other ("This is our land from 2,000 years ago, the arabs are the colonists", "This is our/your land thanks to a UN decision, settlements that go beyond the 1948/1967 borders are colonialism", "All you jews are colonists").
You'd just end up further dividing your employees into hostile groups, even if they were previously able to work together (by just being silently tolerant of each other's opinions).
> I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic.
I think this one is a problem "on both sides".
There are some on the Israeli side that will try to silence criticism by equating it to antisemitism.
There are some antisemites that will express themselves in the form of "reasonable criticism".
There are some that will innocently make some criticism that seems reasonable to them, but due to ignorance of the situation or facts, lack of nuance or just the difficulty of communicating cross culturaly via a limited medium end up with sometimes that seems antisemitic when examined at depth by "the other side".
And no matter which way you go, it is very hard to tell where you are.
Why do we owe this degree of sensitivity to some types of bigot but not others? Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? The realpolitik answer is that Google isn't dependent on the work of klansmen and gaybashers but they are dependent on the work of casteists, and throwing them out the door would hurt their bottom line.
Who says there’s no need to be careful? Almost every discussion about “big tech censorship” has been people crying that they are no longer allowed to be bigots on the timeline.
Sure, but that's coming from the bigots, not the company executives.
This is imposing the cultural dynamics of American racial politics onto an issue with a completely different historical and cultural context. I wasn't talking about people who are expressing a belief of castes being inferior, I was talking about activists who depict a religious group and other castes in a specific light based on a factually inaccurate and outdated reading of history. Hence why I used the world "perspectives" and not "beliefs."
I've been to about 3 of these Equality Labs workshops and just gave up on them because in each one they were throwing around "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" level disinformation about Hinduism, and specific Brahmin groups particularly, while basically shouting down anyone saying things that disagree with their framings of historical events or philosophical references.
Ah, I see how it could cause problems with that type of "equality lab". The equality, discrimination, etc training I've had was very different, and boiled down to "here is a list of behaviors; if you do any of them or anything like any of them your ass is fired."
Yeah this is good in general but needs tempering through a bit of conflict resolution/appeal process built in. Discrimination issues can often just be the result of misinterpretations and blind spots people have, especially when bridging cultural divides. There's some stuff that crosses a clear red line, but most behaviors are subtle and often unintentional and the approach to dealing with them productively should more closely resemble relationship/marriage counseling or the sorts of reconciliation processes they do in post-conflict zones.
The ones I went to involved being told I needed to make "anti-casteism" part of my identity and pick arguments with my aunts and uncles when they make 'problematic' statements. And it then came with a side of misquotes of The Bhagavad Gita and selective quotations out of the Manusmriti to argue that simply identifying yourself as a Hindu is inherently discriminatory and violent towards lower castes. As a history major and religious studies minor in college I took issue with just about every historical and theological "fact" they brought up but didn't think it was worth arguing. But there was nothing particular to the organization we were in and no specific instances of issues reported internally by anyone so I had a hard time understanding why this was happening.
There's a particular historical narrative among certain political movements in India that depict Brahmins as basically collaborating to institute a conspiracy to to impose a caste hierarchy across all of Indian society for millennia. It's a very simplistic and one-sided reading of Indian history and Hindu philosophy, but it has gained a lot of traction within social justice/DEI spaces and particularly with groups that are more focused on pushing an ideological project.
It would be analogous to having a Louis Farrakhan disciple on to talk about being Muslim in the workplace. There are many better people to raise those issues who will bring them without the side of eliminationist rhetoric. It's one thing to meme about people with privilege or be dismissive in a casual context, but at the workplace (or really any public venue) that sort of talk is just mean. It's especially frustrating because this discrimination actually is a blight on Indian society (though most of the issues in the US are in the realm of microaggressions rather than structural or overt discrimination). But that doesn't excuse just peddling nonsense in response.
I admire that you kept your composure in the face of such ludicrous demands. An employer has to be insane to think they can even suggest how I should interact with my own family.
The group has, since, dissolved for obvious reasons.
Cultural change takes time.
When you still have a practice occurring among over a billion people you can't simply throw it out and declare everyone doing it a bigot. You have to transition in steps and get buy in.
Put another way, you wouldn't march single handedly into Saudi Arabia and tell them Islamic law is dumb and they are dumb for following it.
The roots of this behavior as well as the fear of this behavior lie in a logical fallacy called composition, which is spelled out at the Nizkor Project (a site on the history of the Holocaust):
> The first type of fallacy of Composition arises when a person reasons from the characteristics of individual members of a class or group to a conclusion regarding the characteristics of the entire class or group (taken as a whole). More formally, the "reasoning" would look something like this.
> Individual F things have characteristics A, B, C, etc.
> Therefore, the (whole) class of F things has characteristics A, B, C, etc.
http://www.nizkor.com/features/fallacies/composition.html
Just because the Israeli government is highly repressive towards the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and treats non-Jews as second-class citizens within Israel proper, does not mean that all Jews around the world share this behavior. Similarly, just because some Arabs have carried out acts of terrorism does not mean most Arabs approve of terrorist attacks on civilian populations. These notions can certainly be extended to caste conflicts among Indian peoples.
For example, Jews and Muslims live side-by-side in New York City in relative peace and harmony, as do European and Arab descendants.
The reason for this is that the American tradition of strict separation of church and state prevents any one religious group (or ethnic class) from seizing political power and using that power to repress other groups. This is one American tradition that the rest of the world would be wise to embrace, if they wish to minimize such conflicts.
This is a rather hilarious statement as almost no one believes that. You are committing the same fallacy that you repudiated.
Anyway inference is kind of predicated on guessing with some facts isn't it? If Israel is "the only democracy in the middle east", and they elected a government that is openly apartheid, and commits atrocities the jewish people themselves have been victim to, doesn't that make the whole of Israel's voters complicit?
Now there was a period in American history when only white male landowners really had opportunity to vote, but that notion has been soundly repudiated, hasn't it? Even then there was a significant group who advocated for the expansion of voting rights to all. See composition fallacy again.
Similarly, the right to emigrate or own land would not be restricted to members of certain religious groups (imagine if that was the case in the United States!). Hence Israel doesn't actually meet the basic requirements of 'democratic norms and values', does it - and nor does Saudi Arabia. Curiously however, these two states are often referred to as "America's closest allies".
As far as repression, well the targeted assassination of an American-Palestinian journalist in Jenin is just one more example of this. See also the targeted assassination of a Washington Post op-ed columnist Jamal Khashoggi, ordered by Mohammmed bin 'Bone Saw' Salman in the Saudi embassy in Turkey, for comparison.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/24/middleeast/shireen-abu-akleh-...
'They were shooting directly at the journalists': New evidence suggests Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in targeted attack by Israeli forces
Since when can non-citizens vote in US national elections? Let alone people living in Iraq, Afghanistan, or wherever else is/was under US military control.
A valid comparison would be claiming that Native Americans were not citizens of the US government and hence had no right to vote for members of Congress, wouldn't it?
To be more specific, my view is that all people born in the West Bank/Gaza/Israel should have the right to vote in Israeli elections, and Palestinians outside Israel should have the same right to emigrate to Israel as New York Jews do. Some will disagree, but that's basically how the American system works, and I think it's a better system.
Further, there's been plenty of people born in and living in the US (under your definition of "a country includes any territory under its military control") who weren't able vote in US elections. There's residents of US territories who are technically citizens but cannot vote unless the migrate to the mainland. And the US has never granted voting rights to people living in countries under US military occupation.
Personally, I'd suggest using the definitions that people use for themselves. And if you do that, you'll find that there are both religious and ethnic components.
People in upper castes may be that secure in their communities, which might be what matters.
>> Longtime observers of Google’s struggles to promote diversity, equity and inclusion say the fallout fits a familiar pattern. Women of color are asked to advocate for change. Then they’re punished for disrupting the status quo.
I'm not a big culture warrior, but I believe that if as a company you choose to do a thing, you do it fully, from top to bottom.
Yet the outcome described is exactly what you get when you have {status quo} + {new initiative from leadership} + {failure to dedicate time and resources to following up and implementing}.
People are always going to be resistant to change. Middle management is especially resistant to change, not unreasonably.
Consequently, effective change takes follow-through, verification, reminders, and eventually termination to actually implement. Otherwise, everyone shrugs their shoulders and returns to what they've always done... and punishes whoever is still dancing off the beaten path.
> "According to Gupta’s letter and Soundararajan, the decision to cancel the talk came from Gupta’s boss, Cathy Edwards, a vice president of engineering, who had no experience or expertise in caste."
And, another excerpt:
> "To Soundararajan, Google was long overdue for a conversation on caste equity. Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told The Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.” Soundararajan said Pichai has not responded to letter she sent him in April. Google declined to comment."
Clean your own house before pointing at your neighbor's dirty yard...
It's not that Google gave up. They were never going to allow it to begin with and the organizer likely just hoped it would fly under the radar.
99% of corporate DEI initiatives are performative in nature. I realized it when the majority of companies were pushing employees to read a book on systemic racism written by a white woman who was obviously using it as an advertisement for her corporate consulting and training business.
First, some members of group found at a disadvantage are upset. This is regardless of how many other members of that group express that they themselves are not. You can dispute facts, but you can't deny people's feelings.
Second, the disadvantage is then used by some people to justify something that fits their agenda, prejudices of beliefs, whether it makes sense or not.
So I can hardly blame anyone responsible for managing a huge number of people of avoiding sensitive topics. Besides, a corporation is not exactly the place to discuss these things: they need to be dealt with as a society in general. If you try to introduce these topics into your workplace, you might even achieve the opposite of what you want, because people will do whatever you expect them just to keep their jobs, but won't change their opinion because their manager told them to, or because they attended a workshop where it was explained to them that their culture is inferior, for example.
I don't believe HN's current moderation policies/leadership make this the place to have that conversation though. Participate in good faith all you want, you'll still earn a ban/warning for "arguing" if you piss off the right people.
I hope you didn't take my comment is advocating for that. I can't really comment on a thread I didn't see.
>They probably would have been flagged, but the threads were just so deep you wouldn’t see that unless you’re intently following the thread.
Sounds like pointless name calling. That said, my original point that HN is not a good place to have these discussions stands. Unfortunately this community is for sterilized technical discussion, anything with spice or flavor isn't permitted.
Sorry, I must have missed the not, I thought you were saying this is a good place.
How so? You can't say what you mean here, you're forced by moderation to be dishonest and sterilize everything. Nuance is only rewarded if you're nuanced about the right side.
>is respectful of other points of view.
Again, this is not in any way consistently applied. If you disagree with the majority here no amount of nuance will save you from ban/rate limit.
And that message, "You're replying too fast, slow down". Lol. What duplicity.
For argument's sake let's assume it's 80/20, with 10% on each side of a topic very passionate for their side. By banning and/or rate-limiting the 10% you dislike in any issue you can sway the 80% to follow the other side thus "manufacturing" the consensus.
How would you scientific-revolution social media?
Because there are now 4.6 million Indian Americans and they are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the US.
So it's our own problem now too.
The point being made is that people who don't want this conversation in public (i.e. people in favor of and/or who benefit from the caste system) will flood the comments with this type of rhetoric which instantly turns the conversation into to a flame war rather than a helpful discourse on how to improve things.
The fact that you and I both instinctively fell for this reaction is evidence that parent is quite correct in the effectiveness of this tactic.
Which is how they got Google to cancel the talk.
Is there a term for shutting down a discussion by turning the belligerence to eleven? Such that people outside the discussion tune out not the views of those being belligerent, but the discussion itself?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto
"Trolled into oblivion", perhaps?
We really need one, because it's a known phenomenon without a known label. If we can't assign a word or phrase to it, we'll struggle to communicate the concept to others when we see it happening. That, in turn, makes calling this behavior out monumentally more difficult and far less likely to succeed in pressuring people to stop. Imagine if we didn't have the term "ad hominem" and how much more difficult it would be to confront someone making such underhanded attacks in arguments. It would be a lot more difficult to discredit the person, despite recognizing what they are doing.
The most appropriate ones here are probably:
> 2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit.
> 5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal', 'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.
> 18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'
I'm still astounded by how consistently contemporary defenses of Apartheid blamed the objections to it on "anti-Boer bigotry" in order to derail the conversation.
Isn't that the first step in the flame war, attacking, dismissing, and blaming one side (and before they even say something)? How will someone with a good faith interest in discussing concerns about racism or religionism act, seeing this comment - they will feel shut down, and like they won't be heard and will be attacked. There's already no room for those discussions.
There is a lack of trust - a situation that is the goal of people trying to disrupt open societies and the trolls that help them. Whatever we say or do, the primary goal needs to be to build trust. People who are alarmed act badly - that's why trolls try to alarm people (even if they aren't quite conscious of how it works). Even when people are acting badly, if you can build their trust then very often the situation will improve.
It would be extremely valuable to society to find a way to conduct constructive conversations; I think we are improving, but not nearly quickly enough.
It's tough.
I mean this sincerely - It requires heavy moderation.
The government can uphold a free speech ideal, but the good conversations happen in bubbles where someone can't create a burner account and start talking shit as loud as anyone else.
Some years ago, Christopher Hitchens gave a talk about free speech. It's very compelling. Nobody yelled "FIRST!" over him, cause it wasn't an Internet comment thread.
Maybe we should distinguish between free speech and "free-for-all" speech. I'll listen to Hitchens saying we have the Right To Read about Holocaust deniers, but I don't want any given thread to be over-run by the same Holocaust deniers.
Off the top of my head, issues I can think of where an outsider may be oblivious between the "sides" are:
Indian caste
Japanese Barukumin caste
Protestant/Catholic in Europe
Jewish people in Europe/US/USSR
English Class System, or Southern/Northern
Jim Crow, or North/South or Midwest Vs coastal, WASPs, or Nativism.
Ainu in Hokkaido.
Ukraine vs Russian is topical at the moment.
Of course, it goes without saying, perceiving you belong to the true faith does not justify violence or discrimination. But faith-based identification is not analogous to a caste system.
>Of course, it goes without saying, perceiving you belong to the true faith does not justify violence or discrimination. But faith-based identification is not analogous to a caste system.
They were clearly talking about faith-based discrimination. Why would you assume that they were talking about faith-based identification, especially given the context?
A persecuted minority in France.
The South gets it the worst. When I was in college (University of Cincinnati) engineering students from the South were sometimes encouraged to lose their Southern accents because it made them sound "stupid." I heard a few stories about this.
A course on recognizing bias against lowland Southerners would be funny but not wrong or inappropriate and you'd see plenty of rich coastal fragility on display.
Classism and regionalism are absolutely huge in this country, especially when those on the receiving end are not in a racial minority.
But what would people do if there were no easily identifiable out groups to stereotype and mock?
At a past job, I worked for a company headquartered on the upper east coast, but which had opened a "tech hub" in the mid-sized Southern city where I lived at the time. Some of my co-workers had fairly pronounced Southern accents and people in the home office would regularly laugh and make fun of them during meetings. And after I put in my notice, the tech lead on the project I was on declared, completely unprompted, during a completely unrelated call that "we haven't had any issues with code quality or anything, but Southerners are just slow. That's just how they are. It's the culture." I think that I will regret for the rest of my life not telling him to go eff himself right then and there.
And I wish I could say that that was an exception to my experience elsewhere, but while living on the east coast I heard more offhand comments about "stupid Southerners" than I can count, often followed by an awkward "I mean, not you of course, you're different". Interestingly, many (but not all) of the same people who think it's funny to beat up on the South are also the most likely to make impassioned performative declarations of support for every DEI initiative they come across. The level of cognitive dissonance required to maintain that kind of mindset must be intense.
> On October 26, 1909, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease was organized as a result of a gift of US$1 million from John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The five-year program was a remarkable success and a great contribution to the United States' public health, instilling public education, medication, field work and modern government health departments in eleven southern states.[45] The hookworm exhibit was a prominent part of the 1910 Mississippi state fair.
> The commission found that an average of 40% of school-aged children were infected with hookworm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookworm_infestation#Eradicati...
Holding and advancing multiple deeply contradictory ideas is something humans are very good at.
I've come to believe that most people spend very little time asking if their ideas are reasonable. They just believe what they need to believe to fit into a group. It's more about group membership signaling than anything else.
Primates will choose social connection over food, so it's not surprising that we'll also choose social connection over rationality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrNBEhzjg8I
EDIT: I absolutely condone discrimination, but I think for the people that live in areas with very visible Roma people, it's kind of obvious why.
At best, you'll just see them begging on the streets. At worst, you'll experience getting hounded down by them, getting robbed, or your property looted. Mostly just an issue in larger cities, and it used to be much worse 10 years ago.
We had this one older Roma guy that would have his usual spot, and he'd sit there and beg all day long. Rain, snow, or wind - he'd always sit there. In the end, he became a fixture in the city scenery.
But one particular winter got really bad, and some senior citizen offered him their apartment (rent-free) for a couple of months, as they were away for the winter. He passed away a couple of years later.
Did you mean condemn?
condemn: express complete disapproval of
condone: approve or sanction (something), especially with reluctance
I live in a country with two large-ish gypsy areas, and we have a lot of people who are very loud about their rights and discrimination against them...
...somehow none of those people actually live anywhere near them.
There really is discrimination against them, but on the other hand, the system (police, courts, politics) allows them to do all the shitty stuff they're stereotyped by.
Go to police.hu and every time you see someone with the family name Balogh | Góman | Lakatos, you drink. I guarantee you will be dead from alcohol poisioning in an hour or two.
they live by another set of rules and values
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_society_and_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_(Romani_court)
But tbh, it's just half a century ago that pretty much all people from Northern Norway were discriminated against, in the southern parts. Which is why most people moving south were recommended to change accent - fast. More so if you wanted to work in any client/customer-facing job...
Back to the Sámi - unfortunately there are still shitty people out there that feel the need to voice their opinion if they see Sámi people wearing traditional clothing. But it should also be said that there's conflict within the Sámi community, which also comes down to what type Sámi you are (sea/coast Sámi vs hill/raindeer). Most of the real conflicts in any case revolve around land/areal usage.
can you speak more to this? i'm totally unfamiliar with the folk taxonomy
In short, the coastal Sámi people have made their living off fishing, farming, and similar activities.
On the other hand, those living inland have mostly made their money off reindeer husbandry. Reindeers will forage over a large area, and in Northern Norway / Sweden / Finland / Russia that includes large tundra and hilly places - so many of Sámi involved in that trade would trek over and live in these areas.
With that said, these days I think only 5%-10% of Sámi have reindeer husbandry as their main profession.
But the vast majority of conflicts between Sámi people and the rest usually comes down to the reindeer. Since the reindeer need a huge area to graze on, it tends to become a problem for companies wanting to develop the area for industry.
Just recently our supreme court decided that a wind farm had been bult in conflict with cultural landscape of local Sámi people. Reindeer husbandry is a cultural heritage activity, and thus protected. The area reindeer graze on, is thus a cultural landscape, and also protected.
The intra-Sámi conflicts, from what I've seen and heard, boils down to either things related to the reindeer industry - or I guess elitism from the "true" Sámi people toward the coastal Sámi people.
English vs French speaking Canadians?
Dominicans and Haitians
Colombians and.... the rest of Latin america
People are hardwired to perceive outsiders as a threat and usually this originates from good reasoning.
The word you need is “xenophobia” (hate of the others, of those who are different). Race is a limited, artificial concept and by focusing on it we miss the forest for the trees. Xenophobia is as old as humanity and can be based on anything: physical features; ideas, religions, languages, family ties, etc.
Edit: It might be a quote from fiction but there's some truth in there somewhere
Is was used like that in Greek? Even the clinical meaning today does not include hatred.
> "Revulsion" might be a better translation than fear or hatred.
Fear does not require disgust. I am scared of snakes but I think they are beautiful animals.
Like many psychological things the line is more "when your response is damaging to yourself and others".
I knew someone with a phobia of stickers on fruit. Just tried to Google what that is called and found this comment from a sufferer:
"I can't have them on my skin and if anyone put one on me without prior warning I would panic and scream. I HATE HATE HATE ones on fruit"
Though the line between fear and hate is quite thin and blurry in human psychology. The arachnophobes I know do, in fact, hate spiders with a passion.
> Though the line between fear and hate is quite thin and blurry in human psychology.
In some instances it may be, although the word 'awe' has no sense of hatred in it.
> The arachnophobes I know do, in fact, hate spiders with a passion.
Okay, well how about snakes? I'm afraid of them but I don't think anybody is disgusted by them.
Awful has some meanings that are close
https://www.etymonline.com/word/awful
The youngest French Canadians generally speak English. However the oldest generations (50+ or 60+ depending on the region) couldn't and mostly still can't due to the way the system was set up. And since a lot of companies came from either the US or the rest of Canada, they had no hopes in climbing ranks or being competitive as businesspeople. There are some records of French Canadians being sent to unusually harsh missions during the great wars too.
There are casual insults such as calling French Canadian "frogs" and English Canadians "square heads" still in use today.
It is still present even in tech companies where English speakers are sent to client meetings as it is sometimes perceived "rude" to sent someone with a French accent to the front.
These days, it's mostly about not extending the classic "warm Canadian welcome" to the other category. But in some situations, it can get more serious.
(That being said, in 2022 it does not really compare to some of the other examples listed above.)
Russian Nazism is very real, leads to rape, murder, forced deportation and torture.
> Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told The Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.”
Sounds like Mr. Pichai has some explaining to do...
[1] https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/the-brahmin-files-why-atro...
It's like holding any white British person to explain all the bad things British did in their colonies.
Prompting an employee of a tech company, even its CEO, reminding the audience of its ethnical background is what i find suspect.
That's kinda part of the problem. In India there are laws dealing with caste based oppression and discrimination (how well they are enforced is another story). But in most other countries such laws do not exist. And caste-based discrimination is exceptionally easily and silently accomplished because for a vast majority of Indians, your last name gives away your caste.
A hiring manager, gets two resumes. Both are equally qualified. He glances at one, see's the last name and decides on the spot to not hire him. Because of caste.
If he's slightly clever, he'll atleast schedule an initial call with the candidate before inventing a reason to reject him. How does a generic anti-discrimination law identify this as an instance of caste-based discrimination?
Btw we have other avenues, anti discrimination is one that covers shutting down labelled candidates. Nepotism is described as favoring relatives or friends, just add "or group identified with" to it and boom that covers the caste system issue (and beyond). I'm no legalist so of course I'm not drafting a clear definition of group identity but you get the idea, i hope. I suspect we are stuck on this because on some side we have identity politics and quotas advocates wanting the legislation to accommodate their wishes, hence forbidding group identified favoritism in the law. This avenue is being at best ignored as a potential simple solution, at worst battled against with teeth and nails for other unrelated motives.
Isn't the failure to do so the subject of the talk?
Truly puzzling decision.
Sundar's goal has been to smooth over this resentment and prevent events that would exacerbate it. That often occurs by cancelling a venue for discussion/healing. GOogle sort of evolved itself into a state of weaponized progressivism, and is now realizing just how unrealistic its naive view of using technology to transform the world for good was, and how it needs to turn into everything that it said it wasn't to continue to succeed in the face of more determined competitors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083
Right, but what are the implications of it being limited or not? Is there a tolerable level of discrimination?
In some regions, there were also some devout worshippers of one God that take adverserial position about worshippers of another God (Shiva versus Vishnu)
Luckily most of these (I think) are on their way out and don't manifest in professional workplaces of today.
These tendencies must have definitely shaped careers and unfairly disadvantaged people as recently as a couple of decades ago.
Which is illegal.
Just because someone points out the elrphant in the room at a workplace does not make them "radioactive". Quite the opposite. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
The same thing goes for trying to organize a meeting with a speaker who will talk about the caste system in Silicon Valley. Yeah, caste == bad, but is the employer obligated to host such a meeting (at their expense)? Obviously she could rent a venue and invite others to the presentation on their own time, but why must Google submit to her demands for them to pay for it?
>Organizing a labor protest because of a (real or perceived) culture of sexual harassment is not.
...Pardon me, but do you not consider a workplace wherein sexual harassment is implicitly encouraged or tolerated to the point that someone feels the need to clarify or remind others this a workplace to not be a subset of unfair working conditions? I do. Generally it is something that hardly needs explaining in the majority of places I've been, but in the places that needed it, it was needed. It can be overdone. Given recent history on Google however, I'm willing to entertain the benefit of a doubt.
>The same thing goes for trying to organize a meeting with a speaker who will talk about the caste system in Silicon Valley. Yeah, caste == bad, but is the employer obligated to host such a meeting (at their expense)?
Does the employer outsource a sizable chunk of business to somewhere where these concerns are valid? Is management composed of people to whom these concerns should apply? If yes, then absolutely.
Look, the bigger a collective unit of humanity you are, the higher my standards go. Everyone individually is prone to their own vices/biases/fallibilities/etc... but the entire point behind collectives is that not all component members are hopefully having an evil day at the same time. So on average, behavior should tend away from blatant unethical or immoral behavior. This is doubly important, because group behavior is indicative of culture of the constituent parts.
I understand there are some people who look at businesses as nothing but profit engines. I don't. If your business ends up perpetuating discriminatory practices because there is some executive at the top who is a caste-ist bastard, and you've got boots on the ground attestating that yes, that tendency shines through to them numerous enough, then it is absolutely a valid expenditure of our collective society's time.
Should it eclipse everything else? No not necessarily. Is there a point where one needs to rein it in? Who should be entrusted with that decision?
Certainly not those in power/up top. There are fewer of them, and the power they wield taints their impartiality. It is most safely ensconced amongst your workers.
If one person asks for it, say no. Two or three do, start paying attention, possibly escalate. If it is worth your people's time to hear this person out, it is worth your time.
Beside's which, as a leader, you are best thought of as a cache. If you haven't formed a stance or policy in it, do the expensive operation, then cache the result.
Boom. Done. Everybody's happy. Ignoring the potential problem won't make it go away.
Bottom up, not top down. Telling the bottom to chill out because Fearless Leader would never let anything improper happen is about the most unamerican thing I can possibly imagine... Nevermind the biggest bloody lie out there.
In short; I tend to disagree with your standpoint. My job isn't to optimize your accountant's profit figures, it's to make sure that signals get handled so the people doing the real work can concentrate on that. The profit will generally take care of itself.
People are complicated. Those that think they've simplified them enough are inevitably due for a refresher in human nature.
Generally you wont be able to figure the caste of someone but there are clues like skin color, fairer skin generally is "upper" caste, sometimes your surname also gives away your caste.
Unfortunately some Indians specially from the "upper"caste take this very seriously and think they are superior compared to other Indians.
Nevermind that one can be "knighted" - the idea that one could be "brahminated" is no different from thinking one could be "whited" in the antebellum south. (And no, the "honorary whiteness" given to certain asian ethnicities is not akin to "whiting" - it's merely defining a subdivision of a caste to be slightly higher than the other lower castes)
Since economic mobility was greately reduced because of economic stagnation caused by centuries of invasion, they re-applied the originally profession-based caste system using racial discrimination brought to India by the Mughals and the British.
Do you have ancestral home in Mylapore? If not you're not real Tam-Brahm. (JK obviously)
Well it is a stereotype, and they are often true, but not always. eg, in TN, the average brahmin or upper class individual will be fair-skinned while the lower class one would be dark skinned.
I guess up in the North, this does not hold.
> but certain states like Tamil Nadu banned surnames for this reason.
The govt did not ban it. It was more a social movement where one was looked down upon (and even discriminated against for showing they belonged to the higher castes). That's why there are still folks who continue to keep 'Iyer' in their name.
Ofcourse the Iyers and Iyengars wouldn't switch because they had more to lose than they gained from hiding their caste identity (they are the so called upper castes who have traditionally held a much priviledged position).
I am someone who was not given a caste-based last name because my parents were influenced by a regional movement against caste. (I didn't even have a last name to begin with but eventually added a non caste-based one to avoid visa issues.) Whenever I traveled by train and chatted up with a co-passenger, almost surely they would ask my name and would never be satisfied with just knowing my first name. They would get visibly confused when I would tell them I didn't have a last name.
Edit: Curiously, based on the last name of the person (Soundarajan) whose talk got cancelled, I would actually have guessed that they were upper caste (Brahmin - the highest).
(In Telangana, surnames are almost exclusively used as just an initial preceding the given name, and sometimes that’s even all that ends up on official documentation.)
What happens of they find out you’re a lower caste, so they just stop talking to you, talk down to you, etc.?
I'm also not lower caste (or particularly upper caste for that matter) and my parents were doctors, so my family was relatively well-off in a very, very poor part of India, so almost all other social indicators would tell them to place me higher in social status. So, the experience of others would vary.
This is most likely because her parents/grandparents changed to using patronymical last names, precisely to avoid this problem. There was a very popular movement in South India (particularly the state of TamilNadu), called the self-respect movement, which a large part of society (except for the upper castes - who had a lot to lose), adopted.
This is why my own name does not give away my caste. Because my grandfather switched to patronymics from the existing caste based last names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Respect_Movement
In a nutshell, people can sometimes tell by your last name, and if they can’t, they will ask you questions about your background, such as what town and/or neighborhood your family is from, until they figure it out.
In one example in the story, a guy is outed as a Dalit by a coworker who knew him from college.
It is somewhat different if you grew up in the caste system, and the discriminatory behaviour was just ingrained. If you start falling back to that based on, e.g., surname it's hard to avoid. Actively seeking information you can use to treat people like shit is a different level all together!
This also happens in the west and it's not caste-related. Go to a suburban barbecue or something, and observe: people will ask what you do for a living, which neighborhood you live in, how long have you been living here, where did you originally come from, and so on. Often they are doing this kind of small talk just so they can figure out where you are on the social totem pole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa
Trying to get a house in Delhi as a single, straight male is an exercise in discrimination 101. Landlords will ask you if you drink alcohol, eat meat, have female friends, belong to a non-Hindu religion (especially if you're muslim), your caste, and heck, even what city/state you're from.
My friends have been denied housing simply for being from a state with a somewhat poor reputation. Some were denied because they were lawyers AND from a specific caste (the landlords feared that my friends would somehow take over the property through legal shenanigans). And I won't even get into how hard it is for a muslim male to find housing in India, especially outside of big cities.
So much of this simply never gets talked about in Indian society. But its just accepted as something that happens. Sometimes feel that we're developing backwards as a society.
That said, one of the reasons I'm really skeptical claims that casteism is widespread in Silicon valley is that I have a last name that's caste-ambiguous (could be anything from dalit to brahmin) and yet I've never been asked my caste. So it's rather bizarre that casteism could be so widespread without me having ever encountered it.
Insert every social movement in the last 10 years. Absolutely hilarious that a company that goes out of it's way to participate in the US culture war identifies an actual systemic issue in the country where the CEO just happens to originate from, it is suddenly a divisive action to make half baked hyperbolic social statements.
> But Google employees began spreading disinformation, calling her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders, documents posted on Google’s intranet and mailing lists with thousands of employees.
I don't have a solution, just a depressing observation.
Peoples feelings about fairness and justice are always valid, but hell, many people suck so hard at putting it into words.
However we should step back and think about how important it in the American context. What purpose is that talk going to serve? I don’t know if it does anything other than satisfying esoteric learning needs of a few. It may be an issue in he US but the problem may be among single digit or double digit individuals at best. Is it worth spending cycles on it?
so it just goes to show how hypocritical Google is being when they are mega woke on every other facet. probably because their ceo harbors a like for the caste system
It’s a very prevalent problem. A lot of people come from India and keep their cultural values - including caste discrimination.
It’s a small issue in the general US but a huge issue within SV. Same as any Asian topic tbh. Most Asians don’t exist outside the coasts - yet we talk about their issues cause they’re in important cities in significant numbers.
Source please.
>> the problem may be among single digit or double digit individuals at best.
Why do you think it's in single or double digit "at best"? This is a huge problem in India and moving to US doesn't make a racist person inclusive automatically.
Here's an exercise for you: go through the list of US protected classes [1] and see which ones are explicitly stated and which ones aren't. It's actually enlightening. For example, I don't think I've ever seen ageism specifically called out.
As for the impact of the Indian caste system in US tech, I can't really comment on that. It's not my lived experience. I've worked with many Indians. No idea what their castes were. Saying that, just like racism I find it incredibly plausible that if you grew up in such a system, the effects are pervasive and linger.
So should Google allow such a talk? That's a difficult question. It's clearly a divisive issue. It reminds me of Meta telling employees to stop talking about abortion [2]. Now that issue probably doesn't lead to workplace discrimination (alleged or actual) although you might be able to argue that your political views could hurt you. There's something to be said to keeping your political views to yourself, particularly at work.
I imagine (but, again, don't know from experience) that this might be on the level of racial discrimination in the US workplace. So it seems worth examining. I imagine to mahy outsiders it might not look "real" because at the end of the day they're all Indians (which, to be clear, is also a form of racism).
Is a talk the best way to handle this? I honestly don't know. I can sympathize with avoiding divisive issues and also with the desire of a company to cover their ass and not create an HR nightmare. I really wonder if this ends in a lawsuit.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group#United_States
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23131714/meta-ban-abortio...
First off, activism is uncomfortable - it’s about changing the status quo and anyone who benefits will take issue with it even if they don’t actively perpetuate the system. MLK wasn’t met with open arms; he was harassed, arrested and ultimately assassinated.
Personally I’ve worked with many Indians too and I have never heard anyone one of them bring up caste; but I’m not Indian, so why would they?
A better benchmark is how many people of lower caste have you talked to and how do they feel about it? It may be the case that the structures of American Indians have already expunged all the lower caste Indians from your workplace.
Ageism is illegal in the US, however the way the law is written it specifically only protects people over 40. I've always personally theorized that this is why tech ageism tends to start affecting people in their 30s, so that it doesn't wait until it's illegal and gets the job done of oppressing more senior employees earlier on.
Eye opening.
For more context, Dr. B R Ambedkar was the main architect of the constitution of India. He also formulated the affirmative action for Dalit representation, called the reservation system. He was one of the so called Dalits who faced extreme caste discrimination in India despite his brilliance and all his achievements. There are documented instances where upper caste government officers refused to touch files that he signed. The discrimination was so bad that he and 500K of his followers converted to Buddhism.
These days, some sections treat him like an ideological revolutionary (sort of like marxism or leninism). Many are openly calling for replacing his ideas with those from manusmriti - an ancient text that is a huge source of racism and misogyny in India. Hope this gives you some insight into the problem.
[1] http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_...
That's my question: was this in US? Because in US if anyone pulls that kind of shit you head straight to the dean's office and address the problem. 2 years sleeping on a couch because of your roommate's conceit? It boggles the mind.
One of the funniest parts of our HR training at my employer was "If someone does something you don't like, first talk to them and tell them you don't like it."
What a joke. That would never work.
And I have no data to corroborate this, but I've felt caste chauvinism increase in the last few years.
...as has Hindu nationalism, as noted in the article.
In this case believe it or not, it’s a personal anecdote and true story. I’m not interested in revealing the identity or source in case of internet violence