Where was the lecture being attempted? If it’s in n America, others should think about how non-native social structures intersect with traditional mores.
Host the people who were shamed into not speaking and hit the rest with discrimination charges. I know bigots gotta bigot, but one doesn't have to help them do it. Free speech and all that. Laws about religions.
I'm unaware of N American laws where you can't treat people fairly independent of how they're treated elsewhere. If this occurred in India or a 3rd country, the article should have been more explicit about this. Google probably has offices damn near everywhere so seeing glass and their logo's pretty ambiguous.
According to the WP article it was a Dalit soeaker who was invited to talk about Caste-based discrimination. The talk was canceled after severe backlash against the topic, internal backlash.
I really dislike when headlines use weasel words to imply causation when there is none, but I'm not really seeing it here. No one is saying they were denied because they were a Dalit. Some view it as being cancelled from the nature of the talk making those in power uncomfortable, others view it as being cancelled because the activist said anti-hindu things.
This is basically invisible to "us" (assuming you're not Indian); I'm a comparatively well read westerner regarding this issue but I have no practical ability to spot the subtle signifiers that let people familiar with system glean who "belongs" to what caste if they care to.
Also non-Indian managers are very unlikely to be interested in discriminating against specific subgroups of Indians even if they're huge bigots or something, so this is a pretty specifically inter-Indian issue.
Opposing things that everybody is against isn't political. The fact that this topic is being labeled as politics is proof that some people are OK with it.
That policy doesn't mean that there's no politics at work, just that there's no open discussion of the politics that are affecting employees and the company. See for example:
It amuses me how many people rate economic life as taking primacy over civic life.
Economic activity is an outcome that happens in the presence of a stable civic situation. Economic activity does not spontaneously create polite and cooperative groups of people.
If anything, civic/political matters take primacy over economics any day. Once your political landscape degenerates, your economic underpinning is generally quick to follow in the ensuing chaos.
I didn't mean to say that this was Basecamp's intent, merely that it is the inevitable result.
The luxury of ignoring politics is usually reserved for those who are not threatened by the dominant politics. And that luxury is one that most people in tech management have, so it can produce unintentional harm.
I'm so glad no one at my current technology workplace discusses politics anywhere-- not in Slack, Email, nor Conference calls. I literally haven't heard a single political opinion at work, and I freakin love it!
I previously worked at Unity Technologies (3d game engine company) and as well as a CRM Consultancy, and I was amazed by how much time people spent arguing their political agenda. It was a major contributing factor of why I left both places. I had this feeling of "Why are these people chatting about things irrelevant to our work, while I am working? They should be working too-- they're paid to work, not chat & check their slack feed for 30-60 minutes a day about politics"
> I'm so glad no one at my current technology workplace discusses politics anywhere-- not in Slack, Email, nor Conference calls. I literally haven't heard a single political opinion at work, and I freakin love it!
Honestly, this seems boring as hell.
I've often discussed politics, religion, and all sorts of things with coworkers, and we've often disagreed. And then we went about our day working together, or having a beer after work. No problems. It's just part of normal regular socializing, and I'd argue that socializing with co-workers is somewhat important for a healthy workplace.
Excessively pushing politics is a different thing of course, but "absolutely no politics allowed" has just a kind of boring superficiality to it. And also leaves us with the rather tricky question on what "politics" is, exactly.
Boring? That's a funny assumption. The presence of politics is required for work to be fun? Sounds like a nightmare to me.
I love the lack of politics at work. It really makes it more pleasant-- almost an escape from an otherwise over-politically involved society. I can't turn on the news or open the browser (sometimes even IRC) without politics seeping in.
It allows me to stay focused on work, not on what people think about/how I might be judged on my non-work related opinions. Nor that there could be favoritism based on such things.
It levels the playing field.
There are numerous articles discussing any non-liberal voices resulting in people being let-go/fired at various California-based technology companies.
This doesn't mean that the opinions of powerful people do not affect you, however.
The Civil Rights Act and its consequences have meant that America will forever be politicized along every fault line of human identity. Whether it can withstand this burden and remain a functional civilization remains to be seen.
Could someone steel man the protest against the lecture? (Anonymously if you prefer.)
Particularly, the most I've been able to hunt down are vague claims that her organization is Hinduphobic. If that's indeed the issue, what are the concrete examples of this?
That's because it's another term reinvented by people who want to do philosophy without studying any of it. The traditional term is "argument reconstruction".
This seems like a case where a field settled on undescriptive jargon (like "Type I error") and needs to be disrupted by a useful vernacular (like "false positive"). If you hear "steel man" once, you'll never forget it. I've forgotten "argument reconstruction" already.
The problem is that now people think the concept didn't exist before hearing the word "steelman", and can't lookup any preexisting literature about it.
Although if you think that term is hard to understand, I'm sorry to inform you about literally anything written by Europeans, which is more or less made to be impossible to understand on purpose.
> people who want to do philosophy without studying any of it
strikes me as unnecessary gatekeeping. The context here is fairly basic logic and critical thinking that clearly does not require formal study. I hope that more people who haven't ever been formal students of philosophy employ critical thinking, not less!
By “studying it” I’d be fine with, like, reading Wikipedia articles.
The people who say “steelman” a lot aren’t just busy with other things. They’re like full time bloggers and write huge essays constantly about their own system of critical rationalism and thinking correctly and all that, all philosophical topics.
Avoiding the literature is more intentional. Part because they want their community to use all different words so they’ll sound different and engineer-y. Part because they’d be annoyed that midcentury philosophy already tried their project and now thinks it doesn’t work.
Honeslty, this whole "people should exlusively use our field's words instead of coming up with new words to describe concepts of interest to them" attitude always struck me as incredibly elitist.
Language is mutable and redundant. Different people come up with similar concepts independently over centuries and that's fine. Nobody has a copyright on philosophy.
That she dares to be critical of the Hindu caste system. Twice bad because she is a woman and a Dalit. Not that any of that should matter, but we live in the world we live in.
> France appeared to be one of the least racially tolerant countries on the continent, with 22.7 percent saying they didn't want a neighbor of another race.
https://medium.com/who-is-the-american-hindu/why-do-we-say-n... is one example (this is the refutation, the actual article by the lecturer is linked there). Another is a lecture titled "Why Savarnas rape", as a reaction to the series of rapes in Uttar Pradesh in 2020. Savarnas are basically the opposite of Dalit, namely members of the upper caste.
I find it very interesting that the group in power is trying very hard to suppress any criticism, basically silencing the disadvantaged minority (within the Indian diaspora).
The usual argument would be that this isn't profitable or contributing to the bottom line, and would serve only to inflame tensions/unrest etc...
Thereby it's so disruptive it's antithetical to getting things done.
Two options arise out of it:
Hire someone else not prone to or going through this societal conflict at the moment ($$$), or forbid the topic and risk losin conscientious objectors amongst workers/leadership.
The executive case with a shareholder value tilt would be avoid and reject the conversation, sink the risk, evaluate fallout, and hire replacements as necessary. You've still done your fiduciary duty, but damn those meddlesome cats.
The Stakeholder value executive prioritizing social change would likely engage with the topic, seeing it as an opportunity to raise awareness, get free press, attract talent, etc.
I can only really see a case for suppressing it if it were something you couldn't afford to not have.
When you realize pur financial markets are optimized not for solving problems per se, but extracting wealth and fueling fiscal growth, such behavior patterns start making sense.
The goal is trying something out, if it doesn't measure up, it's yeeted in the bin.
Besides which, you're expecting rationality and consistency out of people in positions of power. You already lost. People concerned with the issue of maximally optimizing for wealth accrual are seldom burdened with a burning need to be rational and consistent. At least I've seen precious few positive examples thereof.
> The movement was launched in 1956 by Ambedkar when nearly half a million Dalits – formerly untouchables – joined him and converted to Navayana Buddhism
So it's a Buddhist deal. Is Buddhism anti-hinduism? Um, it isn't exactly pro-hinduism, now is it?
I'm not sure that's the steeliest man, but it's a start.
The right-wing party line on this is that caste was invented by the British to conquer and divide Indians, and has nothing to do with Hinduism. So if you claim castes still exist, you're by definition a Hinduphobic colonialist. The awkward fact that jati/varna is extensively covered in pre-British Hindu scriptures is handwaved away through claiming it's all spiritual metaphors and being a Brahmin was all about mental purity etc, not bloodlines.
In largely the same way that segregation was framed as a "Southern Way of Life", yes, that's what it seems like to me too. Civil rights era apologia was filled with descriptions of how separate but equal was a perfectly fine system and how everyone was OK with it down south. I get the same vibe here.
I'm not in India and not really qualified to comment, but I think the big missing context in all this that Hindu nationalism is the prevalent social and political movement in India right now.
Apartheid is the prevalent social and political movement in Quebec right now as well. As the world shifts to the Right (for whatever reason), this sh*t reappears. Or reasserts. People always hate "them".
Bill 21. Bill 96. What language you can speak. What school you can/can't go to. What you have to say in stores. What you can and can't wear. Where you can and can't work. Hell, they admitted the damn laws violate their own charter of rights and freedoms when they passed them.
But they "they want to preserve their culture". I chose apartheid to avoid Godwin'ing the discussion, but it applies there as well. Or the US South in the 50's, and all those other places where a group feels threatened by "them" and are disinterested in expanding the definition of society or even citizenship.
Bill 96 does look like segregation to me, but comparing it to apartheid or Nazism might be a slight exaggeration.
I just don't think these issues are as simple as "good or bad". At the end of the day, English overtaking French is a real phenomenon. Are they supposed to just sit there and let it happen only to end up with a possibly more divided society where half the population can't communicate with the other?
I'm not saying the solution they came up with is right (actually I think having to pass these types of laws is just a sign of weakness) but at the same time I refuse to think that it's fuelled by xenophobia.
No, not Nazism although there are resemblances to the Nuremberg laws. Apartheid, however, is a reasonable label in that the in-group is creating a (hostile) set of rules that enforces their world view in spite of others. They know it's discriminatory. It's against various UN and country level guarantees of freedom, and the sole justification is "it's supported by the majority".
Hell, lynching black folk were "supported by the majority" in the US back then. Might still be, based on where you look. Change-or-leave isn't a terribly even-handed approach when you expect it to NOT be applied to yourself when outside of Quebec.
And as others have said and written, if you have to take such aggressive measures to preserve one's culture, it's already dead. Trying to make the internet be something other than English or Mandarin is a fools errand. I would think it's being driven by the boomers who have spent their lives in pursuit of a goal. They'll accept the scorched-earth "victory" independent of the cost, as otherwise their adult lives were mis-spent or wasted. Their counterparts had 'Nam to deal with, or the wars of the 80's and 90's.
They could have tried to make the situation positive and played along with the rules of civil society. But they chose not to and Montreal (again) will pay the price. The rest of the province couldn't care less.
The problem is caste discrimination is often (always?) justified in Hindu religious terms, so it's easy to end up with things that are kinda muddled between anti-caste and anti-Hindu perspectives. For example, the "Caste Privilege 101" article on the author's reading list which I was reading (https://theaerogram.com/caste-privilege-101-primer-privilege...) says that "Hinduism is not a safe space for us" and that being Hindu or Sikh suggests you might have caste privilege. I'm not sure that the author meant to imply she hates Hindus or that Hindus are inherently bad people - but I can understand why a devout Hindu might disagree with me.
Say, by analogy, what if another manager in a different situation, who made the 'cancel' decision on a talk, was concerned that the lecture they were being asked to approve was extremist? Then say, if Americans knew Hindu culture they might agree, just as they understand why they wouldn't invite their own untouchables to speak.
In this activist case, it's absolutely offensive to compare the Hindu untouchables with our untouchables because theirs are born into it where ours are just uneducated or indoctrinated and it would be such a grotesque insult to those people living in India, or anywhere in the world, that no serious person could even compare them out loud, and I'm even taking a considerable personal risk to write the comparison hypothetically.
But what if that's how that manager felt? How would "we" (progressive, though still mostly white, hegemonic We) respond to a speaker representing our own untouchables, and even though the comparison itself is so disgusting?
The steelman case for the protests and for the manager is that they are acting on convictions as strong and (they believe) principled as any of our own, however unjustly in this case. Even though they're wrong, until we understand their own complete revolt that caused them to take such a reckless stance in this case, there is no way to engage with them, or understand the source of the conflict. This isn't mere empathy or a "both sides,"-ism, as I don't think we can empathize with someone we fundamentally know is so wrong. However, I do think one can have compassion for everyone involved, and it is immensely difficult, as it requires imagining something you are truly revolted by, and then imaging what it would be like for someone like a Dalit friend or someone you loved to see you feel that way about them. The tension between the heartbreak at imagining their eyes in that moment and then also the feeling of what can only be described as disgust for people with the most offensive values, is I think, the compassion, where you feel both the revolt at being confronted with the very worst of the worst, and also what it feels like that no matter what you do and how much goodness you bring that you will always be an object of social disgust. This is why compassion is hard, but beautiful, but so very hard! Being able to do that suggests a greatness of soul to me.
The steelman case here isn't about pretending the broken logic of the protesting managers beliefs was somehow true, it's from asking, what if someone you loved or were responsible for felt one way or the other in this conflict about you? There is a basic misundertanding between two parts of a culture, where maybe these Brahmins don't trust the Dalits and the Dalits interpret that as contempt, which is returned by being provocative and giving the other just what they might expect? Bit of a homily, but in this sense, the steelman case shows how a specific kind of compassion might provide some future basis on which to establish both trust and respect, even if it's a very high bar.
I don't care about caste, and I haven't met anyone who does for the decade I've lived in the US. It doesn't mean there aren't any Indians in the US that care about it; there surely must be given that such Indians existed back in India. I'm just making it clear that it's not 100% of Indians in the US that care about caste, as your question seems to imply.
People from lower castes care because they face discrimination, obviously.
People from higher castes, even if they're open-minded on the topic of caste, likely have relatives who aren't -- especially if they're the only member of a large family who has left India. Children have been disowned or even murdered by their relatives for marrying a member of a lower caste; it's really hard to escape that sort of prejudice.
I'm Indian, live in the US (Midwest, south, outside big cities) and I'm happy to just meet another fellow Indian lol. Couldn't care less about caste or language or whatever.
We are already so far away from home, atleast we can look out for each other.
I'm not in tech so I've never lived anywhere with many Indians. I'm guessing these types of issues start to crop up when you have higher chances of meeting many people in your exact social group back in India and end up forming cliques.
I don't and no one I know does. I'm happy to leave all that crap behind. Apparently some people would rather drag those issues along with them into a new country that was previously free of this particular scourge :/
To be fair - I think James Baldwin explained it so it's not just Indians. For a lot of folks, you feel some sense of security about your place in the world when you know there's someone "lower" than you.
I'm torn between thinking it's dumb to give talks on caste at work and thinking Google is weak for giving in to people who were complaining about this talk for whatever reason. I suppose I hold both opinions.
Caste is apparently as much a reason for discrimination as sex, sexual orientation, race or religion. Those topics need to be addressed at workplaces. Refusing to so is actually part of the problem.
Not trying to make it ad-hominem, but are you from a race/gender that is the majority in your workplace?
I think many people feel like you...the problem is that some races / gender receive discrimination that the majority might not see.
If we take it to gender, a male might have never received any sexual harassment in his entire life and so might think it's a waste of time to talk about this in the workplace (spoiler: it's not). If a minority of the people in the office are women, maybe a majority of people will feel talking about sexual harassment is a waste of time.
While caste systems might seem far off and irrelevant in the modern world there is actually a rather extreme amount of caste based discrimination in work places. It's an issue we need to talk about and resolve.
I can't talk to this particular activist's positions, but Dalit Activism is a very relevant and worthy cause - it causes pretty significant discrimination even in the US.
India is far too large for place of birth to be a reliable indicator of caste seeing as all cases are everywhere in Hindu majority areas and many areas they’re a minority. Surname, yes.
I don’t want to pile on or anything, because it seems like you’re engaging in good faith, but I don’t understand the quickness to say “I don’t think this should be discussed at work” if you don’t even know the basics. Why is the default position not to be curious to learn more?
You don't know anything about religion X. Does that mean work is a good place to discuss religion X?
Social, political, religious, or just generally ideas that are likely to make people uncomfortable are, generally, not good things to talk about at work. I shouldn't have to worry about my well meaning coworker wanting to save my soul, win my vote, or whatever. My coworker and I need to work together to solve the problems of our business - those other topics don't help us coordinate and might hurt our ability to coordinate by sowing dissension.
Until very recently it was well understood that certain topics are better off not discussed at work. This is not a dearth of curiosity but a surfeit of common sense.
Christianity gets shoved into people's face all the time at work, on the road, at sports games, at the state and local legislature, at the school board, at the fxxxing presidential inauguration. Why don't we throw Hinduism in there for good measure? What's more fuel on the fire?
To my knowledge it's a global issue but the US brings a lot of skilled immigrants from India and is a lot more proactive in addressing workplace discrimination. I'm only aware of the US and Canadian issues with Dalit caste discrimination - maybe someone else can help shed light on other areas? I'm sure that the UK has enough ethnic Indian residents that it's had to deal with it as well?
We get talks about discrimination based off race and gender at work. Caste discrimination is even more deserving because it's much less obvious to non-indians.
Seems like a very fraught topic to me. If I'm part of an interview loop for an Indian person, and one more or of my peers are Indian, how am I supposed to know if my peers are being caste-prejudiced? I would not be able to tell if the candidate was the good caste or the bad caste and asking "What caste is this guy?" seems highly inappropriate. If my peers support the candidate - is that because they like his caste? If they oppose the candidate - do they dislike it?
I have been a part of something like 150 interview loops. In that time I think I've interviewed exactly 1 white woman. In her case, everyone but a single person was in favor of hiring, and that one holdout was adamantly opposed (and eventually won). The person against hiring never said "I hate her because she's a white woman" but instead had reasonable sounding issues.
Given that "white woman" is such a rare category to interview, and, I assume, Dalit is pretty rare as well, AND I don't even regularly interview with the same set of people - how could I possibly tell when another interviewer is motivated by prejudice? Unless the interviewer says they are motivated by prejudice I'm either going to have to give them the benefit of the doubt or make a heckuva leap to accuse them of something.
I think in part because there is direct legislature that makes certain hiring practices illegal and cause for retaliation (obviously this is fraught with problems in proving intent like everything, but if I'm from a particular ethnicity and I have a track record of dismissing candidates that are able to be isolated down to a protected trait rather than ability to do the job, then I can see that as being relatively obvious.) but Like i said it's fraught with external factors, but as far as I know a caste isn't considered a protected class (probably because it doesn't have strict parallels in the West).
I'm familiar with the broader social context of gender and race in the US. So when I see, for example, a coworker who consistently argues that female candidates are too aggressive, I can gently prod the discussion towards focusing on his technical feedback and deferring to the other interviewers for soft skills. With caste discrimination, I have absolutely no idea what the equivalent would be, and it'd surely be inappropriate to corner one of my Indian coworkers in the break room and ask her to teach me all the common Dalit stereotypes.
If that is what the subject of the talk was then I completely agree it would have been appropriate and rescind whatever negative thought I expressed in the parent. (And by "that" I mean "A practical guide to detecting caste-based prejudice and what to do about it.")
It's this naive idea that somehow same tactics which have clearly failed in regards to white/black race relations, would work on a totally different culture. And yes, I know you may think that this woman giving this talk would be someone who knows a thing or two about the Indian culture, but you would be wrong. All she knows is how to sell an offering which western executives would pay for.
Lemme put it this way, if the solution required to fix the problem could be one of the following, which one do you think you would go for:
1. Performing caste cleansing rituals throughout all teams
2. Hiring a caste system expert to give a talk in the company
3. Identifying the troublesome castes by their surnames and making special reports on managers with that caste names regarding any issues of caste discrimination.
Which one of these options would you go for?
Even if the effectiveness of the option 2 is the least, it still would be the most preferred option by all companies because it's the best bang for their buck. In fact, even if these talks were actually toxic for the morale of the company among the Indian diaspora in your company, this gives the most 'color' of action by the company (and when companies like Google resist as in this case, they look bad).
End result: When you need a quick and expedient action to be performed in case of dealing with an issue you have no real understanding of, you are bound to hire scammers whose main job is to give you a totally fake service with no outcome being achieved.
Google often gets bogged down with culture wars. The internal discussion threads are sometimes productive, but often rife with this stuff and it’s a massive time sink for many googlers.
It makes as much sense as a talk on racial discrimination or gender identity discrimination to me, so I'm curious what's perceptively different about it to others.
Never worked at Google. Are such talks about social issues a regular occurrence at Google or other big tech firms? Who would be the intended audience and what would be the goals for the speaker, the hosting employee or the host company?
Perhaps an alternative idea can be considered: this ontology people have latched onto isn’t accurate and there can be people who don’t know the above answer because indeed they aren’t exposed to a whole lot of social issue talks at work.
Having talks on academic subjects is fine. Companies should do more of that. The issue is that corporate diversity discussions happen with all the education and nuance appropriate to elementary schoolers.
Because most of the people in these roles aren't actually well-educated in 'best practices', you get stuff like mandatory non-anonymized surveys that ask whether people are trans and send the results to managers, or slideshows talking about minority representation that omit Asians, Hispanics, and other 'common' groups.
Because people have a hard time getting the difference between Suunit and Shiit moslems. The caste system is even harder to grasp, for us Westerners Indians are Indians. So it seems caste based discrimination was imported through the back door, without anyone realy noticing.
There are no examples of diaspora communities from the Indian subcontinent that have maintained caste discrimination after immigration stopped. If Indians stop being able to tell the difference I doubt the ability of Westerners to do so.
There is 0 percent chance a white person could ever tell the caste of an indian. You need to be indian indian. That being said any human can detect wrongful behaviour and is responsible for calling it out.
Yes, a regular occurrence for the social issues that are either uncontroversial (e.g., reducing poverty, improving education, dealing with pandemics) or only lightly controversial (e.g., climate change, misinformation in the media, etc.).
For the more controversial topics, the talks are vetted more carefully, to make sure they align with the political position of the company, and that they don't raise too much opposition from any groups within the company.
The goal of the speaker is to convert as many (preferably influential) people as possible to their viewpoint. The goal of the hosting employee is typically the same, at least for the controversial issues (since those are usually highly politicized). The goal of the host company is to promote themselves as a bastion of certain (good, from their perspective) ideas, and/or as a place for thoughtful discussions.
I don't know what it's like now, but in the old days, Googlers invited speakers to give "tech talks" on whatever subjects they liked. Sometimes they were only tangentially related to tech. Also, there were often authors who stopped in on their book tours. I don't think they had to be technical books at all. It was quite a fun benefit at the time, making it a bit more like college.
I first learned about effective altruism when GiveWell did a tech talk.
Also, in 2008, all the major presidential candidates stopped in Mountain View to give a campaign speech. And then there was the time OK Go gave a concert, due to the YouTube connection I presume.
Those were different times. That was mostly before the anti-tech backlash, when Google could seemingly do no wrong.
Even in the early days there were frequently minor controversies, but things got much more fraught by 2015 or so.
I have never worked at Google or a big tech firm, but I subscribe to and have listened to more than a few "Talks at Google." Wikipedia says this has existed since 2007.
The website says, "The world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers and doers all in one place. Talks at Google. Where great minds meet."
The last 5 talks in my feed:
- LGBTQ & Spirituality
- Neurdiversity: How to Love, Live, and Work Better
- A Discussion On His Book "Jews Don't Count"
- A Lookback at Japanese Internment & a Storied Writing Career
- No One Understands You and What To Do About It
I don't think I've directly answered your questions, but these talks touch on social issues, tech valuations, Mars and space exploration, physical and athletic performance, health and diet, and I guess anything else that Googlers would be interested in hearing about.
The biggest controversy I remember from the old days of Google was the goji berry war.
A pastry chef at a café on the Google Mountain View campus put out some nice little cakes with Tibetan goji berries. The sign said "Free Tibet Goji Berry Cake". This was obviously a sly nod to the Free Tibet campaign, and also true, as the cake was free, this being Google.
Some local Chinese Googlers complained to kitchen management, saying that the idea of freeing Tibet was anti-Chinese. The pastry chef was suspended by the catering company.
The story soon reached the high traffic "misc" mailing list. Many US Googlers objected to the pastry chef being punished for what they considered inoffensive free speech. A fund was started to compensate the cook for lost wages. There was a campaign to reinstate her immediately.
At least one Chinese Googler threatened to quit if the cook was not fired, and was encouraged to go ahead and quit by people who sided with the cook. Some Chinese Googlers shared their interesting opinions about Tibet, e.g. they said the Dalai Lama is a Nazi, he is a secret CIA agent, etc.
This new information was met with skepticism and failed to win anybody over to the Chinese side.
Anyway, eventually the pastry chef was reinstated. I don't think anybody quit. It all blew over.
Workplaces are best for doing work, earning income and making light conversation. It is risky to turn them into a battleground for every political and religious issue under the sun.
Just because I know you won’t have a good answer - explain how a Dalit activist being called ‘Anti-Hindu’ when it is Hinduism that calls for the caste based system is not evidence of the exact kind of caste being present at these companies(a publicly documented problem.)
Great, you seem to have a semblance of understanding of the issue. Now go talk to the c-suite execs & even lower level managers that are actively discriminating against people, get them to stop, & then all will be well. Things can revert to the form you & most likely wish it would be.
I would be interested in hearing the perspective of any HN readers who are of south Asian background and working in America. Statements that tech companies in the US have caste discrimination (or reverse discrimination) for South Asians who work there, are hard for me (an Anglo-American) to judge, seeing as if it were happening (either way) there's little chance I would have noticed it.
Check the comments on the last post about this talk cancellation for a lot of that [1] and then check the search, this topic has been discussed a few times before.
I'm Bangladeshi, rather than Indian, so I'm watching this from the sidelines. That being said, I'm of the opinion that activists suck up all the oxygen when it comes to discussions of race in the U.S. A Pew poll a few years ago noted that 90% of Indian Americans think discrimination against Indian Americans in America is a "minor problem" or "no problem at all": https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/16/miss-americ.... But the 10% that think it's a big problem get the biggest platforms.
In reality, it's probably impossible to understand how big or small a problem caste discrimination really is in context. The folks who don't face any negative experiences mostly aren't going to pipe up.
> the 10% that think it's a big problem get the biggest platforms.
Don't you think this might have something to do with the representation of low caste Indians in the US, and that they have to be their own advocates? Minorities have to make disproportional noise to get issues that affect them to be heard to the same degree as others. That's just how it is, otherwise our systems would always only advocate for the majority and every single minority would group would be systemically disadvantaged.
...and how is it we americans accept low/minority caste indians ( i am guessing we are talking about citizens from India as opposed to indigenous)? I am in tech on the west coast and wouldnt know the difference. From my perspective Indian migrants from india are indian. I know no castes. This is subjugation they have brought with them and I am not privy or party to. I also have no ability to fight or side with it since I DO NOT see it ... cuz I have no idea.
I think to side with your point ... the vocal extremists have the mic.
From what I read so far the discrimination is not wasps but rather by other Indians. So no one is saying you are discriminating one care or another but that such discrimination exists even if you don't see it.
I hear ya ... and I am not excusing it since im blinded and immune to it. I am saying tho, that it also isnt enforced here anymore than sharia law or the jewish or other hindu/religious law. It will never hold up in court. I feel strongly (im always open to being wrong) that part of coming here (USoA) is freeing yourself of those burdens (we got our own problems that you gotta deal with now).
I dont burden myself with that knowledge as I find it useless. If someone drags it here with them they need to understand its their baggage.
I have no beef in this, I'm not living in the US and not Indian or south Asian.
The thing that is the issue, again from the little I read, is that such discrimination is brought by other Indians on the Dalit and it's most defyingly bit something they want imported. I didn't figure or yet what is wanted and how but it's not like this is sintering you can blame them for.
I feel like you're making comparisons that aren't really apt. Attempting to enforce sharia law in the US in some communities is quite a bit different (and more difficult) than quiet, difficult-to-prove workplace discrimination.
> If someone drags it here with them they need to understand its their baggage.
If you're a low-caste Indian working in the US, and your high-caste boss discriminates against you, I think you'd feel pretty pissed at someone trying to claim that you're dragging your baggage with you. It's the high-caste boss that's doing the dragging.
I've heard of caste discrimination during my second internship (in Europe, not in the US), so quite early in my career, from a "Yada"(??? Correction would be welcome here), concerning another collegue who came from a lower caste and how he was "lucky" not to be in the US or working with a "Bramin" or another elitist caste.
That's... kinda a irrelevant, though? I don't "see" caste either (I have a close Indian friend who has educated me on the topic, but I don't know the details well enough to, say, identify someone's caste by how they look or by their last name), but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist among the people who perpetuate its evils.
Something like 90% of the Indian immigrants in the US are high-caste (big surprise, lower-caste Indians are less likely to be able to get work visas and travel), so of course this is a minority problem. Certainly not all of that 90% wants to perpetuate the caste system here, but I expect it's not easy to be vocal about it. Doesn't make it any less worthy of investigation, though.
> Something like 90% of the Indian immigrants in the US are high-caste (big surprise, lower-caste Indians are less likely to be able to get work visas and travel), so of course this is a minority problem.
Why do you think this is the case despite one of the most active affirmation programs in the world (just search "Reservation in India" on Wikipedia)? Something like 50-60% of seats in colleges and jobs in the government are reserved for lower castes (not a typo, the Wikipedia page should link you to official Indian constitution websites). I am from India and I genuinely don't know the answer myself.
I'd imagine it's due to a systemic disadvantage. Even if there are programs in place today to attempt to bring equity to the situation, the past and inherited poverty shape us and influence the opportunities we might have.
Systemic? I just pointed out the rights and privileges guaranteed lower castes in the Indian constitution. How much more un-systemic does it get? The past and inherited poverty: for how long? It’s been 70+ years since India’s independence…
There's a collectivist, political, external-locus-of-control assumption to your point. Not everybody thinks of the world in those terms. A lot of minorities are too busy making money to worry about representation or group rights. You can make a lot of noise, or you can spend that time developing skills and a track record that will get people to pay you a lot of money.
A lot of industries are based on the idea of "I don't care if people think they're superior to me as long as they pay me." The savvier ones even exploit this: "I'll get people to think they're superior to others because they pay me" (see: Apple, Rolls Royce, DeBeers, BMW, Louis Vitton, and every other luxury brand). American society is uniquely suited to this sort of mercenary economic climbing, because it brings together lots of people who have no knowledge of each others' previous social hierarchies anyway.
> A lot of minorities are too busy making money to worry about representation or group rights. You can make a lot of noise, or you can spend that time developing skills and a track record that will get people to pay you a lot of money.
Por que no los dos? This is such a tired take -- how is activism at odds with getting good at what you do and working hard? You can absolutely do both. In fact, some of the most helpful activists are folks who made it and give a helping hand to others (e.g. successful black businessmen teaching other black folks to be successful businessmen; successful women in tech helping other women to succeed in tech).
You do realize that this very "capitalism as the great equalizer" take ignores that being underrepresented / disadvantaged also very negatively affects one's economic prospects. Say I'm a woman -- looking at that rare woman in tech who's overcome many sexist hurdles / gotten lucky enough to make it to the top, are you telling me I should be cool with my odds being shittier?
White folks already love yelling about affirmative action because it lowers your already-low odds so very slightly when it comes to Ivy League college admittance. But you'll tell minorities "shut up just work hard activism is stupid" in the same breath.
> There's a collectivist, political, external-locus-of-control assumption to your point.
First of all, minorities ARE collectives even if we don't all contribute equally to our collective causes. And representation is political because policy shapes how we are treated and what our lives look like. A democracy by design favors the majority, so minorities need to be politically convincing that their needs are important too. It's okay to work hard at this, it's okay to want the world to be more meritocratic.
Frederick Douglass could have lived as a free black person and had a much better life than other black folks in the US. There were other free blacks who did less for the collective. Instead, he gave a crap about activism, and used his education and ability to make a difference. Wasn't that great? Plenty of white folks running plantations at the time were inconvenienced by this guy saying black folks should be free and that slavery is bad, and I'm sure they said "you're free why do you give a damn." But some people do give a damn about the people around them and the world they hand to their progeny.
Not every activist is their minority's Frederick Douglass, but you can certainly be a point along that spectrum of activist, in accordance with your ability and concern. Saying that minorities should be "too busy making money" to give a crap about how their children will be treated is some hot garbage.
> American society is uniquely suited to this sort of mercenary economic climbing, because it brings together lots of people who have no knowledge of each others' previous social hierarchies anyway.
Guess I won't convince you of the many glass/bamboo/whatever the fuck ceilings that exist, but it seems obvious that people are _absolutely_ bringing knowledge of previous social hierarchies. Talk to some {black folks, women} in tech and see what kind of bullshit they have to put up with that you don't have to. How many female founder stories can you find that talk about counterparts assuming something due to their gender? You simply cannot escape social prejudice and hierarchy (oh wait, you can, if you're a white male! maybe this is why you're confused).
Most people have limited time, energy, and attention. Time spent on activism will be opposed; you get less bang for your buck because the dominant group will seek to undermine everything you do. Time spent developing skills and seizing opportunities will not be, because it can be done in secret, and if you hit roadblocks just go around them and find other people to do business with.
It's like how if you ask for a raise, you will probably be denied. If you make yourself invaluable to the business and then threaten to quit, you will get that raise.
Slavery and Frederick Douglass is actually a pretty good example. White Northern factory owners won the Civil War - look at the Gilded Age that followed, and how "industrialized society" is just "society" now. Blacks did not. The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction; which was followed by Jim Crow; which was followed by 50s segregation; which was followed by the Civil Rights era; which was followed by Nixon's criminalization of crack, marijuana, and all drugs that were associated with "Black" culture, which led to the creation of a permanent Black underclass. We are still having this debate 150+ years later.
There's an order to acquiring power, and it goes technological -> economic -> cultural -> political -> military. If you try to skip steps (forcing economic development without technological modernization, or political power without acquiring economic and cultural power, or military power without consolidating political power) you don't get durable gains, and your system collapses after 10-15 years.
And I was one of those minority children that was treated as hot garbage. I haven't forgotten. That's made me a pretty avid observer of which tactics actually lead to durable shifts in power balance, and simply asking for more power is not one of them.
> Most people have limited time, energy, and attention. Time spent on activism will be opposed; you get less bang for your buck because the dominant group will seek to undermine everything you do.
Isn't this all obvious stuff? None of which refutes the idea that activism moves the needle and is _required_ for minorities to equalize how they're treated.
> Time spent developing skills and seizing opportunities will not be, because it can be done in secret, and if you hit roadblocks just go around them and find other people to do business with.
This sounds untethered from reality. Consider being a black kid who wants to be an engineer in silicon valley. Your entire ethnicity is heavily underrepresented, so you don't have role models / might not even view working as an engineer as something attainable. Okay say you get past that and work hard, you still get fewer opportunities because bias is real and there are so many unwritten rules about how to play this game (get an internship at these companies! talk to startups! this is how to leetcode!) -- you find a lot of these things out via your connections. But if your entire network is underrepresented, how do you break in?
This is to say nothing of unconscious biases that affect you as a minority. Less favorable interpretation of your interview results, less insider information about how to play the game, fewer opportunities offered due to prejudice about your potential, pay gap.
If you hit these roadblocks, pray tell how you "just go around them" ??? If your advice is "don't protest, just work hard and be that lucky 1 person who made it to the top for your race/gender/whatever" that's pretty shit advice.
> It's like how if you ask for a raise, you will probably be denied. If you make yourself invaluable to the business and then threaten to quit, you will get that raise.
That's the problem though. You can't make yourself invaluable or succeed in your career if folks don't take risks on you. If folks don't give you opportunities. There is a huge opportunity gap for folks born black, born female, in systems of power that disadvantage them. Participating in activism to rectify this isn't a waste of time -- if it doesn't directly benefit the participants, it benefits their children.
> And I was one of those minority children that was treated as hot garbage. I haven't forgotten. That's made me a pretty avid observer of which tactics actually lead to durable shifts in power balance, and simply asking for more power is not one of them.
Pray tell what tactics you're talking about other than "get lucky and work hard and hope the system is less biased and more meritocratic than you think" because that's all I'm hearing in your comments. What "durable shift in power balance" was achieved as a result of this advice?
Activism has a great track record. Consider LGBT rights in the country 20 years ago vs today. Would gay marriage be possible today if not for the tireless work of activism?
You're folks to essentially shut up and work hard in the unfair systems they were born into. It's just not going to work for most of them. And it's not "asking for more power" -- it's _fighting_ for equal treatment and _exercising_ the power they already have to multiplicative effect.
Maybe your main gripe is that this takes a long time and doesn't generally pay off monetarily or career-wise for individuals, since you have to spend your money and time for the collective?
But instead of calling this stupid and at odds with success, why not be more honest and realize you can do that AND also work really hard and succeed with the opportunities you've been given. The existence of full-time activists doesn't diminish the contributions of folks who contribute in other ways, and that you can contribute in other ways does not render full-time activists unnecessary.
My point is more about the notion that the activists represent the views of the minority group. With respect to Indians, you have two levels: Indians as minorities with respect to Americans, and lower castes as minorities with respect to other Indians.
At the first level, the Indians who say there’s lots of discrimination against Indians—the folks getting Apu cancelled—get a lot of air time, but aren’t representative. My point is that the same thing may apply to low caste Indians too. The views of this Dalit activist may or may reflect the experience of low caste Indian Americans.
> My point is more about the notion that the activists represent the views of the minority group.
But aren't often those the people who need that sort of representation the most? Even if 90%[0] of Indians aren't discriminated against, the 10% who suffer discrimination absolutely deserve representation and redress.
[0] Apparently 90% of Indian immigrants in the US are high-caste, so funny how that statistic might seem to line up. This of course makes sense, since low-caste people are probably less likely to be able to obtain the education and financial resources necessary to move to a different country.
Working as intended. Consider PETA vs the Humane Society. One is hated, the other is not. Does PETA not have a right to exist? Their distasteful antics didn't change the relationship between me and the Humane Society though they both advocate for animal welfare.
On the other hand, if you are successful at being convincing (and loud enough) for a minority community you can achieve a lot of good! LGBTQ+ activists have made the lives of young non-binary folks so much better in just the last 30 years: they are a minority, but they were loud and convincing that "maybe we should treat people equally (e.g. right to marry) even if their sexual proclivities are different from our own!"
Groups that really change the shape of society ultimately have to be loud if they're underrepresented, and make a lot of people uncomfortable. Frederick Douglass was a free black man, which was rare for the time. He used his very minority voice to make a racket that helped propel centuries of social change for the better. Would you prefer he didn't succeed / couldn't have a platform? It's still up to loud minority communities to actually be convincing, after all. All the hate campaigning like those "god hates fags" stuff won't ever get anywhere because it's not convincing to most people.
You're completely off. Not even in the same zipcode regarding the stats. The article you're citing for your stats says 10% of Indians in the US felt racism from regular Americans. Nothing about caste or internal casteism.
It's talking about the kind of racism you see on H1B threads here, like the outright confession of violating federal law that I once saw in a comment "I stopped giving interviews to Indians because I found they lie in the resume".
If you can't answer this question with respect to the opinions of Indian-Americans of traditionally disadvantaged castes (and to be fair, neither can I answer it), what are the chances that the random mid-level Google exec who made this decision could answer it, or indeed is even aware of the question itself? If we assume that chance is quite low, the question seems like a distraction.
> If we assume that chance is quite low, the question seems like a distraction.
I disagree with that—the question matters either way. Activism creates conflict, and ordinary members of minority groups may or may not feel like the conflict is justified in comparison to the actual scope of the problem.
Other Indians at Google objected to this activist as being anti-Hindu. At the very least bringing this sort of advocacy into the workplace creates the potential for conflict. Depending on the actual scope of the caste discrimination problem, members of lower castes may or may not feel like the potential for conflict is worthwhile.
I would be interested to see a caste breakdown of that poll, and a more recent poll. Nine years is an eternity in tech. One specific to tech workers would help too.
Those days are long gone. Now, anyone can come to US. Some states in India (Telangana) give you money to study abroad, knowing fully well that those kids emigrate.
> Ofcourse they would. They are mostly those whose parents (or themselves) were privileged enough to make it to the US.
I keep seeing this thrown around, but I am yet to see anyone respond exactly what form this "privilege" takes as it pertains to caste. The Indian constitution was co-written by a very forward thinking Dalit and affirmative action for lower castes is literally written into the Indian constitution. The only "privilege" I know of is that only upper castes can conduct priestly duties etc (at least used to), but I mean cmon that's just clutching at straws...
Privilege is the concept that being born into your social standing, race, gender, etc may confer subtle (and not-so-subtle) benefits. Affirmative action does not solve discrimination toward Dalits, it's one of many reactions & mitigations to it.
Even if you have affirmative action, if you feel like you're going to work or school in a hostile environment, this is a disadvantage to you. Psychological safety is one example of a privilege (e.g. women in silicon valley have inherently less psychological safety than men in the workplace because there are more men, and enough of them make unwanted advances with high enough frequency to force them to think about it).
Dalits have to deal with the stress of potentially being treated differently on the basis of their caste. Even if laws say "you can't discriminate," that doesn't change the interactions they have to have. And even if only a small number (let's say 1%) of people are discriminatory, but you go to a school with 300 people, you're now dealing with 3 folks who you're very uncomfortable around and may bully or hurt you. That's still going to suck. Privilege is not having to think about any of that.
Another example is being gay. You might say "well if you're gay and you live in SF, you are worry free!" But at work, school, or even at the grocery store there could be people who harbor discriminatory feelings and even unconcious biases against you, and it can affect how they treat you. If you're straight, you're lucky (privileged) not to have to deal with that. You also are lucky (privileged) that you can visit Alabama without fearing for your life. I mean, unless you're a straight black man and you encounter police in Alabama. Again, your expectations given that situation are a matter of privilege.
The reason folks harp on privilege so much is that privileged folks often say stuff like "X doesn't happen to me or in my proximity, so it doesn't happen ever." But the only way to know it _really_ doesn't happen is to exist as someone who lacks those privileges and to see what that's like. Since we can't do that, everyone argues about the validity of minority folks sharing their personal experiences.
There are also levels to it, as with anything. Within minority groups, there can be folks who have more relative privilege (e.g. black men vs black women, or dalits vs brahmins, or dark skinned vs light skinned black folks). Most people have some privileges relative to other people, so it's good for us to all understand what those things are when we interact with one another. We already do some amount of this very naturally (e.g. unless you're an asshole, you probably won't tell your poor friend to just buy better clothes if you know they are less privileged than you, and you might not expect your female friend to walk to your place through the city at night).
According to Wikipedia, 1.5% of Indian immigrants to the USA are Dalit. 90% are the high castes. That is interesting coincidence to your quoted statistic of 90% thinking this is a minor problem or no problem at all.
Is it really surprising that the poor and marginalized section of society in India isn't the one getting fancy degrees and immigrating to the USA for tech jobs?
In a lot of cases you don't need to ask "what caste are you", you just need to ask "what's your name". For a vast majority of Indians their last name gives away their caste.
Castes come with plenty of cultural baggage, and the metaphorical 'secret handshakes' shared by people of higher castes can be used to suss out those of a lower caste even if the person of interest is trying to hide their background.
An Indian friend of mine several years ago explained it quite clearly to me: Who do you think has the resources to get an education, get an H1B, then travel halfway around the world? The guy whose parents are sleeping in the hallway?
I think the question is how much it (H1B) costs vs the person's disposable income, in addition to the cost of spending time pursuing it, having a place to do the paperwork, having a stable address and even a stable identity... I'm saying the people who make it to that embassy with the right paperwork are already highly filtered.
I saw this happen in front of my last week. A new coworker said he was vegetarian and the other asked if he was always vegetarian (Brahmin’s are usually vegetarian). Then he asks “oh Bangalore? What part? I used to live there, I know it well.”
In addition to surname, these are all questions that can be used to gather details about someone’s caste.
US immigration policy also selects for high earners, the highly educated and skilled and the already wealthy, those belonging to such groups are also likely to be upper class in their home countries already.
Do you think it’s cheap to immigrate to the US? Even married US citizens can’t bring someone over unless they are middle class. Poor people are treated like shit in the US and no one cares.
Buts it’s funny when we start to care about a tiny portion of the poor people.
Dalits (and many other "backward" castes) get reservations in education and government jobs and promotions all the way up to retirement. If they emigrate and their children become citizens of another country, the children would lose this benefit. These factors could be a reasonable deterrent to emigration, especially now that the difference in pay between India and western countries is not as high as it used to be.
The indian constitution provides reservations for Dalits and other social discriminated groups, many of the Dalits prefer these jobs rather than private sector, moving out of India to a western country is also a costly affair (via education or immigration programs), which many of the dalit families cannot afford. Many of the indians I know want to get out of the country, no wonder, upper caste indians, who has the economic means to move out make up the majority
First of all, that poll is about discrimination against Indian-Americans (presumably based on race or ethnicity), while TFA is about caste-based discrimination.
Secondly, the option below "major problem" in that poll is "minor problem", there is no in-between. In other words, 90% or Indian-Americans think it isn't a major problem, but over half do think there is a problem.
Most importantly, polling opinions about this is the worst method of determining if discrimination exists. A better method would look at objective measures like salary/job/hiring rate/layoff rate/etc of lower-caste Indians compared to Indians as a whole.
To add to what others have said, the original form was a rebuke: "RTFA", meaning "read the fucking article", directed at people who make ignorant comments without having read the article. I first came across it on Slashdot in the late 90s, but I imagine it may have its roots earlier than that, and possibly from somewhere else.
I think nowadays most people use "TFA" (no leading "R") in a fairly benign way, without the aggressive tone of the original.
> Most importantly, polling opinions about this is the worst method of determining if discrimination exists. A better method would look at objective measures like salary/job/hiring rate/layoff rate/etc of lower-caste Indians compared to Indians as a whole.
I don’t get this at all. If we treat a group as fairly as possible and on average they perform worse than other groups, is that evidence of discrimination? Is there a hypothesis that they need to perform equally as well.?
Do you think that lower-caste Indians are inherently inferior to upper-caste Indians at IT work? Because that is what you are proposing here.
The other, much more reasonable explanation, is that these differences are explained by the fact that lower-caste Indians are actually _not_ treated "as fairly as possible" by society.
At the individual level exceptions exist, but when you scale out to sufficiently large populations there aren't random demographics that magically perform worse than everyone else because they're all lazy bums.
I don't think inferiority is implied in that statement. Is there any reason why we expect different groups to perform equally? Can't some groups perform worse than others by random chance? Are there really no other factors besides discrimination that could cause this?
> Is there any reason why we expect different groups to perform equally?
Becuase I do not believe an Indian's caste affects their inherent ability to perform IT work. If you do believe that to be true, of course you should expect a difference even in a perfectly fair society.
> Can't some groups perform worse than others by random chance?
> Are there really no other factors besides discrimination that could cause this?
Well of course there are. For example, if one group is more educated than the other they're going to perform better.
I made it sound as easy as "just see if the numbers don't match up", but in real life the statisticians that do these kinds of analysis account for other factors that could impact performance, so that if there is a difference it's purely "because" of the caste.
If it turns out that 90% of (you name the group) are not discriminated against, but 10% are, does that mean that we should ignore that discrimination? Almost by definition, minorities are the generally the ones who are discriminated against.
This the discrimination problem -- if you are not in the minority, it is much more difficult to appreciate how common it is.
This is the thing I find super weird about a lot of the comments in this thread. In the vast majority of cases, it's the majority discriminating against the minority, often a very small minority. (Which makes sense; I mean, most minority groups don't have the clout to discriminate against members of the majority. Sure, it happens [c.f. apartheid in South Africa], but it's not the common case.)
And yet somehow that makes it not worthy of awareness and fixing? It's a very odd argument to make.
Because the stats have been completely misinterpreted in the thread by all the commenters. Kind of like the work visa vs green card legal requirements mass confusion on HN(and all the other tech forums) whenever H1B is discussed. No one is making that "odd argument".
rayiner's comment about 90% of Indian-Americans not thinking discrimination is a big problem is about perceived racism from non-Indian Americans. If you read the link it's about racist Twitter posts about an Indian American by what looks like white folks. No mention of caste. Nothing about internal casteism in the Indian community.
I say this as a HN'er but sorry HN can be just dumb sometimes.
> If it turns out that 90% of (you name the group) are not discriminated against, but 10% are, does that mean that we should ignore that discrimination?
At the very least, it might mean you don’t bring in an activist that antagonizes members of the majority group, as was allegedly the case here.
Activism undertaken on behalf of a minority group affects the relationship between that minority group and society as a whole. All members of the group have a stake in the overall relationship between the group and other groups.
Across the whole USA, discrimination against any minority isn't a problem for the majority who aren't that minority. So what kind of platform should that minority not get?
> A Pew poll a few years ago noted that 90% of Indian Americans think discrimination against Indian Americans in America is a "minor problem" or "no problem at all"
It’s all relative. My mum (in her 80s) is, as they say, “quite fair”. She’s lived in Boston for decades and when I was visiting a couple of weeks ago I could see she was still subject to the usual Boston racism. But I noticed it was mostly older people — ppl my age (50s) or younger were a lot better, and not just because they don’t notice older people.
I got a lot of appearance genes from my white dad so this issue doesn’t come up for me.
Where I live in Palo Alto the kids I interact with don’t appear to care at all and seem to mix pretty indiscriminately, which is great.
Have you ever lived there? (I went to high school in Boston and university in Cambridge). Of all the places I've lived in the USA (Massachusetts, NY, Texas, California) Massachusetts was by far the most overtly unashamedly racist, with certain Boston neighborhoods particularly bad.
I was just visiting a few weeks ago and a couple of my friends told me "it's not as bad as it used to be" but when I asked, admitted it hadn't improved that much from the late 70s/early 80s that we remembered.
Just a casual example: my mum entered her retirement home with some groceries, using her own electronic key, and was told "deliveries are to be made through the service entrance." This to a woman who has been living there for years and whom the "diversity board" keeps trying to recruit (as it's always been 100% white people).
This attitude is deeply rooted. Remember, though Massachusetts was famously abolitionist, its immense wealth started out from funding slave voyages and slave mortgages. And of course the Bay Colony was founded by a shipload of notoriously intolerant people.
I am one and I have never seen anything casteist in the US, for what it's worth. I have been friends with and worked closely with dozens of people with Indian bosses all the way up to CEOs, who would have mentioned or confided such discrimination, and have come across exactly zero instances of caste being an issue. In fact, no one even discusses someone's else caste and most of the time no one knows others' caste, except some guesses from last names or whether someone is vegetarian or not. Many lower caste people in India converted to Christianity and they've been treated really well(as friends, coworkers, being hired by other Indians) as far I as can tell. Same with Muslim Indians who are also quite a sizeable number both back home and here.
The only time it ever came up for discussion is in the context of someone's parents in India preferring their own caste folks as brides/grooms for arranged marriages back home(similar to the very high rates of race discrimination in dating in the US) and even that has trended down a lot recently with everyone becoming more progressive. My sense is that there are isolated cases here and there, and that it's not systemic, and that it's also rapidly getting better with time both back home and with 2nd generation immigrants in the US.
Just curious, for your personal experience do you know the caste distribution of your indian friends? I too haven't seen much of anything casteist at work or among my friends, but I'm not discounting that it exists and potentially at larger scale than I've personally experienced especially since almost all my friends are brahmins or the caste right below that. You'd have to have a large enough sample of low-caste friends to really understand the experience of low-caste individuals.
How is that ironic? A part of anti-racism is understanding what's going on, how people identify themselves, and how people view others.
I feel like being unable (or unwilling) to ask these sorts of questions is the realm of the head-in-the-sand people who claim they're "colorblind", and somehow believe that if we just ignore race and racism it'll somehow magically just go away.
So lets say the tech companies start requiring every Indian looking person to self identify their caste(with penalties if found lying later) on their employee profiles so that everyone in the company can look for signs of casteism to fight it. Same with all Indian looking interviewee to monitoring hiring bias.
Do you think that will tend to increase or decrease discrimination in the companies against various caste groups? Note that caste is much harder to find than race, and many Indians in the US don't care enough about caste to try and find out, but some may now subconsciously or consciously discriminate in both illegal and legal(friendships, dating, invites to social events etc. like racism in America) ways.
> So lets say the tech companies start requiring every Indian looking person to self identify their caste
This is a straw man to represent fighting caste bias. Clearly, asking folks to self-identify their caste and somehow creating a list of low-caste folks is not going to be very productive. This is like that scene in "The Office" where Michael Scott makes a "do not mock" list which turns into a "do mock" list.
Ideally what we're looking for is a setup wherein, given the situation that someone who is low-caste is working with a lot of high-caste individuals and files a report about caste discrimination, that this is taken seriously and that a procedure exists to prevent retaliation / yields outcomes that protect the victim.
It's not that different from general discrimination right? How do you prove someone is racist or sexist? There are just different markers, and different lines that can be crossed. If a male coworker gives unwanted contact e.g. touches a female coworker's thigh, that's crossing a line; even if it's not easy to prove that it happened, you would hope that your workplace would know how to react to this & help your female coworkers to achieve psychological safety. Folks suffering from caste-discrimination deserve the same.
Solving all of these problems is clearly not easy. We don't have to come up with the solutions in internet comments, but there are very big, very obvious problems with discrimination in the workplace and to date it generally sucks to be on the victim side of it. You can't just say "nobody suffers from this because caste is hard for _me_ to personally understand or find, and I haven't _personally_ seen it." You don't work at every company, and you don't have to in order to understand that Indian representation is higher at various companies, and some people do care about this and do wrongly mistreat those they view as inferior to them. Why can't you just say you agree that this is wrong, understand that some folks are saying it happened to them, and leave it at that?
That's... quite the straw man you've come up with there. I don't think it's really even necessary to respond to it, because that's something that just wouldn't happen, and isn't even particularly related to what is happening, or what I was talking about.
> I mean if everyone just ignored race there would literally be no racism.
But that's the problem, it's not possible because even if you try, unconscious bias means we all fail to ignore race (and gender, and height, and all these other things about people). The only thing you can do is accept that race bias exists and learn about how to unbias as much as possible. A lot of corporate trainings involve unbiasing exercises that are really helpful if you go into it with the right mindset (discovering your biases and then working to be vigilant about them).
Thanks for encouraging me to read more about the training my workplace required me to do. Based on what I've read, seems like there's no measurable change in people's long term behavior when given unbiasing training (sad...), but it doesn't change that you can in fact measure peoples' implicit associations (unconcious biases).
I wasn't actually talking about the training, I was talking about the concept of unconscious bias. So, keep reading. The implicit association test is what it's all based on but it doesn't have any test/retest reliability. You can test someone and it'll tell you they're a raging racist without even knowing it, and if you test them again 10 minutes later it'll tell you the opposite. It's junk science which is why unconscious bias training doesn't do anything - the problem it claims to be solving isn't real.
"The original IAT paper is worth revisiting. You only really need to read page 1475. The construct validity evidence is laughable. The whole thing is based on N=26 and they find no significant correlation between the IAT and explicit measures of racism. But that's OK, Greenwald says, because the IAT is meant to find secret racists ("reveal explicitly disavowed prejudice")! The question of why a null correlation between implicit and explicit racial attitudes is to be expected is left as an exercise to the reader. The correlation between two racial IATs (male and female names) is .46 and they conveniently forget to mention the comically low test-retest reliability. That's all you need for 13k citations and a consulting industry selling implicit bias to the government for millions of dollars."
It's kinda funny to claim that something isn't real, because some studies done weren't valid, but then not provide evidence to the contrary.
Being unable to replicate studies showing that something is real doesn't mean that thing is not real, it just means we don't know.
This is of course just my experience, but I know that I've had unconscious biases that I've later managed to surface and suss out (and hopefully eradicate). So maybe unconscious bias isn't as common as these studies you don't like seem to suggest, but it certainly is real, as I've experienced it myself.
Is it fair to call dating preferences “race discrimination”? And without looking at any real stats, I’d guess that the US has more interracial dating/marriage than most countries.
Note that I didn't call it racism. But it definitely fits the definition of discrimination by race. What else would you call this and the stark change from the South and rural places, to the coasts and cities? And higher rates of interracial marriages isn't saying much when the baseline for comparison is low.
>When I relocated from my predominantly Black suburb in Dallas, Texas to an immensely diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, I didn’t expect to receive so many matches on Tinder and Hinge from non-Black men. I had always found myself in mostly white spaces — college, jobs, vacations — yet white men never took a deep interest in me before I moved to the East Coast. And while I had spent two years dating a German guy who was studying abroad at my university, it was only by transplant that a non-Black person really showed interest in courting me beyond a “you’re pretty for a Black girl” comment.
>Eventually, I stopped swiping on non-Black men altogether. There had been several cases before when a white man would match with me and then DM me something obscure like my skin tone reminding him of chocolate or feeling the need to tell me he’s always wanted to fuck a Black girl. I found it ludicrous that these men actually thought that was the way to a Black woman’s heart — or panties — and would unmatch them instantly. But in New York City, the progressive melting pot of America, white men (and Asian and Latino men for that matter) wanted to take me out for dinner and drinks, probed my interests, and complimented my photos in a respectable manner.
If you refuse to consider someone for something (anything!) based on their race, then, by definition, that is race-based discrimination.
I think many people are a lot more tolerant of discrimination in dating, though, even if it's (IMO) unfortunate. People who don't date outside their race are really closing their minds and their worlds to a lot of potentially great possibilities. I get that many people do it because of parental approval/disapproval, and I can absolutely understand the desire not to piss off parents in that way, but it's still a shame.
Are you from a higher caste or a lower one? In the '90s, if a usenet discussion turned to how racism basically doesn't exist anymore, one might question whether this was shaped by the group with access to usenet being almost entirely white.
Here on HN I have to question whether the voice of lower caste Indians is proportionally represented, and if not, why that might be.
Most Indian (or Indian origin) people wouldn’t openly discuss caste and honestly wouldn’t even implicitly judge anyone for it. But a minority do, and often if you’re not yourself from a caste they think is “untouchable” you might never realize or notice anything.
I was in the states for a decade and have encountered numerous cases of bigoted Indian and Indian origin people in power (both academia and industry) who discriminate against caste. Dalit discrimination is one, but there’s actually a more common Brahmin superiority thing as well, which I tend to find easily because I look Brahmin (don’t ask me, that’s what these guys tell me) but I’m not one, so I’ve had 4-5 instances when these Bigots found me because I was eating chicken and they had to lecture about my sin.
The irony I point to them is that If they truly are trying to follow scriptures or whatever then they should remember that their caste is not allowed to cross oceans lol.
> I’ve had 4-5 instances when these Bigots found me because I was eating chicken and they had to lecture about my sin.
Oh haha that has happened to me as well, I’m an “upper” caste fellow and eat meat on occasion and have been lectured by one of these guys on how I am doomed to be reborn as a worm or something! Shitty people exist everywhere I guess..
"
a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip. Off camera, two other men in uniform, who looked like the lighter man, were holding down the darker man from the other side of the police car as dusk approached in Minneapolis. Yet another man in uniform, of Asian descent and thus not in the dominant caste, stood near, watching, immobilized, it seemed, at a remove from his own humanity and potential common cause, as the darker man slipped out of consciousness. We soon learned that the man on the ground, George Floyd, had been accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, and, like uncountable Black men over the centuries, lost his life over what might have been a mere citation for people in the dominant caste.
"
Participation in the conversation is allowed as long as you're respectful. Everyone learns something for the first time some time if they are to learn at all.
> Anyone who finds a comment analogising race in America to caste in India insightful knows nothing about caste.
I will respectfully disagree strongly. I have read the wikipedia links you provided to back your prior claim that 'caste' is not analogous to 'race'. My readings so far, even based on the very links you provided, shows that it appears to be very much race and skin color related. Literally, the word you mentioned, "Varna" means skin color! "Varna contextually means "colour, race, tribe, species, kind, sort, nature, character, quality, property" of an object or people in some Vedic and medieval texts.[4] Varna refers to four social classes in the Manusmriti.[4][5]"
That's... not really caste, though? I mean, ok, caste systems are determined by heredity, as is skin color, but that's not really the same thing. One's caste is enforced by social convention, while one's skin color just... is.
My understanding from a brief examination of published papers is that it is a significant component of it though.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285414433_Mapping_C... " Color and Caste Discrimination The belief in Aryan racial supremacy dominates social hierarchy practices in India. Upper caste members claim a superior lineage by tracing their “genes” to Aryans, connoting a “natural superiority” over “Shudra” and “ex-untouchables.” (The term “ex-untouchables” refers to Scheduled Castes, also known as Avarna (outside four Varna), Outcastes, Panchama, Antyaja, etc.) This chapter uses terms such as Dalits, ex-untouchables interchangeably, to refer to this population, though the socio-legal term defined to this population is Scheduled Castes—deemed as non-Aryans. Aryans textually are described as a pure, noble, and superior race: physically tall, with sharp noses and lighter skin color. Dasyus or Dasas, on the contrary, are considered of lowly origin and racially inferior due to their dark skin. Such stratification based on skin color is perhaps one of the oldest forms of discrimination and domination in human society. "
> My understanding from a brief examination of published papers is that it is a significant component of it though.
Another point of view [0]:
> The view taken by many that caste is invariably related to the skin color variability found in India’s population, and that all Dalits and the lower caste in India are darker skinned, seems a grossly erroneous view. Throughout India, one can find individuals with varied degrees of skin tone in each of the different caste groups, Dalits, or Brahmins alike. However, skin colour is more location specific than caste specific because of India’s widely varied temperatures and geographical conditions. Most of the population in Jammu and Kashmir and other northern states will share fairer skin tone irrespective or their class or caste as compared to their southern Indian counterparts. In states like Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh, many lower caste men and women have the same colour shade as their upper caste counterparts and vice versa.
> One can find dark skinned Brahmins as well as very light colored Dalits.
The author agrees that skin tone discrimination is a serious problem in India, but she sees skin tone and caste as mostly orthogonal dimensions of discrimination.
[0] Neha Mishra, “India and Colorism: The Finer Nuances”, Washington University Global Studies Law Review, vol. 14 n. 4 (2015)
In my opinion, publicizing the apparent discrimination does more to propagate it than get rid of it. The right way is to get successful as a group and change perceptions based on pure success numbers.
I'll make the analogy clear: systemically oppressed people should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop complaining (because it just makes it worse for themselves).
Except they’re not lazy, all the Indians here in the US are very successful and the distinction all but disappears within one generation because it becomes impossible to tell apart castes when everyone starts speaking with an American accent and has American mannerisms. It’s just a matter of keeping on and letting the problems solve themselves.
I don’t think you can use the same strategies that work with other minority groups in the US.
The vast, vast majority of South Asians working in tech jobs in the USA will say that caste based discrimination isn't a real problem here. While it may be true, also remember that you are talking to the cream of the crop of Indian society. The same category of people living in India (say techies in Bangalore) would say that such discrimination isn't a huge problem over there either, but they are also the ones who have benefited from the system their entire lives. Talk to the people cleaning their toilets and it'll be a very different story.
…but then it still wouldn’t be a problem of discrimination in the US; it’d be a problem in India.
The ultimate question is whether that discrimination gets carried forward into the US and continues to be executed here; not whether caste-discrimination happens somewhere in the world
Inherent biases don't automatically disappear when someone gets on a plane and crosses some borders. Even more so when such discrimination isn't illegal here like it is back home and isn't part of corporate policy or any training material. There are enough reports and even lawsuits of such practices in Silicon Valley:
>Devesh Kapur, a professor of South Asian studies at Johns Hopkins University, found that in 2003, only 1.5 percent of Indian immigrants in the United States were Dalits or members of the lower-ranked castes.
>Dalit engineers said that most Indian workers from upper castes do not seem aware of their caste privilege and believe caste bias is a thing of the past, despite the fact that high-profile tech CEOs and board members, such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon board member Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of Pepsi, are Brahmins, or members of the highest caste.
What does this even mean? With 1.5% of Indians in the US, just with the probability of numbers, why would anyone expect a high profile CEO out of two examples to be a lower caste Indian? And also with those examples they seem to be implying that Americans are casteist? How does the ladder of managers who decide promotions look like at, say, Pepsi? Were they all Indians that are holding the other 1.5% of Indians from rising up to the level of CEO of Pepsi?
It's a problem here because low-caste Indians do make it to the US, just in very small numbers compared to high-caste Indians. And if they still suffer discrimination, shouldn't we as a society try to fix that? Perhaps it's even more critical here, as the low-caste group is an even smaller minority here, and so you'd expect they have an even harder time standing up for themselves. Especially given that they're often here on H1-B visas (or similar), and making waves at work could get them fired and and forced to leave the country.
It's a hell of a deal with the devil they have to make: put up with the same discrimination they suffered at home, but without any kind of social support network, in exchange for the possibility getting a green card 10 or 15 or 20 years down the road and thus gaining some security residence-wise.
> And if they still suffer discrimination, shouldn't we as a society try to fix that?
Sure, the US society should strive to eliminate caste-based discrimination occurring in the US.
But that it occurs in India does not mean that it’s been carried forward in the US.
A history of discrimination leading to a disadvantaged position today, and as a result needing additional support, is a separate problem — an argument for affirmative action — but ultimately is nothing different than all the other classes of peoples who’ve been fucked by history struggling to find security in the US (that is, any solution to the problem is not really particular to Indians, or the caste-system).
> But that it occurs in India does not mean that it’s been carried forward in the US.
It doesn't mean that, certainly, but it seems plausible that it would be, to some extent. And while some lower-caste Indians in the US don't believe they've suffered caste-based discrimination, other do. So... it's here?
I remember a lively discussion last year (not sure which one) where several Indian developers living in the SF area said they experienced discrimination, but also many reporting they did not.
I have no idea who is "right" here; I'm neither Indian nor living in the US. But I will add a general comment: experiencing discrimination is not the same thing as being discriminated.
For example, let's say I – as a man – have a disagreement with a female coworker, and maybe I'm a bit of an asshole about it. She might genuinely feel discriminated, belittled, man-splained, or whatever you want to call it. It might be I'm doing this because she's a woman and that she's right, or I might just be having a bad day, or I might be an asshole to everyone I disagree with, or I might just have accidentally phrased things in a bad way.
This is a big problem; there have been a few cases where this actually happened and people accused me of being racist or sexist, usually online. Sometimes I could have phrased things a little bit better maybe, but I sure didn't do it because of someone's identity. People will say it's due to "subconscious bias", but I find that's what the kids nowadays call "gaslighting". Maybe subconscious bias exists and influences people's behaviour in significant ways (not so sure it does, but that's a different discussion), but all but one of the times it happened I wasn't even aware who I was talking to until they "outed" themselves when accusing me of discrimination.
To be clear: no doubt discrimination happens in various ways for various people, but in many instances it can be really hard to say if a specific incident is an instance of it, of if it's due to other reasons. This is problematic because 1) it makes it very hard to actually do something about (systemic) discrimination because you can't punish/fine people easily, but also 2) people will still genuinely feel discriminated against even if there is no actual (or very little) discrimination happening (or is no longer happening).
To be clear: I'm not "accusing" those people of "making things up" or anything like that, I really believe that almost all people report genuine feelings and experiences. As one of those white male types I have it easy: if someone is an asshole to me I can fairly safely assume that person is an asshole to me on account of just being an asshole, but for some other groups this can be a lot harder, either due to current or historical discrimination.
My point is that experiences aren't everything when it comes to these kind of topics, no matter how honest and genuine. They're also not worthless, and some experiences do describe clear-cut cases, but in general I'm careful.
What is the distribution of castes in South Asia vs South Asians that have moved to the United States? Are those of a higher caste more likely to be able to come to the U.S. in the first place or do people of a lower caste move to escape the caste system?
Absolutely. At least from Tamil Nadu (which alongside its neighboring state accounts for pretty much every famous Indian tech guy you might know) 30-40% (my rough estimate) of highly skilled immigrants would be Brahmin, the high caste.
It’s interesting why this happens, the people in this caste have to work harder to get Higher education due to quotas biased against them, and they’re not necessarily more well off either. It’s probably a mix of a focus on education and excellence in their families that compels the children to aspire this way, alongside a community that encourages this as well I suppose. Sad that recent decade has started to radicalize more and more of them (and other castes) due to a religious fanatic government among other things, I would have loved to understand more about what caused the extraordinary success of this community in producing this many talented individuals (like the Hungarian Jewish population did before WWII).
There are different immigrant clusters around geography and industry.
E.g. South indians are a majority in the Tech industry in the Bay Area, Punjabi migrants from North India work in more working class jobs - as taxi/Uber drivers and 7/11 or convenience stores clerks. And the Patel caste from the western state of Gujarat are known for their presence in the motel industry.
Based on my non-scientific observation of looking at the 300+ Indian origin folks in my LinkedIn profile, the upper castes are likely 60%, though they make up 10-15% of the population in India. The "middle" castes a. k. a Other Backward Castes or the so called merchant castes make up the remaining 35% and likely are 30% of the Indian population.
Its obvious to me that the Brahmins are a fraternity and dominate office politics. They have many centuries of administrative experience to draw from. (refer historical text books Chanakya Neeti, Aarthashastra etc)
If you go head to head with one of these guys in the office, expect to lose. They occupy CEO positions in Google, Microsoft, and 100 other big companies, and their inner circle of top lieutenants too. This is partly due to capabilities and partly due to 2000+ years of being the managerial class, inherited by birth.
There is huge discrimination between upper and lower castes, I wasn't aware of it until I actually discussed this with an indian friend because of some news, he basically said society needs people to clean and labor work if they weren't to do it who would do it. I was mind blown to find out my life long friend was secretly equivalent of kkk member. And he saw nothing wrong with it. Upper caste people infact treat other religions/races better than the lower caste. Good luck preventing this discrimination in hiring if company isn't actively caring about this. Name is enough to revel what cast you are part of. Many companies take great measures in creating diversity in hiring boards/committees but completely ignore regional discriminations that can exist within same race of people based on dialect, culture, religion sect, cast, or whatever historical reasons there are. They care so much about unconscious biases yet introduce people with active biases in the name of diversity and defeating the whole point. You can see this in large offices, during lunch certain indians will hangout with non-indians than other indians it's because they are seen as inferior by their fellow country men.
Biases I've noticed:
Chinese have positive bias toward whites
Chinese have strong positive bias toward other chinese
Chinese have slight negative bias toward indian
Chinese have strong negative bias toward blacks
Indians have strong negative bias toward lower caste
Indians have moderate negative bias toward muslims/pakistan
Indians have positive bias toward white
White women have positive bias toward black
White women have negative bias toward white men
White men have strong positive bias toward other white men
White men have positive bias toward asian
White men are neutral toward chinese, hispanic, indian, pakistan...
White men have slight negative bias toward older women
=========
not enough personal data points to tell about muslims, hispanics, black and other groups and subgroups.
you can see this dynamic play out during lunch, in voting, and other various social interactions.
The fact you believe you can’t assess realities such as racism because your a particular race is a super strange concept. Can you assess reality? We all assume you can, sure you may not experience it directly, but you can just as easily observe.
The level of sexism and racism I see on a daily basis in tech is mind-boggling.
I’ve been in trainings (multiple), in fortune 100 companies (multiple), where white men were asked to apologize for the sins of other white people hundreds of years ago.
I’ve been in trainings where pictures of brains were put on screens and little sections were pointed at as the “racist” part of the brain. That’s, exactly what racists did (great scene in django unchained https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2prpdjkDIO8).
Is there racism against Asians absolutely, all people have bias and it’ll have an impact in particular situations.
The reality, is the focus on “women in tech” and “racism” is largely unnecessary and is leading to the caste system mentioned.
If you look at the office as “oppressed” and “oppressors” and do that based on race, you’re the racist. That’s what’s happening everywhere and frankly I know tens of people who have left these companies because of it.
This is crazy if true. sorry you got downvoted for providing your experience. The way I see it is if the behaviour is possible (some people will do it). It is upto the company to ensure those people are thrown out and not allowed back in.
I'm an Indian immigrant working in a large Bay Area Tech company and caste is definitely a thing. At another tech company I worked at the CTO and everyone under him i.e 4/6 VPs was Brahmin. An anecdote - I tried to get a position in the CTO organization and the first question his underling asked me was my full name. Now, corporate email already has your first and last name but he was fishing for my "caste" name. He also wanted to know were my parents were from. Now it's possible he wanted to find some common ground, but for people who are not from the upper castes and part of the inner circle. You don't know, if this question is going to be used to give you less preferential treatment.
I'm not saying the majority of upper caste folks discriminate, in fact I got my first job due to someone who was upper caste referring me. But there definitely are some bad apples. Based on my off the cuff discussion with other Indians, they've definitely noticed preferential treatment within Brahmins and certain upper castes especially when they make up the vast majority of the workforce (80%+)
How did you know upper management caste? I find quite a few Indians have been using their fathers name as their lastname. Did you go by caste or color of skin to make the determination.
In this particular case I knew because we're all from the same state. The Brahmins from the state wear a sacred thread, and on occasions will smear ash on their foreheads in a particular pattern. One would wear the thread visibly outside his shirt. You can also know based on the last name, skin tone (very light compared to other South indians) and office gossip fills in the rest. One of the VPs mentioned his caste in an after hours drinks party once, I was amused but not shocked.
Just curious, what stops Indians from faking a different caste? Wear the thread, smear the ash, get a name change, use sunblock if you'll be in the sun, and suddenly by choice you are a Brahmin? What am I missing?
I have never seen it. I am not suprised if it happens. Usually the same type of character that would do something like sexual discrimination or weird shit that is more common with bad white managers would be the same type to do this to lower caste. Anyways this type of mentality is on its way out anyways. The fact that is happens at google is quite suprising cause you would expect higher standards
Yes caste discrimination exists to various extants. You may not have seen it as most people who come abroad as professionals are "higher" castes who were historically economically and educationally privileged though this is changing slowly - not unlike how the impact of slavery and segregation is still quite obvious in people of color communities in the US.
Surnames and to a much lesser extent skin color/facial features indicate caste quite easily to people who have grown up in India. Often castes / surnames were historically also linked to professions which followed down family.
In fact in early medeival Europe too surnames historically indicated profession (Smith, Wright, Cooper, Ward, Chamberlain, Shoemaker...) but I believe the major labor shortage and dislocations caused by the black death and frequent warfare requiring conscription across all social classes pretty much ended any likelihood of social rigidity coming out of this. It will be interesting to see though how the capital and political power accumulation by the wealthier Americans plays out over the next few centuries.
In India, the way society developed was to restrict warfare largely to be carried out by certain upper castes and for most of the society, it didn't really matter who the ruling king was - at least until late medieval periods when proselytization started with Islamic invasion. So the caste system developed into something deep rooted, pernicious and divisive.
Interestingly in India, while Christianity and Islam don't have castes in theory, in practice it is commonly observed that their adherents too observe such distinctions which tells you how deep rooted the problem is.
Specifically to the community of the activist, the Dalits were actually considered to be "people with no caste" historically and were treated as "untouchables". Very likely they were the people who got the wrong side of the stick during the Aryan invasion ~3000 years ago which forms the basis of much of Hindu culture though there are obvious deep rooted integrations from the pre-existing pre-invasion culture (Shiva, Durga etc..) likely from the people who were integrated into the Aryan society.
You don't really see "untouchability" today especially in urban largely as a result of efforts of freedom movement era social reformers like Gandhi and Ambedkar followed by "vote bank politics" in the nascent democracy. Some communities also stopped using surnames. However i still recall when we were very young, our great grand parents generation still observed some of the discriminatory structures. So it has taken a couple of generations to get rid of untouchability - ie parents who saw discrimination as children but don't practice it raising children who understand it but haven't seen it raising kids who only know of it intellectually). It will probably take a couple more to eliminate caste discrimination but we are half way there.
Yes caste discrimination exists to various extants. You may not have seen it as most people who come abroad as professionals are "higher" castes who were historically economically and educationally privileged though this is changing slowly - not unlike how the impact of slavery and segregation is still quite obvious in people of color communities in the US.
Surnames and to a much lesser extent skin color/facial features indicate caste quite easily to people who have grown up in India. Often castes / surnames were historically also linked to professions which followed down family.
In fact in early medeival Europe too surnames historically indicated profession (Smith, Wright, Cooper, Ward, Chamberlain, Shoemaker...) but I believe the major labor shortage and dislocations caused by the black death and frequent warfare requiring conscription across all social classes pretty much ended any likelihood of social rigidity coming out of this. It will be interesting to see though how the capital and political power accumulation by the wealthier Americans plays out over the next few centuries.
In India, the way society developed was to restrict warfare largely to be carried out by certain upper castes and for most of the society, it didn't really matter who the ruling king was - at least until late medieval periods when proselytization started with Islamic invasion. So the caste system developed into something deep rooted, pernicious and divisive.
Interestingly in India, while Christianity and Islam don't have castes in theory, in practice it is commonly observed that their adherents too observe such distinctions which tells you how deep rooted the problem is.
Specifically to the community of the activist, the Dalits were actually considered to be "people with no caste" historically and were treated as "untouchables". Very likely they were the people who got the wrong side of the stick during the Aryan invasion ~3000 years ago which forms the basis of much of Hindu culture though there are obvious deep rooted integrations from the pre-existing pre-invasion culture (Shiva, Durga etc..) likely from the people who were integrated into the Aryan society.
You don't really see "untouchability" today especially in urban largely as a result of efforts of freedom movement era social reformers like Gandhi and Ambedkar followed by "vote bank politics" in the nascent democracy. Some communities also stopped using surnames. However i still recall when we were very young, our great grand parents generation still observed some of the discriminatory structures. So it has taken a couple of generations to get rid of untouchability - ie parents who saw discrimination as children but don't practice it raising children who understand it but haven't seen it raising kids who only know of it intellectually). It will probably take a couple more to eliminate caste discrimination but we are half way there
Am I understanding correctly that she got severe backlash on a topic nobody in the US cares about except the beneficiaries of an obscure identity politics in India... that nobody thats not from India, in America, cares about?
Seems like exhibit A for something the rest of us should be aware of, and balance opinions on. Since there are many people from India in the US.
we're agreeing that the talk should have occurred, if DEI talks are already occurring there
when I was in Mountain View, and again on Blind App, I got the feeling that it was a completely distinct culture that found like company. Everything from relationship woes, to the role of an employee at first could hide behind the maladjusted software enthusiast stereotype, but it crumbles and reveals itself as a high concentration of South Asian transplants which isn't obvious at first, but makes more sense when its noticed. For a region that diverse, it could be useful to understand what is disproportionate in the pipelines from there to Google.
I’ve read (I think this was on a fairly marginal website, which is why I’m not entirely convinced) that there are networks of high-caste Indians/Hindus in SV who promote each other.
Looking at social media, I know discussing caste is quite taboo. People who celebrate their caste openly are mocked.
Is caste dead, or has it been driven underground? Does it still play a role in places like SV?
I cannot wait for this era of GENERAL political activism at work to end.
If there are specific policies at work that effect you (meaningfully, not tangentially) by all means seek to change them.
If you just want to wear your woke flair and bring all general outside politics inside…get a hobby, start a religion, join a movement…leave the rest of us alone.
What I don't understand is, how do people know the caste of some individual if they want to decide if they hire them or not, how does it work? It doesn't seem like people are very public about their caste, so how do they get an advantage? Do the people of a caste somehow communicate with each other?!
although I've been aware of caste for a long time I assumed it mainly existed in india and disappeared in the US.
however, in retrospect, the pauses and looks I received when I asked people where they were from in india and whether they were vegetarian make more sense now. Woosh.
100% this goes on at amazon all the time. One time, I googled the last name origin of a whole orgs management structure. All of them were from the same part of india.
yup and that is exactly the problem. Letting groups become only 1 ethnicity that is dominated by ego and bias. it is the literal opposite of diversity but no one can say anything.
I can't speak for all the ways, but one way that I do know would be name: a Sikh guru in the 17th Century mandated that all of his followers change their surnames (males to Singh, females to Kaur) to try and get rid of caste discrimination among his followers.
> What I don't understand is, how do people know the caste of some individual if they want to decide if they hire them or not, how does it work? It doesn't seem like people are very public about their caste, so how do they get an advantage? Do the people of a caste somehow communicate with each other?!
The "I don't understand" part is interesting. I learnt one way to contextualize something 'foreign' in a quick way is to apply it to something we're familiar with. For example, in the US, one could easily describe the black-white divide as a more violently enforced caste system. Thus, I presume 'how does it work' is the same way we (American) know the 'caste' of someone applying for a job. Just based on the way someone is named, eg: Hunter, Tanner, Abigail would perhaps be identifiable as 'upper caste' individiuals while names like DeShawn or Laquisha would be identified as 'lower caste'. Then comes linguistic traits and such.
But my understanding is that skin color and first names do not reliably signal caste differences. That's exactly what I think those of us who aren't familiar with caste find confusing - it seems like caste ought to be similar to social class, but none of the markers of social class I'm familiar with seem to be relevant in caste, whereas things that are totally irrelevant to social class in my circles (last name, vegetarianism, details of religious observance) seem to have great importance.
> But my understanding is that skin color and first names do not reliably signal caste differences.
My understanding from a brief examination of published papers is the opposite.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285414433_Mapping_C...
"
Color and Caste Discrimination The belief in Aryan racial supremacy dominates social hierarchy practices in India. Upper caste members claim a superior lineage by tracing their “genes” to Aryans, connoting a “natural superiority” over “Shudra” and “ex-untouchables.” (The term “ex-untouchables” refers to Scheduled Castes, also known as Avarna (outside four Varna), Outcastes, Panchama, Antyaja, etc.) This chapter uses terms such as Dalits, ex-untouchables interchangeably, to refer to this population, though the socio-legal term defined to this population is Scheduled Castes—deemed as non-Aryans. Aryans textually are described as a pure, noble, and superior race: physically tall, with sharp noses and lighter skin color. Dasyus or Dasas, on the contrary, are considered of lowly origin and racially inferior due to their dark skin. Such stratification based on skin color is perhaps one of the oldest forms of discrimination and domination in human society.
"
The paper you cite is very bad but even it doesn’t claim that caste prejudice is primarily about skin color. It’s about ancestry and ritual purity.
I suggest reading the Wikipedia articles on varna and caste in India as an introduction. There’s a lot to learn and very little of it is about color and even less about skin color.
> I suggest reading the Wikipedia articles on varna and caste in India as an introduction. There’s a lot to learn and very little of it is about color and even less about skin color.
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism)
I'm sorry but it does sound a bit hilarious to me when I read from your link that the word 'varna' means skin color! The actual research on the topic gives me stuff like:
"What we call caste is referred to in Sanskrit sources by two concepts—varna and jati. They both assume identity through being born into a group and following a particular occupation. The first literally means color and was used rather metaphorically as such when referring to the four major caste groups—Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, sometimes listed as white, red, yellow, and black. Sociologists sometimes render the concept of varna as ritual or status ranking or alternately as the broader divisions of society. In the latter case, the meaning can be traced to “cover.” The word jati comes from the root ja, meaning to be born. This refers directly to identity based on birth and also extends to occupation, but it is a narrower category than varna and there are hundreds of jatis observing various rules of endogamy and exogamy."
That sounds exactly like the 1 drop rule, just that it is more fractally stratified beyond black, mixed, white categorization that happens here.
The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood")[1][2] is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.[
The word skin does not appear in either the caste or varna article so no, varna does not mean
> skin color
If you look at the varna article you’ll see the concept is quite a bit more capacious than “skin color”.
> The word appears in the Rigveda, where it means "colour, outward appearance, exterior, form, figure or shape".[4] The word means "color, tint, dye or pigment" in the Mahabharata.[4] Varna contextually means "colour, race, tribe, species, kind, sort, nature, character, quality, property" of an object or people in some Vedic and medieval texts.
Anyway caste, varna and jati prejudice exists in India and in dispirit communities with lots of first generation immigrants. So does colorism, where lighter skin is preferred. But they’re not the same thing and acting as if they are confuses much, much more than it illuminates.
The original statement that you had made was: "You can’t tell caste visually.".
But your own comment "So does colorism, where lighter skin is preferred. But they’re not the same thing and acting as if they are confuses much, much more than it illuminates." seems to indicate that it is possible, at least in part to determine caste visually as does the origin story you mentioned "Rigveda" which describes 'upper caste' 'Aryan' conquests over the 'lower caste' dark skinned indigenous population. Hence, 'varna' which you have now acknowledged means 'color' albeit you're claiming a more 'advanced' meaning beyond skin color which I'm sorry, but I perceive as an attempt to spin a racist/caste origin story into something more sophisticated. Let me guess, you're going to say the 'dark colored' here is something more sophisticated then just light skinned chariot driving nomadic invaders subjugating dark skinned indigenous city dwelling people?
"Through fear of thee [Agni] the dark-coloured inhabitants fled, not waiting for battle, when, O Agni (fire) burning brightly for Puru, and destroying the cities, thou didst shine." (VII, 5, 3)
> The original statement that you had made was: "You can’t tell caste visually.".
Yes, that’s still true. Compare Kerala Dalits and Brahmins[1] or Uttar Pradesh ones[2] or Punjabi Dalits and Tamil Brahmins like I did yesterday[3]. Caste isn’t skin color.
> But your own comment "So does colorism, where lighter skin is preferred. But they’re not the same thing and acting as if they are confuses much, much more than it illuminates." seems to indicate that it is possible, at least in part to determine caste visually
You can’t tell what caste someone is from their skin color. The entire range of Indian skin colors is in every caste. The distributions are almost certainly different but there are Brahmins as dark as any African and Dalits who look like Afghans.
> Hence, 'varna' which you have now acknowledged means 'color' albeit you're claiming a more 'advanced' meaning beyond skin color
At no stage did I use the word advanced. I suggest you reserve quotation marks for quotations as it aids clear communication. I do not speak Sanskrit but I bow to the expertise of those who do that it means a lot more than color, never mind skin color.
> which I'm sorry, but I perceive as an attempt to spin a racist/caste origin story into something more sophisticated.
You may not know this but the Vedas are stories of events that happened 3,000-5,000 years ago. The origins of caste prejudice are not super relevant to its modern particulars because Indians in the same region have overlappping distributions of skin color. We’re not talking Chinese and Egyptian here. More like Austrian and Lombard.
Compare these Tamil Brahmins[1] and Punjabi Dalits[2]. Punjab is in Northwest India, Tamil Nadu the extreme south. They’re the same skin color. You can tell from the abstract that article is trash just fro what it scare quotes. “genes”
There’s a critically acclaimed book on the analogy. Even if you think it’s not technically accurate doesn’t mean it’s not a valuable perspective. And given how malleable languages is technically-accurate isn’t even very solid :).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste:_The_Origins_of_Our_Di...
Indians can tell based on looks, skin color, how they talk, etc. One of my close friends is Indian and you can definitely make a pretty good guess based on a factor of all of these.
We’re reliving the last days of Ancient Greece. Direct democracy (strictly NOT representative democracy) led cities like Athens to make harsh decisions based on just-in-time demagoguery. It led to their fall.
Representative democracy is not a fruit of technological impediments, but a conscious decision by the founding fathers after learning of the plights of direct democracy (which they equated to anarchy).
Companies like Apple firing people on employees just in time judgements is the failure of justice and the decay of modern society.
> "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 rancour," the spokesperson further said.
Google publicly defending this decision via an official spokesperson, rather than apologizing and backtracking, makes me think that someone close to the top is personally bothered by the content of the talk. It seems like it would be easy for leadership to brush off complaints about it from further down the chain.
Relatedly, this was a missed opportunity in the UK when the last Labour government were formulating what became the Equality Act 2010.
It's illegal to discriminate against a person's characteristic of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief. But not caste.
This was pointed out at the time, but was unfortunately ignored.
Since then, successive Conservative governments have shied away from making any legislative corrections, preferring to rely on case law to resolve this.
> This was pointed out at the time, but was unfortunately ignored.
I have a hard time believing that was accidental :-( It seems essentially impossible to believe that British politicians would be unaware of Indian caste issues, so I would have to assume it was viewed as too dangerous / too low political benefit to address.
I don't think that has anything to do with caste? Some old systems limited usernames to 8 characters max, Indian surnames can be very long, and there are lots of people with identical names.
Ooo, that's a really interesting example of a Chesterson's Fence situation. I too would never have thought there might be an extremely intentional meaning behind that naming process and would quite possibly have changed it given the opportunity without further consideration.
> A senior manager at Google, named Tanuja Gupta, resigned from the company on Wednesday, 1 June, after a Dalit rights activist was not allowed to give a presentation on caste following emails by employees calling her "anti-Hindu."
This doesn't provide any context. Was Gupta resigning because she was for the presentation, or was she involved in blocking it?
> Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google News who invited Soundararajan to speak, resigned over the incident, according to a copy of her goodbye email posted internally Wednesday and viewed by The Washington Post.
Ah, I missed the "read full article" button and thought the first couple paragraphs was the entire thing. (It seems like they could have included that detail in the intro.)
She also believed she may have been unfairly retaliated against regarding her perf. That's probably the main reason she resigned. Not necessarily that the speaker was not approved.
489 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadI'm unaware of N American laws where you can't treat people fairly independent of how they're treated elsewhere. If this occurred in India or a 3rd country, the article should have been more explicit about this. Google probably has offices damn near everywhere so seeing glass and their logo's pretty ambiguous.
Both are not the same scenario, which the headline seems to conflate.
So I'd say it was both.
I must be the last person still alive that keeps their opinions to themselves while on the job.
Also non-Indian managers are very unlikely to be interested in discriminating against specific subgroups of Indians even if they're huge bigots or something, so this is a pretty specifically inter-Indian issue.
https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidde...
to me it seems that people got carried away by political debacle so much they forgot what they should actually be doing on their job
moreover i doubt Basecamp had a caste problem to begin with
Economic activity is an outcome that happens in the presence of a stable civic situation. Economic activity does not spontaneously create polite and cooperative groups of people.
If anything, civic/political matters take primacy over economics any day. Once your political landscape degenerates, your economic underpinning is generally quick to follow in the ensuing chaos.
How have people not realized this yet?
why talk shit about politics when we can spend time together making money!
we already contribute a significant portion of our income to taxes
maybe we should have political debates with the very people we sponsor and not our coworkers?
This policy only came into play after leadership was called out.
the management said no funny names no more
and this has made some of the employees very upset
they just couldn’t accept they won’t be able to call their customers funny names no more while being hired to do a job
The luxury of ignoring politics is usually reserved for those who are not threatened by the dominant politics. And that luxury is one that most people in tech management have, so it can produce unintentional harm.
I previously worked at Unity Technologies (3d game engine company) and as well as a CRM Consultancy, and I was amazed by how much time people spent arguing their political agenda. It was a major contributing factor of why I left both places. I had this feeling of "Why are these people chatting about things irrelevant to our work, while I am working? They should be working too-- they're paid to work, not chat & check their slack feed for 30-60 minutes a day about politics"
Honestly, this seems boring as hell.
I've often discussed politics, religion, and all sorts of things with coworkers, and we've often disagreed. And then we went about our day working together, or having a beer after work. No problems. It's just part of normal regular socializing, and I'd argue that socializing with co-workers is somewhat important for a healthy workplace.
Excessively pushing politics is a different thing of course, but "absolutely no politics allowed" has just a kind of boring superficiality to it. And also leaves us with the rather tricky question on what "politics" is, exactly.
I love the lack of politics at work. It really makes it more pleasant-- almost an escape from an otherwise over-politically involved society. I can't turn on the news or open the browser (sometimes even IRC) without politics seeping in.
It allows me to stay focused on work, not on what people think about/how I might be judged on my non-work related opinions. Nor that there could be favoritism based on such things.
It levels the playing field.
There are numerous articles discussing any non-liberal voices resulting in people being let-go/fired at various California-based technology companies.
The Civil Rights Act and its consequences have meant that America will forever be politicized along every fault line of human identity. Whether it can withstand this burden and remain a functional civilization remains to be seen.
Particularly, the most I've been able to hunt down are vague claims that her organization is Hinduphobic. If that's indeed the issue, what are the concrete examples of this?
Although if you think that term is hard to understand, I'm sorry to inform you about literally anything written by Europeans, which is more or less made to be impossible to understand on purpose.
I don't think most reasonable people will make that mistake.
> people who want to do philosophy without studying any of it
strikes me as unnecessary gatekeeping. The context here is fairly basic logic and critical thinking that clearly does not require formal study. I hope that more people who haven't ever been formal students of philosophy employ critical thinking, not less!
The people who say “steelman” a lot aren’t just busy with other things. They’re like full time bloggers and write huge essays constantly about their own system of critical rationalism and thinking correctly and all that, all philosophical topics.
Avoiding the literature is more intentional. Part because they want their community to use all different words so they’ll sound different and engineer-y. Part because they’d be annoyed that midcentury philosophy already tried their project and now thinks it doesn’t work.
Language is mutable and redundant. Different people come up with similar concepts independently over centuries and that's fine. Nobody has a copyright on philosophy.
Making your scarecrow out of steel doesn't make them a better arguing partner.
Interesting social contract.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...
I find it very interesting that the group in power is trying very hard to suppress any criticism, basically silencing the disadvantaged minority (within the Indian diaspora).
Two options arise out of it:
Hire someone else not prone to or going through this societal conflict at the moment ($$$), or forbid the topic and risk losin conscientious objectors amongst workers/leadership.
The executive case with a shareholder value tilt would be avoid and reject the conversation, sink the risk, evaluate fallout, and hire replacements as necessary. You've still done your fiduciary duty, but damn those meddlesome cats.
The Stakeholder value executive prioritizing social change would likely engage with the topic, seeing it as an opportunity to raise awareness, get free press, attract talent, etc.
I can only really see a case for suppressing it if it were something you couldn't afford to not have.
This is the same company that makes and throws away products and apps continuously?
The goal is trying something out, if it doesn't measure up, it's yeeted in the bin.
Besides which, you're expecting rationality and consistency out of people in positions of power. You already lost. People concerned with the issue of maximally optimizing for wealth accrual are seldom burdened with a burning need to be rational and consistent. At least I've seen precious few positive examples thereof.
> Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder of Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organisation
Hm ok https://www.equalitylabs.org/mission
> Equality Labs is an Ambedkarite South Asian power-building organization
What is this Ambedkarite thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit_Buddhist_movement
> The movement was launched in 1956 by Ambedkar when nearly half a million Dalits – formerly untouchables – joined him and converted to Navayana Buddhism
So it's a Buddhist deal. Is Buddhism anti-hinduism? Um, it isn't exactly pro-hinduism, now is it?
I'm not sure that's the steeliest man, but it's a start.
But they "they want to preserve their culture". I chose apartheid to avoid Godwin'ing the discussion, but it applies there as well. Or the US South in the 50's, and all those other places where a group feels threatened by "them" and are disinterested in expanding the definition of society or even citizenship.
I just don't think these issues are as simple as "good or bad". At the end of the day, English overtaking French is a real phenomenon. Are they supposed to just sit there and let it happen only to end up with a possibly more divided society where half the population can't communicate with the other?
I'm not saying the solution they came up with is right (actually I think having to pass these types of laws is just a sign of weakness) but at the same time I refuse to think that it's fuelled by xenophobia.
Hell, lynching black folk were "supported by the majority" in the US back then. Might still be, based on where you look. Change-or-leave isn't a terribly even-handed approach when you expect it to NOT be applied to yourself when outside of Quebec.
And as others have said and written, if you have to take such aggressive measures to preserve one's culture, it's already dead. Trying to make the internet be something other than English or Mandarin is a fools errand. I would think it's being driven by the boomers who have spent their lives in pursuit of a goal. They'll accept the scorched-earth "victory" independent of the cost, as otherwise their adult lives were mis-spent or wasted. Their counterparts had 'Nam to deal with, or the wars of the 80's and 90's.
They could have tried to make the situation positive and played along with the rules of civil society. But they chose not to and Montreal (again) will pay the price. The rest of the province couldn't care less.
Say, by analogy, what if another manager in a different situation, who made the 'cancel' decision on a talk, was concerned that the lecture they were being asked to approve was extremist? Then say, if Americans knew Hindu culture they might agree, just as they understand why they wouldn't invite their own untouchables to speak.
In this activist case, it's absolutely offensive to compare the Hindu untouchables with our untouchables because theirs are born into it where ours are just uneducated or indoctrinated and it would be such a grotesque insult to those people living in India, or anywhere in the world, that no serious person could even compare them out loud, and I'm even taking a considerable personal risk to write the comparison hypothetically.
But what if that's how that manager felt? How would "we" (progressive, though still mostly white, hegemonic We) respond to a speaker representing our own untouchables, and even though the comparison itself is so disgusting?
The steelman case for the protests and for the manager is that they are acting on convictions as strong and (they believe) principled as any of our own, however unjustly in this case. Even though they're wrong, until we understand their own complete revolt that caused them to take such a reckless stance in this case, there is no way to engage with them, or understand the source of the conflict. This isn't mere empathy or a "both sides,"-ism, as I don't think we can empathize with someone we fundamentally know is so wrong. However, I do think one can have compassion for everyone involved, and it is immensely difficult, as it requires imagining something you are truly revolted by, and then imaging what it would be like for someone like a Dalit friend or someone you loved to see you feel that way about them. The tension between the heartbreak at imagining their eyes in that moment and then also the feeling of what can only be described as disgust for people with the most offensive values, is I think, the compassion, where you feel both the revolt at being confronted with the very worst of the worst, and also what it feels like that no matter what you do and how much goodness you bring that you will always be an object of social disgust. This is why compassion is hard, but beautiful, but so very hard! Being able to do that suggests a greatness of soul to me.
The steelman case here isn't about pretending the broken logic of the protesting managers beliefs was somehow true, it's from asking, what if someone you loved or were responsible for felt one way or the other in this conflict about you? There is a basic misundertanding between two parts of a culture, where maybe these Brahmins don't trust the Dalits and the Dalits interpret that as contempt, which is returned by being provocative and giving the other just what they might expect? Bit of a homily, but in this sense, the steelman case shows how a specific kind of compassion might provide some future basis on which to establish both trust and respect, even if it's a very high bar.
Not discounting your experience, but I couldn’t imagine that Sorrento Valley would have larger issues about it than Silicon Valley.
People from higher castes, even if they're open-minded on the topic of caste, likely have relatives who aren't -- especially if they're the only member of a large family who has left India. Children have been disowned or even murdered by their relatives for marrying a member of a lower caste; it's really hard to escape that sort of prejudice.
We are already so far away from home, atleast we can look out for each other.
I'm not in tech so I've never lived anywhere with many Indians. I'm guessing these types of issues start to crop up when you have higher chances of meeting many people in your exact social group back in India and end up forming cliques.
I really do not respect people who obsess about race and gender in the workplace.
I think many people feel like you...the problem is that some races / gender receive discrimination that the majority might not see.
If we take it to gender, a male might have never received any sexual harassment in his entire life and so might think it's a waste of time to talk about this in the workplace (spoiler: it's not). If a minority of the people in the office are women, maybe a majority of people will feel talking about sexual harassment is a waste of time.
For those it affects, that is.
I can't talk to this particular activist's positions, but Dalit Activism is a very relevant and worthy cause - it causes pretty significant discrimination even in the US.
Social, political, religious, or just generally ideas that are likely to make people uncomfortable are, generally, not good things to talk about at work. I shouldn't have to worry about my well meaning coworker wanting to save my soul, win my vote, or whatever. My coworker and I need to work together to solve the problems of our business - those other topics don't help us coordinate and might hurt our ability to coordinate by sowing dissension.
Until very recently it was well understood that certain topics are better off not discussed at work. This is not a dearth of curiosity but a surfeit of common sense.
Yes it is a workplace, but also a community of curious and open-minded people
Or at least used to be
regarding caste, toss in skin tones, name, accents, etc…
Given that "white woman" is such a rare category to interview, and, I assume, Dalit is pretty rare as well, AND I don't even regularly interview with the same set of people - how could I possibly tell when another interviewer is motivated by prejudice? Unless the interviewer says they are motivated by prejudice I'm either going to have to give them the benefit of the doubt or make a heckuva leap to accuse them of something.
Lemme put it this way, if the solution required to fix the problem could be one of the following, which one do you think you would go for:
1. Performing caste cleansing rituals throughout all teams
2. Hiring a caste system expert to give a talk in the company
3. Identifying the troublesome castes by their surnames and making special reports on managers with that caste names regarding any issues of caste discrimination.
Which one of these options would you go for?
Even if the effectiveness of the option 2 is the least, it still would be the most preferred option by all companies because it's the best bang for their buck. In fact, even if these talks were actually toxic for the morale of the company among the Indian diaspora in your company, this gives the most 'color' of action by the company (and when companies like Google resist as in this case, they look bad).
End result: When you need a quick and expedient action to be performed in case of dealing with an issue you have no real understanding of, you are bound to hire scammers whose main job is to give you a totally fake service with no outcome being achieved.
Can’t think of a more important talk to be given to them tbh.
It makes as much sense as a talk on racial discrimination or gender identity discrimination to me, so I'm curious what's perceptively different about it to others.
Perhaps an alternative idea can be considered: this ontology people have latched onto isn’t accurate and there can be people who don’t know the above answer because indeed they aren’t exposed to a whole lot of social issue talks at work.
Because most of the people in these roles aren't actually well-educated in 'best practices', you get stuff like mandatory non-anonymized surveys that ask whether people are trans and send the results to managers, or slideshows talking about minority representation that omit Asians, Hispanics, and other 'common' groups.
https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidde...
Maybe US Westerners…
it’s just that the managers are deliberately choosing to ignore the issue, because they themselves actually support (or have nothing against) casteism
can’t make a diversity meeting bout that
For the more controversial topics, the talks are vetted more carefully, to make sure they align with the political position of the company, and that they don't raise too much opposition from any groups within the company.
The goal of the speaker is to convert as many (preferably influential) people as possible to their viewpoint. The goal of the hosting employee is typically the same, at least for the controversial issues (since those are usually highly politicized). The goal of the host company is to promote themselves as a bastion of certain (good, from their perspective) ideas, and/or as a place for thoughtful discussions.
I first learned about effective altruism when GiveWell did a tech talk.
Also, in 2008, all the major presidential candidates stopped in Mountain View to give a campaign speech. And then there was the time OK Go gave a concert, due to the YouTube connection I presume.
Those were different times. That was mostly before the anti-tech backlash, when Google could seemingly do no wrong.
Even in the early days there were frequently minor controversies, but things got much more fraught by 2015 or so.
The website says, "The world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers and doers all in one place. Talks at Google. Where great minds meet."
The last 5 talks in my feed: - LGBTQ & Spirituality - Neurdiversity: How to Love, Live, and Work Better - A Discussion On His Book "Jews Don't Count" - A Lookback at Japanese Internment & a Storied Writing Career - No One Understands You and What To Do About It
https://talksat.withgoogle.com/
I don't think I've directly answered your questions, but these talks touch on social issues, tech valuations, Mars and space exploration, physical and athletic performance, health and diet, and I guess anything else that Googlers would be interested in hearing about.
A pastry chef at a café on the Google Mountain View campus put out some nice little cakes with Tibetan goji berries. The sign said "Free Tibet Goji Berry Cake". This was obviously a sly nod to the Free Tibet campaign, and also true, as the cake was free, this being Google.
Some local Chinese Googlers complained to kitchen management, saying that the idea of freeing Tibet was anti-Chinese. The pastry chef was suspended by the catering company.
The story soon reached the high traffic "misc" mailing list. Many US Googlers objected to the pastry chef being punished for what they considered inoffensive free speech. A fund was started to compensate the cook for lost wages. There was a campaign to reinstate her immediately.
At least one Chinese Googler threatened to quit if the cook was not fired, and was encouraged to go ahead and quit by people who sided with the cook. Some Chinese Googlers shared their interesting opinions about Tibet, e.g. they said the Dalai Lama is a Nazi, he is a secret CIA agent, etc.
This new information was met with skepticism and failed to win anybody over to the Chinese side.
Anyway, eventually the pastry chef was reinstated. I don't think anybody quit. It all blew over.
Good riddance.
Just because it doesn’t affect you personally doesn’t meant it’s not important.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/01/tech/cisco-lawsuit-caste-...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31593799
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=caste
In reality, it's probably impossible to understand how big or small a problem caste discrimination really is in context. The folks who don't face any negative experiences mostly aren't going to pipe up.
Don't you think this might have something to do with the representation of low caste Indians in the US, and that they have to be their own advocates? Minorities have to make disproportional noise to get issues that affect them to be heard to the same degree as others. That's just how it is, otherwise our systems would always only advocate for the majority and every single minority would group would be systemically disadvantaged.
I think to side with your point ... the vocal extremists have the mic.
The thing that is the issue, again from the little I read, is that such discrimination is brought by other Indians on the Dalit and it's most defyingly bit something they want imported. I didn't figure or yet what is wanted and how but it's not like this is sintering you can blame them for.
> If someone drags it here with them they need to understand its their baggage.
If you're a low-caste Indian working in the US, and your high-caste boss discriminates against you, I think you'd feel pretty pissed at someone trying to claim that you're dragging your baggage with you. It's the high-caste boss that's doing the dragging.
Something like 90% of the Indian immigrants in the US are high-caste (big surprise, lower-caste Indians are less likely to be able to get work visas and travel), so of course this is a minority problem. Certainly not all of that 90% wants to perpetuate the caste system here, but I expect it's not easy to be vocal about it. Doesn't make it any less worthy of investigation, though.
Why do you think this is the case despite one of the most active affirmation programs in the world (just search "Reservation in India" on Wikipedia)? Something like 50-60% of seats in colleges and jobs in the government are reserved for lower castes (not a typo, the Wikipedia page should link you to official Indian constitution websites). I am from India and I genuinely don't know the answer myself.
A lot of industries are based on the idea of "I don't care if people think they're superior to me as long as they pay me." The savvier ones even exploit this: "I'll get people to think they're superior to others because they pay me" (see: Apple, Rolls Royce, DeBeers, BMW, Louis Vitton, and every other luxury brand). American society is uniquely suited to this sort of mercenary economic climbing, because it brings together lots of people who have no knowledge of each others' previous social hierarchies anyway.
Por que no los dos? This is such a tired take -- how is activism at odds with getting good at what you do and working hard? You can absolutely do both. In fact, some of the most helpful activists are folks who made it and give a helping hand to others (e.g. successful black businessmen teaching other black folks to be successful businessmen; successful women in tech helping other women to succeed in tech).
You do realize that this very "capitalism as the great equalizer" take ignores that being underrepresented / disadvantaged also very negatively affects one's economic prospects. Say I'm a woman -- looking at that rare woman in tech who's overcome many sexist hurdles / gotten lucky enough to make it to the top, are you telling me I should be cool with my odds being shittier?
White folks already love yelling about affirmative action because it lowers your already-low odds so very slightly when it comes to Ivy League college admittance. But you'll tell minorities "shut up just work hard activism is stupid" in the same breath.
> There's a collectivist, political, external-locus-of-control assumption to your point.
First of all, minorities ARE collectives even if we don't all contribute equally to our collective causes. And representation is political because policy shapes how we are treated and what our lives look like. A democracy by design favors the majority, so minorities need to be politically convincing that their needs are important too. It's okay to work hard at this, it's okay to want the world to be more meritocratic.
Frederick Douglass could have lived as a free black person and had a much better life than other black folks in the US. There were other free blacks who did less for the collective. Instead, he gave a crap about activism, and used his education and ability to make a difference. Wasn't that great? Plenty of white folks running plantations at the time were inconvenienced by this guy saying black folks should be free and that slavery is bad, and I'm sure they said "you're free why do you give a damn." But some people do give a damn about the people around them and the world they hand to their progeny.
Not every activist is their minority's Frederick Douglass, but you can certainly be a point along that spectrum of activist, in accordance with your ability and concern. Saying that minorities should be "too busy making money" to give a crap about how their children will be treated is some hot garbage.
> American society is uniquely suited to this sort of mercenary economic climbing, because it brings together lots of people who have no knowledge of each others' previous social hierarchies anyway.
Guess I won't convince you of the many glass/bamboo/whatever the fuck ceilings that exist, but it seems obvious that people are _absolutely_ bringing knowledge of previous social hierarchies. Talk to some {black folks, women} in tech and see what kind of bullshit they have to put up with that you don't have to. How many female founder stories can you find that talk about counterparts assuming something due to their gender? You simply cannot escape social prejudice and hierarchy (oh wait, you can, if you're a white male! maybe this is why you're confused).
It's like how if you ask for a raise, you will probably be denied. If you make yourself invaluable to the business and then threaten to quit, you will get that raise.
Slavery and Frederick Douglass is actually a pretty good example. White Northern factory owners won the Civil War - look at the Gilded Age that followed, and how "industrialized society" is just "society" now. Blacks did not. The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction; which was followed by Jim Crow; which was followed by 50s segregation; which was followed by the Civil Rights era; which was followed by Nixon's criminalization of crack, marijuana, and all drugs that were associated with "Black" culture, which led to the creation of a permanent Black underclass. We are still having this debate 150+ years later.
There's an order to acquiring power, and it goes technological -> economic -> cultural -> political -> military. If you try to skip steps (forcing economic development without technological modernization, or political power without acquiring economic and cultural power, or military power without consolidating political power) you don't get durable gains, and your system collapses after 10-15 years.
And I was one of those minority children that was treated as hot garbage. I haven't forgotten. That's made me a pretty avid observer of which tactics actually lead to durable shifts in power balance, and simply asking for more power is not one of them.
Isn't this all obvious stuff? None of which refutes the idea that activism moves the needle and is _required_ for minorities to equalize how they're treated.
> Time spent developing skills and seizing opportunities will not be, because it can be done in secret, and if you hit roadblocks just go around them and find other people to do business with.
This sounds untethered from reality. Consider being a black kid who wants to be an engineer in silicon valley. Your entire ethnicity is heavily underrepresented, so you don't have role models / might not even view working as an engineer as something attainable. Okay say you get past that and work hard, you still get fewer opportunities because bias is real and there are so many unwritten rules about how to play this game (get an internship at these companies! talk to startups! this is how to leetcode!) -- you find a lot of these things out via your connections. But if your entire network is underrepresented, how do you break in?
This is to say nothing of unconscious biases that affect you as a minority. Less favorable interpretation of your interview results, less insider information about how to play the game, fewer opportunities offered due to prejudice about your potential, pay gap.
If you hit these roadblocks, pray tell how you "just go around them" ??? If your advice is "don't protest, just work hard and be that lucky 1 person who made it to the top for your race/gender/whatever" that's pretty shit advice.
> It's like how if you ask for a raise, you will probably be denied. If you make yourself invaluable to the business and then threaten to quit, you will get that raise.
That's the problem though. You can't make yourself invaluable or succeed in your career if folks don't take risks on you. If folks don't give you opportunities. There is a huge opportunity gap for folks born black, born female, in systems of power that disadvantage them. Participating in activism to rectify this isn't a waste of time -- if it doesn't directly benefit the participants, it benefits their children.
> And I was one of those minority children that was treated as hot garbage. I haven't forgotten. That's made me a pretty avid observer of which tactics actually lead to durable shifts in power balance, and simply asking for more power is not one of them.
Pray tell what tactics you're talking about other than "get lucky and work hard and hope the system is less biased and more meritocratic than you think" because that's all I'm hearing in your comments. What "durable shift in power balance" was achieved as a result of this advice?
Activism has a great track record. Consider LGBT rights in the country 20 years ago vs today. Would gay marriage be possible today if not for the tireless work of activism?
You're folks to essentially shut up and work hard in the unfair systems they were born into. It's just not going to work for most of them. And it's not "asking for more power" -- it's _fighting_ for equal treatment and _exercising_ the power they already have to multiplicative effect.
Maybe your main gripe is that this takes a long time and doesn't generally pay off monetarily or career-wise for individuals, since you have to spend your money and time for the collective?
But instead of calling this stupid and at odds with success, why not be more honest and realize you can do that AND also work really hard and succeed with the opportunities you've been given. The existence of full-time activists doesn't diminish the contributions of folks who contribute in other ways, and that you can contribute in other ways does not render full-time activists unnecessary.
At the first level, the Indians who say there’s lots of discrimination against Indians—the folks getting Apu cancelled—get a lot of air time, but aren’t representative. My point is that the same thing may apply to low caste Indians too. The views of this Dalit activist may or may reflect the experience of low caste Indian Americans.
But aren't often those the people who need that sort of representation the most? Even if 90%[0] of Indians aren't discriminated against, the 10% who suffer discrimination absolutely deserve representation and redress.
[0] Apparently 90% of Indian immigrants in the US are high-caste, so funny how that statistic might seem to line up. This of course makes sense, since low-caste people are probably less likely to be able to obtain the education and financial resources necessary to move to a different country.
When you engage in activism on behalf of $GROUP you’re affecting the relationship of everyone in the group with the larger society.
On the other hand, if you are successful at being convincing (and loud enough) for a minority community you can achieve a lot of good! LGBTQ+ activists have made the lives of young non-binary folks so much better in just the last 30 years: they are a minority, but they were loud and convincing that "maybe we should treat people equally (e.g. right to marry) even if their sexual proclivities are different from our own!"
Groups that really change the shape of society ultimately have to be loud if they're underrepresented, and make a lot of people uncomfortable. Frederick Douglass was a free black man, which was rare for the time. He used his very minority voice to make a racket that helped propel centuries of social change for the better. Would you prefer he didn't succeed / couldn't have a platform? It's still up to loud minority communities to actually be convincing, after all. All the hate campaigning like those "god hates fags" stuff won't ever get anywhere because it's not convincing to most people.
It's talking about the kind of racism you see on H1B threads here, like the outright confession of violating federal law that I once saw in a comment "I stopped giving interviews to Indians because I found they lie in the resume".
I disagree with that—the question matters either way. Activism creates conflict, and ordinary members of minority groups may or may not feel like the conflict is justified in comparison to the actual scope of the problem.
Other Indians at Google objected to this activist as being anti-Hindu. At the very least bringing this sort of advocacy into the workplace creates the potential for conflict. Depending on the actual scope of the caste discrimination problem, members of lower castes may or may not feel like the potential for conflict is worthwhile.
Ofcourse they would. They are mostly those whose parents (or themselves) were privileged enough to make it to the US.
I keep seeing this thrown around, but I am yet to see anyone respond exactly what form this "privilege" takes as it pertains to caste. The Indian constitution was co-written by a very forward thinking Dalit and affirmative action for lower castes is literally written into the Indian constitution. The only "privilege" I know of is that only upper castes can conduct priestly duties etc (at least used to), but I mean cmon that's just clutching at straws...
Even if you have affirmative action, if you feel like you're going to work or school in a hostile environment, this is a disadvantage to you. Psychological safety is one example of a privilege (e.g. women in silicon valley have inherently less psychological safety than men in the workplace because there are more men, and enough of them make unwanted advances with high enough frequency to force them to think about it).
Dalits have to deal with the stress of potentially being treated differently on the basis of their caste. Even if laws say "you can't discriminate," that doesn't change the interactions they have to have. And even if only a small number (let's say 1%) of people are discriminatory, but you go to a school with 300 people, you're now dealing with 3 folks who you're very uncomfortable around and may bully or hurt you. That's still going to suck. Privilege is not having to think about any of that.
Another example is being gay. You might say "well if you're gay and you live in SF, you are worry free!" But at work, school, or even at the grocery store there could be people who harbor discriminatory feelings and even unconcious biases against you, and it can affect how they treat you. If you're straight, you're lucky (privileged) not to have to deal with that. You also are lucky (privileged) that you can visit Alabama without fearing for your life. I mean, unless you're a straight black man and you encounter police in Alabama. Again, your expectations given that situation are a matter of privilege.
The reason folks harp on privilege so much is that privileged folks often say stuff like "X doesn't happen to me or in my proximity, so it doesn't happen ever." But the only way to know it _really_ doesn't happen is to exist as someone who lacks those privileges and to see what that's like. Since we can't do that, everyone argues about the validity of minority folks sharing their personal experiences.
There are also levels to it, as with anything. Within minority groups, there can be folks who have more relative privilege (e.g. black men vs black women, or dalits vs brahmins, or dark skinned vs light skinned black folks). Most people have some privileges relative to other people, so it's good for us to all understand what those things are when we interact with one another. We already do some amount of this very naturally (e.g. unless you're an asshole, you probably won't tell your poor friend to just buy better clothes if you know they are less privileged than you, and you might not expect your female friend to walk to your place through the city at night).
In addition to surname, these are all questions that can be used to gather details about someone’s caste.
Or so I’m told.
Buts it’s funny when we start to care about a tiny portion of the poor people.
I think you're talking about this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_discrimination_in_the_Un...
First of all, that poll is about discrimination against Indian-Americans (presumably based on race or ethnicity), while TFA is about caste-based discrimination.
Secondly, the option below "major problem" in that poll is "minor problem", there is no in-between. In other words, 90% or Indian-Americans think it isn't a major problem, but over half do think there is a problem.
Most importantly, polling opinions about this is the worst method of determining if discrimination exists. A better method would look at objective measures like salary/job/hiring rate/layoff rate/etc of lower-caste Indians compared to Indians as a whole.
I think nowadays most people use "TFA" (no leading "R") in a fairly benign way, without the aggressive tone of the original.
I don’t get this at all. If we treat a group as fairly as possible and on average they perform worse than other groups, is that evidence of discrimination? Is there a hypothesis that they need to perform equally as well.?
The other, much more reasonable explanation, is that these differences are explained by the fact that lower-caste Indians are actually _not_ treated "as fairly as possible" by society.
At the individual level exceptions exist, but when you scale out to sufficiently large populations there aren't random demographics that magically perform worse than everyone else because they're all lazy bums.
Becuase I do not believe an Indian's caste affects their inherent ability to perform IT work. If you do believe that to be true, of course you should expect a difference even in a perfectly fair society.
> Can't some groups perform worse than others by random chance?
This is extremely unlikely once you get to higher sample sizes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
> Are there really no other factors besides discrimination that could cause this?
Well of course there are. For example, if one group is more educated than the other they're going to perform better.
I made it sound as easy as "just see if the numbers don't match up", but in real life the statisticians that do these kinds of analysis account for other factors that could impact performance, so that if there is a difference it's purely "because" of the caste.
This the discrimination problem -- if you are not in the minority, it is much more difficult to appreciate how common it is.
And yet somehow that makes it not worthy of awareness and fixing? It's a very odd argument to make.
rayiner's comment about 90% of Indian-Americans not thinking discrimination is a big problem is about perceived racism from non-Indian Americans. If you read the link it's about racist Twitter posts about an Indian American by what looks like white folks. No mention of caste. Nothing about internal casteism in the Indian community.
I say this as a HN'er but sorry HN can be just dumb sometimes.
At the very least, it might mean you don’t bring in an activist that antagonizes members of the majority group, as was allegedly the case here.
Activism undertaken on behalf of a minority group affects the relationship between that minority group and society as a whole. All members of the group have a stake in the overall relationship between the group and other groups.
It’s all relative. My mum (in her 80s) is, as they say, “quite fair”. She’s lived in Boston for decades and when I was visiting a couple of weeks ago I could see she was still subject to the usual Boston racism. But I noticed it was mostly older people — ppl my age (50s) or younger were a lot better, and not just because they don’t notice older people.
I got a lot of appearance genes from my white dad so this issue doesn’t come up for me.
Where I live in Palo Alto the kids I interact with don’t appear to care at all and seem to mix pretty indiscriminately, which is great.
I was just visiting a few weeks ago and a couple of my friends told me "it's not as bad as it used to be" but when I asked, admitted it hadn't improved that much from the late 70s/early 80s that we remembered.
Just a casual example: my mum entered her retirement home with some groceries, using her own electronic key, and was told "deliveries are to be made through the service entrance." This to a woman who has been living there for years and whom the "diversity board" keeps trying to recruit (as it's always been 100% white people).
This attitude is deeply rooted. Remember, though Massachusetts was famously abolitionist, its immense wealth started out from funding slave voyages and slave mortgages. And of course the Bay Colony was founded by a shipload of notoriously intolerant people.
The only time it ever came up for discussion is in the context of someone's parents in India preferring their own caste folks as brides/grooms for arranged marriages back home(similar to the very high rates of race discrimination in dating in the US) and even that has trended down a lot recently with everyone becoming more progressive. My sense is that there are isolated cases here and there, and that it's not systemic, and that it's also rapidly getting better with time both back home and with 2nd generation immigrants in the US.
I feel like being unable (or unwilling) to ask these sorts of questions is the realm of the head-in-the-sand people who claim they're "colorblind", and somehow believe that if we just ignore race and racism it'll somehow magically just go away.
Do you think that will tend to increase or decrease discrimination in the companies against various caste groups? Note that caste is much harder to find than race, and many Indians in the US don't care enough about caste to try and find out, but some may now subconsciously or consciously discriminate in both illegal and legal(friendships, dating, invites to social events etc. like racism in America) ways.
This is a straw man to represent fighting caste bias. Clearly, asking folks to self-identify their caste and somehow creating a list of low-caste folks is not going to be very productive. This is like that scene in "The Office" where Michael Scott makes a "do not mock" list which turns into a "do mock" list.
Ideally what we're looking for is a setup wherein, given the situation that someone who is low-caste is working with a lot of high-caste individuals and files a report about caste discrimination, that this is taken seriously and that a procedure exists to prevent retaliation / yields outcomes that protect the victim.
It's not that different from general discrimination right? How do you prove someone is racist or sexist? There are just different markers, and different lines that can be crossed. If a male coworker gives unwanted contact e.g. touches a female coworker's thigh, that's crossing a line; even if it's not easy to prove that it happened, you would hope that your workplace would know how to react to this & help your female coworkers to achieve psychological safety. Folks suffering from caste-discrimination deserve the same.
Solving all of these problems is clearly not easy. We don't have to come up with the solutions in internet comments, but there are very big, very obvious problems with discrimination in the workplace and to date it generally sucks to be on the victim side of it. You can't just say "nobody suffers from this because caste is hard for _me_ to personally understand or find, and I haven't _personally_ seen it." You don't work at every company, and you don't have to in order to understand that Indian representation is higher at various companies, and some people do care about this and do wrongly mistreat those they view as inferior to them. Why can't you just say you agree that this is wrong, understand that some folks are saying it happened to them, and leave it at that?
I mean if everyone just ignored race there would literally be no racism.
But that's the problem, it's not possible because even if you try, unconscious bias means we all fail to ignore race (and gender, and height, and all these other things about people). The only thing you can do is accept that race bias exists and learn about how to unbias as much as possible. A lot of corporate trainings involve unbiasing exercises that are really helpful if you go into it with the right mindset (discovering your biases and then working to be vigilant about them).
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...
"The original IAT paper is worth revisiting. You only really need to read page 1475. The construct validity evidence is laughable. The whole thing is based on N=26 and they find no significant correlation between the IAT and explicit measures of racism. But that's OK, Greenwald says, because the IAT is meant to find secret racists ("reveal explicitly disavowed prejudice")! The question of why a null correlation between implicit and explicit racial attitudes is to be expected is left as an exercise to the reader. The correlation between two racial IATs (male and female names) is .46 and they conveniently forget to mention the comically low test-retest reliability. That's all you need for 13k citations and a consulting industry selling implicit bias to the government for millions of dollars."
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-20587-001
"IATs were poor predictors of every criterion category other than brain activity, and the IATs performed no better than simple explicit measures"
Being unable to replicate studies showing that something is real doesn't mean that thing is not real, it just means we don't know.
This is of course just my experience, but I know that I've had unconscious biases that I've later managed to surface and suss out (and hopefully eradicate). So maybe unconscious bias isn't as common as these studies you don't like seem to suggest, but it certainly is real, as I've experienced it myself.
>When I relocated from my predominantly Black suburb in Dallas, Texas to an immensely diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, I didn’t expect to receive so many matches on Tinder and Hinge from non-Black men. I had always found myself in mostly white spaces — college, jobs, vacations — yet white men never took a deep interest in me before I moved to the East Coast. And while I had spent two years dating a German guy who was studying abroad at my university, it was only by transplant that a non-Black person really showed interest in courting me beyond a “you’re pretty for a Black girl” comment.
>Eventually, I stopped swiping on non-Black men altogether. There had been several cases before when a white man would match with me and then DM me something obscure like my skin tone reminding him of chocolate or feeling the need to tell me he’s always wanted to fuck a Black girl. I found it ludicrous that these men actually thought that was the way to a Black woman’s heart — or panties — and would unmatch them instantly. But in New York City, the progressive melting pot of America, white men (and Asian and Latino men for that matter) wanted to take me out for dinner and drinks, probed my interests, and complimented my photos in a respectable manner.
https://mashable.com/article/racism-online-dating
I think many people are a lot more tolerant of discrimination in dating, though, even if it's (IMO) unfortunate. People who don't date outside their race are really closing their minds and their worlds to a lot of potentially great possibilities. I get that many people do it because of parental approval/disapproval, and I can absolutely understand the desire not to piss off parents in that way, but it's still a shame.
Here on HN I have to question whether the voice of lower caste Indians is proportionally represented, and if not, why that might be.
I was in the states for a decade and have encountered numerous cases of bigoted Indian and Indian origin people in power (both academia and industry) who discriminate against caste. Dalit discrimination is one, but there’s actually a more common Brahmin superiority thing as well, which I tend to find easily because I look Brahmin (don’t ask me, that’s what these guys tell me) but I’m not one, so I’ve had 4-5 instances when these Bigots found me because I was eating chicken and they had to lecture about my sin.
The irony I point to them is that If they truly are trying to follow scriptures or whatever then they should remember that their caste is not allowed to cross oceans lol.
Oh haha that has happened to me as well, I’m an “upper” caste fellow and eat meat on occasion and have been lectured by one of these guys on how I am doomed to be reborn as a worm or something! Shitty people exist everywhere I guess..
That's an interesting comment. "little chance I would have noticed it." . I found this NYT article that pointed out we've long had our own caste system that we don't seem to notice. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson...
" a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip. Off camera, two other men in uniform, who looked like the lighter man, were holding down the darker man from the other side of the police car as dusk approached in Minneapolis. Yet another man in uniform, of Asian descent and thus not in the dominant caste, stood near, watching, immobilized, it seemed, at a remove from his own humanity and potential common cause, as the darker man slipped out of consciousness. We soon learned that the man on the ground, George Floyd, had been accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, and, like uncountable Black men over the centuries, lost his life over what might have been a mere citation for people in the dominant caste. "
It is unclear what you're trying to communicate. Would you like to clarify? Are you saying I don't know what caste is?
I will respectfully disagree strongly. I have read the wikipedia links you provided to back your prior claim that 'caste' is not analogous to 'race'. My readings so far, even based on the very links you provided, shows that it appears to be very much race and skin color related. Literally, the word you mentioned, "Varna" means skin color! "Varna contextually means "colour, race, tribe, species, kind, sort, nature, character, quality, property" of an object or people in some Vedic and medieval texts.[4] Varna refers to four social classes in the Manusmriti.[4][5]"
My understanding from a brief examination of published papers is that it is a significant component of it though.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285414433_Mapping_C... " Color and Caste Discrimination The belief in Aryan racial supremacy dominates social hierarchy practices in India. Upper caste members claim a superior lineage by tracing their “genes” to Aryans, connoting a “natural superiority” over “Shudra” and “ex-untouchables.” (The term “ex-untouchables” refers to Scheduled Castes, also known as Avarna (outside four Varna), Outcastes, Panchama, Antyaja, etc.) This chapter uses terms such as Dalits, ex-untouchables interchangeably, to refer to this population, though the socio-legal term defined to this population is Scheduled Castes—deemed as non-Aryans. Aryans textually are described as a pure, noble, and superior race: physically tall, with sharp noses and lighter skin color. Dasyus or Dasas, on the contrary, are considered of lowly origin and racially inferior due to their dark skin. Such stratification based on skin color is perhaps one of the oldest forms of discrimination and domination in human society. "
Another point of view [0]:
> The view taken by many that caste is invariably related to the skin color variability found in India’s population, and that all Dalits and the lower caste in India are darker skinned, seems a grossly erroneous view. Throughout India, one can find individuals with varied degrees of skin tone in each of the different caste groups, Dalits, or Brahmins alike. However, skin colour is more location specific than caste specific because of India’s widely varied temperatures and geographical conditions. Most of the population in Jammu and Kashmir and other northern states will share fairer skin tone irrespective or their class or caste as compared to their southern Indian counterparts. In states like Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh, many lower caste men and women have the same colour shade as their upper caste counterparts and vice versa.
> One can find dark skinned Brahmins as well as very light colored Dalits.
The author agrees that skin tone discrimination is a serious problem in India, but she sees skin tone and caste as mostly orthogonal dimensions of discrimination.
[0] Neha Mishra, “India and Colorism: The Finer Nuances”, Washington University Global Studies Law Review, vol. 14 n. 4 (2015)
This is a classic American argument.
I don’t think you can use the same strategies that work with other minority groups in the US.
The ultimate question is whether that discrimination gets carried forward into the US and continues to be executed here; not whether caste-discrimination happens somewhere in the world
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/27/indian-...
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/923736245
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-11/how-big-t...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-lawsuit/california-...
>Devesh Kapur, a professor of South Asian studies at Johns Hopkins University, found that in 2003, only 1.5 percent of Indian immigrants in the United States were Dalits or members of the lower-ranked castes.
>Dalit engineers said that most Indian workers from upper castes do not seem aware of their caste privilege and believe caste bias is a thing of the past, despite the fact that high-profile tech CEOs and board members, such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon board member Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of Pepsi, are Brahmins, or members of the highest caste.
What does this even mean? With 1.5% of Indians in the US, just with the probability of numbers, why would anyone expect a high profile CEO out of two examples to be a lower caste Indian? And also with those examples they seem to be implying that Americans are casteist? How does the ladder of managers who decide promotions look like at, say, Pepsi? Were they all Indians that are holding the other 1.5% of Indians from rising up to the level of CEO of Pepsi?
It's a hell of a deal with the devil they have to make: put up with the same discrimination they suffered at home, but without any kind of social support network, in exchange for the possibility getting a green card 10 or 15 or 20 years down the road and thus gaining some security residence-wise.
Sure, the US society should strive to eliminate caste-based discrimination occurring in the US.
But that it occurs in India does not mean that it’s been carried forward in the US.
A history of discrimination leading to a disadvantaged position today, and as a result needing additional support, is a separate problem — an argument for affirmative action — but ultimately is nothing different than all the other classes of peoples who’ve been fucked by history struggling to find security in the US (that is, any solution to the problem is not really particular to Indians, or the caste-system).
It doesn't mean that, certainly, but it seems plausible that it would be, to some extent. And while some lower-caste Indians in the US don't believe they've suffered caste-based discrimination, other do. So... it's here?
I have no idea who is "right" here; I'm neither Indian nor living in the US. But I will add a general comment: experiencing discrimination is not the same thing as being discriminated.
For example, let's say I – as a man – have a disagreement with a female coworker, and maybe I'm a bit of an asshole about it. She might genuinely feel discriminated, belittled, man-splained, or whatever you want to call it. It might be I'm doing this because she's a woman and that she's right, or I might just be having a bad day, or I might be an asshole to everyone I disagree with, or I might just have accidentally phrased things in a bad way.
This is a big problem; there have been a few cases where this actually happened and people accused me of being racist or sexist, usually online. Sometimes I could have phrased things a little bit better maybe, but I sure didn't do it because of someone's identity. People will say it's due to "subconscious bias", but I find that's what the kids nowadays call "gaslighting". Maybe subconscious bias exists and influences people's behaviour in significant ways (not so sure it does, but that's a different discussion), but all but one of the times it happened I wasn't even aware who I was talking to until they "outed" themselves when accusing me of discrimination.
To be clear: no doubt discrimination happens in various ways for various people, but in many instances it can be really hard to say if a specific incident is an instance of it, of if it's due to other reasons. This is problematic because 1) it makes it very hard to actually do something about (systemic) discrimination because you can't punish/fine people easily, but also 2) people will still genuinely feel discriminated against even if there is no actual (or very little) discrimination happening (or is no longer happening).
To be clear: I'm not "accusing" those people of "making things up" or anything like that, I really believe that almost all people report genuine feelings and experiences. As one of those white male types I have it easy: if someone is an asshole to me I can fairly safely assume that person is an asshole to me on account of just being an asshole, but for some other groups this can be a lot harder, either due to current or historical discrimination.
My point is that experiences aren't everything when it comes to these kind of topics, no matter how honest and genuine. They're also not worthless, and some experiences do describe clear-cut cases, but in general I'm careful.
It’s interesting why this happens, the people in this caste have to work harder to get Higher education due to quotas biased against them, and they’re not necessarily more well off either. It’s probably a mix of a focus on education and excellence in their families that compels the children to aspire this way, alongside a community that encourages this as well I suppose. Sad that recent decade has started to radicalize more and more of them (and other castes) due to a religious fanatic government among other things, I would have loved to understand more about what caused the extraordinary success of this community in producing this many talented individuals (like the Hungarian Jewish population did before WWII).
Based on my non-scientific observation of looking at the 300+ Indian origin folks in my LinkedIn profile, the upper castes are likely 60%, though they make up 10-15% of the population in India. The "middle" castes a. k. a Other Backward Castes or the so called merchant castes make up the remaining 35% and likely are 30% of the Indian population.
If you go head to head with one of these guys in the office, expect to lose. They occupy CEO positions in Google, Microsoft, and 100 other big companies, and their inner circle of top lieutenants too. This is partly due to capabilities and partly due to 2000+ years of being the managerial class, inherited by birth.
Biases I've noticed:
Chinese have positive bias toward whites
Chinese have strong positive bias toward other chinese
Chinese have slight negative bias toward indian
Chinese have strong negative bias toward blacks
Indians have strong negative bias toward lower caste
Indians have moderate negative bias toward muslims/pakistan
Indians have positive bias toward white
White women have positive bias toward black
White women have negative bias toward white men
White men have strong positive bias toward other white men
White men have positive bias toward asian
White men are neutral toward chinese, hispanic, indian, pakistan...
White men have slight negative bias toward older women
=========
not enough personal data points to tell about muslims, hispanics, black and other groups and subgroups.
you can see this dynamic play out during lunch, in voting, and other various social interactions.
The level of sexism and racism I see on a daily basis in tech is mind-boggling.
I’ve been in trainings (multiple), in fortune 100 companies (multiple), where white men were asked to apologize for the sins of other white people hundreds of years ago.
I’ve been in trainings where pictures of brains were put on screens and little sections were pointed at as the “racist” part of the brain. That’s, exactly what racists did (great scene in django unchained https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2prpdjkDIO8).
Is there racism against Asians absolutely, all people have bias and it’ll have an impact in particular situations.
The reality, is the focus on “women in tech” and “racism” is largely unnecessary and is leading to the caste system mentioned.
If you look at the office as “oppressed” and “oppressors” and do that based on race, you’re the racist. That’s what’s happening everywhere and frankly I know tens of people who have left these companies because of it.
Surnames and to a much lesser extent skin color/facial features indicate caste quite easily to people who have grown up in India. Often castes / surnames were historically also linked to professions which followed down family.
In fact in early medeival Europe too surnames historically indicated profession (Smith, Wright, Cooper, Ward, Chamberlain, Shoemaker...) but I believe the major labor shortage and dislocations caused by the black death and frequent warfare requiring conscription across all social classes pretty much ended any likelihood of social rigidity coming out of this. It will be interesting to see though how the capital and political power accumulation by the wealthier Americans plays out over the next few centuries.
In India, the way society developed was to restrict warfare largely to be carried out by certain upper castes and for most of the society, it didn't really matter who the ruling king was - at least until late medieval periods when proselytization started with Islamic invasion. So the caste system developed into something deep rooted, pernicious and divisive.
Interestingly in India, while Christianity and Islam don't have castes in theory, in practice it is commonly observed that their adherents too observe such distinctions which tells you how deep rooted the problem is.
Specifically to the community of the activist, the Dalits were actually considered to be "people with no caste" historically and were treated as "untouchables". Very likely they were the people who got the wrong side of the stick during the Aryan invasion ~3000 years ago which forms the basis of much of Hindu culture though there are obvious deep rooted integrations from the pre-existing pre-invasion culture (Shiva, Durga etc..) likely from the people who were integrated into the Aryan society.
You don't really see "untouchability" today especially in urban largely as a result of efforts of freedom movement era social reformers like Gandhi and Ambedkar followed by "vote bank politics" in the nascent democracy. Some communities also stopped using surnames. However i still recall when we were very young, our great grand parents generation still observed some of the discriminatory structures. So it has taken a couple of generations to get rid of untouchability - ie parents who saw discrimination as children but don't practice it raising children who understand it but haven't seen it raising kids who only know of it intellectually). It will probably take a couple more to eliminate caste discrimination but we are half way there.
Surnames and to a much lesser extent skin color/facial features indicate caste quite easily to people who have grown up in India. Often castes / surnames were historically also linked to professions which followed down family.
In fact in early medeival Europe too surnames historically indicated profession (Smith, Wright, Cooper, Ward, Chamberlain, Shoemaker...) but I believe the major labor shortage and dislocations caused by the black death and frequent warfare requiring conscription across all social classes pretty much ended any likelihood of social rigidity coming out of this. It will be interesting to see though how the capital and political power accumulation by the wealthier Americans plays out over the next few centuries.
In India, the way society developed was to restrict warfare largely to be carried out by certain upper castes and for most of the society, it didn't really matter who the ruling king was - at least until late medieval periods when proselytization started with Islamic invasion. So the caste system developed into something deep rooted, pernicious and divisive.
Interestingly in India, while Christianity and Islam don't have castes in theory, in practice it is commonly observed that their adherents too observe such distinctions which tells you how deep rooted the problem is.
Specifically to the community of the activist, the Dalits were actually considered to be "people with no caste" historically and were treated as "untouchables". Very likely they were the people who got the wrong side of the stick during the Aryan invasion ~3000 years ago which forms the basis of much of Hindu culture though there are obvious deep rooted integrations from the pre-existing pre-invasion culture (Shiva, Durga etc..) likely from the people who were integrated into the Aryan society.
You don't really see "untouchability" today especially in urban largely as a result of efforts of freedom movement era social reformers like Gandhi and Ambedkar followed by "vote bank politics" in the nascent democracy. Some communities also stopped using surnames. However i still recall when we were very young, our great grand parents generation still observed some of the discriminatory structures. So it has taken a couple of generations to get rid of untouchability - ie parents who saw discrimination as children but don't practice it raising children who understand it but haven't seen it raising kids who only know of it intellectually). It will probably take a couple more to eliminate caste discrimination but we are half way there
Seems like exhibit A for something the rest of us should be aware of, and balance opinions on. Since there are many people from India in the US.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-lawsuit/california-...
when I was in Mountain View, and again on Blind App, I got the feeling that it was a completely distinct culture that found like company. Everything from relationship woes, to the role of an employee at first could hide behind the maladjusted software enthusiast stereotype, but it crumbles and reveals itself as a high concentration of South Asian transplants which isn't obvious at first, but makes more sense when its noticed. For a region that diverse, it could be useful to understand what is disproportionate in the pipelines from there to Google.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31593799
Looking at social media, I know discussing caste is quite taboo. People who celebrate their caste openly are mocked.
Is caste dead, or has it been driven underground? Does it still play a role in places like SV?
If there are specific policies at work that effect you (meaningfully, not tangentially) by all means seek to change them.
If you just want to wear your woke flair and bring all general outside politics inside…get a hobby, start a religion, join a movement…leave the rest of us alone.
If you are protesting SOCIETY at work, I encourage you to leave the building.
The office is not your church.
And there are other indicators; I've been told upper casts are usually lighter-skinned, and Brahmins are often vegetarian.
however, in retrospect, the pauses and looks I received when I asked people where they were from in india and whether they were vegetarian make more sense now. Woosh.
they have whole departments consisting exclusively of Indians and i believe their biggest non-US office is actually in India
a manager may know somebody on their team who can tell your caste or maybe suggest your caste based on the region you were from
this is as far i understood it
The "I don't understand" part is interesting. I learnt one way to contextualize something 'foreign' in a quick way is to apply it to something we're familiar with. For example, in the US, one could easily describe the black-white divide as a more violently enforced caste system. Thus, I presume 'how does it work' is the same way we (American) know the 'caste' of someone applying for a job. Just based on the way someone is named, eg: Hunter, Tanner, Abigail would perhaps be identifiable as 'upper caste' individiuals while names like DeShawn or Laquisha would be identified as 'lower caste'. Then comes linguistic traits and such.
My understanding from a brief examination of published papers is the opposite.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285414433_Mapping_C... " Color and Caste Discrimination The belief in Aryan racial supremacy dominates social hierarchy practices in India. Upper caste members claim a superior lineage by tracing their “genes” to Aryans, connoting a “natural superiority” over “Shudra” and “ex-untouchables.” (The term “ex-untouchables” refers to Scheduled Castes, also known as Avarna (outside four Varna), Outcastes, Panchama, Antyaja, etc.) This chapter uses terms such as Dalits, ex-untouchables interchangeably, to refer to this population, though the socio-legal term defined to this population is Scheduled Castes—deemed as non-Aryans. Aryans textually are described as a pure, noble, and superior race: physically tall, with sharp noses and lighter skin color. Dasyus or Dasas, on the contrary, are considered of lowly origin and racially inferior due to their dark skin. Such stratification based on skin color is perhaps one of the oldest forms of discrimination and domination in human society. "
It sounds like you're saying the research paper I linked to is incorrect? Is there some evidence you could help to cite. Thanks.
I suggest reading the Wikipedia articles on varna and caste in India as an introduction. There’s a lot to learn and very little of it is about color and even less about skin color.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India
I'm sorry but it does sound a bit hilarious to me when I read from your link that the word 'varna' means skin color! The actual research on the topic gives me stuff like:
"What we call caste is referred to in Sanskrit sources by two concepts—varna and jati. They both assume identity through being born into a group and following a particular occupation. The first literally means color and was used rather metaphorically as such when referring to the four major caste groups—Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, sometimes listed as white, red, yellow, and black. Sociologists sometimes render the concept of varna as ritual or status ranking or alternately as the broader divisions of society. In the latter case, the meaning can be traced to “cover.” The word jati comes from the root ja, meaning to be born. This refers directly to identity based on birth and also extends to occupation, but it is a narrower category than varna and there are hundreds of jatis observing various rules of endogamy and exogamy."
That sounds exactly like the 1 drop rule, just that it is more fractally stratified beyond black, mixed, white categorization that happens here.
The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood")[1][2] is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.[
> skin color
If you look at the varna article you’ll see the concept is quite a bit more capacious than “skin color”.
> The word appears in the Rigveda, where it means "colour, outward appearance, exterior, form, figure or shape".[4] The word means "color, tint, dye or pigment" in the Mahabharata.[4] Varna contextually means "colour, race, tribe, species, kind, sort, nature, character, quality, property" of an object or people in some Vedic and medieval texts.
Anyway caste, varna and jati prejudice exists in India and in dispirit communities with lots of first generation immigrants. So does colorism, where lighter skin is preferred. But they’re not the same thing and acting as if they are confuses much, much more than it illuminates.
But your own comment "So does colorism, where lighter skin is preferred. But they’re not the same thing and acting as if they are confuses much, much more than it illuminates." seems to indicate that it is possible, at least in part to determine caste visually as does the origin story you mentioned "Rigveda" which describes 'upper caste' 'Aryan' conquests over the 'lower caste' dark skinned indigenous population. Hence, 'varna' which you have now acknowledged means 'color' albeit you're claiming a more 'advanced' meaning beyond skin color which I'm sorry, but I perceive as an attempt to spin a racist/caste origin story into something more sophisticated. Let me guess, you're going to say the 'dark colored' here is something more sophisticated then just light skinned chariot driving nomadic invaders subjugating dark skinned indigenous city dwelling people?
"Through fear of thee [Agni] the dark-coloured inhabitants fled, not waiting for battle, when, O Agni (fire) burning brightly for Puru, and destroying the cities, thou didst shine." (VII, 5, 3)
Yes, that’s still true. Compare Kerala Dalits and Brahmins[1] or Uttar Pradesh ones[2] or Punjabi Dalits and Tamil Brahmins like I did yesterday[3]. Caste isn’t skin color.
> But your own comment "So does colorism, where lighter skin is preferred. But they’re not the same thing and acting as if they are confuses much, much more than it illuminates." seems to indicate that it is possible, at least in part to determine caste visually
You can’t tell what caste someone is from their skin color. The entire range of Indian skin colors is in every caste. The distributions are almost certainly different but there are Brahmins as dark as any African and Dalits who look like Afghans.
> Hence, 'varna' which you have now acknowledged means 'color' albeit you're claiming a more 'advanced' meaning beyond skin color
At no stage did I use the word advanced. I suggest you reserve quotation marks for quotations as it aids clear communication. I do not speak Sanskrit but I bow to the expertise of those who do that it means a lot more than color, never mind skin color.
> which I'm sorry, but I perceive as an attempt to spin a racist/caste origin story into something more sophisticated.
You may not know this but the Vedas are stories of events that happened 3,000-5,000 years ago. The origins of caste prejudice are not super relevant to its modern particulars because Indians in the same region have overlappping distributions of skin color. We’re not talking Chinese and Egyptian here. More like Austrian and Lombard.
[1] https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/kerala-dalit-man-assau...
https://medium.com/@jawadakhtar/wedding-rituals-typical-to-k...
[2] https://english.varthabharati.in/india/dalit-groom-takes-out...
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.craftsvilla.com/blog/the-...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31616355
Yes, you could use a wildly inaccurate analogy to show a lack of understanding.
Caste (varna) and jati are not about race. They’re culturally transmitted and not based on easily visible characteristics.
I mentioned in my other comment.
My understanding from a brief examination of published papers is the opposite.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285414433_Mapping_C... " Color and Caste Discrimination The belief in Aryan racial supremacy dominates social hierarchy practices in India.
[1] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tamil_brahmins_at_... [2] http://sanhati.com/articles/20079/
Even things like putting a hand on someone's shoulder to feel if they are wearing the thread the upper caste sometimes wear under their clothes.
Apparently for those raised around the system it can be fairly easy to figure out over extended co-working.
Representative democracy is not a fruit of technological impediments, but a conscious decision by the founding fathers after learning of the plights of direct democracy (which they equated to anarchy).
Companies like Apple firing people on employees just in time judgements is the failure of justice and the decay of modern society.
Hot take, but you know…
Google publicly defending this decision via an official spokesperson, rather than apologizing and backtracking, makes me think that someone close to the top is personally bothered by the content of the talk. It seems like it would be easy for leadership to brush off complaints about it from further down the chain.
It's illegal to discriminate against a person's characteristic of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief. But not caste.
This was pointed out at the time, but was unfortunately ignored.
Since then, successive Conservative governments have shied away from making any legislative corrections, preferring to rely on case law to resolve this.
I have a hard time believing that was accidental :-( It seems essentially impossible to believe that British politicians would be unaware of Indian caste issues, so I would have to assume it was viewed as too dangerous / too low political benefit to address.
Working a bit with one Indian company, I was puzzled by their mandated usernames of the form FirstnameInitialDigit, e.g. johns1 if you're John Smith.
It was sad learning that people had to give up using family names for practical reasons.
This doesn't provide any context. Was Gupta resigning because she was for the presentation, or was she involved in blocking it?
The recent WP article explains this much better:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/02/google-...
> Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google News who invited Soundararajan to speak, resigned over the incident, according to a copy of her goodbye email posted internally Wednesday and viewed by The Washington Post.
> Gupta, the senior manager at Google News who had invited Soundararajan to speak on the matter, thus put in her papers on Wednesday.