Would it be possible for the government to 'phase out' last names and instead rely on other forms of identification? Instead of putting in your name in an application form, you just list an id number and your address. Then when you show up, you only mention your first and middle name.
I just posted this on a probably-dead thread about caste discrimination, but the short of it is the folks who wish to discriminate by caste have a variety of ways to determine what your caste is. From the Vice article below:
Indians will not ask outright what caste you are, as it’s seen as overly discriminatory, but they use more subtle methods to identify your place in the caste structure.
“Sometimes they ask, ‘Are you vegetarian?’ If you say yes, they ask are you vegetarian by birth or by choice, before getting into which village you come from, because sometimes the village gives up your caste,” Sam said.
Another method described to VICE News is the pat on the back to see if the person is wearing a Juneau, a sacred white thread typically worn by the upper castes in India.
Higher-caste Indians will also search social media accounts to ascertain a job candidate’s religious views or diet.
Can a born vegetarian be identified by measuring, I don't know, the diameter of nostrils or distance between nose tip and chin? And if so, do born vegans differ from those measurwmemts? And do they get bonus points?
Sarcasm aside, this whole caste system is easily a contentender for the worst form discrimination and, yes, racism is existence today.
> I don't believe this at all. Feels like overexaggerating.
Never underestimate how petty people can be. We've seen plenty of times in the past decade where people doing hiring will examine social media of candidates (on the extreme end even demand handing over of your phone phone during an interview). So it's hardly a stretch to think people with such views could overlap with people who harbor caste prejudice.
What happens if you lie on your resume? what if you practice speaking with a more prestigious accent than you grew up with? What if you carefully study your friends who went to private schools and summered in the Hamptons to learn how to imitate their ineffable shibboleth mannerisms?
The answer is yes, you can do these things, and it will confer exactly the benefits you imagine. And the consequences for getting "caught" aren't usually serious, either. But sometimes they are.
> What if you practice speaking with a more prestigious accent than you grew up with? What if you carefully study your friends who went to private schools and summered in the Hamptons to learn how to imitate their ineffable shibboleth mannerisms?
> The answer is yes, you can do these things
I mean, I personally can't. (From a UK perspective.) First I would need access to these people and spend a lot of time with them. That could be difficult in itself if they are discriminatory. Then I would need another separate social group to practice my new personality with. Plus I'm just not a good actor. So it's not surprising that people's movement in social class is pretty limited. This isn't even getting into how people of your previous class will treat you if they think you've deserted them.
Lying about credentials or experience is a bit different from wearing a piece of clothing you arguably find pretty or obviously inconsequential things like saying you eat meat or not
I had a friend in college who was an OBC. But he pretended to be General caste. By the end of final year, most people knew about it, but no one confronted him.
Are you indian / have you actually observed this? I'm Indian-American and in my experience this has been entirely non-existent so this article kinda baffles me. I've been asked whether I'm vegetarian before, but always in the context of grabbing food (respecting dietary preferences), and certainly haven't noticed any discrimination after saying that I'm not. I worked in SF for a year and currently in Seattle. Have several Indian friends/colleagues aswell and not once have I ever heard caste brought up
I was born in the US, and my parents immigrated from India. I encountered this once at a tech company in Seattle. My team's previous manager left the org, so we were assigned a new one. On our very first 1:1 meeting, he wasn't interested in discussing projects, but he kept asking all of these bizarre personal questions. At first, I didn't understand, but it became clear later on.
I'm really sorry that you experienced this. If you're still in Seattle and it ever happens again, know that caste discrimination is now formally banned as of March of this year. Please spread the word that claims can be filed with the city's Office for Civil Rights.[1]
This sounds like someone who has no idea about India.
Being vegetarian tells you nothing about somoene's caste at all, either by choice or birth. You might make a wild guess but it has very less chance of being correct. Vegetarianism permeates throughout society in both upper and lower classes.
Asking someone's village name to know anything is laughable. There are about a million villages in India, and most villages have mixed caste populations, so this is just so laughably absurd. Even if you meet someone in a local city, you will not get to know their caste by their village name, let alone meeting someone in a big Indian city or the US. Asking someone's village gives you same amount of information as doing Math.random(1e6).
> see if the person is wearing a Juneau
This is something that has almost stopped and at this point almost nobody wears it since it involves a lot of extra effort. It would be very very long ago when the % of peopling wearing it was high enough.
> Higher-caste Indians will also search social media accounts to ascertain a job candidate’s religious views or diet.
This again sounds like a handway statement that is somehow intended to show how one can easily find someone else's caste.
I would guess there are a ton of ways to tell what caste someone is. Where they are from, accent, one article I remember reading mentioned a person was Buddhist not Hindu and keeping that secret to avoid caste discrimination https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidde...
Indian government offers different benefits to different castes. For example say you murder someone. The victim's caste will play a big role in how you are treated. If you kill a person belonging to so called "lower caste", your punishment would higher and bar for evidence much lower.
If you belong to certain castes then you get government jobs and promotions on priority bases. Upto 50% of jobs are reserved based on caste. Around 70% of admissions in colleges are done by looking at your caste.
> An uninitiated might be forgiven for not realizing that caste-based discrimination is rampant in India
Don’t mind all the people from India, outside of India, that will swear up and down that such thing doesn’t exist
I feel like there is a group of people taking advantage of western sensitivities against “being insensitive”, and reappropriating it when convenient to deflect
I’m glad Seattle passed a law against caste discrimination, just this year, since there are so many people from India in the tech industry there it was eventually able to be noticed, but that ends right at Seattle’s city limits and more awareness and uniform regulation is needed
We get a skewed perspective of India’s identity politics because of a lack of representation from different groups in India
There is a whole paragraph answering this question:
```
An uninitiated might be forgiven for not realizing that caste-based discrimination is rampant in India (yes, even among faculty members at IITs), and perhaps worse among Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). Therefore, there was always fear of what would a potential letter writer or someone on tenure evaluation committee think of me if they knew I belonged to OBC. It was the same fear that stopped me from mentioning anything about my caste in any of DEI statements that I prepared for the job search or tenure: I had to pretend not to know what it feels to be under-represented.
```
>> There are at most five tenure-track faculty who belong to OBC category among all the faculty members in North America's "top" 50 CS departments
The full quote is:
>I think I can summarize the lack of representation with the help of a claim that I believe is true: There are at most five tenure-track faculty who belong to OBC category among all the faculty members in North America's "top" 50 CS departments. Any reasonable process to pick 50 CS departments should suffice. I will, of course, be overjoyed to be corrected.
So, this is a claim they believe is true and would be happy to be corrected. Please go ahead and correct them if you disagree.
>And then continues to show castes of faculty at IIT.
This is literally preceded by
>You might ask: What evidence do I have to support my claim?
So, to lay it out for you:
1) Hypothesis: There is discrimination against OBC in academia
2) Evidence: The near absence of OBC professors in IITs
3) Prediction: This probably affects OBCs outside India as well
I am Indian, from an IIT, and I have seen this kind of knee-jerk dismissal from higher-caste Indians against any claims of discrimination more times than I can count. I do not believe you are making a good-faith argument here.
Are the Indians in NA somehow fundamentally different? It isn't like we've left the rest of our social/cultural practices and ills behind upon moving to the West. Thus it makes sense that if there's evidence of caste based discrimination at the highest levels of education in India, there is likely such discrimination in Indian communities in the West too.
One important difference is that Indo-Canadians make up about 5% of the Canadian population. It would be surprising if the higher caste subset of that 5% was capable of suppressing access to tenure-track positions across the board. Moreso if it's extended to NA, as the number is ~1.5% in the US. Less if I'm supposed to assume that people from India prefer to work for other Indians, or if Indians are overrepresented in CS academia positions.
I also tend to imagine that those in academia are considerably more likely than the general population to reject racism.
Knowing how those in positions of power can gate keep, yes, those higher caste Indians could easily block tenure. Especially since non-Indians propably cannot really spot the caste based component of those actions.
I'd like real numbers, but I've come across, a disproportionate number of people in interreligious, inter-ethnicity marriages, and presumably inter-caste marriages, except that I can't really tell one's caste unless they have a caste based lastname, and I know that name is associated with a caste.
I've heard of numerous cases where Indian-Americans didn't know their caste until they were asked about it by people not of Indian origin, who seemed to have the 4 caste + outcastes model in their heads, which barely maps to how caste is understood in modern India.
Yes. They are fundamentally different because they are a super minority and hence any kind of discrimination is unlikely to have any measurable impact.
For example imagine people who have tattoo on right hand discriminating against people who have tattoo on their left hand or people who are members of Libertarian party discriminating against members of green party.
If you're from IIT, you must be aware there is clear difference in the performance of those who come on quota(like oBC, SC, ST etc) and those without quota. If you extrapolate the same academic performance throughout the students career, and assuming for the incoming class of 1000 have to select 10 professor on the academic performance, who it's gonna be? The dude who came on quota or the dudes who were off the chart in the tests? Do you suggest we should also appoint professors and give grants based on the caste?
1) Hypothesis: There is discrimination against OBC in academia
2) Evidence: The near absence of OBC professors in IITs
3) Prediction: This probably affects OBCs outside India as well
---
I hope the author is not a STEM prof, because with that poor grasp of scientific method and statistics he wont be able to do justice to any subject that involves science. But of course I recognize that this is paraphrasing of the author and not author's precise argument.
When you take tiny slices of society where the people need to be in top 0.05% of their field, chances are there wont be uniform distribution of other social aspects in it such as race, caste, language, gender etc. I am not a statistician but this phenomenon is called non-ergodicity. I like to call it `Jew` effect.
> According to a May 1945 roster, Jews made up about two-thirds of the leadership in the Manhattan Project’s Theoretical Division (T-Division) — the group tasked with calculating critical mass and modeling implosions — which is still operating today as the only division with an uninterrupted history since Project Y.
Does this imply that the government was somehow discriminatory because there were not enough black people on the project leadership ? Perhaps project Manhattan needed a DEI department too ?
> 3) Prediction: This probably affects OBCs outside India as well
This is even more nonsensical. Outside India is mostly white and probably cant even spell Caste properly is obsessed with author's
dubious OBC identity ? How ? In my experience white people see all of us as brown people. They do no discriminate in their discrimination if at all they do it.
It is even easier to bust this sort of propaganda by finding counter examples. Look at areas where discrimination might cause major harm to the one discriminating.
Good example is politics:
Kamala Harris - who has some Indian blood is actually coming from "high caste" Tamil Brahmin.
Vivek Ramaswamy - again belongs to high caste Tamil Brahmin
Rep. Ro Khanna - Khatri caste (typically high caste)
Rep. Pramila Jaypal (maiden name Menon) belongs to higher caste Nair from Kerala.
Rep. Raja Krishnamooorthi - Tamil Brahmin.
Nikki Haley (real name Namrata Randhawa) - Jat (Royal/Warrior caste).
Let us look at Trump's appointments of federal judge appointments:
- Amul Thapar - Higher caste/Royal caste.
- Jagan Ranjan - Maithili Brahmin - high caste
- Raag Singhal - Warrior caste higher caste.
- Diane Gujrati - Trader caste - Medium caste (not OBC)
Lets look at other prominent judges in USA
- Moxilla Upadhyay the judge who warned trump - Higher caste Brahmin.
- Arun Subramanian - high caste.
- Sri Srinivasan - appointed by Obama. is an high caste Iyenger.
Unless both Trump and Obama administrations and their advisors such as Cato, Heritage, Soros etc. are all casteist engaging in a conspiracy to keep OBCs out of courts, it might be the case that Brahmins and Kshatriyas often tend to dominate the top academic fields.
PS Note: I have closely looked at IIT Bombay faculty recruitment for CSE department. The process is extremely rigorous and has far too many people involved. The person need to have impeccable academic record to begin with. We are pretty much talking about people who have consistently been top 0.05% of every damn exam in their life.
Yes, I think so. The evidence he's showing demonstrates the claim he made (within a reasonable level of accuracy given the data). The point is that the number of OBC professors is much smaller than you'd expect, ceteris paribus, and one likely explanation is caste discrimination in top-rated North American CS departments.
I had a student in my class who wrote about being from a "low caste" background. So when a friend hosted a woman from India on her podcast who said there was so caste discrimination in India I spoke up about this. The podcast guest said that the fact that anyone in the west mentioned caste discrimination, even within western tech companies, was an act of racism against Indian culture and reflected colonial judgements. My friend, who is very, very woke, agreed. I was so annoyed. Thank you for bringing this up. Such discrimination has no place!
I would've been in the same camp of denying it and treating it as just a thing westerners exaggerate and to an extent that is the case. But at the same time caste discrimination is still very much a thing.
The way I've seen people in the west envision it is that everyone is keenly aware of their caste, where they are in society and what they're "allowed" to do. But it isn't that blatant to me, so I felt impressions of caste discrimination were overblown. I was raised to be caste-blind (literally wasn't taught the differences to be able to even subconsciously be biased) so I projected that upon everyone.
However as I've interacted with other Indians, I have noticed that our conversations tend to be very different. I don't really care about where they're from, barely care about their name beyond how to refer to them etc, mostly interested in what they do professionally and what they're interested in while their questions tend to focus on where I'm from and what my family history is.
My understanding is that my caste is fairly mundane so I haven't really noticed any discrimination towards myself, but I think I've atleast noticed that many people have a lot of interest in identifying the caste at least, which can obviously lead to discrimination pretty easily.
I think originally woke was shorthand for anti-racist (I don’t mind being corrected on this since I am not American). Unfortunately the term did not reach the UK in good enough time to be properly encoded in our Oxford English Dictionary and as a result the usage has gone rampant become diffuse! The meaning now seems to be converging on "I don’t agree with .".
Generally western laws would view caste-based discrimination as illegal and wrong. So, it would correct for an individual to express the same opinion in the West, even if that opinion disturbs the ideas and beliefs of a subset of the population attached to someone else’s culture.
You're right on target there. The term is basically meaningless now, after the reactionary right in the US started using "woke" as a scare word for "anything anyone vaguely liberal does that we can pretend is an extremist conspiracy", after attempts to use "cultural Marxism" fell flat.
That's silly. Obviously all cultures have their own issues, and I'd say it's actually rather patronizing to pretend that non-Western cultures don't have their own dynamics of bias and discrimination.
Having said that, as a cultural Westerner, I'd be very loathe to speak much on the topic of the Indian caste system, as while it's clearly a real thing, and I believe those Indians in America who say it is, I'm certain I lack enough context and background to talk about it without it ending up being an exercise in projecting my own culture's dynamics onto theirs. It's the kind of conversation I think I probably need to do far more listening that talking in.
> > I had a student in my class who wrote about being from a "low caste" background.
> as a cultural Westerner, I'd be very loathe to speak much on the topic of the Indian caste system, as [...] I'm certain I lack enough context and background to talk about it without it ending up being an exercise in projecting my own culture's dynamics onto theirs. It's the kind of conversation I think I probably need to do far more listening that talking in.
Depending on the length and depth of that student's essay, the person you're responding to may have done enough listening to at least raise the topic and hear an honest opinion rather than being shut down as colonialist prejudist for merely asking the question
At least, that's how it's written. Maybe they said a lot more, it's not like I was there, but I'm just going by the version that we can read here
> I was invited by some Sadhus from Swami Narayan Temple (BAPS) to visit the temple and have a discussion with them. Because they practice very strict Brahmacharya (eight types of avoiding women, each correlated to an organ: it is called Ashtanga Brahmacharya), the Sadhus said that women could not be present during our discussions, while they were welcome to visit the temple.
> A few years later, one of my teachers from Belgium visited another wing of the Swami Narayan people and found that ‘women were discriminated against’ because they were allowed only to come some distance from the temple when the Sadhus were present.
> The question here is: why did these people (my students and my teacher) experience ‘discrimination’, where I saw none and also knew that none was intended?
Dropped the article right there. Having a genuine religious belief doesn't automatically excuse discrimination, and I have zero interest in reading more from someone who thinks that it does.
Discriminating in private life and affairs is not just a basic human right but also necessary for the wellbeing of people.
Imagine you are not allowed to pick gender on Tinder. Would that be a good example ?
These are nor discriminations, these are perfectly valid life choices that make our society diverse. The problem is when your boss refuses you promotion or when government decides to have a higher tax rate for you because of your identity.
The article boils down to "discrimination is bad, treating people differently by sex or caste is okay, therefore I don't want to call it discrimination, regardless of whether it is or not".
Any charge of discrimination requires one of making normative moral assumptions: everyone ought to be equal, everyone ought be to be same, etc. Without such moral assumptions, it becomes a mere choice.
Depends on the region too. Part of my family is from a landowning/feudal caste (Chaudhary/Jatt and Pahari) that is traditionally Upper Caste but successfully lobbied to become counted as OBC/Lower Caste in order to avail affirmative action benefits.
The Jatts side got reservation thanks to Congress [0] and the Pahari side got reservation thanks to the BJP [1]
Edit: Lmfao this professor (Kuldeep Meel) is Jatt from Hisar/Jhunjunu side. Jatt is not lower caste. Ask my extremely casteist Jatt grandfather who uses Dalit caste names like Chamar, Gujjar, Kanjar, or Balmik as slurs. We became OBC because we burned shit down. The people who actually deserve some form of Affirmative Action didn't get any.
Eh Sri Ganganagar Meel biradari de siga? Those guys are an elite Feudal Family (they're related to the Jakkhars in neighboring Fazilka Punjab, who have been MPs and MLAs for that area since the 1970s).
To be fair, getting in even with the Quota is extremely difficult. If difficulty without the quota is a 10, difficulty with the quota is more like a 9.7.
If you were Forward Caste and rejected from CSE@IITB only because of a Caste Quota, you statistically would have ended up at CSE@IITK or EE@IITD, which has no meaningful difference.
Belittling people who attended top programs on caste quotas is lame and mean.
Common Rank List :90.7788642 (Brahmins, upper castes which Ycombinator hates)
Gen-EWS:75.6229025
OBC-NCL:73.6114227 : Mr Kuldeep meel (based on his caste)
SC:51.9776027
ST:37.2348772
PwD:0.0013527
I would say 73 is minuscule in comparison of 90. Kuldeep is a typical Kota kid, he is not someone coming out from rural India. I wish him best. Sad to see he stopped so low for clicks.
The thread is just a headsup to those, who are not well informed on the issues and the word caste triggers them. The effort is to provide factual data along with the circumstances so that people can weight and relate all kind of arguments with their own life experiences. Also, help our white bois/gals understand what they talking about lol.
Discrimination goes against article one of my country's Constitution. I don't need to know anything about caste just as I don't need to know that in some countries you can marry an 11 year old.
The point is no one is discriminating against Jaats, the group the professor belongs to. They are one of the richest & powerful groups in India. The blog is very misleading since caste based discrimination against Jatts is unheard of.
In fact the group the professor belongs to is responsible for 80% of caste based discriminations that happen in India.
If I've not crossed into personal attack, why my comments are not visible? If Mr Meel chooses to contest any of the facts stated here, he can do it publicly, here at Ycombinator.
The only states I know that have been immune to this shit are Kerala and Himachal Pradesh because the leadership in both states forced land reform very early in their existence, which meant all rural people were essentially equal economically.
If he is so well off, I wonder if he would have even qualified for OBC considering the creamy layer income limits. I wonder if he got a fake income certificate to get himself below the limits to avail OBC reservations.
I worked in 3 different companies (Hyderabad, Bangalore) in South India and did not see any evidence of caste discrimination. Or even people talking about discrimination in office.
While I did see discrimination in college, which was in a rural town in South India.
It doesn’t work like that. This isn’t like racism where differences are immediately superficially apparent. You need to have conversations bordering on light interrogations to determine who is what.
That only applies to Northern part of the country. In south each state has it's own language and there is no way an outside state person can know your caste without asking
Just because people from outside the caste system cannot spot it, and it is much jarder to spot than say discrmination against people of color or women, doesn't mean caste based discrimination isn't every single bit as racist as all other forms of racism.
I guess that depends on your definition of racism. Can people from the UK be racist to the Polish? If yes, fine. But technically it’s different from racism and more nationally based bigotry.
The was a race in Europe that faut a genocidal war against East Europeans, based on perceived race.
Playing semantics during discussions on discrmination always has some undertones of trying to justify said discrimination, because of course it is something different...
Semantics may not be the most helpful during a discussion of this but neither is application of modes/solutions learnt from other forms of bigotry. The best way to kill the caste system is to forget about it which is in the process of happening. It’s not further entrenching yourself in that identity that may be necessary in more superficial forms of bigotry.
There’s already a 30-50% quota in most public institutions that is very successful at giving lower castes an advantage. No bootstraps required.
Will those affirmative actions extend how long the caste system stays around? Probably but they’re meant to be in place for a couple of generations (40-80 years) which should be an acceptable amount of time to level the field.
Race is an ambiguous delineation of a tribe someone might belong to.
Sex, age, etc are more defined delineations.
Who is to say the 1.3B population of Indians does not have multiple races? They might all be the same tribe in the eyes of a person with ancestors from Europe, born and raised in the US. But for someone in India, they very well could view the other 1.29B Indians as being in tribes as different as “white” and “black” tribes in the US.
Note that racism is not skin color-ism, since a very light skinned descendent of a darker skinner person is also, commonly, referred to as being “black”, especially if they have obvious physical traits that display they have “black” ancestors.
Race in the US (and other parts of the developed world) is about the socioeconomic tribe that the one belongs to, or that one’s network (including ancestors) belong to. That seems very similar to castes in India.
Indian populations also have similar differences in physical traits that they use to discriminate, but they also correlate with socioeconomic status. Including lighter and darker skin.
So my wife is from a shipyard town in Russia which refitted that air carrier ship for Indian navy. So at times they had a lot of Indian citizens in town.
I remember some of her acquaintances, working at child care, discovered that some of Indian kids shun other ones based on Caste, and promptly made them all do kids' dances holding hands with each other.
Accepting a huge warship, learning to use and service it is a multi-year affair involving a lot of people, who in turn have families. So they had to acclimatize to the near polar circle White sea experience.
Reading the attachments, the data seems to be recent (except for IIT bombay?) and includes assistant, associate, and tenured professors. Surprising that almost 175 of the 180 faculty members are from the "forward castes" (~30% of population) vs 5 (1 obc, 4 sc, scheduled caste) from the remaining 70%. Could also be due to academia skewing older? (i.e reflecting past biases)
> The Google spokesperson said that caste discrimination has “no place in our workplace and it’s prohibited in our policies.”
I can testify that Ads was very heavily Indian, much more than the general employee percentages would predict. I don't know if it still is. Sridhar Ramaswamy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sridhar_Ramaswamy) probably had something to do with that. From informal observation, IIT was a very common alma mater for them.
Yet, within the SmartASS team in Ads, a huge percentage of the engineers were Canadian. I worked in the office right next door to them for a while.
What does this tell you? People tend to refer their friends and give good recommendations to people they know. A Canadian is more likely to know other Canadians. So is that "discrimination?"
I wonder how that sits with the diversity and inclusion directives that are everywhere now. Maybe they turn a blind eye when it suits them, or use other teams to offset the difference.
idk, but there's always a question of how big a unit you look at when computing ethnic percentages. Does a group of 10 have to have 5 women, 3 POC's, and one LGBT? Or can you measure DEI only for very large groups, like the whole company?
Probably for the government, it's the entire company, or maybe each large strata of it.
For a team of 10 I absolutely agree that you're probably not going to get that fine-grained, and you'll probably look at larger groups of 100 or more.
But it still can be useful to spot-check smaller teams. If that team of 10 is, say, 100% male, or 100% Chinese, maybe that's something that deserves a second look. Not with guns-blazing, "you all are obviously sexist/racist", but... a second look, nonetheless.
What if they were 100% Gelgameks? It's a nonsense question because at any large tech co, there aren't any engineering teams that are 100% women or Black. I don't believe that's a reflection the skills of race or gender lacking, just that there aren't any tech co execs that would feel comfortable with that due to their own bias and overall corporate culture..
that's the nonsense question. This isn't 100%, but there were Google managers who prided themselves on having very disproportionately large numbers of black or female employees. SRE groups, especially.
In addition, there are plenty of teams that are almost all Chinese. Or Indian. Or, of course, white male.
From what I've seen from the outside, it looks like US companies focus on what they view as "non-core" departments to reach their overall diversity goals. So, for example, in a software company, the coders might largely be of one or two ethnicities, and then the company's diversity goals are met by hiring diverse candidates in, say, HR, legal, payroll, etc.
It's at least a lack of diversity processes, metrics, and benchmarks, which leads to discriminatory outcomes. Or in other words, someone should've said, "hey, this team is X% Indian, maybe branch out a little". It's the exact same dynamic that leads to heavily white/male teams, "hey I made all my friends at institutions that didn't at all strive for diversity... and that's where I hire from... hmm."
How is your argument relevant when there were 20 complaints from actual Googlers about caste discrimination? Unless you are actually Indian and aware of the castes you wouldn't have any idea whether caste discrimination was happening to your colleagues.
Yes, absolutely. It may be passive and unconscious, but it's still discrimination. I bet a lot of more-than-qualified candidates -- many likely even more qualified than the people who ended up getting hired -- were rejected.
Unless you're going to assert that Indian people are uniquely the most qualified and best at building advertising systems (which I hope we can agree would be an absurd assertion to make), it's a near certainty that better candidates were passed over.
And looking at it from the potential candidate perspective, I personally wouldn't want to work on a team that is heavily over-represented by any one race (even my own), and I wouldn't be surprised if that "scared away" some great candidates (of other races) for positions as well. This is no different than the archetypal example of a woman engineer being uncomfortable joining a team full of men.
> People tend to refer their friends and give good recommendations to people they know.
I've come to believe that referrals are great when you're a tiny startup trying to find people whose work you can trust (since dead weight can be fatal to a new company), but become less and less useful -- and sometimes even counterproductive -- as a company grows in size.
At any rate, at any non-tiny company, any referral should be put through the same interview process as the other candidates, and should be judged based on the interview, not on the referrer's opinion. The referrer should not even be a part of the interview process, anyway. Not just when it comes to their referral, but (if possible), they shouldn't be a part of the other candidates' interview panels either, as they may be (at best) unconsciously biased against the others.
> A Canadian is more likely to know other Canadians.
Canadians aren't a racial group (and a Canadian may be white, black, native, Asian, Indian, whatever), so I don't think this particular example has anything to do with the rest of what you're talking about. If that team mostly or exclusively comprised white Canadians (or Canadians of any other single race), then yeah, maybe there's an issue there. And regardless, a team comprised of the same $X -- where $X is pretty much anything -- should be a red flag. To me, that's a sign that the team may be cliquish and discriminate (even unconsciously) against anyone who might join the team but be an "outsider" from the perspective of $X.
> Canadians aren't a racial group (and a Canadian may be white, black, native, Asian, Indian, whatever), so I don't think this particular example has anything to do with the rest of what you're talking about.
They're not, but it has absolutely everything to do with it. As you agreed (I think): People tend to refer their friends. Canadians often went to the same schools (Waterloo, McGill, UBC) and if you asked one about another one, quite possibly they'd know someone who knew him or her.
The thread is filled with white progressives who know nothing about caste. There are what 2 cases of caste discrimination in US companies. In one of the cases (the famous Cisco) case was proven there was no discrimination.
The professor who wrote this blog is literally a Jatt. A land owning caste & one of the most powerful castes in India. Any Indian reading this blog will know this is BS. I would understand if the author was at least Dalit or ST.
It sounds like you know something about this topic, but the way you've been posting about it is too inflammatory and flamebaity. Putting other people down for being ignorant isn't helpful; neither is calling names.
If you know more than others, that's great, but then the thing to do is to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn.
I interned there one summer about 10 yrs ago and i already noticed back then that some departments were composed either entirely of indians or chinese employees.
The Cisco case was dismissed as false recently. The person was found not guilty of any caste based discrimination. Caste issue in America is mostly made up. Indians who have money to go from India to US don't care about castes in the first place
Cisco did not have any problems, it was Equality Labs which brainwashed an employee to file a lawsuite against his manager (who happened to be Christian). Not only the lawsuite has been dropped the last time I checked the victim (the manager accused of discrimination) is countersueing.
Equality Labs is behind these sort of plans and propaganda.
There are far too many caste grifters in USA pushing an "agenda". Equality Labs for example is an Islamic Organization with a Christian Thenmouzi as its face who talks about "caste" but in reality is she is born to very rich doctor parents in central California. Most of these claims and propaganda is not just bogus but outright harmful for the very people they pretend to fight for.
Equality Labs was initially setup by a Bangladeshi Muslim to fight "Islamophobia" and to target Hindus in general. Thenmozi joined it much later and became "co-founder". They shared stage with known wanted Khalistani terrorists and such.
The "Islamists" tag made it harder for this organization to get any traction with politicians and corporate world. Everyone would look at them suspiciously so they quietly dropped all the muslim names from their site and removed most references to Islamophobia.
The caste system in India is layered like onions. The author says he was born as OBC (Other Backward Classes), but that's not the lowest in the overall scheme. SC (Scheduled Castes) are considered lower in the hierarchy. ST (Scheduled Tribes) are considered even lower (there are variations across states and regions, so please take this with a pinch of salt). While the atrocities and punishments by "upper" caste people on "lower" caste people continue, even OBCs oppress SCs and STs quite badly, sometimes along with other "upper" caste people and sometimes by themselves. [1] It's a sad fact that the oppressed themselves don't understand it well enough to avoid oppressing others. If they could get together and lift each other up, things could be very different (or at least not as bad as they have been and are).
[1]: Searching for news on atrocities and punishments on "dalits" would yield many results from as recent as a few days to long ago in the past.
> While the atrocities and punishments by "upper" caste people on "lower" caste people continue, even OBCs oppress SCs and STs quite badly [...].
This is the step 1. in ensuring any oppressive system continues to be supported by a majority / critical mass of people, who are themselves subject to oppression: make sure there's someone even lower than you, on whom you can unleash your frustration.
The issue is OBC (Other Backwards Castes) was invented as a populist measure in 1992.
After Independence, Affirmative Action/Reservation was created so Dalits and Nomadic Tribes who were traditionally outcastes in South Asian society could be integrated into society.
Yet, in the 1980s-90s, Agrarian and Feudal Caste politicians like Mulayam Singh Yadav (Yadav), Lalu Prasad Yadav (Yadav), Chaudhary Charan Singh (Jatt), Bal Thackarey (Maratha), YRS Reddy (Reddy), etc began pushing to expand Affirmative Action to include those castes that are traditionally Feudal Lords/Zamindars and oppressed Dalits and Nomads.
When this expansion began in 1992, every single non-Dalit caste saw that if they could lobby hard enough, they could also be give guarunteed Affirmative Action for college admissions, government jobs, welfare, etc.
This is why even some Brahmin majority castes like Paharis were given Affimative Action by being treated as an OBC or Scheduled Tribe.
I'm not one who believes that perfect representational parity is possible or even desirable within all social groupings. That said, I see no reason to ignore the implication of a 1% vs 40% disparity within a highly advantageous profession.
Right, they absolutely should fight for equal representation.
The numbers aren't always going to be exactly equal to representation, sure. But when you have a group that comprises 40% of society only represented by a half percent in prestigious university faculty positions, you need to step back and figure out what's going on there. These people are not genetically different or of lower intelligence; they've literally been not allowed to hold these positions even if they wanted them and could be qualified for them.
Frankly, your point of view is advocating for bigotry and oppression, and I suggest you re-evaluate why that is so.
There was functionally no public education system available to most Indians until a decent bit after Independence, and even now most rural communities have atrocious schooling standards with chronically absentee teachers.
India has been an extremely poor country for a long time. It’s not a situation like the US where there were plenty of opportunities available and some segment of society is gated out of them. Almost all Indians save for a narrow clade of people who worked directly under the imperial administration of the British Empire had access to anything, and even those were the cream of the crop from the pre-British days who could translate their prior privileges to getting ahead of their peers in the rat race.
It’s basically tautological to say OBCs are underrepresented in the upper echelons of society. That’s literally how the category is defined. The system was set up from colonialism on down to leave very few positions with contemporary standards of dignity for “natives” to occupy.
There is a very real economic divide between rural India and urban India.
Even if you were from a feudal landlord family, 30 years ago you might have not even had running water or electricity. But at least you had a solid house, instead of living in a mud hut (if you were lucky) like most Dalits and Nomads in rural India back then.
If someone from an elite rural family came to the city, their privilige automatically becomes moot because in a purely capitalist society Money begets Privilige.
In the 1990s-to-present, there was a massive migration from rural India to cities, and a number of formerly priviliged Men (it's men who become migrant workers) were at the bottom rung of the urban social ladder. And they were/are PISSED. So in retaliation, they began organizing their own Castes to fight for political power and quotas.
Also, in India, Affirmative Action is a Quota System, unlike the US where Quotas are unconstitutional. This means you are playing a Zero Sum game where one family's Affirmative Action might doom your family to poverty.
Schhol shootings in the US, Neo-Nazis in East Germany, islamist terrorists. They all have in common of being, over simplifying, frustrated, in secure young men.
They are easily manipulated by populists and ideologists, prone to use violence and prone to be sexist, racist etc. I guess that is becaise the way they see themselves, or what they think society expects them to be, is something they do not get. Hence the incredible amount of frustration. Frustration that breeds, especially when combined with a sense of entitlement and inhrained superiority, radicals like nothing else. Bonus points if thes can see themselves as the victims, conspiracy theories go a long way in building some groups conspiring against them.
So, I think I agree with part of what you're saying. But I can't exactly grasp your logic.
I'd like to understand. Let's use white male young men school shooters in the US.
OP > So in retaliation, they began organizing their own Castes to fight for political power and quotas.
You > the way they see themselves, or what they think society expects them to be, is something they do not get. Hence the incredible amount of frustration
What I'm interpreting your comments as, is that people should just "stay in their lane"/ caste/ station at birth and not cause trouble/ accept their rung of society
>> What I'm interpreting your comments as, is that people should just "stay in their lane"/ caste/ station at birth and not cause trouble/ accept their rung of society
If ypu read my other comments on caste systeks and discrimination, it becomes clear that is the exact opposite of what I mean.
The solution is not for everyone else to adapt around the greavances of frustrated individuals and groups that cannot adapt to change. The task is on those frustrated individuals to find ways to adapt whatever they have adapting to in a changinf society, because the only these large changes can be surpressed is by oppressing others. We all know where that ends.
Those frustrated young men (and it is mostly men) so, they are actually in a pretty bad spot. Those that actually act on those feelings are just plain pathetic so, the others, well, society owes them some form of support. Just don't ask me what kind of support so.
The much much worse proboem so is the people in power, read populist and nationalist movement and political leader along with their religious counterparts, that use those men to further their own goals of power. More often than not, that use ends in violence and death. No idea what can be done about that neither, other than voting for parties that are not like that and keep tbose radicals out of government and power as much as possible. And that approach doesn't always work neither, nor is it even possible in a lot of places.
And no, I wont stay in a lane someone else put me in just because it would hurt that other persons feelings. And neither should anyone else, ever.
> Schhol shootings in the US, Neo-Nazis in East Germany, islamist terrorists. They all have in common of being, over simplifying, frustrated, in secure young men.
Isn't the same also true about e.g. protests against the Vietnam War, or... probably about almost all protests ever.
Young men are more likely to stand up and actually do something. Sometimes good things, sometimes bad things.
Identical phenomenon exists in US where groups with well above average incomes are considered officially "disadvantaged groups" for purposes of eg SBA loans.
The most obvious one is that Asian American are considered “disadvantaged” group for getting SBA loans which makes zero sense (highest earning group in US). They also qualify for minority-owned business status that opens up gov contracting opportunities.
Bal Thackeray is no way a Maratha, although he fought for Marathi and Hindu identity. Just shows how complex things are. Also the PM is OBC for what I know off.
OBC is indeed a completely made up category and has no relation to any kind of historic "atrocities".
OBCs are > 50% of India's population my some measure which tells you they are extremely powerful in an democracy. They engage in this race to bottom where they want more legal discrimination that favors them at the expense of another.
One can easily see that the most powerful politicians everywhere in India are mostly OBC. India's current PM is an OBC, so is the CMs of some of the richest states like Maharahstra, Tamilnadu or the most populous states like Uttar Pradesh. Making a claim that this group is somehow "oppressed" is like claiming Teachers Unions or NRA being politically oppressed. It is other way around.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Reminds me of ragging in Indian colleges. There is no particular generation thinks that they should put a full stop to this. Their insane justification is “we bore it, now it’s our turn to do it”. Society is just f*^ed up.
To make it further complex, the OBCs are further categorized into A,B,C,D.. groups. You need to add this info in multiple government forms right from childhood before writing any exam to what category and sub category you belong.
And to make it even more complex I’m classified as Upper caste in the state I was born, OBC in 2 other neighboring states. Many from the caste I was born in migrate to other states so they can get reservations (affirmative action) benefits for their kids.
To make it even further further complex, there is a sub caste with in the caste I was born in that are treated as SCs because of political reasons (may be?), so many cross marriage on purpose, again to get benefits for their kids.
This is one of the main reason that is holding back India as a country. No one I know in my generation (born in 90s) practice or discriminate anyone, but the government regularly does and reminds you of it
> the oppressed themselves don't understand it well enough to avoid oppressing others
I can’t comment too much because i’ve had a copy sitting unread in my pile of books to read for over 6 months now, but if anyone is interested, I think this is the exact topic of Paulo Freire’s ‘ Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed
Why is this relevant other than as an attempt to misdirect blame from the "caste system" to "the writer of the article"?
I read the article as a critique of India's caste system evidenced by the lack of representation for a class that represents almost half the population. What does the actions of individuals in this group(that makes up half the population of India) have to do with that point?
This whole idea is completely wrong, in my opinion. You first need to demonstrate why your sampling model/methodology (collection of top50 NA CS departments) will lead to an error-free way to establish a discrimination type mechanism of selection. There is a near absence of people of South east asian origin in the NFL, but I don't think the NFL is doing so on discriminatory grounds. The end result is under-representation, but the underlying mechanism is not one of malicious discrimination by the talent scouts.
The point is, lets discuss evidence of discrimination rather than a weird "this can only be possible with discrimination" argument.
So you're saying the Indian caste system is well partitioned with respect to capability for tenure-producing work across a wide range of disciplines taught in IIT schools?
Elephants do not exist, so there could not possibly be one in this room. Instead, let's self-soothe with talk of flaws in common elephant-detection methodologies, because that will reassure us that the room is elephant-free. Nevermind the pervasive smell of elephant shit.
Honestly I think this is majorly overblown. Having lived in both India and the US and being in my late 30s, I’ve never seen caste come up in any conversation even once. That’s tens of thousands of Indian people at the very least. Feels like this person is hyper aware of his caste and seems to take steps bordering on paranoia.
1. OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population
and
2. Exactly one out of 180 CS faculty members across five IITs belongs to OBC category
Those two facts alone make it sound like a pretty big deal to me, even if it hasn't been a part of your experience in India. Or do you think he is wrong about those numbers?
Historically and culturally the higher castes are more educationally oriented so it wouldn’t be surprising. The caste system is rapidly breaking down but only for about the last generation. I presume it’s going to take time for representation within college professors being one of the most erudite fields. On the other hand, there is tremendous representation within the government, judges, police, teachers, civil servants, engineers etc. Modi the PM is an OBC, the president is also OBC. A very large number of politicians are from lower castes.
The numbers could be right, but you couldn’t exactly argue discrimination tbh.
27% seats are reserved for OBC students in IITs
There is a similar quota for people in OBC categories in govt jobs (which IIT professors are). Maybe there are plenty of OBC professors, but not in CS? Or that they don’t openly identify as OBC? Or maybe, people just don’t qualify/apply to the position?
Because of centuries of discrimination that has kept them poorer and less educated.
You might be able to argue that there is no discrimination today and that the hiring process itself is not discriminatory, but the outcomes are entirely the result of discrimination in society.
This discussion made me curious, how is the cause of their poverty and lack of opportunity relevant? There are hundreds of millions of underprivileged people in India, why should those from a lower caste be given precedence over others, even if there is a history of oppression behind their poverty?
But that is exactly what exists. You could be born in a “lower caste” but a wealthy family, you’d have a preferential treatment over someone who is poor but is born in a “higher caste”.
So there's basically three views on social welfare. The far right doesn't want it to exist at all, or if it must exist it should be funneled towards the already powerful, because nobody deserves it. The left says that we need to distribute social welfare in order to equalize society, because everyone deserves a good life. The liberals, in between the two, view welfare as a means to make up for societal failures or outright wrongs. It's not about the fact that these people are needy, it's about the fact that they're needy and it's our fault.
Race/caste/etc based welfare distribution comes from that last model.
You’re presuming Anglo political dynamics and cleavages onto a completely foreign culture here. The Indian right wing I wouldn’t characterize as “anti-welfare” at all.
> Because of centuries of discrimination that has kept them poorer and less educated
No one is denying this. But there has been a reservation of seats for SC and ST categories for about 80 years and for OBC category for 40+ years in education. The reservation in govt job openings exists since the 80s. How can you reasonably argue that the outcomes are entirely the result of discrimination in society?
Caste is absolutely a huge problem in India as these numbers show. It’s a different question whether it’s a problem in Western companies, especially outside India, and I’m not sure about the data for that.
That being said, even this statistic shows that we should be wary of mapping our understanding of other kinds of discrimination onto caste without being very careful.
In an idealized version of the caste system (which you will see some bigots use to defend it but in the real world the idealized version is nowhere to be seen), it’s literally impossible for those lower caste numbers to be anything other than 0%, because in the idealized version your caste is defined by your profession, so being a professor means you’re not any of those castes.
I think the case is highlighted pretty well, clearly the representation is less because of continued/historical lack of access.
Seems to be something that should addressed asap because this is clearly holding the Indian economy and social progress back, efficient use of labor and capital is key, seems to me this is an obvious hindrance.
The bit about names is interesting, seems like something that has a hold on society and people go out of their way to conform to it. Like it is subliminal, not externally evident like race so it should be theoretically an easier problem to solve, I wonder if education and economic progress can resolve this, ironic as it is.
There are two sides to the story. Yes caste does come up in India in daily life, the more rural you go, the more important it becomes. That being said, there is also an element of obsession with caste in people who are well removed from the discrimination because they’re doing well socio economically. Sometimes people feel discriminated against because generally that’s what you’re told you should expect, but sometimes you over compensate for your insecurities and people just don’t like you for who you are. I’ve had plenty of people from OBC come up to me in the US and ask my caste, and when I don’t engage, they feel almost insulted. Context: I’m not OBC but I’m not up there in the caste ladder either. And I’ve basically completely blocked the whole caste system from my brain.
I wasn't even aware of my caste (ST) until I joined intermediate(equivalent to 11-12 grade). I feel like I'm lucky that I didn't face any sort of caste discrimination. I guess it depends on which part of India you live in.
Caste based reservations in the private sector will be the end of any chance of India becoming a more prosperous nation. In public sector, the reservations are not limited to getting a job, but the promotions as well. In some public sectors, the promotion schedule gets accelerated basis caste. Sure, a lot needs to be done for a more equal society where everyone has the same opportunities, but private sector reservation is not it.
I am not getting your point, if you were making any. Regardless of what history shows, almost everyone will agree that we must have equal opportunities for all people, for a humane society.
Equality is the prerogative of the government. Why do you want equal share in someone's private property? This is what reservations in the private sector mean. Someone takes all the risk, and works their ass off to establish a business and you come in with demands of equality in what someone else has made.
I want discrmination, of any shape, form and kond and for all reasons, to go away in the private sector as well. Your, and my, personal freedom stop where someone elses begins. And that explicitly includes caste based discrimination, among all other forms.
Affirmative action does not eliminate discrimination, it enforces discrimination up to an arbitrarily defined standard.
Suppose you're applying to a company that's posted 10 openings and has already filled 7 of them, and that you belong to category A, and there's three more candidates who belong to category B. Suppose further that it can be objectively determined that you're a better fit for any of the openings than any of the other candidates, but the company has already filled its category A quota. You will be rejected because of your category, and the less capable candidates will be accepted also because of their category.
Note that it doesn't matter how the categories are defined in my example. Maybe you belong to a privileged (in the social justice sense) class, but it's equally possible that you belong to a disadvantaged class and the inept candidates belong to a privileged class.
> Your, and my, personal freedom stop where someone else begins.
Basically arbitrary rule. Someone else's personal freedom can begin anywhere according to this statement. It can even begin in your home, doesn't matter whether you live alone or not.
Equal societies indeed make better use of human capital than societies that discriminate and waste otherwise valuable skills. But equality is not the same thing as equity.
Yeah, and you can always tell someone's full financial position from little details like that. (eyeroll)
So someone who got a benefit from the state that addresses a serious, well-proven injustice, and wasn't crawling on their knees and begging for it. Sounds like the system is working.
Even if your anecdote is real, and their use of an Audi indicated they were well able to pay full school fees, so what? We give such benefits to the parents because we want to target the child. Sometimes the parents might make different financial choices, obtain a car that's more than they need. (And you don't know how they got it, whether it's used, or whether they feel they need it to "keep up appearances" with others so peers, like you, don't judge them by their car.)
In any case that's why the benefit is delivered as reduced school fees. TLDR the children aren't the ones who bought the Audi.
"little details": In a country where an Audi is a huge luxury, yeah you can tell enough.
That also means they have the resources to compete fairly with their peers and choose not to by invoking their OBC class, which in all practicality has NO affect on their life.
The point was a generation before had reaped the benefits of reservation and anything further was exploitation. That family was not treated, nor lived as an OBC. The system worked, its stoppage is overdue by at least 20 years.
Elite capture is a real phenomenon and I think one that affirmative action programs worldwide struggle to handle. It's worth acknowledging even if we ultimately decide the benefits outweigh the costs.
No, we don't need caste-based reservations in the private sector. (And I'm saying this as someone that's ST). That would further increase the divide between castes, and I've never heard of anyone being denied a job in private sector based on their caste. It's definitely not the norm.
Reservation should be meant to uplift 1-2 generations, I don't see the point in giving reservation beyond that. I've seen so many rich people from lower castes getting into institutions easily and also availing scholarships by faking their parents yearly income. The whole system is rigged to be honest.
I see OBC mentioned here many times but never defined in comments:
The Other Backward Class (O.B.C.) is a collective term used by the Government of India to classify castes which are educationally or socially backward. It is one of several official classifications of the population of India, along with General castes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SCs and STs).
The caste system in India is the paradigmatic ethnographic instance of social classification based on castes. It has its origins in ancient India, and was transformed by various ruling elites in medieval, early-modern, and modern India, especially the Mughal Empire and the British Raj.
Key terms:
* Varna, meaning type, order, colour, or class are a framework for grouping people into classes, first used in Vedic Indian society. . . .
* Jati, meaning birth, is mentioned less often and clearly distinguished from varna. There are four varnas but thousands of jatis. . . .
* . . . [C]aste is derived from the Portuguese word casta, meaning "race, lineage, breed" and, originally, "'pure or unmixed (stock or breed)". . . .
What’s the hypothesized reason why American universities are evidently discriminating against OBC persons? To my knowledge most Americans know little to nothing about caste, few of us can reliably tell caste from name, and even if we could we wouldn’t care.
The subtext is that other people of Indian descent are doing the discrimination. So far as I know, nobody asserts that non-Indians are aware of caste, or could possibly identify caste from names.
Just as India is large and complex, so is everyone's experience. 59.5% of IIT seats are reserved for backward castes - that is HUGE in a nation full of students competing for the 40% seats available for the general category. The entrance exam score gap between reserved and general is massive (numbers are public) and it shows in their relative academic performance. One could make an argument that the Indian Government should step in earlier (early - middle school up to high school) by funding better education to reduce the academic gap between students from backward castes and the rest. The author here if anything points to the effect of poverty/poor education in one's early years as opposed to there being a systematic campaign to exclude backward castes in academia esp in the west where hardly anybody understands the caste system. I can't speak much to academia in India though.
No one wants to talk about the giant elephant in the room: reservation system vs. competence. Go to any govt office: the chief of some division is incompetent, some low-level clerk does the heavy lifting. Of course, this low-level clerk happens to be from non-reserved category, as both recruitment and promotions in the government are driven by reservations.
Why people (both reserved and non-reserved) send their kids to private schools, techno-schools, residential-schools, IIT-schools even in small towns, small villages these days? The whole education system from primary to all the way to universities is failing: incompetent teachers abound. There was a time Indian politicians used to send their kids to colleges in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Culcutta. Now, these politicians send their kids abroad right after 12th grade, as they are not impacted. The malaise in the Indian education system is so deep: getting a job in the govt is a way to 'correct historical wrongs'; if so, why these teachers (beneficiaries of this correction) don't send their kids to these govt schools? Ask, why these people look for the best doctors for their care?
Maybe, it is time to destroy IITs as well by forcing the reservation system on the faculty recruitment (equality of outcomes). That way, we can achieve the common denominator from primary to IITs. People with means (importantly politicians and intellectuals who defend reservations) can send their kids abroad for undergrad B.A/B.S, whereas 99% people are stuck with systematic malaise in the whole education system.
> Go to any govt office: the chief of some division is incompetent, some low-level clerk does the heavy lifting.
For the majority of the time since 1947, it was the non-reserved "competent" class of people who were in charge of government institutions. Even today, I can easily walk into a government office and find some "competent" class officer whose only interest is in milking as much money as he can out of the citizenry. So what gives?
Corruption is NOT confined to one class, one caste, one set (random vs. non-random), one alumni association, one group (competent vs. incompetent). This issue is orthogonal to competence: one can be corrupt irrespective of competence.
People recruited in state services (just like UPSC) are promoted to IAS/IPS. When these promoted IAS/IPS officers want postings as district magistrates (collectors) or superintendents of police for districts, the chief secretary or the DGP want bribes; otherwise, they are posted in loop-line (like special project director for land acquisition or railways SP). Add this to sycophancy in India: this sycophancy is there since Islam Rule, then continued into British Raj, now post-Independence India. Every subordinate officer, while treating his/her subordinates as trash, salutes his/her superior. Sycophancy and corruption are deeply related, and collusion between bureaucracy and politicians adds flavor to this mix.
My point is why the enormous amount of energy directed at reservations when there are mountains of evidence that corruption is several orders of magnitude more destructive? It's an elephant vs an ant in the room thing. You ignore the elephant and think the ant is causing systemic malaise. Why is that?
Is it because Hindu dharma dictates that certain classes are meant to do certain jobs? Like a person availing reservation is born stupid - because of bad karma from a past life - and so can never learn how to do administrative work competently?
Both incompetence and corruption need to be fixed. Incompetence from the rationality perspective [1], corruption from the systems perspective. Just because some book says "people from X varna should do certain job", who is enforcing it? Now you can say that Brahmins haven't taught Vedas to non-brahmins. Come on, who wants to recite Vedas today? History showed us that many Sudra kings ruled; what does it show? That one's favorite text is not binding; or, no one is enforcing what the text says; or, human actions are not instantiations of beliefs, which are textual; etc.
> Just because some book says "people from X varna should do certain job", who is enforcing it?
Hindu dharma is not driven by any particular book, but is simply the dominant sociopolitical system in the Indian sub-continent. A political system with a tiny elite controlling the rest is inherently unstable (think monarchies or communism) whereas a political system which distributes its elites tends to be stable. That is what the caste system is. Each jati had its own ruling body and social structure. And then there were broader rules which governed how jatis interact, which is where the varnas come in.
Now how do you maintain this political system if people are free to leave a jati or intermarry with another jati willy-nilly? You can't. That is why caste endogamy is so strictly enforced (and often violently) in the sub-continent. And the endogamy dates back to like from 2000 years ago. This socio-political system is so fundamental a building block of the sub-contient that even Muslims and Christians follow it unlike in other parts of the world.
The other problem to solve in this jati system is that how do you keep some jati doing the dirty or undesirable jobs? This is where the concept of karma comes in. Some people can get away with murder because that's just how the universe works. They will get their just desserts in the next life.
Given all that, people who grow up in such a culture carry some biases pretty strongly. Like if a guy gets into medical college due to reservation, but earns the degree like everyone else in his class - by you know completing all the course requirements - he is still not qualified to treat people. The bad karma sticks around. That is how the enforcement works. The cultural beliefs do it.
No one has described the so-called sociopolitical system and its dynamic (how it reproduces). What we have speculative accounts, ad hoc in nature. Let's look at endogamy.
"A caste is an endogamous group, or collection of endogamous groups, bearing a common name, membership of which is hereditary, arising from birth alone; imposing on its members certain restrictions in the matter of social intercourse; either (i) following a common traditional occupation, or (ii) claiming a common origin, or (iii) both following such occupation and claiming such origin; and generally regarded as forming a single homogenous community" (p.5 of Blunt's The caste system of Northern India)
"The endogamy of a subcaste is not as rigid as that of a caste. A marriage between (say) a Brahman bridegroom and a Rajput bride is unthinkable, but intermarriages have occurred between subcastes of the same caste with no worse consequences than a purificatory sacrifice; and if circumstances make it desirable, such as lack of women, subcaste endogamy is abandoned. Even in the Brahman caste this has occurred. Subcaste endogamy is muta- ble; sometimes a subcaste which is endogamous in one place is not so in another. A trifling quarrel will drive two groups that formerly intermarried to endogamy: the removal of the cause of offense removes the restriction. But the most potent of all objections is the fact that endogamous subcastes are not regarded by their own members or by the rest of Hindu society as castes. To call such groups castes is to treat them as being what no Hindu would admit them to be. An investigator is not at liberty to manipulate his material so as to make it fit his theories." ( ibid, 6-7)
From a field study from Karnataka:
"[O]ut of the 600 Panchayat members, majority of them did not endorse strict endogamy, commensality, untouchability. Nonetheless these respondents, did express their willingness to continue their jati tradition. This makes sense only when they think that these are not constituent properties of the jati traditions. Otherwise how can they disagree with the so called constituent properties of the jati and yet are willing to continue with their affiliation to their jati. This either indicates that none of the so-called characteristic features of the caste system are valid for these jatis or that the jati structure can include or exclude anything and still survive.
Those who consider the jatis as the referential points of the term caste, hold endogamy to be the most fundamental to the caste difference. However the Swamis of some of these jatis advocate for inter jati marriages for various reasons, like for survival of the jati against shortage of brides, or to unite different jatis belonging to the same cluster like Lingayat, Brahmana.. Though they have their own preferences of jatis to be accepted for inter marriage, this at least indicates that endogamy is not a constituent property of the jati units The Havyak Brahmins preferred inter-jati marriage as a means of saving their jati from the crisis of brides. In the case of Lingayat swamis, inter-jati marriage is viewed as a way to unite the Lingayats."
The real biggest problem is: what is a caste? For instance, in the states of Andhra Pradesh/Telangana, after the internet revolution, I have seen people talking about "reddy society". When I asked these society members, what makes some Subba Reddy from a village A, Kurnool District, another Ram Reddy from a village B, Nalgonda District, as belong to the reddy-caste? Their simple answer: because we are all reddy-s, we have that 'reddy' tag in our names. This is a circular explanation. If one goes back 40 years ago, we heard different kinds of reddy-s: pakanati, pedakanti, neravadi, panta, etc. People from each of these (pakanati, pedakanti, ...) didn't marry from other groups. Is there a super-caste called 'reddy', whose sub-castes are pakanati, pedakanti, neravadi, panta, etc? Or pakanati, pedakanti, neravadi, panta, etc are different ca...
Up until a decade or two ago, rhetoric was an extremely effective tool when it came to denying the origins of caste. But with genetic evidence piling up, such positions are simply untenable[1]. As to why certain social institutions endure for so long, it's for the same reason why monarchies had endured even longer than caste endogamy has.
Endogamy fails when the ratio of males to females in a group is not 1:1, a simple mathematical fact. Many castes have disappeared, many emerged. Genetical evidence just show that people prefer to marry within that particular sub-caste, but it is not a constituent property of caste--let alone a system of castes. If we apply this logic (endogamy meausurement), castes existed in other continents, countries far away from India. In that case, we see a phenomenon not unique to India.
BTW, I am not denying that practices exist, practices are continued, even modified. Nor am I denying that jaatis-exist. I am not even denying that there are fights between different jaatis at different places. There is a difference between phenomena and explanations(descriptions). Over the time, theory-laden descriptions of phenomena start replacing the very phenomena. That facts are theory-laden or that facts are facts of a theory--is not some rhetoric.
Once caste-system (sociopolitical system, as you put), a theoretical entity, is postulated to explain various phenomena, now all these phenomena are re-described using this language. When I deny these re-descriptions, you seem to think that I am denying phenomena (for example, people prefer intra-jaati marriages), as you call this denial of re-descriptions as rhetoric.
Practices exist, jaatis exist, various phenomena exist, does the caste-system exist?
450 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadIndians will not ask outright what caste you are, as it’s seen as overly discriminatory, but they use more subtle methods to identify your place in the caste structure.
“Sometimes they ask, ‘Are you vegetarian?’ If you say yes, they ask are you vegetarian by birth or by choice, before getting into which village you come from, because sometimes the village gives up your caste,” Sam said.
Another method described to VICE News is the pat on the back to see if the person is wearing a Juneau, a sacred white thread typically worn by the upper castes in India.
Higher-caste Indians will also search social media accounts to ascertain a job candidate’s religious views or diet.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azjp5/silicon-valley-has-a-...
Sarcasm aside, this whole caste system is easily a contentender for the worst form discrimination and, yes, racism is existence today.
My team lead asked me in a Teams call, lol. At that point, he doesn't even know what I look like (because of covid, and we don't do video calls).
(I am not OBC though)
> Higher-caste Indians will also search social media accounts to ascertain a job candidate’s religious views or diet.
I don't believe this at all. Feels like overexaggerating.
Life imitates art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taSH_nZkRdw
Never underestimate how petty people can be. We've seen plenty of times in the past decade where people doing hiring will examine social media of candidates (on the extreme end even demand handing over of your phone phone during an interview). So it's hardly a stretch to think people with such views could overlap with people who harbor caste prejudice.
You could misdirect someone just passively asking, however as soon as the questions got more pointed, you'd have a hard time keeping up the charade.
Something as simple as the clothes you wear or the food you ate or the mannerisms you had could "give you up".
The answer is yes, you can do these things, and it will confer exactly the benefits you imagine. And the consequences for getting "caught" aren't usually serious, either. But sometimes they are.
> The answer is yes, you can do these things
I mean, I personally can't. (From a UK perspective.) First I would need access to these people and spend a lot of time with them. That could be difficult in itself if they are discriminatory. Then I would need another separate social group to practice my new personality with. Plus I'm just not a good actor. So it's not surprising that people's movement in social class is pretty limited. This isn't even getting into how people of your previous class will treat you if they think you've deserted them.
Lying about credentials or experience is a bit different from wearing a piece of clothing you arguably find pretty or obviously inconsequential things like saying you eat meat or not
1. https://www.seattle.gov/civilrights/civil-rights-enforcement...
Being vegetarian tells you nothing about somoene's caste at all, either by choice or birth. You might make a wild guess but it has very less chance of being correct. Vegetarianism permeates throughout society in both upper and lower classes.
Asking someone's village name to know anything is laughable. There are about a million villages in India, and most villages have mixed caste populations, so this is just so laughably absurd. Even if you meet someone in a local city, you will not get to know their caste by their village name, let alone meeting someone in a big Indian city or the US. Asking someone's village gives you same amount of information as doing Math.random(1e6).
> see if the person is wearing a Juneau
This is something that has almost stopped and at this point almost nobody wears it since it involves a lot of extra effort. It would be very very long ago when the % of peopling wearing it was high enough.
> Higher-caste Indians will also search social media accounts to ascertain a job candidate’s religious views or diet.
This again sounds like a handway statement that is somehow intended to show how one can easily find someone else's caste.
If you belong to certain castes then you get government jobs and promotions on priority bases. Upto 50% of jobs are reserved based on caste. Around 70% of admissions in colleges are done by looking at your caste.
GOVERNMENT insists on knowing your caste.
Don’t mind all the people from India, outside of India, that will swear up and down that such thing doesn’t exist
I feel like there is a group of people taking advantage of western sensitivities against “being insensitive”, and reappropriating it when convenient to deflect
I’m glad Seattle passed a law against caste discrimination, just this year, since there are so many people from India in the tech industry there it was eventually able to be noticed, but that ends right at Seattle’s city limits and more awareness and uniform regulation is needed
We get a skewed perspective of India’s identity politics because of a lack of representation from different groups in India
Risk of what ? Seems a bit exaggerating.
> There are at most five tenure-track faculty who belong to OBC category among all the faculty members in North America's "top" 50 CS departments
> What evidence do I have to support my claim?
And then continues to show castes of faculty at IIT.
Am I missing something here ?
There is a whole paragraph answering this question:
``` An uninitiated might be forgiven for not realizing that caste-based discrimination is rampant in India (yes, even among faculty members at IITs), and perhaps worse among Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). Therefore, there was always fear of what would a potential letter writer or someone on tenure evaluation committee think of me if they knew I belonged to OBC. It was the same fear that stopped me from mentioning anything about my caste in any of DEI statements that I prepared for the job search or tenure: I had to pretend not to know what it feels to be under-represented. ```
>> There are at most five tenure-track faculty who belong to OBC category among all the faculty members in North America's "top" 50 CS departments
The full quote is:
>I think I can summarize the lack of representation with the help of a claim that I believe is true: There are at most five tenure-track faculty who belong to OBC category among all the faculty members in North America's "top" 50 CS departments. Any reasonable process to pick 50 CS departments should suffice. I will, of course, be overjoyed to be corrected.
So, this is a claim they believe is true and would be happy to be corrected. Please go ahead and correct them if you disagree.
>And then continues to show castes of faculty at IIT.
This is literally preceded by
>You might ask: What evidence do I have to support my claim?
So, to lay it out for you:
1) Hypothesis: There is discrimination against OBC in academia
2) Evidence: The near absence of OBC professors in IITs
3) Prediction: This probably affects OBCs outside India as well
I am Indian, from an IIT, and I have seen this kind of knee-jerk dismissal from higher-caste Indians against any claims of discrimination more times than I can count. I do not believe you are making a good-faith argument here.
You don't claim something on based on beliefs. He already has evidence on IIT. Why talk about North America if he doesn't have data to back up it up ?
What's your evidence for this claim?
I also tend to imagine that those in academia are considerably more likely than the general population to reject racism.
I am not denying the presence of discrimination in North America. I believe it exists.
I've heard of numerous cases where Indian-Americans didn't know their caste until they were asked about it by people not of Indian origin, who seemed to have the 4 caste + outcastes model in their heads, which barely maps to how caste is understood in modern India.
(Parents came here from India in the 1970's).
This may also differ by generation.
For example imagine people who have tattoo on right hand discriminating against people who have tattoo on their left hand or people who are members of Libertarian party discriminating against members of green party.
1) Hypothesis: There is discrimination against OBC in academia
2) Evidence: The near absence of OBC professors in IITs
3) Prediction: This probably affects OBCs outside India as well
---
I hope the author is not a STEM prof, because with that poor grasp of scientific method and statistics he wont be able to do justice to any subject that involves science. But of course I recognize that this is paraphrasing of the author and not author's precise argument.
When you take tiny slices of society where the people need to be in top 0.05% of their field, chances are there wont be uniform distribution of other social aspects in it such as race, caste, language, gender etc. I am not a statistician but this phenomenon is called non-ergodicity. I like to call it `Jew` effect.
> According to a May 1945 roster, Jews made up about two-thirds of the leadership in the Manhattan Project’s Theoretical Division (T-Division) — the group tasked with calculating critical mass and modeling implosions — which is still operating today as the only division with an uninterrupted history since Project Y.
Does this imply that the government was somehow discriminatory because there were not enough black people on the project leadership ? Perhaps project Manhattan needed a DEI department too ?
> 3) Prediction: This probably affects OBCs outside India as well
This is even more nonsensical. Outside India is mostly white and probably cant even spell Caste properly is obsessed with author's dubious OBC identity ? How ? In my experience white people see all of us as brown people. They do no discriminate in their discrimination if at all they do it.
It is even easier to bust this sort of propaganda by finding counter examples. Look at areas where discrimination might cause major harm to the one discriminating.
Good example is politics:
Kamala Harris - who has some Indian blood is actually coming from "high caste" Tamil Brahmin. Vivek Ramaswamy - again belongs to high caste Tamil Brahmin Rep. Ro Khanna - Khatri caste (typically high caste) Rep. Pramila Jaypal (maiden name Menon) belongs to higher caste Nair from Kerala. Rep. Raja Krishnamooorthi - Tamil Brahmin. Nikki Haley (real name Namrata Randhawa) - Jat (Royal/Warrior caste).
Let us look at Trump's appointments of federal judge appointments:
- Amul Thapar - Higher caste/Royal caste. - Jagan Ranjan - Maithili Brahmin - high caste - Raag Singhal - Warrior caste higher caste. - Diane Gujrati - Trader caste - Medium caste (not OBC)
Lets look at other prominent judges in USA
- Moxilla Upadhyay the judge who warned trump - Higher caste Brahmin. - Arun Subramanian - high caste. - Sri Srinivasan - appointed by Obama. is an high caste Iyenger.
Unless both Trump and Obama administrations and their advisors such as Cato, Heritage, Soros etc. are all casteist engaging in a conspiracy to keep OBCs out of courts, it might be the case that Brahmins and Kshatriyas often tend to dominate the top academic fields.
PS Note: I have closely looked at IIT Bombay faculty recruitment for CSE department. The process is extremely rigorous and has far too many people involved. The person need to have impeccable academic record to begin with. We are pretty much talking about people who have consistently been top 0.05% of every damn exam in their life.
Yes, I think so. The evidence he's showing demonstrates the claim he made (within a reasonable level of accuracy given the data). The point is that the number of OBC professors is much smaller than you'd expect, ceteris paribus, and one likely explanation is caste discrimination in top-rated North American CS departments.
I think at this point we could just double down and say “I’m fighting colonialism, on the side of the colonizers”
Just throw the meme back, and still stamp out caste discrimination
“hey some cultural genocide is worth it” first, the reaction would be funny af, especially if all the “OBC’s” get the joke
The way I've seen people in the west envision it is that everyone is keenly aware of their caste, where they are in society and what they're "allowed" to do. But it isn't that blatant to me, so I felt impressions of caste discrimination were overblown. I was raised to be caste-blind (literally wasn't taught the differences to be able to even subconsciously be biased) so I projected that upon everyone.
However as I've interacted with other Indians, I have noticed that our conversations tend to be very different. I don't really care about where they're from, barely care about their name beyond how to refer to them etc, mostly interested in what they do professionally and what they're interested in while their questions tend to focus on where I'm from and what my family history is.
My understanding is that my caste is fairly mundane so I haven't really noticed any discrimination towards myself, but I think I've atleast noticed that many people have a lot of interest in identifying the caste at least, which can obviously lead to discrimination pretty easily.
Generally western laws would view caste-based discrimination as illegal and wrong. So, it would correct for an individual to express the same opinion in the West, even if that opinion disturbs the ideas and beliefs of a subset of the population attached to someone else’s culture.
Having said that, as a cultural Westerner, I'd be very loathe to speak much on the topic of the Indian caste system, as while it's clearly a real thing, and I believe those Indians in America who say it is, I'm certain I lack enough context and background to talk about it without it ending up being an exercise in projecting my own culture's dynamics onto theirs. It's the kind of conversation I think I probably need to do far more listening that talking in.
> as a cultural Westerner, I'd be very loathe to speak much on the topic of the Indian caste system, as [...] I'm certain I lack enough context and background to talk about it without it ending up being an exercise in projecting my own culture's dynamics onto theirs. It's the kind of conversation I think I probably need to do far more listening that talking in.
Depending on the length and depth of that student's essay, the person you're responding to may have done enough listening to at least raise the topic and hear an honest opinion rather than being shut down as colonialist prejudist for merely asking the question
At least, that's how it's written. Maybe they said a lot more, it's not like I was there, but I'm just going by the version that we can read here
> A few years later, one of my teachers from Belgium visited another wing of the Swami Narayan people and found that ‘women were discriminated against’ because they were allowed only to come some distance from the temple when the Sadhus were present.
> The question here is: why did these people (my students and my teacher) experience ‘discrimination’, where I saw none and also knew that none was intended?
Dropped the article right there. Having a genuine religious belief doesn't automatically excuse discrimination, and I have zero interest in reading more from someone who thinks that it does.
Imagine you are not allowed to pick gender on Tinder. Would that be a good example ?
These are nor discriminations, these are perfectly valid life choices that make our society diverse. The problem is when your boss refuses you promotion or when government decides to have a higher tax rate for you because of your identity.
The Jatts side got reservation thanks to Congress [0] and the Pahari side got reservation thanks to the BJP [1]
Edit: Lmfao this professor (Kuldeep Meel) is Jatt from Hisar/Jhunjunu side. Jatt is not lower caste. Ask my extremely casteist Jatt grandfather who uses Dalit caste names like Chamar, Gujjar, Kanjar, or Balmik as slurs. We became OBC because we burned shit down. The people who actually deserve some form of Affirmative Action didn't get any.
[0] - https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/haryana-kh...
[1] - https://theprint.in/opinion/security-code/reservations-for-k...
If you were Forward Caste and rejected from CSE@IITB only because of a Caste Quota, you statistically would have ended up at CSE@IITK or EE@IITD, which has no meaningful difference.
Belittling people who attended top programs on caste quotas is lame and mean.
Common Rank List :90.7788642 (Brahmins, upper castes which Ycombinator hates)
Gen-EWS:75.6229025
OBC-NCL:73.6114227 : Mr Kuldeep meel (based on his caste)
SC:51.9776027
ST:37.2348772
PwD:0.0013527
I would say 73 is minuscule in comparison of 90. Kuldeep is a typical Kota kid, he is not someone coming out from rural India. I wish him best. Sad to see he stopped so low for clicks.
source: https://www.shiksha.com/engineering/jee-main-exam-cutoff
In fact the group the professor belongs to is responsible for 80% of caste based discriminations that happen in India.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The only states I know that have been immune to this shit are Kerala and Himachal Pradesh because the leadership in both states forced land reform very early in their existence, which meant all rural people were essentially equal economically.
While I did see discrimination in college, which was in a rural town in South India.
Are you of a member of a discriminated-against caste? If not, it may simply be it wasn't visible to you.
> Typically, one's surname (last name) is a giveaway and most Indians can reasonably identify someone's caste based on the last name
Playing semantics during discussions on discrmination always has some undertones of trying to justify said discrimination, because of course it is something different...
Because that sounds a lot like telling someone to pull themselves up from their bootstraps after stealing their boots.
Will those affirmative actions extend how long the caste system stays around? Probably but they’re meant to be in place for a couple of generations (40-80 years) which should be an acceptable amount of time to level the field.
Just like sexism is not racism.
Sex, age, etc are more defined delineations.
Who is to say the 1.3B population of Indians does not have multiple races? They might all be the same tribe in the eyes of a person with ancestors from Europe, born and raised in the US. But for someone in India, they very well could view the other 1.29B Indians as being in tribes as different as “white” and “black” tribes in the US.
Note that racism is not skin color-ism, since a very light skinned descendent of a darker skinner person is also, commonly, referred to as being “black”, especially if they have obvious physical traits that display they have “black” ancestors.
Race in the US (and other parts of the developed world) is about the socioeconomic tribe that the one belongs to, or that one’s network (including ancestors) belong to. That seems very similar to castes in India.
I remember some of her acquaintances, working at child care, discovered that some of Indian kids shun other ones based on Caste, and promptly made them all do kids' dances holding hands with each other.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/googles-caste-bias-pr...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-moves-closer-his...
> The Google spokesperson said that caste discrimination has “no place in our workplace and it’s prohibited in our policies.”
I can testify that Ads was very heavily Indian, much more than the general employee percentages would predict. I don't know if it still is. Sridhar Ramaswamy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sridhar_Ramaswamy) probably had something to do with that. From informal observation, IIT was a very common alma mater for them.
Yet, within the SmartASS team in Ads, a huge percentage of the engineers were Canadian. I worked in the office right next door to them for a while.
What does this tell you? People tend to refer their friends and give good recommendations to people they know. A Canadian is more likely to know other Canadians. So is that "discrimination?"
Probably for the government, it's the entire company, or maybe each large strata of it.
But it still can be useful to spot-check smaller teams. If that team of 10 is, say, 100% male, or 100% Chinese, maybe that's something that deserves a second look. Not with guns-blazing, "you all are obviously sexist/racist", but... a second look, nonetheless.
that's the nonsense question. This isn't 100%, but there were Google managers who prided themselves on having very disproportionately large numbers of black or female employees. SRE groups, especially.
In addition, there are plenty of teams that are almost all Chinese. Or Indian. Or, of course, white male.
Yes, absolutely. It may be passive and unconscious, but it's still discrimination. I bet a lot of more-than-qualified candidates -- many likely even more qualified than the people who ended up getting hired -- were rejected.
Unless you're going to assert that Indian people are uniquely the most qualified and best at building advertising systems (which I hope we can agree would be an absurd assertion to make), it's a near certainty that better candidates were passed over.
And looking at it from the potential candidate perspective, I personally wouldn't want to work on a team that is heavily over-represented by any one race (even my own), and I wouldn't be surprised if that "scared away" some great candidates (of other races) for positions as well. This is no different than the archetypal example of a woman engineer being uncomfortable joining a team full of men.
> People tend to refer their friends and give good recommendations to people they know.
I've come to believe that referrals are great when you're a tiny startup trying to find people whose work you can trust (since dead weight can be fatal to a new company), but become less and less useful -- and sometimes even counterproductive -- as a company grows in size.
At any rate, at any non-tiny company, any referral should be put through the same interview process as the other candidates, and should be judged based on the interview, not on the referrer's opinion. The referrer should not even be a part of the interview process, anyway. Not just when it comes to their referral, but (if possible), they shouldn't be a part of the other candidates' interview panels either, as they may be (at best) unconsciously biased against the others.
> A Canadian is more likely to know other Canadians.
Canadians aren't a racial group (and a Canadian may be white, black, native, Asian, Indian, whatever), so I don't think this particular example has anything to do with the rest of what you're talking about. If that team mostly or exclusively comprised white Canadians (or Canadians of any other single race), then yeah, maybe there's an issue there. And regardless, a team comprised of the same $X -- where $X is pretty much anything -- should be a red flag. To me, that's a sign that the team may be cliquish and discriminate (even unconsciously) against anyone who might join the team but be an "outsider" from the perspective of $X.
They're not, but it has absolutely everything to do with it. As you agreed (I think): People tend to refer their friends. Canadians often went to the same schools (Waterloo, McGill, UBC) and if you asked one about another one, quite possibly they'd know someone who knew him or her.
so if the "why" is "I worked with this person" that's bad? Or not?
The thread is filled with white progressives who know nothing about caste. There are what 2 cases of caste discrimination in US companies. In one of the cases (the famous Cisco) case was proven there was no discrimination.
The professor who wrote this blog is literally a Jatt. A land owning caste & one of the most powerful castes in India. Any Indian reading this blog will know this is BS. I would understand if the author was at least Dalit or ST.
If you know more than others, that's great, but then the thing to do is to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Equality Labs is behind these sort of plans and propaganda.
There are far too many caste grifters in USA pushing an "agenda". Equality Labs for example is an Islamic Organization with a Christian Thenmouzi as its face who talks about "caste" but in reality is she is born to very rich doctor parents in central California. Most of these claims and propaganda is not just bogus but outright harmful for the very people they pretend to fight for.
The "Islamists" tag made it harder for this organization to get any traction with politicians and corporate world. Everyone would look at them suspiciously so they quietly dropped all the muslim names from their site and removed most references to Islamophobia.
[1]: Searching for news on atrocities and punishments on "dalits" would yield many results from as recent as a few days to long ago in the past.
This is the step 1. in ensuring any oppressive system continues to be supported by a majority / critical mass of people, who are themselves subject to oppression: make sure there's someone even lower than you, on whom you can unleash your frustration.
After Independence, Affirmative Action/Reservation was created so Dalits and Nomadic Tribes who were traditionally outcastes in South Asian society could be integrated into society.
Yet, in the 1980s-90s, Agrarian and Feudal Caste politicians like Mulayam Singh Yadav (Yadav), Lalu Prasad Yadav (Yadav), Chaudhary Charan Singh (Jatt), Bal Thackarey (Maratha), YRS Reddy (Reddy), etc began pushing to expand Affirmative Action to include those castes that are traditionally Feudal Lords/Zamindars and oppressed Dalits and Nomads.
When this expansion began in 1992, every single non-Dalit caste saw that if they could lobby hard enough, they could also be give guarunteed Affirmative Action for college admissions, government jobs, welfare, etc.
This is why even some Brahmin majority castes like Paharis were given Affimative Action by being treated as an OBC or Scheduled Tribe.
It’s probably closer to the welfare queen trope. Yeah, there are a few people who cheat the system, like any other system in the world.
Thaw existence of cheaters does not negate the very real problems and challenges faced by the actual “victims”.
The numbers aren't always going to be exactly equal to representation, sure. But when you have a group that comprises 40% of society only represented by a half percent in prestigious university faculty positions, you need to step back and figure out what's going on there. These people are not genetically different or of lower intelligence; they've literally been not allowed to hold these positions even if they wanted them and could be qualified for them.
Frankly, your point of view is advocating for bigotry and oppression, and I suggest you re-evaluate why that is so.
Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud so.
India has been an extremely poor country for a long time. It’s not a situation like the US where there were plenty of opportunities available and some segment of society is gated out of them. Almost all Indians save for a narrow clade of people who worked directly under the imperial administration of the British Empire had access to anything, and even those were the cream of the crop from the pre-British days who could translate their prior privileges to getting ahead of their peers in the rat race.
It’s basically tautological to say OBCs are underrepresented in the upper echelons of society. That’s literally how the category is defined. The system was set up from colonialism on down to leave very few positions with contemporary standards of dignity for “natives” to occupy.
There is a very real economic divide between rural India and urban India.
Even if you were from a feudal landlord family, 30 years ago you might have not even had running water or electricity. But at least you had a solid house, instead of living in a mud hut (if you were lucky) like most Dalits and Nomads in rural India back then.
If someone from an elite rural family came to the city, their privilige automatically becomes moot because in a purely capitalist society Money begets Privilige.
In the 1990s-to-present, there was a massive migration from rural India to cities, and a number of formerly priviliged Men (it's men who become migrant workers) were at the bottom rung of the urban social ladder. And they were/are PISSED. So in retaliation, they began organizing their own Castes to fight for political power and quotas.
Also, in India, Affirmative Action is a Quota System, unlike the US where Quotas are unconstitutional. This means you are playing a Zero Sum game where one family's Affirmative Action might doom your family to poverty.
This makes the situation highly volatile.
They are easily manipulated by populists and ideologists, prone to use violence and prone to be sexist, racist etc. I guess that is becaise the way they see themselves, or what they think society expects them to be, is something they do not get. Hence the incredible amount of frustration. Frustration that breeds, especially when combined with a sense of entitlement and inhrained superiority, radicals like nothing else. Bonus points if thes can see themselves as the victims, conspiracy theories go a long way in building some groups conspiring against them.
I'd like to understand. Let's use white male young men school shooters in the US.
OP > So in retaliation, they began organizing their own Castes to fight for political power and quotas.
You > the way they see themselves, or what they think society expects them to be, is something they do not get. Hence the incredible amount of frustration
What I'm interpreting your comments as, is that people should just "stay in their lane"/ caste/ station at birth and not cause trouble/ accept their rung of society
If ypu read my other comments on caste systeks and discrimination, it becomes clear that is the exact opposite of what I mean.
The solution is not for everyone else to adapt around the greavances of frustrated individuals and groups that cannot adapt to change. The task is on those frustrated individuals to find ways to adapt whatever they have adapting to in a changinf society, because the only these large changes can be surpressed is by oppressing others. We all know where that ends.
Those frustrated young men (and it is mostly men) so, they are actually in a pretty bad spot. Those that actually act on those feelings are just plain pathetic so, the others, well, society owes them some form of support. Just don't ask me what kind of support so.
The much much worse proboem so is the people in power, read populist and nationalist movement and political leader along with their religious counterparts, that use those men to further their own goals of power. More often than not, that use ends in violence and death. No idea what can be done about that neither, other than voting for parties that are not like that and keep tbose radicals out of government and power as much as possible. And that approach doesn't always work neither, nor is it even possible in a lot of places.
And no, I wont stay in a lane someone else put me in just because it would hurt that other persons feelings. And neither should anyone else, ever.
Isn't the same also true about e.g. protests against the Vietnam War, or... probably about almost all protests ever.
Young men are more likely to stand up and actually do something. Sometimes good things, sometimes bad things.
OBCs are > 50% of India's population my some measure which tells you they are extremely powerful in an democracy. They engage in this race to bottom where they want more legal discrimination that favors them at the expense of another.
One can easily see that the most powerful politicians everywhere in India are mostly OBC. India's current PM is an OBC, so is the CMs of some of the richest states like Maharahstra, Tamilnadu or the most populous states like Uttar Pradesh. Making a claim that this group is somehow "oppressed" is like claiming Teachers Unions or NRA being politically oppressed. It is other way around.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Same with caste system.
And to make it even more complex I’m classified as Upper caste in the state I was born, OBC in 2 other neighboring states. Many from the caste I was born in migrate to other states so they can get reservations (affirmative action) benefits for their kids.
To make it even further further complex, there is a sub caste with in the caste I was born in that are treated as SCs because of political reasons (may be?), so many cross marriage on purpose, again to get benefits for their kids.
This is one of the main reason that is holding back India as a country. No one I know in my generation (born in 90s) practice or discriminate anyone, but the government regularly does and reminds you of it
I can’t comment too much because i’ve had a copy sitting unread in my pile of books to read for over 6 months now, but if anyone is interested, I think this is the exact topic of Paulo Freire’s ‘ Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed
I read the article as a critique of India's caste system evidenced by the lack of representation for a class that represents almost half the population. What does the actions of individuals in this group(that makes up half the population of India) have to do with that point?
The point is, lets discuss evidence of discrimination rather than a weird "this can only be possible with discrimination" argument.
1. OBCs are estimated to comprise 40-45% of India's population
and
2. Exactly one out of 180 CS faculty members across five IITs belongs to OBC category
Those two facts alone make it sound like a pretty big deal to me, even if it hasn't been a part of your experience in India. Or do you think he is wrong about those numbers?
27% seats are reserved for OBC students in IITs
There is a similar quota for people in OBC categories in govt jobs (which IIT professors are). Maybe there are plenty of OBC professors, but not in CS? Or that they don’t openly identify as OBC? Or maybe, people just don’t qualify/apply to the position?
Because of centuries of discrimination that has kept them poorer and less educated.
You might be able to argue that there is no discrimination today and that the hiring process itself is not discriminatory, but the outcomes are entirely the result of discrimination in society.
Race/caste/etc based welfare distribution comes from that last model.
No one is denying this. But there has been a reservation of seats for SC and ST categories for about 80 years and for OBC category for 40+ years in education. The reservation in govt job openings exists since the 80s. How can you reasonably argue that the outcomes are entirely the result of discrimination in society?
That being said, even this statistic shows that we should be wary of mapping our understanding of other kinds of discrimination onto caste without being very careful.
In an idealized version of the caste system (which you will see some bigots use to defend it but in the real world the idealized version is nowhere to be seen), it’s literally impossible for those lower caste numbers to be anything other than 0%, because in the idealized version your caste is defined by your profession, so being a professor means you’re not any of those castes.
Seems to be something that should addressed asap because this is clearly holding the Indian economy and social progress back, efficient use of labor and capital is key, seems to me this is an obvious hindrance.
The bit about names is interesting, seems like something that has a hold on society and people go out of their way to conform to it. Like it is subliminal, not externally evident like race so it should be theoretically an easier problem to solve, I wonder if education and economic progress can resolve this, ironic as it is.
Is it a big deal that this is the case and does it imply a grand conspiracy? Or are there other explanations?
Suppose you're applying to a company that's posted 10 openings and has already filled 7 of them, and that you belong to category A, and there's three more candidates who belong to category B. Suppose further that it can be objectively determined that you're a better fit for any of the openings than any of the other candidates, but the company has already filled its category A quota. You will be rejected because of your category, and the less capable candidates will be accepted also because of their category.
Note that it doesn't matter how the categories are defined in my example. Maybe you belong to a privileged (in the social justice sense) class, but it's equally possible that you belong to a disadvantaged class and the inept candidates belong to a privileged class.
Basically arbitrary rule. Someone else's personal freedom can begin anywhere according to this statement. It can even begin in your home, doesn't matter whether you live alone or not.
Tell that to my OBC friends who paid 5% of our school fees while they were dropped in Audis.
So someone who got a benefit from the state that addresses a serious, well-proven injustice, and wasn't crawling on their knees and begging for it. Sounds like the system is working.
Even if your anecdote is real, and their use of an Audi indicated they were well able to pay full school fees, so what? We give such benefits to the parents because we want to target the child. Sometimes the parents might make different financial choices, obtain a car that's more than they need. (And you don't know how they got it, whether it's used, or whether they feel they need it to "keep up appearances" with others so peers, like you, don't judge them by their car.)
In any case that's why the benefit is delivered as reduced school fees. TLDR the children aren't the ones who bought the Audi.
That also means they have the resources to compete fairly with their peers and choose not to by invoking their OBC class, which in all practicality has NO affect on their life.
The point was a generation before had reaped the benefits of reservation and anything further was exploitation. That family was not treated, nor lived as an OBC. The system worked, its stoppage is overdue by at least 20 years.
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1867-elite-capture
Reservation should be meant to uplift 1-2 generations, I don't see the point in giving reservation beyond that. I've seen so many rich people from lower castes getting into institutions easily and also availing scholarships by faking their parents yearly income. The whole system is rigged to be honest.
The Other Backward Class (O.B.C.) is a collective term used by the Government of India to classify castes which are educationally or socially backward. It is one of several official classifications of the population of India, along with General castes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SCs and STs).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Backward_Class
The caste system in India is the paradigmatic ethnographic instance of social classification based on castes. It has its origins in ancient India, and was transformed by various ruling elites in medieval, early-modern, and modern India, especially the Mughal Empire and the British Raj.
Key terms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_IndiaWhy people (both reserved and non-reserved) send their kids to private schools, techno-schools, residential-schools, IIT-schools even in small towns, small villages these days? The whole education system from primary to all the way to universities is failing: incompetent teachers abound. There was a time Indian politicians used to send their kids to colleges in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Culcutta. Now, these politicians send their kids abroad right after 12th grade, as they are not impacted. The malaise in the Indian education system is so deep: getting a job in the govt is a way to 'correct historical wrongs'; if so, why these teachers (beneficiaries of this correction) don't send their kids to these govt schools? Ask, why these people look for the best doctors for their care?
Maybe, it is time to destroy IITs as well by forcing the reservation system on the faculty recruitment (equality of outcomes). That way, we can achieve the common denominator from primary to IITs. People with means (importantly politicians and intellectuals who defend reservations) can send their kids abroad for undergrad B.A/B.S, whereas 99% people are stuck with systematic malaise in the whole education system.
[1] https://www.isro.gov.in/media_isro/pdf/recruitmentNotice/202...
For the majority of the time since 1947, it was the non-reserved "competent" class of people who were in charge of government institutions. Even today, I can easily walk into a government office and find some "competent" class officer whose only interest is in milking as much money as he can out of the citizenry. So what gives?
People recruited in state services (just like UPSC) are promoted to IAS/IPS. When these promoted IAS/IPS officers want postings as district magistrates (collectors) or superintendents of police for districts, the chief secretary or the DGP want bribes; otherwise, they are posted in loop-line (like special project director for land acquisition or railways SP). Add this to sycophancy in India: this sycophancy is there since Islam Rule, then continued into British Raj, now post-Independence India. Every subordinate officer, while treating his/her subordinates as trash, salutes his/her superior. Sycophancy and corruption are deeply related, and collusion between bureaucracy and politicians adds flavor to this mix.
Is it because Hindu dharma dictates that certain classes are meant to do certain jobs? Like a person availing reservation is born stupid - because of bad karma from a past life - and so can never learn how to do administrative work competently?
[1] https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/2015/sep/11/Indian...
Hindu dharma is not driven by any particular book, but is simply the dominant sociopolitical system in the Indian sub-continent. A political system with a tiny elite controlling the rest is inherently unstable (think monarchies or communism) whereas a political system which distributes its elites tends to be stable. That is what the caste system is. Each jati had its own ruling body and social structure. And then there were broader rules which governed how jatis interact, which is where the varnas come in.
Now how do you maintain this political system if people are free to leave a jati or intermarry with another jati willy-nilly? You can't. That is why caste endogamy is so strictly enforced (and often violently) in the sub-continent. And the endogamy dates back to like from 2000 years ago. This socio-political system is so fundamental a building block of the sub-contient that even Muslims and Christians follow it unlike in other parts of the world.
The other problem to solve in this jati system is that how do you keep some jati doing the dirty or undesirable jobs? This is where the concept of karma comes in. Some people can get away with murder because that's just how the universe works. They will get their just desserts in the next life.
Given all that, people who grow up in such a culture carry some biases pretty strongly. Like if a guy gets into medical college due to reservation, but earns the degree like everyone else in his class - by you know completing all the course requirements - he is still not qualified to treat people. The bad karma sticks around. That is how the enforcement works. The cultural beliefs do it.
"A caste is an endogamous group, or collection of endogamous groups, bearing a common name, membership of which is hereditary, arising from birth alone; imposing on its members certain restrictions in the matter of social intercourse; either (i) following a common traditional occupation, or (ii) claiming a common origin, or (iii) both following such occupation and claiming such origin; and generally regarded as forming a single homogenous community" (p.5 of Blunt's The caste system of Northern India)
"The endogamy of a subcaste is not as rigid as that of a caste. A marriage between (say) a Brahman bridegroom and a Rajput bride is unthinkable, but intermarriages have occurred between subcastes of the same caste with no worse consequences than a purificatory sacrifice; and if circumstances make it desirable, such as lack of women, subcaste endogamy is abandoned. Even in the Brahman caste this has occurred. Subcaste endogamy is muta- ble; sometimes a subcaste which is endogamous in one place is not so in another. A trifling quarrel will drive two groups that formerly intermarried to endogamy: the removal of the cause of offense removes the restriction. But the most potent of all objections is the fact that endogamous subcastes are not regarded by their own members or by the rest of Hindu society as castes. To call such groups castes is to treat them as being what no Hindu would admit them to be. An investigator is not at liberty to manipulate his material so as to make it fit his theories." ( ibid, 6-7)
From a field study from Karnataka: "[O]ut of the 600 Panchayat members, majority of them did not endorse strict endogamy, commensality, untouchability. Nonetheless these respondents, did express their willingness to continue their jati tradition. This makes sense only when they think that these are not constituent properties of the jati traditions. Otherwise how can they disagree with the so called constituent properties of the jati and yet are willing to continue with their affiliation to their jati. This either indicates that none of the so-called characteristic features of the caste system are valid for these jatis or that the jati structure can include or exclude anything and still survive.
Those who consider the jatis as the referential points of the term caste, hold endogamy to be the most fundamental to the caste difference. However the Swamis of some of these jatis advocate for inter jati marriages for various reasons, like for survival of the jati against shortage of brides, or to unite different jatis belonging to the same cluster like Lingayat, Brahmana.. Though they have their own preferences of jatis to be accepted for inter marriage, this at least indicates that endogamy is not a constituent property of the jati units The Havyak Brahmins preferred inter-jati marriage as a means of saving their jati from the crisis of brides. In the case of Lingayat swamis, inter-jati marriage is viewed as a way to unite the Lingayats."
The real biggest problem is: what is a caste? For instance, in the states of Andhra Pradesh/Telangana, after the internet revolution, I have seen people talking about "reddy society". When I asked these society members, what makes some Subba Reddy from a village A, Kurnool District, another Ram Reddy from a village B, Nalgonda District, as belong to the reddy-caste? Their simple answer: because we are all reddy-s, we have that 'reddy' tag in our names. This is a circular explanation. If one goes back 40 years ago, we heard different kinds of reddy-s: pakanati, pedakanti, neravadi, panta, etc. People from each of these (pakanati, pedakanti, ...) didn't marry from other groups. Is there a super-caste called 'reddy', whose sub-castes are pakanati, pedakanti, neravadi, panta, etc? Or pakanati, pedakanti, neravadi, panta, etc are different ca...
https://www.brownpundits.com/2018/06/07/genetical-observatio...
BTW, I am not denying that practices exist, practices are continued, even modified. Nor am I denying that jaatis-exist. I am not even denying that there are fights between different jaatis at different places. There is a difference between phenomena and explanations(descriptions). Over the time, theory-laden descriptions of phenomena start replacing the very phenomena. That facts are theory-laden or that facts are facts of a theory--is not some rhetoric.
Once caste-system (sociopolitical system, as you put), a theoretical entity, is postulated to explain various phenomena, now all these phenomena are re-described using this language. When I deny these re-descriptions, you seem to think that I am denying phenomena (for example, people prefer intra-jaati marriages), as you call this denial of re-descriptions as rhetoric.
Practices exist, jaatis exist, various phenomena exist, does the caste-system exist?