The large and vocal constituency activated against the bill is good evidence that in fact it is not already accounted for under existing civil rights law.
No idea what the actual reason is, but I could potentially understand the argument that passing such laws would suggest to courts that other categories that they might've thought were already intended to be protected perhaps actually weren't so.
Moreover, every new law carries a risk of having unintended consequences. So the argument may well be as simple as, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
(That said, I don't get the impression everyone who opposed it did so for the same reasons.)
People do not want to import this shit into the US.
They left these systems behind, and making a law codifies the system into law, which is kinda fucked up.
I myself have seen discrimination in non obvious ways (not Indian but exact same idea where your birth dictates certain societal ideas about you) , and would be absolutely pissed if anyone made a law that protects against that because discrimination is already protected against.
I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about, and now everyone wants to codify a system that I would rather just fade away into time.
> because discrimination is already protected against
Some discrimination is protected against, but this statement is far too broad to be accurate. I can discriminate against you because of who you vote for or what car you drive or which NFL team you root for.
>absolutely pissed if anyone made a law that protects against that because discrimination is already protected against
Why would this piss you off? It's a little redundant, I suppose, but that hardly seems particularly upsetting. Specifically, this bill looks like it updated CA's definition to clarify that ancestry based descrimination include caste, where caste was defined as:
>(aa) “Caste” means an individual’s perceived position in a system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status. “A system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status” may be characterized by factors that may include, but are not limited to, inability or restricted ability to alter inherited status; socially enforced restrictions on marriage, private and public segregation, and discrimination; and social exclusion on the basis of perceived status.
I'm not really seeing where the government is codifying you into a group you don't want to be in. The idea seems to be based on the discrimanator's perception of what groups you are in. Without this clarification, though, I'm not sure how Newsom (or anyone) can be confident of judicial interpretation of law, especially given that he notably was complaining recently about a judge's interpretation of the law.
>I would rather just fade away into time.
Would you say that most of the progress on dismantling caste-related issues has been by way of the government actively ignoring its existence?
I'm pretty American and thus largely ignorant about most things but especially India's history and how this issue has been addressed and changed over time, but American history doesn't have many examples of places where the things people discriminated on simply faded away. Most have required active efforts to get to where they are today and obviously where it's at is still not a great place.
This makes so little sense I can't really tell whether or not this is in good faith.
> People do not want to import this shit into the US.
You realize people discriminating on this basis are the ones "importing this shit into the US", right?
> I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about
You realize that this law wouldn't involve the government compiling a list of the caste background of every Hindu in America from ahead of time right?
> now everyone wants to codify a system that I would rather just fade away into time.
How does it "codify" the caste system to allow people who are being discriminated on its basis to have a better shot at obtaining legal redress for the wrong being done to them?
Regardless of the merits of this law, your take is very simplistic. All laws are trade-offs and they achieve their purposes imperfectly and with side effects. Not to mention the administration of the law (the justice system) is far from perfect.
Just to give a perhaps contrived example based on what the GP said. We can imagine that companies start worrying about the caste of their employees (or just if they're indians) when they otherwise wouldn't, and constrain their actions lest they be exposed to higher legal jeopardy down the line.
How is my take simplistic? I wasn't even really arguing in favor of the law, nor was I opining on the concern you raise about the chilling effect on companies in terms of hiring Hindu employees (I think your point is reasonable).
I was merely pointing out several inane things about the post to which I was replying. That post raised no reasonable arguments for its position, and showed a lot of ignorance about what the law would actually do.
>This makes so little sense I can't really tell whether or not this is in good faith.
It makes a degree of sense. Pick some other non standard "trait" for dividing people and imagine that we need laws for all of them for anti discrimination.
Anti-discrimination laws for your astrological sign, for the color of your chi, for the phrenological map of your skull, maybe ones for your INTJ profile, your New Thought energy types, the amount of toxins in your blood, your blood type, the balance of your humors, your aura, your chakras, your graphology.
I'm not sure I would really want a law codifying astrological signs and banning discrimination based on them. Not because I think you should be discriminating based on astrological signs, but because I don't think our government should be giving any serious legal weight or discussion to the concept of astrology at all. If it's a serious enough problem, I'd rather we work on crafting a law that more specifically codifies the few things we do allow discrimination on, than the innumerable things we won't.
The whole point of caste based discrimination is that people are putting you, as you say, in a bucket and then discriminating on that basis. By having such discrimination be legal you ensure that such discrimination is (a) legal, and (b) gets to be entrenched in the US.
It’s impossible for it to get entrenched because people from India can’t even tell a persons caste unless they are from the same cluster of towns and villages. This is Indian “county specific” knowledge that cannot survive a cosmopolitan society.
You can [and people do] use family names as an effective proxy for caste, and if you’re planning on discriminating on caste that’s more than enough. The Dalit's (in the case of Cisco) are not all the same "village" as the people they're claiming are discriminating against, and it's bizarre you would think that clusters of immigrants from a country of a billion people would magically already know each other.
I know of people who through marriage had their family name change from a lower caste to a higher one, and experience an immediate drop in questions of the “how could you get here?” Form.
More to the point: if it were already impossible to discriminate based on caste then this law would not impact anyone.
South India it's pretty impossible, since it went through the self respect movements and basically got rid of surnames. Most south indians have surnames based on their fathers names.
But it is definitely common to use surnames as proxies in North Indian communities (unfortunately)
You don’t have to “magically” know each other, you just have to know what the last name implies. What I’m saying is that knowledge is very locally specific.
> People do not want to import this shit into the US.
It already exists whether you wish to acknowledge it or not.
The question, at the end of the day, is whether or not existing law is sufficient. Presumably we are expecting that caste falls under "religion or creed" in terms of protected characteristics.
The one good faith argument is that Hindus feel targeted by it because, de facto, this is about higher-caste Hindus discriminating against low-caste Hindus.
Whether or not that's particularly convincing or a reason not to pass it is debatable, but I think it's a valid reason that merits consideration.
Any reasoning beyond this ends up being gobbledygook.
I mean there are plenty of caste based systems in many religions, perhaps of relevance to the US are Mormonism and Scientology which both have ranking systems that determine options for people in the religion (and who have tried to leave it).
It's also worth noting that if you are born in a specific caste, and convert from your religion, you will still be subjected to caste discrimination from the folk in the original religion.
Obviously under the rules of the current Supreme Court anyone can claim their bigotry is because "religion" and carry on doing it. Don't want to serve someone? claim doing so violates your religious beliefs. Renting a property? ditto. Employment? again.
Mormonism and scientology both have castes, albeit in varying forms of "ranking". A person of a lower rank is always subservient to the higher ranked version, which is castes.
There may be a degree of mobility between ranks, but mormonism at least makes it explicit that a black person for instance starts at a subservient rank, and can never reach the top rank, as that is reserved for white people.
Your position in a job, or the availability of that job, or housing, or in fact anything, should never be restricted simply due to some religious doctrine.
Because anytime you pass unnecessary laws you open the future up to some judge somewhere, or some prosecutor some where twisting the words to mean something completely different
Happens all the time in society and the fact that people believe it is acceptable to simply duplicate laws is very dangerous
We need a massive curbing of the number of laws in society as it is, personally in think for every law that is passed they should be forced to repel one.
Would make sense if this wasn't being proposed specifically in response to specific real things happening in actual reality today which the law is failing to address.
Well clearly many people disagree that is an actual reality to today, and if it is the problem would be a symptom of a much deeper issue not addressed by the bill at all, and in fact would probably make the root cause worse
That is today we seem to be moving away from the "melting pot" of multiculturalism were we are all one nation made of many, to a salad bowl of multiculturalism where we lose the "one nation" part, and communities are splintering / siloing themselves off from one another inside one geographic bloc
We need the melting pot to return... that is the only way multiculturalism actually works.
Codifying into law a dying system only prolongs it. Unless you have people from hyper local regions working together, no one can even tell caste. People from different parts of the same state in India can’t even tell apart castes.
> "It's already prohibited" - so why the fierce opposition?
Because making something double illegal is a waste of time at best, and at worst would be actually harmful if there are unforeseen negative consequences.
Whether or not it is already accounted for under existing law, this sort of reasoning is about as valid as "the large and vocal constituency against a bill requiring everyone to pledge allegiance to the US is evidence that people aren't loyal to the country"
Better evidence would be someone who would have been eligible to bring a case under the new law having been denied justice under the existing laws.
I think he means it would be better proof if you simply gave an example case which was dismissed because a Judge ruled that it didn't qualify as a civil rights violation.
That isn't how it works. The issue is that cases are not brought because it is hard to prove it illegal.
https://www.equalitylabs.org/castesurvey documents that 2/3 of Dalits in the USA report being mistreated at work. I'm only aware of one lawsuit about it. That was the CISCO case. No federal agencies got involved because it does not fall into race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetic information. Therefore discriminating by caste is legal under federal law.
Remember. Only case ever brought, when surveys indicate that 2/3 of Dalits are discriminated against on the job in the USA. And it is definitely legal under federal law.
In the absence of any case, ever, saying that it is illegal to discriminate on caste in the USA, it is almost certainly generally legal.
>In the absence of any case, ever, saying that it is illegal to discriminate on caste in the USA, it is almost certainly generally legal.
That's not how it works. You're conflating court cases vs court decisions.
> documents that 2/3 of Dalits in the USA report being mistreated at work
That's an online self reported survey conducted by a partisan foundation. It certainly didn't cover all Dalits in the US, nor was it a random or representative sample.
If there were actually that many people facing discrimination, there would be more court cases, and then you can point to court decisions potentially finding that discrimination by caste is or is not illegal. The absence of such cases and decisions could also be caused by no one being discriminated against on the basis of caste.
As linked in some sibling comments, the CISCO case was withdrawn because they didn't find discrimination and were actually discriminating and making assumptions about the alleged perpetuators and publicizing it.
Not all forms of discrimination would be illegal even if discrimination on the basis of caste was banned. For example, a Dalit in the poll might have reported as discrimination that a coworker didn't invite them to their home after work but invited a different coworker who wasn't a Dalit. That happens all the time in the US and the world on the basis of race, sex etc. and certainly is not illegal even if provable. Just like the super common racial discrimination in dating that hasn't been made illegal. The examples given on the site in your link are more on the lines of those, stories about being invited to a religious ceremony and not allowed to share meat based food.
That's not how it works. You're conflating court cases vs court decisions.
No, I just understand how precedence works in a Common Law system.
First, by default things are legal unless specifically forbidden. Being forbidden is based on some theory based upon the law, the Constitution, and a web of precedent called Common Law.
In this case, there is no law specifically written covering caste. There is no precedent regarding caste. Therefore any case alleging that it is illegal to discriminate on caste must be based on an untested theory based on the law. There is no particular reason to believe that a judge will accept your theory about the implications of the law, rather than some other theory that the other side comes up with.
If you take your theory to court, the other side will almost certainly come up with an opposing case. The judge will be weighing two theories. And likely will also be presented with the argument that the untested theory that discriminating on caste is illegal is untested exactly because other lawyers have consistently concluded that the law doesn't say that it is illegal.
This argument is not without merit. I do not know of a clear argument from the law. Maybe there is one that I don't know. But if there was, then I'd expect some prosecuting attorney to have brought it long ago. It doesn't help my confidence that the only attorneys to have brought such a case turned out (as you point out) to have been stretching the facts. What are the odds that they were also stretching the law?
Therefore the lack of cases really is evidence that the law really doesn't cover caste. (I'm quite confident that federal law doesn't cover it.)
>Therefore the lack of cases really is evidence that the law really doesn't cover caste. (I'm quite confident that federal law doesn't cover it.)
Or the lack of cases is because it's very rare or even non-existent in a workplace environment, based on many comments here, including my own, and it happens more in the personal sphere like how there's strong race based preferences in dating and friendship in the US. That's not prosecutable.
> Therefore discriminating by caste is legal under federal law
I’m curious if those people filed a lawsuit of any kind? I would imagine that discriminating against them would fall under in-group vs out-group type of discrimination and companies discourage this.
Workers get unhappy about work and other co-workers, this doesn’t mean laws were broken.
Only stories alleging caste discrimination trend on HN and are assumed to be true. Not when they're withdrawn for lack of evidence, so we can't blame GP for not knowing that.
The analogy here isn't quite the same though: you can pledge allegiance, but you aren't required to. A bill saying that you are now required would be a change in obligations, and patriotic citizens might still oppose that.
This bill, however, is proscriptive: it is saying that you cannot perform an action. It's a hard case to say that we shouldn't put that restriction into law while also believing that discrimination should be restricted.
The nature of the law isn't relevant to the analogy. The point is that you can't say anything about the current state of the law simply by noting the size of the opposition to a new proposed law. The analogy would work just as well if it were a law that prohibited the killing of children, punishable by generational imprisonment. There are any number of reasons to oppose the introduction of such a law, and none of that would be evidence that killing children is currently legal.
I am not familiar with the issue, but to parrot other comments that are, it seems that because caste is not ethnicity or nationality, even having a law that recognizes caste as a difference os a step in the wrong direction. Making certain castes protected under the law has backfired horribly in India, and many do not want to see that repeated.
It might be good evidence that those people don't believe it's covered, but it doesn't really imply anything about the actual law. Or even about what other people think about it.
The large and vocal constituency isn’t evidence of anything except for a bunch of people being mad. But we do not have caste protections as far as the law is concerned. If someone said “I don’t want to hire them because they’re poor trash from Alabama,” there’s actually nothing legally discriminatory about it as far as our protections go. Weird to think about.
I'm not sure if you noticed, but there are already legal protections for discrimination on basis of race and religion.
> There's a vast array of prejudices and grievances in most cultures. Are you going to enumerate them all?
Are you going to enumerate them all in defense of caste discrimination on the faulty logic that we have to eliminate every other possible injustice before we tackle caste discrimination?
What would cover discrimination based on religion if religion was not in that list?
The argument here is that ancestry already covers caste so it’s unnecessary.
Adding caste, assuming Newsom’s argument is correct, would then be the equivalent of adding religious denomination because an Evangelical Christian is concerned a Catholic is discriminating against them.
And most likely that would never even see the light of day because people would reasonably argue that’s already covered under discrimination based on religion.
> The argument here is that ancestry already covers caste so it’s unnecessary.
It seems that there is caselaw in California indicating that courts do not believe ancestry covers caste (?)
It's unclear really; nobody in this thread has posted any caselaw either way. It could be that the issue is so unsettled that maybe it would make sense for advocates of the law to first try to establish that ancestry covers it--or build up some clear precedent that ancestry is inadequate in the process.
That appears to cover consumers, but doesn’t cover employees. Is there another law that also refers to ancestry that applies in the employment context?
I’ve been convinced by your points here (and a few others). I strongly strongly suspect caste discrimination is a real thing that happens and that is hard to detect/address, but agreed that it’s adequately accounted for legislatively, at least in California. And yeah, I’ve been convinced of the potential negative effects of such additional legislation, redundant or not.
If I propose adding "don't be sneaky little hobbitses" to the MIT license and people don't want to add it, is it evidence that we have sneaky Hobbits infiltrating the software developer community?
Or something more serious, people who are against the PATRIOT Act are evidence that we need the laws and they are not patriots, anyway? Is it the level of discourse we want?
You take what's in the bill at face value and believe it has only positive effects, and don't even consider why others might be against it.
NYT mentions that the bill "would make South Asians (...) more vulnerable to unfair accusations of discrimination."
My attempt to understand their argument: imagine you are from India, living your life, conducting interviews, working to the best of your abilities, then someone sues you, alleging that you only didn't hire him, because of his cast. Now, you'll spend months if not years trying to prove that you didn't, while people around you will believe the accusations and start treating you like a casteist bigot. Then, as this gets more and more common, companies stop hiring people from South Asia because they don't want to deal with this.
Now, is this true or is it their only argument against it? I don't know, but you can see how people could be against it for other reasons than "oh I want to discriminate so hard and this bill won't let me".
>Then, as this gets more and more common, companies stop hiring people from South Asia because they don't want to deal with this.
And what is wrong with this solution, compared to the alternative of American companies and the American people being forced to deal with foreign prejudices and beliefs imported into their country?
When children get into a fight, adults intervene by separating the combatants and sending them home regardless of who is "right". As a non-Indian American, I don't know who is "right" regarding the existence and extent of caste-based discrimination. I don't care. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't have to know or care in the first place!
I know. I am going further, and stating that if South Asians are arguing *in the US* about the existence and extent of caste-based discrimination, and it's gotten to the point that a law was proposed and almost enacted, maybe we Americans should question whether we should have the arguers, as well as the arguments, in the US in the first place.
I mean, you can say that the South Asian presence in the UK is because of the legacy of empire and all that. You can kind of sort of make the same argument for Canada. But that in no way applies to the US. The US has zero obligations of any kind to India. Like all immigrants Indians should be evaluated on their potential to contribute to the US in positive and negative ways.
I ask again: What is the obligation for America, or Americans, to host intra-South Asian arguments and their arguers? Arguments that do not, in theory, involve any non-South Asians whatsoever? Is the only allowed outcome one in which the number and volume of said arguments hosted by America increase?
As I said:
>Like all immigrants Indians should be evaluated on their potential to contribute to the US in positive and negative ways.
There is no inherent right for South Asians to enter the US other than on the US government and its people's sufferance of same. If Americans decide that the disadvantages from the presence of South Asians (or Kenyans, or Danish, or Guatemalans, or New Zealanders) exceed the advantages, there can and should be consequences regarding immigration, visa, and naturalization laws. What should not happen is to preemptively squelch any efforts toward determining this as "blanket racism", any more than existing laws that apply uniformly toward all of a particular national origin are such.
It may sound like that, but let's assume positive intentions.
This person might wanted to point out that the people who argue about the bill (which is certainly not 1.5B people), can't escape from and leave behind their mental prison of casteism, and they import a new form of racism into the US, which is not ideal.
I mean they're openly advocating deporting them for legal free speech, not even a dog whistle. I would imagine a good chunk are US citizens. While not fully understanding all the nuances.
This TMWNN person is literally saying this about this entire matter
>> When children get into a fight, adults intervene by separating the combatants and sending them home regardless of who is "right"
They actually see themselves as the "adult" and this matter as a children's fight even though its been ongoing for several hundred years prior to Columbus ever set sail to find India and accidentally found TMWNN's america.
And as the other commenter noted, this person has also argued in favor of deportation and blanket censorship on discussing caste matters.
I don't think its fair to continue assuming postive intentions at this point. If not racist, they are extremely condescending at the very least.
You're assuming that all of those 1.5 billion people support the caste system simply because they come from India. This type of generalisation used to be the basis for the definition of the term "racism" before it got coopted by identity politics:
"racism, also called racialism, the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioural features" (Encyclopedia Britannica; emphasis mine)
I assume the original poster means to keep out the discussion of the caste system by keeping out its supporters. Disregarding the feasibility of such a plan [1] it does put this proposal in a different light: keeping out supporters of a system or ideology which divides people based on unalienable characteristics is something which those who claim to be against racism should welcome.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/attitudes-ab... shows that support for the caste system is less prevalent among higher educated Indians who are more likely to immigrate based on employment opportunities so in that respect it would be feasible. Given this fact a rule to keep out caste supporters could be easily construed as an attempt to keep out less educated people by those seeking to weaponise identity for political purposes.
The tech industry in CA is basically Chinese and Indians. jFYI "You Americans" have no special rights and cannot do anything to disenfranchise. Free speech rights granted by the US constitution doesn't care if you are a citizen or not.
>jFYI "You Americans" have no special rights and cannot do anything to disenfranchise.
We Americans can certainly, should we choose to do so, reduce or even eliminate the entry of South Indians or any other nationality/ethnicity. That is not an American peculiarity, but that of any nation to protect its borders as it sees fit. It goes back as far as the concept of the Westphalian state, and really much further than that.
That some Americans deny or have forgotten that we have this right—no, obligation—does not mean that it does not exist.
If there is a real problem with caste-based discrimination among and between South Asians in the US, I am pretty sure (at least, I hope) that it is not being committed by the American-born among them.
>Free speech rights granted by the US constitution doesn't care if you are a citizen or not.
Sure in theory “you Americans” can also storm the Capitol and burn the constitution and the institution - it is all democracy after all. In practice though you just have to bend the knee and work your ass for your paycheck like the rest of us. Your pipe dream is based on racism and while you are hallucinating, the rest of the hard working immigrants are just making their lives better. Just get back to work.
So the following is a snippet from your earlier comment where you are clearly saying that arguers as well as the arguments should not be in the US in the first place.
>> I know. I am going further, and stating that if South Asians are arguing in the US about the existence and extent of caste-based discrimination, and it's gotten to the point that a law was proposed and almost enacted, maybe we Americans should question whether we should have the arguers, as well as the arguments, in the US in the first place.
Since you specifically mention arguments, please tell us how is this not asking for censorship?
> Since you specifically mention arguments, please tell us how is this not asking for censorship?
Not at all. I am saying that
* if there is a real problem with caste-based discrimination between South Asians (as one not such, I have to go by anecdotes and reports), then
* one possible outcome is to prevent further entry by South Asians and, perhaps
* the revoking of visas of the non-citizen South Asians already in the US
The third step isn't so important; as I noted elsewhere, if caste-based discrimination exists in the US I expect the US-born children of South Asian immigrants to not participate, so if there is a problem it will work itself out as long as it is not constantly refreshed by newcomers. Regardless, revoking visas is not censorship, any more than any other country doing so for any other non-citizens living among them means those noh-citizens are being censored; expelling non-citizens for any reason that the state deems is reasonable is, again, a fundamental right of the Westphalian state.
That's it. Nowhere, despite your and others' fevered imaginations, have I proposed violating the First Amendment or the revoking of US citizenship from those of South Asian ethnicity.
>The tech industry in CA is basically Chinese and Indians.
Funny that you should mention the Chinese. Although China is 91% Han, the Han are themselves very divided by language and regional origin/culture. The emergence of Taiwan added another division to the mix; as I understand it, there are significant tensions between the mainland and Taiwanese Chinese communities in the US. (It would be a surprise if there were none.)
That said, there are zero calls for a need in the US for legal protection of the mainland-born Chinese from Taiwanese, or vice versa.[1] They have (and certainly their children have), in the US, by and large moved beyond such divisions. Just as Catholic and Protestant Irish did so in the US and the rest of the Anglosphere outside the UK and Ireland. I bet that if everyone of South Asian ethnicity in the US were born and raised in the US, there would similarly be zero calls for this law that Newsom vetoed.
You mentioned the Indian dominance of the California tech sector. I know you intend that to be a veiled threat, but that to me says that unwary Americans unnecessarily imported caste divisions en masse in a place where such divisions did not previously exist (and there was and is no shortage of other, preexisting divisions). From this non-Indian, non-Chinese perspective, if (again, if) there is a real problem with caste-based discrimination in the US among South Asians, it seems like South Asians aren't doing as well as the Chinese in terms of assimilation.[2] Is this really the place you want to make a stand on?
[1] Maybe I've overlooked rampant blatant instances of discrimination. But I doubt it.
[2] Again, I am not differentiating between the alleged oppressors and alleged victims. As I have said, their dispute should never have occurred on American soil in the first place. It is not our business and not our concern.
Dealing with foreign beliefs and prejudices is part and parcel of having an immigration system. The US, having been built on immigration, has been dealing with these kind of “motherland” conflicts for its entire history. Sometimes these American soil conflicts spill back out onto the motherland countries in a big way, as Cuba, Ireland, and Israel/Palestine can all attest.
If caste-based discrimination is rampant then certainly it should be a bigger part of the screening process for immigrants. You can even refuse entry for immigrants from South Asia entirely - though I suspect this is a massively losing proposition for the US as a whole.
What you cannot do (as you seem to be implying) is wholesale cast out American citizens based on their ethnicity or place of birth. Or at least I would hope not!
I am a Canadian citizen, born in India. I have the exact same rights as any other Canadian - any Canadian telling me “your problems are not Canada’s” would be incorrect, and I would consider them a racist as well. I don’t practice any caste based discrimination. I wouldn’t even know the caste I might have belonged; the caste of anyone I know; or how to determine caste! I would still vote against this bill.
>Dealing with foreign beliefs and prejudices is part and parcel of having an immigration system.
It is inevitable. That does not mean that we can, or should, tolerate all such examples indefinitely.
>Sometimes these American soil conflicts spill back out onto the motherland countries in a big way, as Cuba, Ireland, and Israel/Palestine can all attest.
I am well aware. But all those conflicts occur "back home". Boston Irish support for the Nationalists in Ireland may not have been a wonderful thing to other Americans, but at least Americans did not have to deal with the conflicts on their own soil. Miami anti-Castro Cubans did not fight Miami Cuban Communists on American soil.
On the other hand, the reports of widespread celebrations in heavily Arab-immigrant sections of European cities during the current Hamas attack on Israel, and the well known huge rise in attacks on native Jews by said immigrants (and, more worryingly, their descendants) in France in recent years, ought to be very concerning to Europeans.
>If caste-based discrimination is rampant then certainly it should be a bigger part of the screening process for immigrants. You can even refuse entry for immigrants from South Asia entirely - though I suspect this is a massively losing proposition for the US as a whole.
Maybe. Probably. At least the sheer diffuseness of the issue of caste-based discrimination—we can't quantify its existence, and as a non-Indian I cannot personally speak to its existence, one way or another—makes that calculation likely. If the problem were so widespread and visible that non-Indians were routinely witnesses to it, that might be a different story.
>What you cannot do (as you seem to be implying) is wholesale cast out American citizens based on their ethnicity or place of birth. Or at least I would hope not!
Nowhere have I suggested such. I have only said that if there is a widespread caste-based problem, one solution is to reduce or block further entry by those of South Asian origin to the US, and possibly revoke the visas of non-US citizen South Asians. The frenzied claims by others that I have proposed to revoke First Amendment protections on South Asians in the US, or that I advocate the expulsion of all South Asians (regardless of US citizenship), are only in their minds.
>I am a Canadian citizen, born in India. I have the exact same rights as any other Canadian - any Canadian telling me “your problems are not Canada’s” would be incorrect, and I would consider them a racist as well.
I disagree. As a naturalized Canadian citizen part of the duties and responsibilities that accompany receiving a new citizenship is to abandon the detrimental parts that came with the old. That includes prejudices and behavior that would cause societal turmoil in the new country. The onus is on the new citizen, and not the new citizen's new country.
>I don’t practice any caste based discrimination. I wouldn’t even know the caste I might have belonged; the caste of anyone I know; or how to determine caste!
Again, speaking as a non-Indian, how is this possible? Were you naturalized as a small child, and your parents never once spoke of the caste they belonged to? I thought every Indian in India was aware (whether they like it or not) of their caste.
Are you suggesting that there were not conflicts between say Catholic Americans of Irish descent and other Americans? I don’t know whether you are magnifying caste based conflicts in the US to an absurd degree, or are not aware of ethnic based conflicts in US history.
Please read about the Fenian raids for example - these things did have impacts in North America and to a very violent/impactful degree.
> That includes prejudices and behavior that would cause societal turmoil in the new country. The onus is on the new citizen, and not the new citizen's new country.
No, the onus is on my country to uphold the charter of rights for every citizen. If I was the victim of caste based discrimination I would absolutely expect my government to protect me, not deport me or reduce my rights in any way, simply because the issue originated abroad.
The same thing would apply if I belonged an Indian religion and was discriminated for it. Whether the prejudice was developed in India, or Europe, or Canada, is irrelevant- I expect my government to act to protect me.
Anyone saying this is not Canada’s problem would be wrong. It is in fact Canada’s problem because I am Canadian and it is happening on Canadian soil.
> Again, speaking as a non-Indian, how is this possible? Were you naturalized as a small child, and your parents never once spoke of the caste they belonged to
I was naturalized as a child and caste is never spoken of with my family. The city I live in has lots of south Asian immigrants of all stripes and I have never discussed caste wit anyone. I asked my mom today, who spent most of her life in India, she would also not be able to determine someone’s caste.
Keep in mind she is non-Hindu, and grew up in a big city more insulated from caste based identities & issues. Nevertheless, any kind of blanket prejudice would apply to her (and me) as well.
>Are you suggesting that there were not conflicts between say Catholic Americans of Irish descent and other Americans?
I didn't say that. I even noted
>Boston Irish support for the Nationalists in Ireland may not have been a wonderful thing to other Americans, but at least Americans did not have to deal with the conflicts on their own soil.
And yes, I am well aware of the Fenian raids, as well as the (myth of) the "no dogs or Irish" signs, and other aspects of Irish American history. I can tell you what "26 + 6" means.
My point is that the Irish Americans that supported NORAID, and predecessor organizations in earlier decades, at least did so regarding activities that occurred outside the US. Same with the Fenian raids; Irish Catholic Americans did not launch quasi-military expeditions against British/Irish Protestant entities located on US soil. And, more importantly, as the decades passed the American assimilation engine won out, just as I expect any intra-South Indian conflicts that go beyond name-calling to go away as long as giant waves of newcomers don't keep arriving and refreshing the impetus.
>No, the onus is on my country to uphold the charter of rights for every citizen. If I was the victim of caste based discrimination I would absolutely expect my government to protect me, not deport me or reduce my rights in any way, simply because the issue originated abroad.
I agree that the Canadian or US government's responsibility is to defend your rights as well as those of others.
That is not the same thing as, if intra- or inter-ethnic conflicts become a serious societal concern—a concern great enough to require the enshrinement of yet another protected class (to use the US legal term; I am sure Canada has some equivalent) into US law—being willing to indefinitely support the entry of the group or groups that are involved in such conflicts, whether they are the victims or oppressors. It is always possible for the people (speaking collectively) to decide that the net benefits to their society do not justify the continued fueling of such conflicts through the indefinite entry of the kindling, so to speak. As I said, it is their right to do so.
Further, as a non-US citizen your rights are legally limited in the US. Unless you have a green card you do not have the right to indefinite residency in the US, and even if you do, said right comes with some requirements (such as being present in the US for a certain number of years for each given period, and otherwise obeying the law). Beyond which, the US can at any time change the law and remove indefinite residency, and tell any non-citizen (whether permanent resident or not) to leave immediately. Canada can do the same for its landed immigrants. Ultimately, any country can change the rules as it sees fit for non-citizens within its borders (or those seeking entry) at any time. Again, it is the country's people's right to decide to do so.
>Keep in mind she is non-Hindu, and grew up in a big city more insulated from caste based identities & issues. Nevertheless, any kind of blanket prejudice would apply to her (and me) as well.
Interesting. From what little I know of caste I gather that it is a Hindu-specific thing? That Christians are excluded from it?
It sounds like you agree with me. Ethnic conflicts are a natural consequence of immigration, and they die out over time. They used to be more pronounced in the past, and American history is littered with it.
You don’t even seem to think caste conflicts are a pronounced or big deal, so I’m not sure what we were even arguing about.
And yeah, caste is supposed to not matter for Christians, muslims or sikhs - but in practice that matters where you are.
Are you suggesting that there were no conflicts between say Catholic Americans of Irish descent and other Americans? I don’t know whether you are magnifying caste based conflicts in the US to an absurd degree, or are not aware of ethnic based conflicts in US history.
Please read about the Fenian raids for example - these things did have impacts in North America and to a very violent/impactful degree.
> That includes prejudices and behavior that would cause societal turmoil in the new country. The onus is on the new citizen, and not the new citizen's new country.
No, the onus is on my country to uphold the charter of rights for every citizen. If I was the victim of caste based discrimination I would absolutely expect my government to protect me, not deport me or reduce my rights in any way, simply because the issue originated abroad.
The same thing would apply if I belonged an Indian religion and was discriminated for it. Whether the prejudice was developed in India, or Europe, or Canada, is irrelevant- I expect my government to act to protect me.
Anyone saying this is not Canada’s problem would be wrong. It is in fact Canada’s problem because I am Canadian and it is happening on Canadian soil.
> Again, speaking as a non-Indian, how is this possible? Were you naturalized as a small child, and your parents never once spoke of the caste they belonged to
I was naturalized as a child and caste is never spoken of with my family. The city I live in has lots of south Asian immigrants of all stripes and I have never discussed caste with anyone. I asked my mom today, who spent most of her life in India, she would also not be able to determine someone’s caste.
Keep in mind she is non-Hindu, and grew up in a big city more insulated from caste based identities & issues. Nevertheless, any kind of blanket prejudice would apply to her (and me) as well.
> When children get into a fight, adults intervene by separating the combatants and sending them home regardless of who is "right"
Americans are not "adults" of the world and others are not "children". Stop with this patronizing and condescending bullshit. The world doesn't revolve around your ass.
> I don't care. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't have to know or care in the first place!
Same. Hard Same.
Next time when one of your european self appointed "adult" attacks another european self appointed "adult", don't cry like a b---h when the rest of the world continues to live their life like it doesn't matter.
Maybe if you’re starting from no priors, but actually we’re starting from the prior of 2,000 years of religion-driven apartheid (arguably mandated, but happy to concede this point), and ~50% of Indian-Americans still subscribe to the system that’s responsible for that apartheid (even if they might disagree with the apartheid itself).
So with those priors, I simply cannot put much weight in “people accused of being discriminatory are worried they will be accused of being discriminatory.”
That argument can be leveled against any civil rights action.
I don't think this is very good logic. I'm not South Asian, but I can understand not wanting to be subjected to the judgements of a majority who neither knows or cares about the nuances of my culture, yet has to judge me through the lens of that culture.
The amount of times in these and other threads where people just try to explain the culture by simply analogizing to American history (X are the [Black|Mexican|Jewish] people of India) is ridiculous. America is not a macrocosm for the rest of the world.
Well the thing about American laws is that they apply to America and American culture. A pluralistic society like ours has no reason nor obligation to import (or even respect) ass-backwards concepts like caste.
Either you misunderstood my comment or you're deliberately interpreting it in a way that is easier to argue against. In no place do I argue that we should be importing the "concept of caste".
- Age, gender, sexual orientation etc apply to all human beings. But caste is applicable only to people from the Indian Subcontinent, and even though Indian Muslims, Christians and Sikhs all practice caste it was presented as though it was only applicable to Hindus. So this was seen as a bill that was specifically targeted at Hindus.
- The senator who presented the bill is a first generation Afghan muslim. This adds to the suspicion among Hindus that this is a Hindu-phobic action. It is kind of like a Palestinian senator pushing a bill to protect Sephardi and Misrahi jews from discrimination by Ashkenazi jews in Californian workplaces.
- The bill was based on a questionable survey by Equality labs - this survey has been challenged as unscientific and biased. For e.g. see [1] Anatomy of a Dishonest survey.
There's the argument (correct as it turned out) that was used in arguing against the bill of rights. That the specific enumeration of certain classes would be interpreted as raising those above other unenumerated classes. As it happens it's still probably a good thing that the bill of rights exists, and maybe being explicit is better than not, but it's undeniable that enumerated cases in law get much more solid standing than non-enumerated cases.
I can see hiring managers avoiding Indian candidates if they think it would add risk of future lawsuits from that candidate’s subordinates in the future.
(“Don’t hire him, he might use caste-ist decision-making when building his team.”)
In practice, only other South Asians would likely run afoul of this law, so they now have baggage that workers of other national origins would not have.
I'm describing what I think is a predictable second-order effect of this explicit enumeration.
Prop 65 seemed like a fine idea. Let's make sure people know about the carcinogens in their daily lives! Oops, now that stupid sticker is on everything, because you've created a fear in the minds of retailers and manufacturers. It's entirely useless, nothing has improved, but now people spend additional time wasting paper and ink and resources to stay clear.
The law itself thinks it's covering a hole in existing protections, so people are going to modify their behavior accordingly to make sure they don't get in trouble. What's the easiest way to do that? For Hindus already employed, they can take extra care to ask about a candidate's background to ensure they're not skewing their workforce. Indians applying for a job now get to check a box next their caste. Most will probably check "prefer not to say", or maybe they check whatever one they think will give them an advantage. For non-Hindus, they can just decide to hire Mike Smith, who doesn't even know what a caste is. There's this whole new thing that must be accounted for, and those doing the accounting will find the easiest path through it.
>The law itself thinks it's covering a hole in existing protections
I don't think that was quite the argument. Per Sen. Wahab:
>It’s largely believed that California’s civil rights law does cover caste to some degree, because some people will put it under the concept of ancestry or race. But caste is very specific; it encompasses more than just those two factors. We are just trying to clarify the law to explicitly include protection against discrimination based on a person’s caste, which we define as a system of social stratification, in which people are characterized by hereditary status, social barriers and other forms of segregation.
The intent seems to be to ensure no future confusion based upon something we all presently read in the law. Given how Gavin Newsom has recently been publicly at odds with judges over the interpretation of laws and that we've seen interpretations change radically over time (2nd amendment!), it's hardly without precedent.
>predictable second-order effect of this explicit enumeration... and those doing the accounting will find the easiest path through it.
Rather than comparing to consumer labeling laws, what about comparing to other presently enumerated forms of discrimination (and information collection requirements). Do you think we are presently harming minorities with these same second order effects from explicitly listing race and requirements to measure race in hiring? Or that non-heterosexual folk were harmed by explicitly adding sexual orientation (courts had previously inferred it based on prohibiting sex based discrimination)?
Because the law doesn’t work like a set of logical propositions where having redundancy is strictly zero harm. If the law says “no one should be discriminated against; and by the way specifically theogravity should not be discriminated against” that would raise some eyebrows about why this clarification is necessary, wouldn’t it? Also imagine ever simplifying the law to get rid of redundancies in the future. “caste discrimination is now allowed!” etc. - lots of ways bad actors can spin this.
I’d be very very careful about what’s put down on paper in cases like this.
poorly understood and difficult to enforce laws cause a ton of harm. basically any time somebody wants to delay or obscure, their best tool is an unenforceable or redundant law. "oh, before we can start on that project / cancel that project / hire that person / fire that person we need to consult with legal to see the impacts under suchandsuch law"
> “not only target and racially profile South Asian Californians, but will put other California residents and businesses at risk and jeopardize our state’s innovative edge.”
How? Because south asians can't be caste-ist against others now?
They would be the only group “exposed” to this law. The vast majority of non-Indian people in California have very little idea how caste works, and how to identify membership, etc.
So now there’s this new law that de facto only applies to a specific ethnicity of Californians. I guess you could argue that all Californians—regardless of their ethnicity—are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of caste. But to me that sounds a lot like “all Californians, both rich and poor, are prohibited from sleeping under a bridge.”
But to me that sounds a lot like “all Californians, both rich and poor, are prohibited from sleeping under a bridge.”
In the saying (by Anatole France) the point is not so much that the poor get arrested while the rich don’t, it’s that the poor need to sleep under the bridge because they have no where else to sleep.
If non South Asians aren’t being targeted by the law because they aren’t discriminating—-that’s a good thing. No one wants more discrimination so that laws against it can be fairer.
> I guess you could argue that all Californians—regardless of their ethnicity—are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of caste.
The law would literally prohibit everyone from discriminating on the basis of caste. There's nothing arguable or debatable about that.
As I posted above, I think it's a valid point for Hindus to make that they feel kind of targeted, but the flip side of that is that they feel that way because they are the only major religion where this is a pervasive problem. The rest of us are known for other problems and faults lol...
> The law would literally prohibit everyone from discriminating on the basis of caste. There's nothing arguable or debatable about that.
I'm not debating the literal law, I'm debating the effects of the law. Harsher sentencing for crack cocaine literally applied to everyone of all races. But... yeah, it was done that way to target Black offenders, sentencing them more harshly for a couple rocks than White stock brokers got for a kilo of powder.
Just because a law technically applies to all, doesn't mean it does so in practice.
This law does target Hindus. They may have a pervasive problem, but I'd prefer the solutions to be neutral to nationality or religion, like the ones we have now. Step up enforcement of existing laws so you can deal not only with caste-ism, but also sectarian strife among other groups. Shia or Sunni, Catholic or Protestant, Orthodox or Reformed, etc.
> Step up enforcement of existing laws so you can deal not only with caste-ism, but also sectarian strife among other groups. Shia or Sunni, Catholic or Protestant, Orthodox or Reformed, etc.
That's a pretty good point that nobody here has raised yet
If there was a way to ensure basically that people didn't discriminate against people of their own broad religion who were of a different sect, and that such a law would automatically cover caste discrimination by people of upper caste background against people of lower caste background (whether or not either claim to profess any specific religion termed Hinduism), that would certainly be better.
There are a couple issues with this in practice, however, and this suffers even more strongly from the conceptual problem that discrimination between a Shia and Sunni or between a Catholic and Protestant, etc., is almost certainly already covered under religious discrimination, whereas caste apparently isn't.
A big part of the problem with this bill is that we actually don't seem to have a clear answer on the latter question--it seems like almost everyone is kind of just assuming that caste is or isn't already covered by existing law based on their preferences. Doesn't seem to be a lot of definitive caselaw either way.
From that perspective, it's pretty reasonable for Newsom to veto it for now until the situation becomes more clear (though it's probably the case that his move was driven more by political calculation than wise leadership).
Indians can’t even tell castes unless they are from essentially the same county/local cluster. This is only really a problem because you have a lot of people from the same part of Andra pradesh coming and working in the tech sector.
not really, many of the states does not use last name and many take up their fathers name as last name.
It also varies from state to state, so the probability of you identifying another person caste from their last name is very small.
With many people taking different names that are modern from parents ,its really hard to know .
You can’t look up this stuff, it’s too local and none of it is written down or relevant even if it was. Just families classifying families in their towns. Geography means nothing, families of most castes live right next to each other.
I think the fear is that sb403 would have ended up with a lot of allegations of caste discrimination when there was none, specifically in situations where bitter employees are upset about not being promoted (for example) and are desperate to find a reason for anything but their performance. This sounds harsh, but I'm trying to explain the reasoning.
Take a look at the Cisco case (tmk the only known legal case of caste discrimination in California). The case was dropped with prejudice because the allegations were found to be lies. Tech industry was afraid of this kind of situation being widespread.
Look, I'm really not in favor of the caste system. People are people; they are not the slot they got stuffed in by the system in the old country. But...
A lot of whites got really frustrated by White Fragility. The claim that all whites are inherently racist was offensive (with some good reason). Well, isn't this kind of the same? This is at least being read as "all Indians are caste-ist".
That's for the "target" part, and maybe the "racially profile" part. The rest is just hyperventilating.
"California is about 1.3% Indian, with many living in Orange County and Santa Clara County. Many live in Yuba City, about 15% Indian, which has a significant Sikh community."
The Bay Area is around 6%, on the same order of magnitude as people of Chinese (10%), black (6%), Filipino (5%) or Jewish (4.5%) ancestry in the Bay. Depending on exactly how you group things, they're the 4th (after white non-Hispanic, Hispanic, and Chinese) largest Bay Area ethnic group. (src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area#/media/...)
Caste discrimination is not limited to the Indian population. As a matter of fact, ancestral caste is not a concept introduced by Hinduism or Indian culture (look up "varna", which is native to Hinduism and is not necessarily assigned by ancestry).
The word "caste" itself derives from the Portuguese words "casta".
its basically a “leave your problems at home” law and I think this would have sent a really clear message, that Seattle has already done
Is there a way to do this that doesn’t “create racial profiling” as some opponents of the bill said? I just want to cut through the denial, so many groups take advantage of American sensibilities to avoid criticism of their toxic behaviors as if we’re all stupid. For now, we are.
> The veto dealt a blow to state Sen. Aisha Wahab (D-Hayward), a first-term lawmaker who shepherded one of the more controversial bills of the session through the Legislature.
It's like when a new VP joins the company you work for and suddenly there's a useless project of some kind. A new initiative or re-org that they are spearheading to justify their position/salary.
Would you use the same logic to argue in favor of California updating it's law to remove listing race, sex, color, and ancestry from the list of explicitly defined prohibitions?
The argument in the case of caste is that it's already covered by way of the law presently prohibiting discrimination based on "ancestry". But additionally, the law prohibits discrimination based on "genetic information", which seems like it would cover race, sex, and ancestry. Color, probably, too, unless that's intended to protect clowns and the sun tanned.
Edit: Similarly, would you say California erred back in 2005 when they amended the law to specifically include sexual orientation, as courts were already using the existing law to rule against sexual orientation (on the basis of it being also sex based discrimination, see like Rolon v. Kulwitzky back in 84)?
> But additionally, the law prohibits discrimination based on "genetic information"
That sounds specific to using DNA tests for things like health insurance or work fitness. In most of the cases you don't need to swab DNA to find someone's race, sex or ancestry. You can find those by other means. So that law won't prohibit discrimination based on sex, race and ancestry.
My interpretation could be and probably is wrong. I'm not sure it's super important to the point I'm trying to make, though, especially given that Newsom's explicit argument is that this is unnecessary because we already can liberally interpret some categories to cover this.
I'm more getting at why value conciseness over clarity? Even if "genetic information" doesn't cover them presently, there's no reason it couldn't to achieve Gavin Newsom's new goal of not having laws be overly explicit.
> Would you use the same logic to argue in favor of California updating it's law to remove listing race, sex, color, and ancestry from the list of explicitly defined prohibitions?
If, as you have indicated, those provisions are already redundant under California law - of course I would. You seen to be asking this question as if you expect to catch someone in a contradiction, but I don't think you're going to find people support one situation but not the other.
Mmm, sure. I ask because I expect folk would balk at removing explicit protections for race, sex, and the like because it could be liberally interpreted from other protections listed, as seems to be Gavin's argument here.
Prior to this thread, I didn't really think folk would be up in arms in making the language of law being explicit in barring something we apparently all agree it does bar and should bar rather than leaving it ambiguous and reliant on judges not construing the law slightly less liberally than Newsom thinks they should. In other contexts, replacing the explicit callouts with ambiguous, broadly interpretable ones seems like the opportunity for harm is obvious.
Aisha Wahab is an first-term Sen and an Afghan Muslim. So, one of the things that has always bothered me is if this was driven by some kind of Hindu-phobia or other agenda.
Obviously it can be argued that she was championing a cause dear to some of her ethic Indian constituents, but still.
I think it’d be similarly odd if a first term Hindu Sen were to champion the cause of Shia/Sunni discrimination, or the discrimination against Ahmadia Muslims or Orthodox Jews or whatever. All of which are already covered under existing laws.
Lots of claims in this article but I'd love to hear more details. What part of the civil rights law protects against caste discrimination? How would this law jeopardize or put other businesses at risk?
Well we know the discrimination happens, and currently is not prevented by courts.
The harm to businesses, is that say you own a business and don't want to serve people of the wrong caste, now you can't. That's very damaging to you as you want to be a bigot but you've lost that freedom.
You're making a lot of assertions with no sources across multiple comments.
>Well we know the discrimination happens, and currently is not prevented by courts.
How do 'we' know that?
> The harm to businesses, is that say you own a business and don't want to serve people of the wrong caste, now you can't. That's very damaging to you as you want to be a bigot but you've lost that freedom.
This particular law came about in response to a suit against Cisco iirc in which a significant problem was "is caste discrimination illegal" that led to the case being dismissed.
Or you could do a fairly quickly search on twitter or mastodon for many people talking about how they directly experienced caste based discrimination. A person I followed talked about how that discrimination occurred until they married a "higher" caste person and suddenly semi-regular questions about how they got to the US, how they could get their job, etc disappeared when they took their partner's name.
> You're also losing business and violating laws.
You're only violating laws if the discrimination is illegal. You aren't losing business as we're talking about people you're actively choosing to discriminate against, if anything you're being forced to accept more business, not less.
I have heard lot of cases from friends in US about how they are discriminated based on caste and they can’t say anything because of backlash they might face.
Unfortunately, Unlike other kind of discrimination, caste based discrimination is hard to prove in courts. And on top of that they have to prove that caste based discrimination is illegal too, making it hard to bring justice.
Who even knows someone’s caste in the US. As an Indian living in the US for 20 years, I have never once even heard it come up in any conversation even in passing. How would you even tell? I grew up in India and I can’t tell.
Same. No one even brings up caste at all, except very rarely in the context of someone's parents back in India wanting a spouse for their child overseas (for arranged marriages) to be of a similar caste(like date/marriage racial preferences in the west). Things are changing fast in India and that is becoming rarer as time goes on.
Very strange that it comes up a lot on HN for some reason. I'm not higher caste and I never felt anyone has ever mistreated me in professional or personal life.
You have to be upper caste to not have to think about caste.
That being said, I’ve seen very little evidence of this as well.
Which makes it even more perplexing why groups would oppose the addition of caste among the list of factors on which someone can be discriminated.
I do think Newsom is right in that it’s covered under current ancestry laws (proponents point to a case in NY decades ago when ancestry wasn’t included). Clearly the CA govt actually believes that because they’re sued Cisco over caste discrimination a few years ago.
But again, I don’t see why people are opposing adding it to the list. If it’s added and redundant it makes no difference, except then they can point to the lack of caste based discrimination in the U.S. based on the low number of such cases that have succeeded.
I am not upper caste and I don't think about caste. Nor does any of my friends or family ever talk or mention someone's caste except rarely in very limited circumstances about older parents in India caring about their children's potential spouses' castes. And even that is dying out fast with society liberalizing extremely fast and the generational turnover.
Not GP - but I come from a lower caste family. Although I was born and raised in the U.S, I cant recall a a single time someone wanted to know my caste or made it an issue. I have several friends who like me are of South-Ancestry. A diverse multi-ethnic group whose parents came from all over India. None of us are even aware what caste hierarchy we fall into.
My wife is South Indian, and her dad is a very proud Brahmin (I think that's the highest on the pole). He has mentioned it at least once or twice at some point when I was around him. We do not know if he discriminates anyone based on their caste or not, but he is a hardcore traditionalist.
(I realize this is an anecdote and it doesn't speak for anyone else).
Not Indian, but from observation in America, Indians get weirdly interested in specific information about the other party's hometown and family when making workplace introductions. It only happens between Indians and the same questions have never been asked of me.
I assume this is how all the caste stuff surfaces.
During an interview, my team lead was asking the interviewee strange questions. I thought they were benign... Afterwards, she plainly stated she was trying to find out what caste he was from. I was ignorant, thinking this is like, are you from the east coast, west coast, etc. My biggest mistake was not going to HR. I later suspected if this was going on, I was probably going to receive the same treatment sooner or later. Then it happened, and I left the company.
You don't have to be from Southeast Asia to get caught up in this stuff.
> I assume this is how all the caste stuff surfaces.
Stop making assumptions about things that you have no clue about.
Govt of India did a caste census in 2011, they came up with 4,673,034 categories of caste, sub-caste, synonyms, different surnames, gotras in the caste and clan names [1]
At that scale, no one can tell someone's caste by asking such generic questions about hometown and family.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the ability for the executive to veto the work of the legislature serves only conservatives and turns any legislative body into a farce.
The California legislature has more in common with the USSR’s legislature than the UK.
Do we need laws against every specific thing if another law already covers it? I'd argue no, we don't need to call out special groups as protected, then there is precedent for doing so for every special group. Keep our laws general and comprehensive, with as few special cases as possible, especially when it comes to protecting rights.
"Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws." -- Antonin Scalia
It would be great if we could trust that laws would be interpreted as general and comprehensive. But laws mean what the judges want them to mean, which can be narrow or broad depending on their inclination.
Right now the inclination of the top court is that if a protection isn't spelled out, then you don't have it.
The whole point is that existing laws do not clearly do so: they aren't discriminating against gender, race, religion, politics, or any of the other examples Newsom pointed to. That this discrimination is occurring is not up for debate, it is objective fact, which demonstrates the existing laws are not sufficient.
Newsom pointed to ancestry, which covers caste perfectly because it's all about ancestry.
> That this discrimination is occurring is not up for debate, it is objective fact
Source for this so called objective fact?
> which demonstrates the existing laws are not sufficient?
Even it true it doesn't doesn't demonstrate that. There are strict laws against murder, theft, assault etc. and they happen quite frequently. The fact that they are occurring doesn't automatically mean existing laws are not sufficient. Is there any country in the world where crime has been totally eliminated by just passing a million laws?
This law came about after a case about caste discrimination against Cisco was dismissed. Or you can do some basic searches of twitter and mastodon for first hand accounts.
> Even it true it doesn't doesn't demonstrate that. There are strict laws against murder, theft, assault etc. and they happen quite frequently. The fact that they are occurring doesn't automatically mean existing laws are not sufficient. Is there any country in the world where crime has been totally eliminated by just passing a million laws?
What?
The whole point of this is that caste discrimination exists, and it happens, and it's not illegal. Pointing to things like murder, theft, etc is bizarre: all of those things are illegal, so when they happen the person responsible has broken the law. That's literally the point. Currently caste discrimination is not explicitly against the law, so your example would only ever be relevant if murder, theft, or assault were not already illegal.
Seriously, I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. It's also explicitly illegal to discriminate based on race and gender and that happens, but the victims can sue precisely because it is illegal.
Caste discrimination is bad but I do worry that passing bills like this will make employers less willing to hire south Asians. America has shown a tendency to burden south Asian populations with the downside effects of its regulations (TSA and affirmative action come to mind) and I worry this would be another case of that.
The West does not understand caste. Their only comparison is slavery which is completely irrelevant. The closest thing to caste in the West is class.
This is the British social classification experiment all over again where they came to India, invented criminal tribes and martial races, and took the fluid jati/varna system and froze everything as part of law instead of letting society deal with its problems at its own pace. The result is there for every one to see. Three hundred years later, politicians in India want a caste census to maintain their caste-based vote banks, and caste groups that used to rule entire kingdoms demand to be classified as backward castes because it helps them compete with other caste groups who are benefiting from reservations/affirmative action.
If the US legally recognizes caste, in 50 years time, you will see Indian politicians campaigning for votes on caste lines in California.
An absolutely disgusting response, to the point where I don't think you read the article or have a vested interest in preventing action.
This isn't about "the US recognizing the caste system" or even about who is responsible for it. It's about preventing very real, very tangible discriminatory effects happening to people TODAY, right now. When the time comes to prevent actual, quantifiable harm, slippery slope arguments and debates about the origin of the problem help absolutely nobody.
> It's about preventing very real, very tangible discriminatory effects happening to people TODAY, right now.
Draconian versions of such anti-discrimination laws exist in India. They are weaponized to settle personal scores to such an extent that the Supreme Court of India has had to step in on multiple occasions.[1][2]
This is a legitimate fear of those protesting against such laws in the US.
If you cannot handle caste discrimination cases without enacting a religion-specific law, that is a defect of existing laws that the relevant authority should fix.
How is this related to the British? Caste is not their invention.
Indian politicians will try to maximize votes overall. Only in a district with supermajority caste-culture population would they be able to prefer their caste over others someone in campaigning, and why wouldn't they do that anyway?
As it stands now, an elected Indian official is free to appoint only same-caste officials when said officials are also Indian. Do they pr do they not do that now?
> How is this related to the British? Caste is not their invention.
Technically, it is. This happens when people who do not understand a particular society or its conflict hierarchy start writing the laws for that society.
From Wikipedia:
> Modern India's caste system is based on the artificial modern superimposition of an old four-fold theoretical classification called the Varna on the natural social groupings called the Jāti. Varna conceptualised a society as consisting of four types of varnas, or categories: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, according to the nature of the work of its members. Varna was not an inherited category and the occupation determined the varna. However, a person's Jati is determined at birth and makes them take up that Jati's occupation; members could and did change their occupation based on personal strengths as well as economic, social and political factors. A 2016 study based on the DNA analysis of unrelated Indians determined that endogamous Jatis originated during the Gupta Empire.
> From 1901 onwards, for the purposes of the Decennial Census, the British colonial authorities arbitrarily and incorrectly forced all Jātis into the four Varna categories as described in ancient texts. Herbert Hope Risley, the Census Commissioner, noted that "The principle suggested as a basis was that of classification by social precedence as recognized by native public opinion at the present day, and manifesting itself in the facts that particular castes are supposed to be the modern representatives of one or other of the castes of the theoretical Indian system."
Exactly, the west thinks applying everything they learnt from the civil rights movement applies here. Not even close. You can’t forget racism because the superficial differences are too stark. The caste system is a dying system and the strategies applied to fighting racism would only serve to prolong an archaic system that by definition can’t survive in a cosmopolitan world.
I don’t see anyone fighting for laws that prevent discrimination against former European serfs. You forget those differences and move on.
The problem is a massive influx of naturalized Americans to a limited number of geographic areas bring their culture, good and bad, with them. This causes a dilution of the melting pot effect typical of areas like say NYC. If there is suffering that can be effectively reduced by legislating against it, then it needs to happen. IANAL, so I can't speak to if this was something useful or if it was a liberal purity test pandering to a demographic.
In my limited experience, the few Brahmins I worked with were absolutely intolerable, toxic, mean people. It was probably an aberration as I don't have a large enough sample size to condemn an entire group as "mostly horrible because of a caste system".
Whether or not the law is good or bad, this is such a dumb comment.
Obviously, the law would not somehow create caste as a legal category, or otherwise confer recognition, legal or otherwise, that there is validity to the concept of "caste". Surely you understand that right? Your comment suggests you think the law is some kind of proclamation that caste is a real thing that exists, but I mean, surely you just can't be so dumb as to think that (?)
What it would do is try to curtail people who do believe in caste from discriminating against others on the basis of their perceived, supposed "caste".
Surely you understand that the law would thus be "anti-caste"?
Anti discrimination laws are a license for unscrupulous people to sue with basically no consequences. It is basically extortion; a stray comment can trigger a lawsuit by a contingency lawyer who usually makes more than the plaintiff
Caste discrimination is an issue in the home country, but it is pretty cut and dry here in the US.
I have the rare distinction of not being upper caste, but 'passing' as one. I get to hear the conversations of upper castes as a fly on the wall. But in some groups I am open about my caste, letting me see the other side.
Honestly, caste is total non-factor in the US. There are cliques within the Indian community, but caste is not the main favor. The main type of discrimination is between FOB immigrants vs American-Indians.Other than that, American-Indians are fully integrated, to the point of barely knowing caste, let alone discriminating based on it.
Among immigrants, IIT vs non-IITian ivy-league style snobbishness can happen. Second, those who did their undergrad in the US usually come from the rich class of india, and innocently as it may be, end up maintaining those rich-people cliques. Grad students are often less-well off and can feel left out. both groups harbor resentment towards Infosys/TCS style L1/H1bs who are seen to abuse immigration loopholes. Lastly, cliques are linguistic. It is less discriminatory, more based on feeling comfortable communicating with those who speak the same native language.
But none of these are based on caste. Yes, caste may be correlated with class given their economic differences. But people get the casual directions wrong and the correlation is much smaller then these accusations claim. Indians in the US are obsessed with merit. If you can signal merit, nothing else matters.
Note: Urban and Northern American whites are largely of English and German descent. Southern, Appalachia and flyover state whites are overwhelmingly scots-irish. Due to clear regional cultural and accent differences, it's considered acceptable to ridicule and discriminate against scots-irish Americans from 'bumfuck nowhere'. These groups don't inter-marry and the economic differences between both groups are vast. Yet, the average American doesn't understand this. They consider themselves 'woke' and happily continue discriminating on visible class signals. What they don't realize, is that even among whites, the class signals are strongly correlated with sub-racial identity & genetically distinct people.
You may not call it caste, but that's caste. At least with Indian class differences, both aspire to be better urban-white Americans. On the other hand, with whites, one group starts off an urban-white American while the other group is denied their identity despite being a so-called native of independent USA.
How do non-indians rank into the caste system? If there is caste discrimination then it seems like we generally have a bad actor working for an in-group rather than for the company.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] thread"It's already prohibited" - so why the fierce opposition?
"Passing a law against discrimination of X will stigmatize X" - Imagine someone was making this argument for an existing federally protected class.
Moreover, every new law carries a risk of having unintended consequences. So the argument may well be as simple as, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
(That said, I don't get the impression everyone who opposed it did so for the same reasons.)
They left these systems behind, and making a law codifies the system into law, which is kinda fucked up.
I myself have seen discrimination in non obvious ways (not Indian but exact same idea where your birth dictates certain societal ideas about you) , and would be absolutely pissed if anyone made a law that protects against that because discrimination is already protected against.
I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about, and now everyone wants to codify a system that I would rather just fade away into time.
Some discrimination is protected against, but this statement is far too broad to be accurate. I can discriminate against you because of who you vote for or what car you drive or which NFL team you root for.
Why would this piss you off? It's a little redundant, I suppose, but that hardly seems particularly upsetting. Specifically, this bill looks like it updated CA's definition to clarify that ancestry based descrimination include caste, where caste was defined as:
>(aa) “Caste” means an individual’s perceived position in a system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status. “A system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status” may be characterized by factors that may include, but are not limited to, inability or restricted ability to alter inherited status; socially enforced restrictions on marriage, private and public segregation, and discrimination; and social exclusion on the basis of perceived status.
I'm not really seeing where the government is codifying you into a group you don't want to be in. The idea seems to be based on the discrimanator's perception of what groups you are in. Without this clarification, though, I'm not sure how Newsom (or anyone) can be confident of judicial interpretation of law, especially given that he notably was complaining recently about a judge's interpretation of the law.
>I would rather just fade away into time.
Would you say that most of the progress on dismantling caste-related issues has been by way of the government actively ignoring its existence?
I'm pretty American and thus largely ignorant about most things but especially India's history and how this issue has been addressed and changed over time, but American history doesn't have many examples of places where the things people discriminated on simply faded away. Most have required active efforts to get to where they are today and obviously where it's at is still not a great place.
> People do not want to import this shit into the US.
You realize people discriminating on this basis are the ones "importing this shit into the US", right?
> I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about
You realize that this law wouldn't involve the government compiling a list of the caste background of every Hindu in America from ahead of time right?
> now everyone wants to codify a system that I would rather just fade away into time.
How does it "codify" the caste system to allow people who are being discriminated on its basis to have a better shot at obtaining legal redress for the wrong being done to them?
Just to give a perhaps contrived example based on what the GP said. We can imagine that companies start worrying about the caste of their employees (or just if they're indians) when they otherwise wouldn't, and constrain their actions lest they be exposed to higher legal jeopardy down the line.
I was merely pointing out several inane things about the post to which I was replying. That post raised no reasonable arguments for its position, and showed a lot of ignorance about what the law would actually do.
It makes a degree of sense. Pick some other non standard "trait" for dividing people and imagine that we need laws for all of them for anti discrimination.
Anti-discrimination laws for your astrological sign, for the color of your chi, for the phrenological map of your skull, maybe ones for your INTJ profile, your New Thought energy types, the amount of toxins in your blood, your blood type, the balance of your humors, your aura, your chakras, your graphology.
I'm not sure I would really want a law codifying astrological signs and banning discrimination based on them. Not because I think you should be discriminating based on astrological signs, but because I don't think our government should be giving any serious legal weight or discussion to the concept of astrology at all. If it's a serious enough problem, I'd rather we work on crafting a law that more specifically codifies the few things we do allow discrimination on, than the innumerable things we won't.
The whole point of caste based discrimination is that people are putting you, as you say, in a bucket and then discriminating on that basis. By having such discrimination be legal you ensure that such discrimination is (a) legal, and (b) gets to be entrenched in the US.
You can [and people do] use family names as an effective proxy for caste, and if you’re planning on discriminating on caste that’s more than enough. The Dalit's (in the case of Cisco) are not all the same "village" as the people they're claiming are discriminating against, and it's bizarre you would think that clusters of immigrants from a country of a billion people would magically already know each other.
I know of people who through marriage had their family name change from a lower caste to a higher one, and experience an immediate drop in questions of the “how could you get here?” Form.
More to the point: if it were already impossible to discriminate based on caste then this law would not impact anyone.
South India it's pretty impossible, since it went through the self respect movements and basically got rid of surnames. Most south indians have surnames based on their fathers names.
But it is definitely common to use surnames as proxies in North Indian communities (unfortunately)
they make similar arguments about why they feel the bill is a bad idea
It already exists whether you wish to acknowledge it or not.
The question, at the end of the day, is whether or not existing law is sufficient. Presumably we are expecting that caste falls under "religion or creed" in terms of protected characteristics.
Has that actually been established?
Whether or not that's particularly convincing or a reason not to pass it is debatable, but I think it's a valid reason that merits consideration.
Any reasoning beyond this ends up being gobbledygook.
It's also worth noting that if you are born in a specific caste, and convert from your religion, you will still be subjected to caste discrimination from the folk in the original religion.
Obviously under the rules of the current Supreme Court anyone can claim their bigotry is because "religion" and carry on doing it. Don't want to serve someone? claim doing so violates your religious beliefs. Renting a property? ditto. Employment? again.
I'd be interested to know whether any other major religion has anything quite like the caste system.
There may be a degree of mobility between ranks, but mormonism at least makes it explicit that a black person for instance starts at a subservient rank, and can never reach the top rank, as that is reserved for white people.
Your position in a job, or the availability of that job, or housing, or in fact anything, should never be restricted simply due to some religious doctrine.
Because anytime you pass unnecessary laws you open the future up to some judge somewhere, or some prosecutor some where twisting the words to mean something completely different
Happens all the time in society and the fact that people believe it is acceptable to simply duplicate laws is very dangerous
We need a massive curbing of the number of laws in society as it is, personally in think for every law that is passed they should be forced to repel one.
That is today we seem to be moving away from the "melting pot" of multiculturalism were we are all one nation made of many, to a salad bowl of multiculturalism where we lose the "one nation" part, and communities are splintering / siloing themselves off from one another inside one geographic bloc
We need the melting pot to return... that is the only way multiculturalism actually works.
Because making something double illegal is a waste of time at best, and at worst would be actually harmful if there are unforeseen negative consequences.
Better evidence would be someone who would have been eligible to bring a case under the new law having been denied justice under the existing laws.
Source(s)?
Should be easy to link if there are many, and they're documented as you say.
https://www.equalitylabs.org/castesurvey documents that 2/3 of Dalits in the USA report being mistreated at work. I'm only aware of one lawsuit about it. That was the CISCO case. No federal agencies got involved because it does not fall into race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetic information. Therefore discriminating by caste is legal under federal law.
California may be a different story. The case against CISCO is the only one ever brought. You can read about it at https://hulr.org/spring-2021/caste-in-cisco-understanding-ca....
Remember. Only case ever brought, when surveys indicate that 2/3 of Dalits are discriminated against on the job in the USA. And it is definitely legal under federal law.
In the absence of any case, ever, saying that it is illegal to discriminate on caste in the USA, it is almost certainly generally legal.
That's not how it works. You're conflating court cases vs court decisions.
> documents that 2/3 of Dalits in the USA report being mistreated at work
That's an online self reported survey conducted by a partisan foundation. It certainly didn't cover all Dalits in the US, nor was it a random or representative sample.
If there were actually that many people facing discrimination, there would be more court cases, and then you can point to court decisions potentially finding that discrimination by caste is or is not illegal. The absence of such cases and decisions could also be caused by no one being discriminated against on the basis of caste.
As linked in some sibling comments, the CISCO case was withdrawn because they didn't find discrimination and were actually discriminating and making assumptions about the alleged perpetuators and publicizing it.
Not all forms of discrimination would be illegal even if discrimination on the basis of caste was banned. For example, a Dalit in the poll might have reported as discrimination that a coworker didn't invite them to their home after work but invited a different coworker who wasn't a Dalit. That happens all the time in the US and the world on the basis of race, sex etc. and certainly is not illegal even if provable. Just like the super common racial discrimination in dating that hasn't been made illegal. The examples given on the site in your link are more on the lines of those, stories about being invited to a religious ceremony and not allowed to share meat based food.
No, I just understand how precedence works in a Common Law system.
First, by default things are legal unless specifically forbidden. Being forbidden is based on some theory based upon the law, the Constitution, and a web of precedent called Common Law.
In this case, there is no law specifically written covering caste. There is no precedent regarding caste. Therefore any case alleging that it is illegal to discriminate on caste must be based on an untested theory based on the law. There is no particular reason to believe that a judge will accept your theory about the implications of the law, rather than some other theory that the other side comes up with.
If you take your theory to court, the other side will almost certainly come up with an opposing case. The judge will be weighing two theories. And likely will also be presented with the argument that the untested theory that discriminating on caste is illegal is untested exactly because other lawyers have consistently concluded that the law doesn't say that it is illegal.
This argument is not without merit. I do not know of a clear argument from the law. Maybe there is one that I don't know. But if there was, then I'd expect some prosecuting attorney to have brought it long ago. It doesn't help my confidence that the only attorneys to have brought such a case turned out (as you point out) to have been stretching the facts. What are the odds that they were also stretching the law?
Therefore the lack of cases really is evidence that the law really doesn't cover caste. (I'm quite confident that federal law doesn't cover it.)
>Therefore the lack of cases really is evidence that the law really doesn't cover caste. (I'm quite confident that federal law doesn't cover it.)
Or the lack of cases is because it's very rare or even non-existent in a workplace environment, based on many comments here, including my own, and it happens more in the personal sphere like how there's strong race based preferences in dating and friendship in the US. That's not prosecutable.
I’m curious if those people filed a lawsuit of any kind? I would imagine that discriminating against them would fall under in-group vs out-group type of discrimination and companies discourage this. Workers get unhappy about work and other co-workers, this doesn’t mean laws were broken.
https://theprint.in/opinion/dismissal-of-cisco-case-proves-e...
This bill, however, is proscriptive: it is saying that you cannot perform an action. It's a hard case to say that we shouldn't put that restriction into law while also believing that discrimination should be restricted.
I reminded of that scene in "Mad Men" where Pete Campbell is denied a sale by a McDonald.
You know, because of the 1692 Massacre at Glencoe and related. https://www.ccsna.org/the-campbells-and-macdonalds.
Then there is the Balkans ....
> There's a vast array of prejudices and grievances in most cultures. Are you going to enumerate them all?
Are you going to enumerate them all in defense of caste discrimination on the faulty logic that we have to eliminate every other possible injustice before we tackle caste discrimination?
The argument here is that ancestry already covers caste so it’s unnecessary.
Adding caste, assuming Newsom’s argument is correct, would then be the equivalent of adding religious denomination because an Evangelical Christian is concerned a Catholic is discriminating against them.
And most likely that would never even see the light of day because people would reasonably argue that’s already covered under discrimination based on religion.
It seems that there is caselaw in California indicating that courts do not believe ancestry covers caste (?)
It's unclear really; nobody in this thread has posted any caselaw either way. It could be that the issue is so unsettled that maybe it would make sense for advocates of the law to first try to establish that ancestry covers it--or build up some clear precedent that ancestry is inadequate in the process.
"...the unlawful discrimination is in part based on a person's sex, race, color, religion, *ancestry*..."
Thanks for sharing your thoughts + info!
If I propose adding "don't be sneaky little hobbitses" to the MIT license and people don't want to add it, is it evidence that we have sneaky Hobbits infiltrating the software developer community?
Or something more serious, people who are against the PATRIOT Act are evidence that we need the laws and they are not patriots, anyway? Is it the level of discourse we want?
You take what's in the bill at face value and believe it has only positive effects, and don't even consider why others might be against it.
NYT mentions that the bill "would make South Asians (...) more vulnerable to unfair accusations of discrimination."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/us/south-asians-are-divid...
My attempt to understand their argument: imagine you are from India, living your life, conducting interviews, working to the best of your abilities, then someone sues you, alleging that you only didn't hire him, because of his cast. Now, you'll spend months if not years trying to prove that you didn't, while people around you will believe the accusations and start treating you like a casteist bigot. Then, as this gets more and more common, companies stop hiring people from South Asia because they don't want to deal with this.
Now, is this true or is it their only argument against it? I don't know, but you can see how people could be against it for other reasons than "oh I want to discriminate so hard and this bill won't let me".
And what is wrong with this solution, compared to the alternative of American companies and the American people being forced to deal with foreign prejudices and beliefs imported into their country?
When children get into a fight, adults intervene by separating the combatants and sending them home regardless of who is "right". As a non-Indian American, I don't know who is "right" regarding the existence and extent of caste-based discrimination. I don't care. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't have to know or care in the first place!
Newsom vetoing the bill is on similar grounds - no one should care or talk about cast and certainly it should not be mentioned in any CA bill.
I mean, you can say that the South Asian presence in the UK is because of the legacy of empire and all that. You can kind of sort of make the same argument for Canada. But that in no way applies to the US. The US has zero obligations of any kind to India. Like all immigrants Indians should be evaluated on their potential to contribute to the US in positive and negative ways.
That certainly doesn't sound blanket racist against an ethnicity of 1.5 billion people...
Land of free speech indeed.
Yes, and I want to keep it that way.
I ask again: What is the obligation for America, or Americans, to host intra-South Asian arguments and their arguers? Arguments that do not, in theory, involve any non-South Asians whatsoever? Is the only allowed outcome one in which the number and volume of said arguments hosted by America increase?
As I said:
>Like all immigrants Indians should be evaluated on their potential to contribute to the US in positive and negative ways.
There is no inherent right for South Asians to enter the US other than on the US government and its people's sufferance of same. If Americans decide that the disadvantages from the presence of South Asians (or Kenyans, or Danish, or Guatemalans, or New Zealanders) exceed the advantages, there can and should be consequences regarding immigration, visa, and naturalization laws. What should not happen is to preemptively squelch any efforts toward determining this as "blanket racism", any more than existing laws that apply uniformly toward all of a particular national origin are such.
Its almost as if American citizens of South Asian origins don't exist. How can people of South Asian origin even be Americans? Am I right?
This person might wanted to point out that the people who argue about the bill (which is certainly not 1.5B people), can't escape from and leave behind their mental prison of casteism, and they import a new form of racism into the US, which is not ideal.
This TMWNN person is literally saying this about this entire matter
>> When children get into a fight, adults intervene by separating the combatants and sending them home regardless of who is "right"
They actually see themselves as the "adult" and this matter as a children's fight even though its been ongoing for several hundred years prior to Columbus ever set sail to find India and accidentally found TMWNN's america.
And as the other commenter noted, this person has also argued in favor of deportation and blanket censorship on discussing caste matters.
I don't think its fair to continue assuming postive intentions at this point. If not racist, they are extremely condescending at the very least.
"racism, also called racialism, the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called “races”; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioural features" (Encyclopedia Britannica; emphasis mine)
I assume the original poster means to keep out the discussion of the caste system by keeping out its supporters. Disregarding the feasibility of such a plan [1] it does put this proposal in a different light: keeping out supporters of a system or ideology which divides people based on unalienable characteristics is something which those who claim to be against racism should welcome.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/attitudes-ab... shows that support for the caste system is less prevalent among higher educated Indians who are more likely to immigrate based on employment opportunities so in that respect it would be feasible. Given this fact a rule to keep out caste supporters could be easily construed as an attempt to keep out less educated people by those seeking to weaponise identity for political purposes.
The tech industry in CA is basically Chinese and Indians. jFYI "You Americans" have no special rights and cannot do anything to disenfranchise. Free speech rights granted by the US constitution doesn't care if you are a citizen or not.
We Americans can certainly, should we choose to do so, reduce or even eliminate the entry of South Indians or any other nationality/ethnicity. That is not an American peculiarity, but that of any nation to protect its borders as it sees fit. It goes back as far as the concept of the Westphalian state, and really much further than that.
That some Americans deny or have forgotten that we have this right—no, obligation—does not mean that it does not exist.
If there is a real problem with caste-based discrimination among and between South Asians in the US, I am pretty sure (at least, I hope) that it is not being committed by the American-born among them.
>Free speech rights granted by the US constitution doesn't care if you are a citizen or not.
I am not talking about censorship.
So the following is a snippet from your earlier comment where you are clearly saying that arguers as well as the arguments should not be in the US in the first place.
>> I know. I am going further, and stating that if South Asians are arguing in the US about the existence and extent of caste-based discrimination, and it's gotten to the point that a law was proposed and almost enacted, maybe we Americans should question whether we should have the arguers, as well as the arguments, in the US in the first place.
Since you specifically mention arguments, please tell us how is this not asking for censorship?
Not at all. I am saying that
* if there is a real problem with caste-based discrimination between South Asians (as one not such, I have to go by anecdotes and reports), then
* one possible outcome is to prevent further entry by South Asians and, perhaps
* the revoking of visas of the non-citizen South Asians already in the US
The third step isn't so important; as I noted elsewhere, if caste-based discrimination exists in the US I expect the US-born children of South Asian immigrants to not participate, so if there is a problem it will work itself out as long as it is not constantly refreshed by newcomers. Regardless, revoking visas is not censorship, any more than any other country doing so for any other non-citizens living among them means those noh-citizens are being censored; expelling non-citizens for any reason that the state deems is reasonable is, again, a fundamental right of the Westphalian state.
That's it. Nowhere, despite your and others' fevered imaginations, have I proposed violating the First Amendment or the revoking of US citizenship from those of South Asian ethnicity.
Funny that you should mention the Chinese. Although China is 91% Han, the Han are themselves very divided by language and regional origin/culture. The emergence of Taiwan added another division to the mix; as I understand it, there are significant tensions between the mainland and Taiwanese Chinese communities in the US. (It would be a surprise if there were none.)
That said, there are zero calls for a need in the US for legal protection of the mainland-born Chinese from Taiwanese, or vice versa.[1] They have (and certainly their children have), in the US, by and large moved beyond such divisions. Just as Catholic and Protestant Irish did so in the US and the rest of the Anglosphere outside the UK and Ireland. I bet that if everyone of South Asian ethnicity in the US were born and raised in the US, there would similarly be zero calls for this law that Newsom vetoed.
You mentioned the Indian dominance of the California tech sector. I know you intend that to be a veiled threat, but that to me says that unwary Americans unnecessarily imported caste divisions en masse in a place where such divisions did not previously exist (and there was and is no shortage of other, preexisting divisions). From this non-Indian, non-Chinese perspective, if (again, if) there is a real problem with caste-based discrimination in the US among South Asians, it seems like South Asians aren't doing as well as the Chinese in terms of assimilation.[2] Is this really the place you want to make a stand on?
[1] Maybe I've overlooked rampant blatant instances of discrimination. But I doubt it.
[2] Again, I am not differentiating between the alleged oppressors and alleged victims. As I have said, their dispute should never have occurred on American soil in the first place. It is not our business and not our concern.
This bill wasn't proposed by a South Asian impacted by caste. It was done by an Afghan immigrant.
The irony is that she is not doing anything against Sunni-Shia violence/discrimination which is a larger problem in the US [1] and globally.
Where is the protection for short-bearded men and women who don't cover up fully as they are persecuted in Afghanistan?
Won't immigrants to the US from Afghanistan carry these biases over?
The agenda is so clear and moronic and borders on "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
[1] https://time.com/6205521/albuquerque-muslim-murders-shiite-s...
If caste-based discrimination is rampant then certainly it should be a bigger part of the screening process for immigrants. You can even refuse entry for immigrants from South Asia entirely - though I suspect this is a massively losing proposition for the US as a whole.
What you cannot do (as you seem to be implying) is wholesale cast out American citizens based on their ethnicity or place of birth. Or at least I would hope not!
I am a Canadian citizen, born in India. I have the exact same rights as any other Canadian - any Canadian telling me “your problems are not Canada’s” would be incorrect, and I would consider them a racist as well. I don’t practice any caste based discrimination. I wouldn’t even know the caste I might have belonged; the caste of anyone I know; or how to determine caste! I would still vote against this bill.
It is inevitable. That does not mean that we can, or should, tolerate all such examples indefinitely.
>Sometimes these American soil conflicts spill back out onto the motherland countries in a big way, as Cuba, Ireland, and Israel/Palestine can all attest.
I am well aware. But all those conflicts occur "back home". Boston Irish support for the Nationalists in Ireland may not have been a wonderful thing to other Americans, but at least Americans did not have to deal with the conflicts on their own soil. Miami anti-Castro Cubans did not fight Miami Cuban Communists on American soil.
On the other hand, the reports of widespread celebrations in heavily Arab-immigrant sections of European cities during the current Hamas attack on Israel, and the well known huge rise in attacks on native Jews by said immigrants (and, more worryingly, their descendants) in France in recent years, ought to be very concerning to Europeans.
>If caste-based discrimination is rampant then certainly it should be a bigger part of the screening process for immigrants. You can even refuse entry for immigrants from South Asia entirely - though I suspect this is a massively losing proposition for the US as a whole.
Maybe. Probably. At least the sheer diffuseness of the issue of caste-based discrimination—we can't quantify its existence, and as a non-Indian I cannot personally speak to its existence, one way or another—makes that calculation likely. If the problem were so widespread and visible that non-Indians were routinely witnesses to it, that might be a different story.
>What you cannot do (as you seem to be implying) is wholesale cast out American citizens based on their ethnicity or place of birth. Or at least I would hope not!
Nowhere have I suggested such. I have only said that if there is a widespread caste-based problem, one solution is to reduce or block further entry by those of South Asian origin to the US, and possibly revoke the visas of non-US citizen South Asians. The frenzied claims by others that I have proposed to revoke First Amendment protections on South Asians in the US, or that I advocate the expulsion of all South Asians (regardless of US citizenship), are only in their minds.
>I am a Canadian citizen, born in India. I have the exact same rights as any other Canadian - any Canadian telling me “your problems are not Canada’s” would be incorrect, and I would consider them a racist as well.
I disagree. As a naturalized Canadian citizen part of the duties and responsibilities that accompany receiving a new citizenship is to abandon the detrimental parts that came with the old. That includes prejudices and behavior that would cause societal turmoil in the new country. The onus is on the new citizen, and not the new citizen's new country.
>I don’t practice any caste based discrimination. I wouldn’t even know the caste I might have belonged; the caste of anyone I know; or how to determine caste!
Again, speaking as a non-Indian, how is this possible? Were you naturalized as a small child, and your parents never once spoke of the caste they belonged to? I thought every Indian in India was aware (whether they like it or not) of their caste.
Please read about the Fenian raids for example - these things did have impacts in North America and to a very violent/impactful degree.
> That includes prejudices and behavior that would cause societal turmoil in the new country. The onus is on the new citizen, and not the new citizen's new country.
No, the onus is on my country to uphold the charter of rights for every citizen. If I was the victim of caste based discrimination I would absolutely expect my government to protect me, not deport me or reduce my rights in any way, simply because the issue originated abroad.
The same thing would apply if I belonged an Indian religion and was discriminated for it. Whether the prejudice was developed in India, or Europe, or Canada, is irrelevant- I expect my government to act to protect me.
Anyone saying this is not Canada’s problem would be wrong. It is in fact Canada’s problem because I am Canadian and it is happening on Canadian soil.
> Again, speaking as a non-Indian, how is this possible? Were you naturalized as a small child, and your parents never once spoke of the caste they belonged to
I was naturalized as a child and caste is never spoken of with my family. The city I live in has lots of south Asian immigrants of all stripes and I have never discussed caste wit anyone. I asked my mom today, who spent most of her life in India, she would also not be able to determine someone’s caste.
Keep in mind she is non-Hindu, and grew up in a big city more insulated from caste based identities & issues. Nevertheless, any kind of blanket prejudice would apply to her (and me) as well.
I didn't say that. I even noted
>Boston Irish support for the Nationalists in Ireland may not have been a wonderful thing to other Americans, but at least Americans did not have to deal with the conflicts on their own soil.
And yes, I am well aware of the Fenian raids, as well as the (myth of) the "no dogs or Irish" signs, and other aspects of Irish American history. I can tell you what "26 + 6" means.
My point is that the Irish Americans that supported NORAID, and predecessor organizations in earlier decades, at least did so regarding activities that occurred outside the US. Same with the Fenian raids; Irish Catholic Americans did not launch quasi-military expeditions against British/Irish Protestant entities located on US soil. And, more importantly, as the decades passed the American assimilation engine won out, just as I expect any intra-South Indian conflicts that go beyond name-calling to go away as long as giant waves of newcomers don't keep arriving and refreshing the impetus.
>No, the onus is on my country to uphold the charter of rights for every citizen. If I was the victim of caste based discrimination I would absolutely expect my government to protect me, not deport me or reduce my rights in any way, simply because the issue originated abroad.
I agree that the Canadian or US government's responsibility is to defend your rights as well as those of others.
That is not the same thing as, if intra- or inter-ethnic conflicts become a serious societal concern—a concern great enough to require the enshrinement of yet another protected class (to use the US legal term; I am sure Canada has some equivalent) into US law—being willing to indefinitely support the entry of the group or groups that are involved in such conflicts, whether they are the victims or oppressors. It is always possible for the people (speaking collectively) to decide that the net benefits to their society do not justify the continued fueling of such conflicts through the indefinite entry of the kindling, so to speak. As I said, it is their right to do so.
Further, as a non-US citizen your rights are legally limited in the US. Unless you have a green card you do not have the right to indefinite residency in the US, and even if you do, said right comes with some requirements (such as being present in the US for a certain number of years for each given period, and otherwise obeying the law). Beyond which, the US can at any time change the law and remove indefinite residency, and tell any non-citizen (whether permanent resident or not) to leave immediately. Canada can do the same for its landed immigrants. Ultimately, any country can change the rules as it sees fit for non-citizens within its borders (or those seeking entry) at any time. Again, it is the country's people's right to decide to do so.
>Keep in mind she is non-Hindu, and grew up in a big city more insulated from caste based identities & issues. Nevertheless, any kind of blanket prejudice would apply to her (and me) as well.
Interesting. From what little I know of caste I gather that it is a Hindu-specific thing? That Christians are excluded from it?
You don’t even seem to think caste conflicts are a pronounced or big deal, so I’m not sure what we were even arguing about.
And yeah, caste is supposed to not matter for Christians, muslims or sikhs - but in practice that matters where you are.
Please read about the Fenian raids for example - these things did have impacts in North America and to a very violent/impactful degree.
> That includes prejudices and behavior that would cause societal turmoil in the new country. The onus is on the new citizen, and not the new citizen's new country.
No, the onus is on my country to uphold the charter of rights for every citizen. If I was the victim of caste based discrimination I would absolutely expect my government to protect me, not deport me or reduce my rights in any way, simply because the issue originated abroad.
The same thing would apply if I belonged an Indian religion and was discriminated for it. Whether the prejudice was developed in India, or Europe, or Canada, is irrelevant- I expect my government to act to protect me.
Anyone saying this is not Canada’s problem would be wrong. It is in fact Canada’s problem because I am Canadian and it is happening on Canadian soil.
> Again, speaking as a non-Indian, how is this possible? Were you naturalized as a small child, and your parents never once spoke of the caste they belonged to
I was naturalized as a child and caste is never spoken of with my family. The city I live in has lots of south Asian immigrants of all stripes and I have never discussed caste with anyone. I asked my mom today, who spent most of her life in India, she would also not be able to determine someone’s caste.
Keep in mind she is non-Hindu, and grew up in a big city more insulated from caste based identities & issues. Nevertheless, any kind of blanket prejudice would apply to her (and me) as well.
Americans are not "adults" of the world and others are not "children". Stop with this patronizing and condescending bullshit. The world doesn't revolve around your ass.
> I don't care. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't have to know or care in the first place!
Same. Hard Same.
Next time when one of your european self appointed "adult" attacks another european self appointed "adult", don't cry like a b---h when the rest of the world continues to live their life like it doesn't matter.
So with those priors, I simply cannot put much weight in “people accused of being discriminatory are worried they will be accused of being discriminatory.”
That argument can be leveled against any civil rights action.
The amount of times in these and other threads where people just try to explain the culture by simply analogizing to American history (X are the [Black|Mexican|Jewish] people of India) is ridiculous. America is not a macrocosm for the rest of the world.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-...
- The senator who presented the bill is a first generation Afghan muslim. This adds to the suspicion among Hindus that this is a Hindu-phobic action. It is kind of like a Palestinian senator pushing a bill to protect Sephardi and Misrahi jews from discrimination by Ashkenazi jews in Californian workplaces.
- The bill was based on a questionable survey by Equality labs - this survey has been challenged as unscientific and biased. For e.g. see [1] Anatomy of a Dishonest survey.
[1] https://medium.com/@rachelgotham5/equality-labs-caste-report...
(“Don’t hire him, he might use caste-ist decision-making when building his team.”)
In practice, only other South Asians would likely run afoul of this law, so they now have baggage that workers of other national origins would not have.
Prop 65 seemed like a fine idea. Let's make sure people know about the carcinogens in their daily lives! Oops, now that stupid sticker is on everything, because you've created a fear in the minds of retailers and manufacturers. It's entirely useless, nothing has improved, but now people spend additional time wasting paper and ink and resources to stay clear.
Or for a more recent backfire example, see the FDA's new rules on sesame seed labeling (https://reason.com/2023/07/28/fda-commissioner-no-one-envisi...)
The law itself thinks it's covering a hole in existing protections, so people are going to modify their behavior accordingly to make sure they don't get in trouble. What's the easiest way to do that? For Hindus already employed, they can take extra care to ask about a candidate's background to ensure they're not skewing their workforce. Indians applying for a job now get to check a box next their caste. Most will probably check "prefer not to say", or maybe they check whatever one they think will give them an advantage. For non-Hindus, they can just decide to hire Mike Smith, who doesn't even know what a caste is. There's this whole new thing that must be accounted for, and those doing the accounting will find the easiest path through it.
I don't think that was quite the argument. Per Sen. Wahab: >It’s largely believed that California’s civil rights law does cover caste to some degree, because some people will put it under the concept of ancestry or race. But caste is very specific; it encompasses more than just those two factors. We are just trying to clarify the law to explicitly include protection against discrimination based on a person’s caste, which we define as a system of social stratification, in which people are characterized by hereditary status, social barriers and other forms of segregation.
The intent seems to be to ensure no future confusion based upon something we all presently read in the law. Given how Gavin Newsom has recently been publicly at odds with judges over the interpretation of laws and that we've seen interpretations change radically over time (2nd amendment!), it's hardly without precedent.
>predictable second-order effect of this explicit enumeration... and those doing the accounting will find the easiest path through it.
Rather than comparing to consumer labeling laws, what about comparing to other presently enumerated forms of discrimination (and information collection requirements). Do you think we are presently harming minorities with these same second order effects from explicitly listing race and requirements to measure race in hiring? Or that non-heterosexual folk were harmed by explicitly adding sexual orientation (courts had previously inferred it based on prohibiting sex based discrimination)?
I’d be very very careful about what’s put down on paper in cases like this.
The law is like a giant unmaintainable software project, where the code and the JIT compiler get constantly modified.
How? Because south asians can't be caste-ist against others now?
So now there’s this new law that de facto only applies to a specific ethnicity of Californians. I guess you could argue that all Californians—regardless of their ethnicity—are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of caste. But to me that sounds a lot like “all Californians, both rich and poor, are prohibited from sleeping under a bridge.”
In the saying (by Anatole France) the point is not so much that the poor get arrested while the rich don’t, it’s that the poor need to sleep under the bridge because they have no where else to sleep.
If non South Asians aren’t being targeted by the law because they aren’t discriminating—-that’s a good thing. No one wants more discrimination so that laws against it can be fairer.
The law would literally prohibit everyone from discriminating on the basis of caste. There's nothing arguable or debatable about that.
As I posted above, I think it's a valid point for Hindus to make that they feel kind of targeted, but the flip side of that is that they feel that way because they are the only major religion where this is a pervasive problem. The rest of us are known for other problems and faults lol...
I'm not debating the literal law, I'm debating the effects of the law. Harsher sentencing for crack cocaine literally applied to everyone of all races. But... yeah, it was done that way to target Black offenders, sentencing them more harshly for a couple rocks than White stock brokers got for a kilo of powder.
Just because a law technically applies to all, doesn't mean it does so in practice.
This law does target Hindus. They may have a pervasive problem, but I'd prefer the solutions to be neutral to nationality or religion, like the ones we have now. Step up enforcement of existing laws so you can deal not only with caste-ism, but also sectarian strife among other groups. Shia or Sunni, Catholic or Protestant, Orthodox or Reformed, etc.
That's a pretty good point that nobody here has raised yet
If there was a way to ensure basically that people didn't discriminate against people of their own broad religion who were of a different sect, and that such a law would automatically cover caste discrimination by people of upper caste background against people of lower caste background (whether or not either claim to profess any specific religion termed Hinduism), that would certainly be better.
There are a couple issues with this in practice, however, and this suffers even more strongly from the conceptual problem that discrimination between a Shia and Sunni or between a Catholic and Protestant, etc., is almost certainly already covered under religious discrimination, whereas caste apparently isn't.
A big part of the problem with this bill is that we actually don't seem to have a clear answer on the latter question--it seems like almost everyone is kind of just assuming that caste is or isn't already covered by existing law based on their preferences. Doesn't seem to be a lot of definitive caselaw either way.
From that perspective, it's pretty reasonable for Newsom to veto it for now until the situation becomes more clear (though it's probably the case that his move was driven more by political calculation than wise leadership).
With many people taking different names that are modern from parents ,its really hard to know .
Google suffered a backlash in Japan when they made ancient maps easy to find, as people feared it'd make it easy to connect them to frowned upon ancestry: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=7514420&page=1
Seems easy enough. There are only 4.6 Million possibilities to choose from.
based on the number of subcastes Govt of India identified for a caste census in 2011. https://www.deccanherald.com/content/489752/socio-economic-c...
Take a look at the Cisco case (tmk the only known legal case of caste discrimination in California). The case was dropped with prejudice because the allegations were found to be lies. Tech industry was afraid of this kind of situation being widespread.
A lot of whites got really frustrated by White Fragility. The claim that all whites are inherently racist was offensive (with some good reason). Well, isn't this kind of the same? This is at least being read as "all Indians are caste-ist".
That's for the "target" part, and maybe the "racially profile" part. The rest is just hyperventilating.
"California is about 1.3% Indian, with many living in Orange County and Santa Clara County. Many live in Yuba City, about 15% Indian, which has a significant Sikh community."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Americans_in_Californi...
Guess it makes sense that they have Indian specific legislation.
As the Cali Indian population grows I imagine more will begin to enter politics and well see more Indian related legislation.
Interesting.
https://www.statsamerica.org/sip/rank_list.aspx?rank_label=p...
The word "caste" itself derives from the Portuguese words "casta".
What other cultures in modern times practice the caste system?
Sorry Im not knowledgeable about such things.
Is there a way to do this that doesn’t “create racial profiling” as some opponents of the bill said? I just want to cut through the denial, so many groups take advantage of American sensibilities to avoid criticism of their toxic behaviors as if we’re all stupid. For now, we are.
> The veto dealt a blow to state Sen. Aisha Wahab (D-Hayward), a first-term lawmaker who shepherded one of the more controversial bills of the session through the Legislature.
It's like when a new VP joins the company you work for and suddenly there's a useless project of some kind. A new initiative or re-org that they are spearheading to justify their position/salary.
I think we've all seen it before :)
The argument in the case of caste is that it's already covered by way of the law presently prohibiting discrimination based on "ancestry". But additionally, the law prohibits discrimination based on "genetic information", which seems like it would cover race, sex, and ancestry. Color, probably, too, unless that's intended to protect clowns and the sun tanned.
Edit: Similarly, would you say California erred back in 2005 when they amended the law to specifically include sexual orientation, as courts were already using the existing law to rule against sexual orientation (on the basis of it being also sex based discrimination, see like Rolon v. Kulwitzky back in 84)?
That sounds specific to using DNA tests for things like health insurance or work fitness. In most of the cases you don't need to swab DNA to find someone's race, sex or ancestry. You can find those by other means. So that law won't prohibit discrimination based on sex, race and ancestry.
I'm more getting at why value conciseness over clarity? Even if "genetic information" doesn't cover them presently, there's no reason it couldn't to achieve Gavin Newsom's new goal of not having laws be overly explicit.
If, as you have indicated, those provisions are already redundant under California law - of course I would. You seen to be asking this question as if you expect to catch someone in a contradiction, but I don't think you're going to find people support one situation but not the other.
Prior to this thread, I didn't really think folk would be up in arms in making the language of law being explicit in barring something we apparently all agree it does bar and should bar rather than leaving it ambiguous and reliant on judges not construing the law slightly less liberally than Newsom thinks they should. In other contexts, replacing the explicit callouts with ambiguous, broadly interpretable ones seems like the opportunity for harm is obvious.
Obviously it can be argued that she was championing a cause dear to some of her ethic Indian constituents, but still.
I think it’d be similarly odd if a first term Hindu Sen were to champion the cause of Shia/Sunni discrimination, or the discrimination against Ahmadia Muslims or Orthodox Jews or whatever. All of which are already covered under existing laws.
The harm to businesses, is that say you own a business and don't want to serve people of the wrong caste, now you can't. That's very damaging to you as you want to be a bigot but you've lost that freedom.
>Well we know the discrimination happens, and currently is not prevented by courts.
How do 'we' know that?
> The harm to businesses, is that say you own a business and don't want to serve people of the wrong caste, now you can't. That's very damaging to you as you want to be a bigot but you've lost that freedom.
You're also losing business and violating laws.
This particular law came about in response to a suit against Cisco iirc in which a significant problem was "is caste discrimination illegal" that led to the case being dismissed.
Or you could do a fairly quickly search on twitter or mastodon for many people talking about how they directly experienced caste based discrimination. A person I followed talked about how that discrimination occurred until they married a "higher" caste person and suddenly semi-regular questions about how they got to the US, how they could get their job, etc disappeared when they took their partner's name.
> You're also losing business and violating laws.
You're only violating laws if the discrimination is illegal. You aren't losing business as we're talking about people you're actively choosing to discriminate against, if anything you're being forced to accept more business, not less.
I have heard lot of cases from friends in US about how they are discriminated based on caste and they can’t say anything because of backlash they might face.
Unfortunately, Unlike other kind of discrimination, caste based discrimination is hard to prove in courts. And on top of that they have to prove that caste based discrimination is illegal too, making it hard to bring justice.
Very strange that it comes up a lot on HN for some reason. I'm not higher caste and I never felt anyone has ever mistreated me in professional or personal life.
That being said, I’ve seen very little evidence of this as well.
Which makes it even more perplexing why groups would oppose the addition of caste among the list of factors on which someone can be discriminated.
I do think Newsom is right in that it’s covered under current ancestry laws (proponents point to a case in NY decades ago when ancestry wasn’t included). Clearly the CA govt actually believes that because they’re sued Cisco over caste discrimination a few years ago.
But again, I don’t see why people are opposing adding it to the list. If it’s added and redundant it makes no difference, except then they can point to the lack of caste based discrimination in the U.S. based on the low number of such cases that have succeeded.
This entire bill feels so alien to the lived experience of every Indian I know in the US.
(I realize this is an anecdote and it doesn't speak for anyone else).
I assume this is how all the caste stuff surfaces.
You don't have to be from Southeast Asia to get caught up in this stuff.
Stop making assumptions about things that you have no clue about.
Govt of India did a caste census in 2011, they came up with 4,673,034 categories of caste, sub-caste, synonyms, different surnames, gotras in the caste and clan names [1]
At that scale, no one can tell someone's caste by asking such generic questions about hometown and family.
[1] - https://www.deccanherald.com/content/489752/socio-economic-c...
The California legislature has more in common with the USSR’s legislature than the UK.
I cannot be stronger in urging activists to retry this again.
A massive injustice. Shame on Newsom.
We MUST pass this.
It would be great if we could trust that laws would be interpreted as general and comprehensive. But laws mean what the judges want them to mean, which can be narrow or broad depending on their inclination.
Right now the inclination of the top court is that if a protection isn't spelled out, then you don't have it.
> That this discrimination is occurring is not up for debate, it is objective fact
Source for this so called objective fact?
> which demonstrates the existing laws are not sufficient?
Even it true it doesn't doesn't demonstrate that. There are strict laws against murder, theft, assault etc. and they happen quite frequently. The fact that they are occurring doesn't automatically mean existing laws are not sufficient. Is there any country in the world where crime has been totally eliminated by just passing a million laws?
This law came about after a case about caste discrimination against Cisco was dismissed. Or you can do some basic searches of twitter and mastodon for first hand accounts.
> Even it true it doesn't doesn't demonstrate that. There are strict laws against murder, theft, assault etc. and they happen quite frequently. The fact that they are occurring doesn't automatically mean existing laws are not sufficient. Is there any country in the world where crime has been totally eliminated by just passing a million laws?
What?
The whole point of this is that caste discrimination exists, and it happens, and it's not illegal. Pointing to things like murder, theft, etc is bizarre: all of those things are illegal, so when they happen the person responsible has broken the law. That's literally the point. Currently caste discrimination is not explicitly against the law, so your example would only ever be relevant if murder, theft, or assault were not already illegal.
Seriously, I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. It's also explicitly illegal to discriminate based on race and gender and that happens, but the victims can sue precisely because it is illegal.
https://theprint.in/opinion/dismissal-of-cisco-case-proves-e...
The West does not understand caste. Their only comparison is slavery which is completely irrelevant. The closest thing to caste in the West is class.
This is the British social classification experiment all over again where they came to India, invented criminal tribes and martial races, and took the fluid jati/varna system and froze everything as part of law instead of letting society deal with its problems at its own pace. The result is there for every one to see. Three hundred years later, politicians in India want a caste census to maintain their caste-based vote banks, and caste groups that used to rule entire kingdoms demand to be classified as backward castes because it helps them compete with other caste groups who are benefiting from reservations/affirmative action.
If the US legally recognizes caste, in 50 years time, you will see Indian politicians campaigning for votes on caste lines in California.
This isn't about "the US recognizing the caste system" or even about who is responsible for it. It's about preventing very real, very tangible discriminatory effects happening to people TODAY, right now. When the time comes to prevent actual, quantifiable harm, slippery slope arguments and debates about the origin of the problem help absolutely nobody.
Draconian versions of such anti-discrimination laws exist in India. They are weaponized to settle personal scores to such an extent that the Supreme Court of India has had to step in on multiple occasions.[1][2]
This is a legitimate fear of those protesting against such laws in the US.
If you cannot handle caste discrimination cases without enacting a religion-specific law, that is a defect of existing laws that the relevant authority should fix.
[1] "Civil dispute can’t be converted to a case under SC/ST Act: SC (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/civil-dispute-cant...)
[2] "Insulting, abusing SC/ST person not an offence under SC/ST Act unless victim abused on account of caste: Supreme Court" (https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/insulting-abusin...)
Indian politicians will try to maximize votes overall. Only in a district with supermajority caste-culture population would they be able to prefer their caste over others someone in campaigning, and why wouldn't they do that anyway?
As it stands now, an elected Indian official is free to appoint only same-caste officials when said officials are also Indian. Do they pr do they not do that now?
Technically, it is. This happens when people who do not understand a particular society or its conflict hierarchy start writing the laws for that society.
From Wikipedia:
> Modern India's caste system is based on the artificial modern superimposition of an old four-fold theoretical classification called the Varna on the natural social groupings called the Jāti. Varna conceptualised a society as consisting of four types of varnas, or categories: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, according to the nature of the work of its members. Varna was not an inherited category and the occupation determined the varna. However, a person's Jati is determined at birth and makes them take up that Jati's occupation; members could and did change their occupation based on personal strengths as well as economic, social and political factors. A 2016 study based on the DNA analysis of unrelated Indians determined that endogamous Jatis originated during the Gupta Empire.
> From 1901 onwards, for the purposes of the Decennial Census, the British colonial authorities arbitrarily and incorrectly forced all Jātis into the four Varna categories as described in ancient texts. Herbert Hope Risley, the Census Commissioner, noted that "The principle suggested as a basis was that of classification by social precedence as recognized by native public opinion at the present day, and manifesting itself in the facts that particular castes are supposed to be the modern representatives of one or other of the castes of the theoretical Indian system."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste#In_South_Asia
I don’t see anyone fighting for laws that prevent discrimination against former European serfs. You forget those differences and move on.
[1] "Why is religion suddenly declining?" - https://blog.oup.com/2020/12/why-is-religion-suddenly-declin...
[2] "Losing their religion: why US churches are on the decline" - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/22/us-churches-...
All men are created equal.
In my limited experience, the few Brahmins I worked with were absolutely intolerable, toxic, mean people. It was probably an aberration as I don't have a large enough sample size to condemn an entire group as "mostly horrible because of a caste system".
Obviously, the law would not somehow create caste as a legal category, or otherwise confer recognition, legal or otherwise, that there is validity to the concept of "caste". Surely you understand that right? Your comment suggests you think the law is some kind of proclamation that caste is a real thing that exists, but I mean, surely you just can't be so dumb as to think that (?)
What it would do is try to curtail people who do believe in caste from discriminating against others on the basis of their perceived, supposed "caste".
Surely you understand that the law would thus be "anti-caste"?
Caste discrimination is an issue in the home country, but it is pretty cut and dry here in the US.
I have the rare distinction of not being upper caste, but 'passing' as one. I get to hear the conversations of upper castes as a fly on the wall. But in some groups I am open about my caste, letting me see the other side.
Honestly, caste is total non-factor in the US. There are cliques within the Indian community, but caste is not the main favor. The main type of discrimination is between FOB immigrants vs American-Indians.Other than that, American-Indians are fully integrated, to the point of barely knowing caste, let alone discriminating based on it.
Among immigrants, IIT vs non-IITian ivy-league style snobbishness can happen. Second, those who did their undergrad in the US usually come from the rich class of india, and innocently as it may be, end up maintaining those rich-people cliques. Grad students are often less-well off and can feel left out. both groups harbor resentment towards Infosys/TCS style L1/H1bs who are seen to abuse immigration loopholes. Lastly, cliques are linguistic. It is less discriminatory, more based on feeling comfortable communicating with those who speak the same native language.
But none of these are based on caste. Yes, caste may be correlated with class given their economic differences. But people get the casual directions wrong and the correlation is much smaller then these accusations claim. Indians in the US are obsessed with merit. If you can signal merit, nothing else matters.
Note: Urban and Northern American whites are largely of English and German descent. Southern, Appalachia and flyover state whites are overwhelmingly scots-irish. Due to clear regional cultural and accent differences, it's considered acceptable to ridicule and discriminate against scots-irish Americans from 'bumfuck nowhere'. These groups don't inter-marry and the economic differences between both groups are vast. Yet, the average American doesn't understand this. They consider themselves 'woke' and happily continue discriminating on visible class signals. What they don't realize, is that even among whites, the class signals are strongly correlated with sub-racial identity & genetically distinct people.
You may not call it caste, but that's caste. At least with Indian class differences, both aspire to be better urban-white Americans. On the other hand, with whites, one group starts off an urban-white American while the other group is denied their identity despite being a so-called native of independent USA.