From Politico: An effort to ban caste discrimination in California has touched a nerve
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Caste discrimination wasn’t on the radar of many lawmakers in California. Then it showed up on their doorstep.
Hundreds of people mobilized outside the state Capitol in recent months, protesting a bill from first-term state Sen. Aisha Wahab to add caste to the list of protected groups in California — a proposal that many felt was unnecessary and unfairly tarnished the image of the South Asian community. Hearings on the bill got heated.
“Clearly we hit a nerve,” Wahab, who got death threats and is being targeted with a recall for her efforts, said at one hearing.
As a Californian, I think we should be looking at this. I’m not surprised it touched a nerve, but we should be looking at this.Report
“We shouldn’t discriminate against people in wheelchairs. Like, we should have ramps everywhere.”
“Absolutely.”
“We shouldn’t discriminate against deaf people. Like, if videos don’t have subtitles, we should get rid of them.”
“Absolutely.”
“We shouldn’t have Caste discrimination.”
“HOW DARE YOU WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU IMPLYING”Report
it’s getting back to the thing that killed Online Atheism, which is the tension between “We Must Always Criticize Cultural Reinforcement Of Bigotry” and “We Must Never Criticize Non-White People Because That’s Racist”.Report
Of course it hit a nerve. This country has enough problems like this. We sure don’t need to import what’s already in plentiful supply.Report
It should be baned.Report
It’s a big state.
Report
This is a problem we didn’t know we had, that may already be addressed by existing law. (I would take, on contingency, a case claiming that caste discrimination is covered by existing laws against racial, religious, or national origin discrimination.) The current proposal may be belt-and-suspendering, but that isn’t a reason to oppose it. I would like to hear more, though, about why some people are so bitterly opposed to it. Perhaps because it’s a form of discrimination that only a small, but ethnically identifiable, subset of the population would have any reason to commit and that subset feels unfairly singled out. If there are other, similar forms of discrimination that other groups get to slide on, they may rightly resent that, but the solution is to tell us what they are so we can ban them too.Report
I…don’t see how. I mean, it’s clearly not the last two.
And while race and caste are both social constructs sorta based on who your parents, race actually does require some differing physical traits. In fact, that’s mostly what it actually is, and people just pretend it’s entire hereditary.
Whereas caste does not. Being unobservable is a pretty major difference.Report
I am not completely sure that caste is unobservable by members of a caste culture.
My limited understanding is that upper castes and lower castes tend to have slightly different physical traits (darker skin or other Dravidic features being one, but not the only one) and cultural markers that are fairly visible within their societies. They (or most of them) cannot “pass” as upper caste.
Obviously, to us westerners, those differences are unobservable. But that’s on us, and our lack of familiarity. As Maxwell’s Smart’s foe The C(l/r)aw pointed out, all American blondes also look the same to them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftgAG3Vnif8Report
I know nothing about the state of caste discrimination in the US, so naturally I have strong opinions about it.Report
This is the way.Report
I’ve never met a Dalit. Maybe they are as bad as the Brahmin think.
I mean, they know them and I don’t. If they are stupider than other castes, “discrimination” is an appropriate response to finding out that one applied to the company.Report
I know a fair number of people of Indian descent (a given in my profession), but have no idea what caste they are, or if that matters to them.Report
I’m second generation and product of a mixed marriage, and i didn’t even know what caste my father was in until I was an adult.
Here are some thoughts from someone a little less removed from it: https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1699275730788499760Report
What is the best response when someone farts in a crowded elevator?Report
I’m guessing that “death threats” would probably have to be dismissed as not representative of the opposition to elevator farting.Report
Point. Miss.Report
Is the best response supposed to be “Blame the Dalit”?Report
For your elevator fart?Report
Make sure that you’re not confusing your take with being around people who merely eat food you’re not used to.Report
Pretend not to notice and keep looking at the floor numbers.Report
One of the side effects of increasing diversity in the United States is having to deal with social problems that Americans are not really equipped to deal with.Report
I really don’t understand this point of posts like this. Obviously increasingly diversity and globalization means that legislatures in developed democracies are going to makes laws concerning stuff that never happened it before. Why is this a bad thing? What is the point?Report
Why is this a bad thing?
Why do you think that this story is indicative of my thinking that this is a bad thing?
For the record, I am against Caste Discrimination.
What is the point?
I think that this is an interesting story. I think it touches on various themes that we’ve discussed in the past and I think that we’re going to continue discussing these themes in the future.
I’m pretty sure that you didn’t read the story and think “ho-hum, another law”. If anything, I think that you read the story and thought something to the effect of “Oh, jeez. This is a can of worms. This is going to get a bunch of people upset and half of the people upset at the other half will be appealing to some vague principle instead of something involving knowledge of how complicated the situation is… but that vague principle is more important than how complicated the situation is… Oh, jeez. This is a can of worms.”Report
A can of worms makes great conversation bait.Report
See Jay, that’s actually important context which would have made the OP more interesting, especially if you were to, say, outline what you thought those themes were and why they applied to this story.Report
See, I don’t think “Jay thinks this is interesting” is interesting, though.
I also see “Jay, you need to give the *CONTEXT* for this story!” as insulting to you, yes you, the reader.
But, sure.
It touches on:
California is passing another law! Maybe we don’t even need it!
Different Cultures Have Different Values.
Discrimination against people for stuff like “National Origin” or “Race” is wrong. Caste seems to be a weird amalgamation of “where you’re from” and “who your ancestors are” and both of those map imperfectly to “National Origin” and “Race”.
WE CAN’T JUDGE PEOPLE FROM OTHER COUNTRIES
What the hell? Of course we can judge people from other countries.
Those are the big ones.Report
And I see posting blockquoted story links to other sources without any context as the laziest trolling around here. If you aren’t willing to tell us why you think this story needs our attention, that’s the insult.Report
Perhaps we could also ask why Politico covered it.
When we go to CNN.com, it’s fair to ask “why did the editors pick *THESE* stories and not other stories?”
Indeed, we ought to ask that.
So I will tell you this: I posted this story because I think that this is an interesting story. I think it touches on various themes that we’ve discussed in the past and I think that we’re going to continue discussing these themes in the future.Report
Part of moving to a different country and culture (as I did in my 30s, coming to the USA) is accepting that you are now living within a different culture that supersedes your culture of origin.
That means, in practice, that in case of a conflict between your original culture’s values and American cultural values (like non discrimination, or equality among the sexes, or freedom of religion, or gun carrying), American values must take precedence.
Yes, you can still cook the way you want, you can still speak your home language, you can still wear a hijab. But no, you cannot force your daughter to marry your nephew, nor can you divorce your wife and kick her out of the house. And you also cannot discriminate towards others based on prohibited causes. Even if those others are from your same culture, and would have been discriminated in your home country.Report
This is one of the problems when talking about multiculturalism and DEI. The liberal side of the aisle can get really mealy-mouthed and not come out and say that by multiculturalism they mean food, festivals, and fabrics but the code of conduct is that of bougie college educated people. It is painfully obvious that this is what people mean by multiculturalism and if a Japanese person were to set up a business in the United States he or she can’t have everybody use Japanese honorifics and social relationship guidelines. People have a hard time coming out and saying this though. They probably should come out and be more honest about it.Report
I want to point out for a second that US law doesn’t just impact us. Other people look at our laws as evidence of how we want the world to be, and our likes and dislikes are pretty important.
Anyway, I’m not really sure how much caste discrimination exist in the US, and honestly, reading about examples, it seems like in some very very small areas, some people occasionally get called names, which not actually the point of anti-discrimination laws. I don’t know we have any real discrimination that’s happened.
That said…we don’t want that to start(1), and saying it’s not allowed here sends a pretty strong message to countries that still do it.
And as for the people complaining about that because they say it stigmatizes South Asians…uh, no. The caste system _still existing_ unofficially (2) in parts of South Asians is what stigmatizes the people who still practice it.
1. We all think other Americans wouldn’t let that happen, but…if some Indian-American you were working with hinted strongly you shouldn’t hire some other Indian-American for some reason you didn’t quite understand, would you really think ‘This might be a prejudice thing?’ Wouldn’t you assume that, of all people, they probably _aren’t_ prejudice about this guy. He’s someone that, as far as you can tell, checks all the same boxes as that person. If he’s telling you to not go with this guy, he probably sees something you don’t, right?
I don’t think people who have only lived in American know enough about the caste system, or even remember it exists enough, to notice when it comes into play. Some of the articles I read had Indian-American teens startled to learn what caste they supposedly were.
2. BTW, it’s actually pretty interesting to look at this, because India does exactly the sort of stuff to hide caste discrimination as the US does to hide racial discrimination. For example, the government stopped releasing any data in 2014 about people based on caste, aka, ‘We don’t see caste…so good luck figuring out how many Dalits that government officials refuse to give ration cards to’.Report
I had an uncle who was kind of a piece of crap. He couldn’t hold on to a job, and it was always somebody else’s fault, as he told it. My father, in a triumph of hope over experience, convinced his boss to hire him. That lasted about as long as the other jobs. He blamed my father—his own brother—and beat him up.
Since my uncle was a straight white man, suing for discrimination wasn’t on the table. And we could all just admit that he wasn’t a victim, just a jerk.
But contrary to popular belief, people like my uncle come in other sexes and races. And when people of other sexes and races make claims of discrimination, that can cause big problems for their employers. Even if the case is a total baloney sandwich and can’t win on the merits, it costs money to make it go away. And employers have to keep an unproductive employee on long enough to establish extensive evidence of grounds for firing. They’ll probably have to have regular caste sensitivity training to show that they take caste discrimination seriously. And maybe some caste-based CYAAA.
Anti-discrimination law is not costless, and “discrimination is bad” is not a sufficient justification for incurring the costs of requiring employers to justify their personnel decisions to the satisfaction of bureaucrats and juries. Laws are serious tools for solving real problems, and should not be passed purely for the purpose of moral grandstanding.Report
If someone of Indian origin is going to groundlessly sue over that sort of thing, suing over race or national origin or even religion (assumed or real) makes infinitely more sense considering who operates almost all companies in the US. To assert _caste_ discrimination you have to get over the hump of the employer even knowing or guessing what caste they are, which, again, 99.9999% of Americans would have literally no idea. (In fact, I’d wager that 90% of American generally forget ‘caste’ is even a thing at all until prompted.)
Saying ‘They didn’t hire me because I’m Indian’ or ‘They didn’t hire me because I’m brown’ or even ‘They didn’t hire me because I’m Hindu’ works infinitely better…unless the person they are suing is also all those things, _and also_ a higher caste than they are (And mostly is only going to relevant if the potential employee are Dalit, aka, the untouchable caste, most other castes have sorta fallen apart.)
So…seems pretty unlikely for frivolous lawsuits. Like I said, I can’t actually find any stories of this happening in ways it would be illegal, the stories are mostly about Indian-American teens being hit with slurs from other, more recent immigrant, Indian-Americans teens. Which is not illegal, but probably should be something public schools don’t allow to happen in school. (Which is going to require a bunch of non-Indian-American teachers to actually learn about caste…and probably a few Indian-American teens, too, because those kids who didn’t realize what caste they were considered would be in for a pretty bad shock if they grew up and decided ‘let’s take the kids to see the old country’.)
And laws are also for stopping problems before they happen. We don’t have laws about misusing biological weapons because that historically happened.Report
Shoplifting law is not costless, and “shoplifting is bad” is not a sufficient justification for incurring the costs of requiring customers to justify their shopping decisions to the satisfaction of bureaucrats and juries. Laws are serious tools for solving real problems, and should not be passed purely for the purpose of moral grandstanding.Report
Oh, and for the record, it is perfectly possible to sue for getting fired because you’re white. Or because you’re a man. Or, depending on the jurisdiction and time (Before 2020, in about half the states, in 2020 the courts folded it into ‘on the basis of sex’ in federal discrimination law.), because you’re straight.
The reason straight white men generally don’t try that is almost all companies are known to have very long histories of hiring straight white men(1), and thus have a pretty easy rebuttal to any claims of discrimination.
So, the way for companies to not get sued by, for example, a gay white man is to…have a long and known history of hiring gay white men that they could pull out in court, which would mean said gay white man would know the lawsuit is pointless.
1) There are actually a few weird exceptions to ‘ almost all companies are known to have very long histories of hiring straight white men’. Hooters has actually been repeatedly sued over not hiring male wait staff, and it’s exactly because their wait staff employment practices are so clearly tilted towards women (The position is even specifically called ‘Hooter Girls’.) that they’ve usually just settled those lawsuits with no real defense.Report
I suspect if there is caste discrimination in the United States, it is both highly concentrated and discrete. I happen to live close to the Indian consulate. Sikhs protest in front of it fairly often because of what is happening back in India to Sikhs. I would not be surprised if anti-Sikh feeling sometimes found its way into Silicon Valley tech companies somehow. Likewise, it would not surprise me if someone from a Brahmin caste tried sniffing out and stomping on Indian applicants from lower castes.Report
I’ve heard stories but never actually seen this happen in person. Upper caste coders and executives making fun of the lower castes who work in the cafeteria or as janitors or inconvenience stores.Report
But contrary to popular belief, people like my uncle come in other sexes and races. And when people of other sexes and races make claims of discrimination, that can cause big problems for their employers
You forgot to conclude your idea, which is, apparently, that, since people who should be fired come in all races and sexes, then I should be able to refuse to hire any person of a specific race or sex (or religion), because, for sure, at least someone in that list will be a jerk. By refusing to hire, say, any white Christian male, I have surely avoided hiring at least one character like your uncle.
Makes all the senseReport
In another story on this I read, it noted that interviewers could fish for caste identification without outright asking, but asking things like “are you a vegetarian?” or “what village are you from?” of another person of Indian origin.
I’m pretty sure (thanks Bart Likko!) that there’s no legitimate reason for most of these prospective employers to ask whether a prospective employee is a vegetarian. However, the vegetarians are eager to be asked this, I suspect, because they know their answer will identify them in a positive light. So nobody is bringing suit for this. And if you aren’t a vegetarian, you aren’t a protected group, and yet you really wish you could sue because you were asked if you were a vegetarian.
That’s probably where this stuff goes.Report