
California sues Cisco alleging discrimination based on India’s caste system - IMAYousaf
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-02/california-sues-cisco-bias-indian-caste-system
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KindOne
Discussion 10 days ago (600+ comments):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083)
"California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's
caste"

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IMAYousaf
Thank you for this. I must have missed it.

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ramraj07
Interesting because this is not the first time I've heard that Indians in
Cisco are extremely cliquey. Definitely remember hearing story of a workplace
discrimination settlement from there. In that case it was argued in the gender
angle, but the person involved said it's actually a group of Indians who were
allegedly pulling all stops to promote each other while trying to exclude
other Asians.

I'm from India, and can totally believe it. Have also heard of stories in
Texas where they will keep a trusted Indian guy in interview panels to make
sure that it's not a cousin or friend (who only barely looks like the
interviewee) actually coming for the interview. And then there are these
"consulting firms" who specialise in helping you fake a resume and get a job
(most of the time these are people who won the H1 lottery and have come to the
US via Infosys/TCS and are trying to switch to a real job instead of the half-
pay serfdom they are in). These shenanigans are of course not common nowadays,
but what this means is there's a big population of disingenuous Indian origin
people in the second-grade tech jobs in the US, which does not bode well for
the general image of Indian tech workers unfortunately.

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IMAYousaf
I've sadly heard stories about forced deference, though not seemingly as overt
as in Cisco, at other tech companies.

The most shocking experience is actually a personal anecdote. Someone from
India from a client once asked my father, who also works in tech in a senior
position, why people listen to him given his background. Kind of jarring given
that the discrimination in the US tends to be much more structural and
sinisterly subtle as opposed to some Indian or South African style outright
"one drop rule" thing.

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mirimir
I'm confused. Was it about the Indian's background, or your father's
background?

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IMAYousaf
Specifically with reference to my dad's background and why people in the US at
large, including the native population, let him be in charge.

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danans
This will be an interesting case because it will need to test how a construct
like caste maps on to the protected classes of US anti discrimination law.
There's plenty of overlap between caste and many US protected classes,
including race, class, and religion, but there is not a tight fit to any of
them.

Perhaps countries like the UK have more experience with this, because they
have proportionally much larger and older Indian populations, and also the UK
has its own historical hereditary caste like system.

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dsr_
It's the equivalent of hiring white supremacists and letting them make
employment decisions.

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danans
Kind of, except with caste the "racial" categories have repeatedly both
smoothed out and discretized over the millenia, though always with a with a
hierarchy. It's a far more complicated system of discrimination and social
ordering than the traditional black/white dichotomy of American
discrimination.

~~~
dsr_
Sophistication doesn't make racism better.

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danans
I didn't mean to imply it was better. If anything it is even worse because it
attempts to hide the aspects of it that come from racism.

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newshorts
Sorry to say it, but I believe there will always be groups of people who
unjustifiably feel they are superior to another group of people.

~~~
mirimir
People in the US can feel however they want, but they don't get to
discriminate on the basis of protected group status.

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tesseracted
"The suit alleges that Iyer told other workers the employee was Dalit and had
gained entry into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology through
affirmative action."

Indian law explicitly requires a much lower standard of admission for the
lower castes. Is it illegal to take consideration of this fact?

~~~
toast0
I couldn't read the article because of the paywall.

I'm going to assume the person in question graduated from IIT as well as
gained entry. If so, I don't see how it matters if he got in through a door
with a lower bar, if he graduated, he graduated. Unless graduating from IIT is
a rubber stamp for showing up?

Also, just because the bar is lower for admissions doesn't mean that people
who cleared the bar couldn't have cleared the bar otherwise. I don't see how
IIT entrance exam scores are relevant for employment at Cisco anyway.

~~~
MattGaiser
It depends on what theory you believe about why a university degree is
valuable. If you see it as a competitive signal of how many people a candidate
was better than, then the signal is contaminated.

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mirimir
One might feel the same about an African American graduate of MIT, but it'd be
illegal to discriminate based on it.

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duxup
It's an interesting situation.

Discrimination based on something not common in one country can still have
negative impacts.... but perhaps it hasn't been sorted out legally in our
country yet?

We live in a strange global world.

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pankajdoharey
Yeah well sounds about right, entirely possible.

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saltedonion
Will this be a precedent setting case?

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hardsoftnfloppy
_Laughs in Californian_

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binaryzeitgeist
This is rich coming from a state that introduced a bill like ACA-5.

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dis-sys
shocking but still confused. When they practiced the indian caste system in
the US, how would they interact with people not from india, e.g. people with
US, EU, Vietnam, Korea etc background? Do they get treated as "high caste" or
"low caste" people?

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whatshisface
Caste is highly correlated to skin pigmentation, so in practice... this would
be almost indistinguishable from regular old racism.

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cjsaltlake
It's not at all highly correlated, and skin color certainly wouldn't trump
real caste affiliation.

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mirimir
Please see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23799512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23799512)
for a recent paper which reports that it is.

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mahaganapati
As a Hindu I'd like to take the opportunity to share that the implementation
of the caste system is not based on what it really means to be Hindu. The
Vedas state that one's caste is fluid (not based on lineage) and can change in
one's lifetime, and that further a person of the worker class is not lesser
than someone of the priest caste, they both perform dharma necessary for the
community.

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dis-sys
are you defending the caste system?

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Bang2Bay
caste system would have no problems. Caste discrimination is the problem.
Every religion and Entire world has caste system in one form or the other.
otherwise there would be no fights.

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ignoramous
> _Every religion and Entire world has caste system in one form or the other._

Except one thing isn't like another. If you think otherwise, I'd appreciate
examples.

> _caste system would have no problems. Caste discrimination is the problem._

That's like saying, apartheid isn't the problem, the ensuing discrimination
is?

