I am Indian-American (born into a brahmin family if that matters) and personally haven't noticed casteism, barring the occasional idiot in our communities. Having said that, we (Indian-Americans) should be open to criticism and scrutiny. We are a very successful lot - arguably the richest immigrant group in America - surely we can be secure enough to confront some of these bad things. We need to stop being defensive and touchy about such charges.
You clearly know nothing about caste, because in cases where it happens, the "higher" or "middle" castes are most often the ones actively doing the discrimination. As a "higher" caste person, I have seen a great deal of this discrimination firsthand in India (both subtle and egregious [1]), and almost never among my fellow Indian immigrants in America [2].
The typical American response that I already see elsewhere in this thread is "lol this is like a white dude saying racism doesn't exist". This totally ignores the basic fact that it is not that easy to tell someone's caste, which makes it a totally different class of problem. It's kind of possible based on a combination of factors [3], but there are so many exceptions that basically unless you ask someone, you can never be sure. And therein lies the problem – the very existence of these sorts of conversations about "how you tell what caste X is?" is often the backbone of caste-based discrimination. I feel shitty even talking about how you'd tell someone's caste.
And ultimately, I think that's why these kinds of measures will backfire. You are going to have a lot more Indian-Americans being curious about what caste they are when the problem could have faded into the background, with existing anti-discrimination statutes being applied to cases like the ones cited in the article.
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[1] A typical subtle version is mentioning a person's caste in a conversation where's it's totally irrelevant; a US equivalent would be something like "Jim, the new software engineer started today. He's Latino."
[2] A reasonable question here would be: "What changed? Why would Indian immigrants not discriminate after they come to America?" My answer is best guess is most Indians who come to the US are already likely predisposed to liberal and educated to a fairly high level. Unlike the US (where even Civil War history is still a touchy subject), specific lessons about the history of caste discrimination, statutes against it, and attempts at reparations are baked into all levels of the Indian education curriculum. Along with that, exposure to the staggeringly high diversity of America tends to dull any remaining biases that might exist. Like everything, I am sure there are exceptions. And I'm guessing that they are certainly more likely in Councilwoman Sawant's age group (she's almost 50).
[3] There should be a Falsehoods American Media Perpetuates About Caste article. If I wrote it, the top two would be: a) It's always possible to tell a person's caste based on their last name, and b) It's always possible to tell a person's caste by whether or not they eat meat.
You realize it's like a white person saying they've never witnessed a case of anti-black racism. It is the people on the receiving end who notice, and indeed cannot help but notice.
You do realize, that I am calling for scrutiny and banishing the scourge of casteism. It might very well exist, but our communities should be introspective and self-aware on how widespread this phenomenon is, instead of getting defensive.
But then your supposed to finish reading it, and have some charity in your interpretation. The gp implicitly recognizes their epistemic bias by affirming they should be open to scrutiny.
This is extremely important. One should take a good faith approach during a discussion. I see the opposite happening far too frequently these days, and it makes having productive conversations neigh impossible.
> I am Indian-American (born into a brahmin family if that matters) and personally haven't noticed casteism, barring the occasional idiot in our communities.
Translation: I don't see a problem.
> Having said that, we (Indian-Americans) should be open to criticism and scrutiny.
Translation: even though I'm open to criticism, I don't see a problem.
> We are a very successful lot - arguably the richest immigrant group in America - surely we can be secure enough to confront some of these bad things. We need to stop being defensive and touchy about such charges.
Translation: blah, blah, blah . . . me, me, me. Nothing about the problem.
It might be poorly worded, and the OP appears to be unaware of the fact that their being a member of the upper caste means they’re unlikely to witness casteism.
But they have shown an openness to learning. Instead of responding, like some commenters have, by getting mad at their potentially ignorant sentence, it’s a far better approach to, like some other commenters have, educate them about the fact that the very nature of privilege means that as part of the privileged class you get to live life being oblivious about the class distinctions.
That is indeed the privilege of the privileged. And the burden of the unprivileged is that they do not have the luxury to live their lives while being oblivious to their lack of privilege.
He left a factual statement of his own experience. It's not poorly worded.
It's entirely fair to point out that different castes would see and experience casteism very differently...but sheesh, it's tiresome to see a bunch of (probably white) keyboard warriors show up and argue with in Indian American about what it's like to be Indian in America.
I'm an Indian-American as well. Don't make assumptions.
In any case, there are some deeply problematic aspects to Indian culture, including that of my own community, and criticism of them is warranted, no matter the demographics of the critic.
They are providing scrutiny and criticism of your position. Specifically that you might be in a privileged position where you are unlikely to see the negative effects of casteism. While it is meaningful to say that you don't see it, it's not meaningful in the way you intend it. It's demonstrating the problem that this is trying to solve.
I'm a White person from Utah. Saying that I don't see Racism is missing the point. Of course I don't see Racism, it's well hidden from me as a part of my culture. And above and beyond that the Racism I do see is actually the hiding of clear discrimination such that it is invisible to me.
The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have a problem.
Unfortunately, criticism/scrutiny on the internet is not always nicely couched. So people will be direct like this commenter was.
Or it's like a "POC" saying that you can't be racist against white people despite it being clearly evident that racism against all people - including white - is happening every day.
Everyone is receiving racism but it's the truly privileged that can do so and claim they aren't guilty of it themselves.
> not OK for a lower-caste person to discriminate against a Brahmin
Unfortunately, U.S. discrimination laws have a long history of replacing perceived, hard to demonstrate/prove discrimination with actual explicit discrimination in the other direction... so although you may be morally correct, you're likely to be legally incorrect.
I won't speak to the situation in India, but in America it is certainly possible for somebody from a 'lower caste' to be in a position of authority over somebody from a 'higher caste'. If for no other reason than because Americans with no understanding of the caste system might find the 'lower caste' person to be more competent and capable than the 'higher caste' person and promote accordingly.
What is a lower-caste person? Your other comments argue that people are being dismissive yet you're using the very language that furthers caste segregation.
It actually has a genetic basis. According to David Reich in his outstanding book Who we are and how we got here, the varna/jati castes and sub-castes have been able to maintain a level of endogamy stricter than Ashkenazi Jews for millennia and there is 2-3x more genetic distance between two different jati groups coexisting in the same village than between North and South Europeans.
So basically you had a group of invaders who came to India, proclaimed themselves both racially and morally superior, and enforced a rigid system of miscegeneation laws to prevent themselves from being diluted. Makes the wildest dreams of white supremacists tame in comparison.
Of course, none of that justifies the discrimination. I don't know how to fix it either, India tried but hasn't succeeded. B. R. Ambedkar, the author of India's Constitution came to the conclusion that Hinduism is unreformable and that former untouchables like himself should convert to Buddhism, but that hasn't happened on a large scale. Subhas Chandra Bose proposed to abolish the caste system through socialism and inter-caste marriages, but he was an authoritarian bordering on Fascist.
Your idea of abolishing the concept of caste system is noble, but it has been tried and failed in India. Just as you could say making people color-blind would solve racism (setting aside the problem of reparations for past injustice), but how do you make it happen? It's a social problem, and there are seldom simple solutions. Banning the language won't make it disappear, just as (effectively) banning the N-word hasn't made racism go away.
Genetic differences don’t mean it’s not made up. It’s not like we studied people’s genes and went “hm yes you can divide this ethnic group into four subgroups, Science!” People made a system where they divided themselves, and over time that division resulted in some small but noticeable amount of genetic divergence.
But there are, like, trillions of different genetic differences between all of us, and you could draw totally different lines around people and find a genetic basis if you really wanted. The genetic basis is used to justify the arbitrary groups; the groups are not an emergent phenomenon of the genetics.
You're confusing cause and effect. The genetics did not emerge from the castes, the castes were an effort to entrench through religion the superior social status of invaders who were a different group with distinct genetics. They were not imposed from within by a faction of a unified group that subsequently diverged.
Race is made up, yet racial discrimination happens all the time. Money is made up, yet we all use it every day. Just because something is “made up” doesn’t mean it isn’t real. We made it real.
Instead of a law to stop "lower" and "upper" caste from discriminating against each other (like that comment was saying), the entire concept of caste needs to be purged.
That won't happen if you continue to use those very terms and then say it's (describing) reality. The sooner people stop dealing with it, the sooner it stops being a (real) thing.
Like, who is “we”? In any situation where one group has structural advantages over another, there are going to be people who are very much not on board with merging the groups. If your plan to equalize everyone is just “pretend the groups don’t exist”, it will fail, because you’re simply ignoring a status quo that others are actively working to preserve.
There are people who want caste discrimination to exist. Given that reality, should the people who don't want caste discrimination to exist simply pretend caste doesn't exist (and therefore caste discrimination doesn't exist) or acknowledge that the former group exists and try to do something about it?
The hierarchy of castes (and the untouchables) is intrinsic to the caste system, I am not the one making a value judgment. It's like saying "upper class" vs. "middle class" vs. "working class", which are within the reference frame of the class system.
One could of course combat it by totally transforming the original language and rituals of the culture, so that they can’t be used anymore. That is what communists tried to do with the Bible for instance.
But if you want to refer to things in a really widespread system by their name, then you show respect to the people practicing the system and may have more success in saying — keep believing what you are believing, but in this context you cannot enforce it. You may have an easier time getting it adopted then.
In the case of the caste system, my initial reaction was like the sibling comment but then I realized that I personally (and many Indians today) no longer believe it has anything to do with reality and is in fact just a self perpetuating mass delusion. So the question is, do we therefore have a right to gaslight and disrespect the beliefs of those who do believe it if they come to live in our country. My guess is yes.
This seems like a definition of racism that, at the very least, doesn't align with everyday use of the word and most people's conceptual understanding of it. What makes your minority interpretation of racism the correct one?
It seems to me that defining racism like this is less about reflecting some ground truth, and more about trying, through linguistic prescriptivism, to change an expansive term into something more proscribed, in order to focus attention only on a particular subset of activity. But doing so in a somewhat underhanded way, that avoids acknowledging or justifying the motivations behind the redefinition and instead attempts to make it a definitional fait acompli, saying "your definition is wrong, and mine is right".
The goal is simple - individual discrimination and systemic discrimination are fundamentally different things.
And systemic discrimination is what has been used to oppress minorities in the US for as long as the US has existed.
Indeed, I believe the opposite position (that all discrimination against all people based on race is racism) is the underhanded approach, as it waters down the concerns around systemic discrimination by emphasizing the individual discrimination over the systemic discrimination.
Discrimination against someone based on race is wrong. Full stop.
But it's critical we understand that what Black people in America face isn't just a few individuals with backwards ideas. It's fundamentally and categorically different than a few people hating me because I'm white.
Knowing nothing at all about this topic, I have a very basic question: How do people find out about the caste of another person? I mean, for example, is it because of the family name? Or dialect/accent? (I'd know if someone grew up in Liverpool as soon as they spoke)
Usually the last name is a giveaway. That said, last names are very regional in India, so someone from north India can pretty much instantly infer the caste of another north Indian, but that person would have difficulty doing the same with a south Indian last name.
Hi, just your average American here, please forgive my lack of understanding. I was under the impression that the system of using a father's first name as a son or daughter's last name was intended to disrupt caste identification by name. Is this not the case? I'm asking genuinely. I have worked with a lot of people from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and it's been something I have struggled to understand.
The British introduced that system, aligned on the Western European system (not everywhere, though, Iceland is an outlier). That's why you have people like Padmasree Warrior, one of her husband's ancestors put his profession as his last name when the British asked for one, and it stuck. Then again, many English surnames are also based on profession, one of Jimmy Carter's ancestors literally made carts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variar
Is a caste who have traditionally rendered temple services. it is not related to the english word or meaning warrior.
The caste name also differs from region to region. I am not sure if the person you mentioned is the same caste or a different one.
Caste does not say your ancestors did that job, caste meant a person from a particular caste could only do that job and could not take up other jobs, people from other castes could not take their jobs and were disqualified because you were not born in a particular list of families.
Some castes were prohibited from getting an education and were killed for this.
Yeah exactly, nowadays (especially in the US)... it's not easy to tell what caste a person is from.
If someone doesn't want to share their caste, that's very easy to do.
Hence... discrimination amongst indians is usually around where in india you're from, what language do you speak (tamil, hindi, marathi, etc.), what tier college you went to (IIT?), obviously gender, and other factors.
Comparing Caste to race is completely wrong and it's a red herring.
Having every indian fill out what caste they are on their job application doesn't solve the problem.
While the factors you mention are relevant, caste ranks higher than those, maybe lower than religion. Its pretty easy to tell someone's caste just from their last name (at least for North Indian Hindus). I have an uncommon last name that makes hard for most people to tell my caste but it also means lots of people have come up to me talking shit about our other low caste co-workers, assuming I'm high caste (I'm not). This phenomenon seems to exist purely with immigrant South Asians and disappears completely after first generation.
It's a difficult thing unless you have access to their official/historical documents. Family name can be a starting point. But it's not enough to full ascertain someone's caste. One thing you can do is to avoid using food preferences and skin color to figure out the caste. These have only led to more anecdotes and distract attention from the actual discrimination.
> We need to stop being defensive and touchy about such charges.
I think it’s a human trait in general. People often don’t handle when a piece of their culture is by and large rejected as backwards and wrong. Often a lot of doubling down happens and you end up with some really nasty fringe groups. Often people evolve and adapt and it’s a success story.
> I am Indian-American (born into a brahmin family if that matters) and personally haven't noticed casteism
Same (I'm also indian but I'm vaishya). But I have a bunch of white dudes telling me that it happens all the time!
I've seen much more discrimination on other factors - mainly around what state you're from (since someone from chennai obviously has a completely different culture than someone from delhi)
Religion is already a protected category. Arguably caste falls within both religion and race categories, but it is better to make it explicit until case law and state and federal legislation catch up.
In parts of the US, Catholics or Jews were not allowed to hold office well into the 1870s, so your example is not as hypothetical as you seem to think.
It does not matter what religion the discriminator is, it is the act of discrimination based on a protected characteristic (in this case religion) which is illegal. Imagine a Jewish boss rejecting Jewish candidates because he does not want his company to get the reputation of being only for Jews to apply to, that would still be illegal discrimination, even if they are of the exact same religion.
Before you accuse me of making up a contrived example, that was exactly why the New York Times downplayed the Holocaust during WWII despite by that time uncontrovertible evidence, because they did not want to be perceived as a Jewish news outlet engaging in special pleading:
> It does not matter what religion the discriminator is, it is the act of discrimination based on a protected characteristic (in this case religion) which is illegal
There is a nuance here. Sunni-shia is a sect rather than a religion.
There is a difference between:
1. A Muslim manager rejecting a Muslim candidate (without knowing or paying attention to their sect)
2. A Sunni manager rejecting Shia candidates while hiring Sunni candidates
1 is covered by current law while 2 is not (this is why Seattle passed this ban but for castes)
Your example won't apply here as the candidate won't be rejected due to being Muslim but rather being Sunni or Shia. If there were sects in play in the Judaism case, then that is an accurate parallel.
This is out of topic: Also, shouldn't laws go beyond just discrimination? Shouldn't we legislate towards prevent violence given the past and present of Sunni-shia violence? Discrimination in jobs seem tame compared to outright violence.
I personally don’t mind any amount of criticism and scrutiny if it means an end to the evil scourge that is casteism.
However what I do mind is when this criticism is mixed with religion and culture bashing (in this case Hinduism) by ill-informed people who read hot takes on the news.
Case in hand, the Seattle ordinance. The councilwoman proposing the ordinance went to great lengths to assure people that it doesn’t target a single religion and yet here’s a BBC article[0] that manages to convey an extraordinary amount of misinformation in one line on the third paragraph. This is exactly what people were concerned about and exactly what is playing out.
Edit: Text from the article “ The caste system in India dates back over 3,000 years and divides Hindu society into rigid hierarchical groups.” There are many flaws with this statement but Hacker News is probably not the best place for history lessons.
The caste system exists outside India. In Japan, people who were falconers, butchers, leather workers and other "ignoble" or "cruel" professions under Buddhism were branded as untouchables, burakumin in Japanese, sometimes also eta or hinin, literally meaning "subhuman". Somehow the lord who employed the falconer was not cruel or ignoble, funny how things work out...
The issue is that Americans with half-baked knowledge think that all Indians have a caste assigned to them, or that India has a national level caste allocation policy. For Americans who hate India, this gives them more ammo to hate us.
>I am Indian-American (born into a brahmin family if that matters) and personally haven't noticed casteism, barring the occasional idiot in our communities.
That's the Indian equivalent of "I was born into a white family and I personally haven't noticed racism, barring the occasional idiot..."
Would be really great if you could spend 20 minutes reading up on Indian culture before lecturing us on what our issues are.
I'm not saying discrimination doesn't happen. But from what I've seen, it's rarely about caste and usually about other factors (read my other comments in this thread for context)
"Brahman, also spelled Brahmin, Sanskrit Brāhmaṇa (“Possessor of Brahma”), highest ranking of the four varnas, or social classes, in Hindu India. "
... did you think a quick google would confirm what you're saying? I'm confused.
What you're doing is kind of like a white American lecturing an Indian about how, in spite of what they may know already, racism in the US is overblown.
I never said nor implied discrimination doesn't happen. I'm saying it's far more complicated than just what caste you're in... and you're chasing the wrong thing if you just go after caste.
1) I'm not brahmin. I'm Vaishya. And my last name makes that extremely obvious.
2) It's not obvious what caste you're from. What is obvious is where in india you're from, what college you're from (indians care a TON about college rank), what cultural upbring you had. It's far more likely to get discriminated on that.
Again, you're taking your knowledge of American politics and applying that to India.
India has a far richer history (thousands of years vs. 250 years) and far more areas to discriminate over.
You are 1) completely clueless and 2) incredibly arrogant about issues you know nothing about. So yeah, not really interested in talking to you further.
I never said you were. I certainly wouldn't have imagined you were dalit with your attitude, but I wouldn't have put a bet on Brahmin either.
>It's not obvious what caste you're from. What is obvious is where in india you're from, what college you're from (indians care a TON about college rank),
I thought you were trying to emphasize just how NOT like the US Indian culture is? Going to Harvard is, y'know, kind of a big deal in the US too, even if the officer who just pulled you over can't tell at a glance.
>what cultural upbring you had. It's far more likely to get discriminated on that.
I mean, I'm no expert on India but I'd bet pretty good money that a lot of this parallels "acting white" in the US - which is often used as cover for the underlying prejudice.
And that fury you are exhibiting about "how I wouldn't know because I'm not one of them"... yeah, white Southern Americans have been like that to me too (I'm not American).
Prejudice and social hierarchy reinforcement is more of a human trait than a cultural one, and similar patterns are exhibited in different cultures.
