>In 2016, Equality Labs conducted the first survey on caste discrimination in the United States, helmed by Dr. Maari Zwick Maitreyi and myself. Surveying more than 1,500 respondents, we uncovered a problem that was much larger than we expected: One in four Dalits surveyed reported facing physical and verbal assault, one in three faced educational discrimination, and two in three workplace discrimination.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58347d04bebafbb1e66df...
Could be the same here. Say that in 1/100 of interactions between a upper and lower caste there is some form of discrimination, regardless the intensity. I'm too tired to do the math, but it seems reasonable that would lead to a high percentage of people ending up answering yes to a "have you ever been discriminated" question.
That’s the kind of pictures I have in the books I mentioned in the earlier comment. The British census takers would go village to village..they were obsessed with the angle of the nose and how flat it was up the face. To them these aboriginal features and skin colour were the basis of caste division.
And this wasn’t at all true. The Vedas divided people on the basis of their nature and their dharma or work or duty to society was based on their temperament. A weak vegetarian Brahmin who was keen to learn numbers and had the aptitude for math isn’t going to be riding horses and wield weapons to fight and die for the country. That was the job of the Kshatriyas. The divisions were there so there is a corps of people who did the best acc to their abilities. Was it perfect? No. Did they inter marry and also strive to live the best life exploiting the resources they had as well as their positions. Yes. But like a goat on a leash..they had a radius of free movement but were tethered by social restriction. A Vaishya could never be a king and a shudra could never become a priest. But neither could the king live without the Indian equivalent of democeles sword over his head nor could the Brahmin enjoy creature comforts. The system had nothing to do with the British understanding of caste which was racial.
Then they super imposed their understanding of race over the caste system. And this was patently ridiculous. The world’s understanding of caste system as promulgated by the British doesn’t resemble what is in the texts or what was in practice before they came along. Guess what happened to the all the ‘lower classes’? They converted to Christianity because the missionaries were always standing..waiting in the wings.
This is not to say that there weren’t terrible things that happened in India. We don’t crucify all black people because of a few criminals. We don’t crucify all whites people for the racism of a few. Not all homeless people are drug addicts. We don’t call all men rapists because of Harvey Weinstein. All Germans are not Nazis. Caste discrimination is not a Hindu blot. In all of the above cases, it was ‘humans behaving badly’.
I am blown away every time by how the uneducated untraveled masses are willing to believe second hand accounts of a colonizing power that reluctantly left a country that single handedly overfilled the coffers and granaries of The Empire.
Why is the victim being shamed and the rapist account being taken as gospel? Because the sick fucks went around villages and measured peoples noses like they are cattle and published their understanding of what it means to them first before Indians could master English ..you know in the past 70 years after freedom...to protest all the lies?
The evidence for this happening is poor. I have dozens of Indian friends who have been in the US for three decades, and they've never heard of it either. It could still be happening, of course, but the case for it would be more real if there was one actual case of a company or government censuring someone for it.
To be clear, this story got legs specifically because California is bringing a case against Cisco for caste-related discrimination. So the government is certainly trying to censure someone for it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24953219
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24953346
But what can you do.
The main thing I think the article got wrong is this:
> they're often clever attempts to find out something very specific
I don't think they are "clever" attempts. People aren't that clever, in general. It's very possible that people are just used to asking these very normal questions out of habit (e.g. "are you vegetarian" is a perfectly normal question to ask before going to lunch with someone, to factor that in your suggestions of places to eat). It's just that they may be subconsciously deriving further biases based on the answers instead of taking the answers at face value. If, for example, someone not being vegetarian was originally just a benign question to go out to lunch together, but later subconsciously causes the manager to not give them that promotion, that would be discrimination, and I can't say for sure that that doesn't happen.
This sounds like a white male talking to other white males assumes that racism is not seen anywhere
It doesn't prove anything one way or the other, but it is the exact same rhetorical strategy.
She tells an anecdote about visiting a conference in India on caste and even though the reason everyone was there was to discuss ways to undo the effects of the caste system, she was able to see effects of the system right there in the conference by how various participants interacted with each other. It was so ingrained to the participants that they didn’t realize they were doing it. It was small things like how one person would yield to another during conversation.
Interesting listen.
https://www.vox.com/2020/8/25/21399479/caste-the-warmth-of-o...
Caste is the way of life in the Indian society. Segregation and discrimination is so normalized that it needs an outsider to point that out.
Sadly Muslims were not much better in this regard and created their own caste system of sorts, with descendants of foreign invaders given more status than descendants of local converts (Afghan good, Middle Eastern better), who were assumed to be low-caste fleeing oppression for that specific reason. I've heard the same from a Christian Indian from Mangalore. Perhaps that's why Dr. Ambedkar opted for Buddhism rather than Islam or Christianity as his recommended path forward for the Dalits (former untouchables).
I know you're saying this in a bit of an off the cuff manner, but there is a lot more to the history of Bangladesh than you were letting on, and even in a joking manner it kinda contributes to this idea that Islam was this great emancipatory force in Bangladesh, which is...a bit reductionist. The idea that Bengal is historically a nation of low-caste Indians is 100% not the case. Bengal's distinct identity goes back to the Vedic period of 1500BC - 500BC.
Its historic wealth predates Mughal era Bengal when Islam was introduced, and relates back to its historically rich breadbasket/river delta land and strategic placement as a thalossocracy very well placed along the maritime section of the Silk Road. Secondly, caste has always been somewhat complicated, and has a long history of systematically resistance in the Dharmic tradition in Bengal. That pertains to the historical development of Buddhism in the Maurya and Pala empires. To say it was "low-caste Indians" who converted to Islam to get out of the caste system that created the identity of "Bangladeshi" rather than competing ideological traditions (pro-Brahminical Old Vedic religion vs anti-Brahminical Buddhism) is really white-washing things. Islam's interaction with greater South Asian religion and philosophy was a lot more syncretic than that. By the time it had gotten there, there were already existing religios traditions that had begun to explore an idea of a religion without caste against religion through caste.
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/untouchability-high-...
I asked you how often you get asked for your caste, which you did not answer. I have a few very visibly brahmin colleagues. When we work together, they don't discriminate against any of my colleagues or me. When we go for team outings, they don't go to restaurant kitchens and ask the cooks and waiters for their caste, and more often than not, the restaurant serves meat.
Please scroll to page 8. The data shows about 27% of Indian households ADMITS to practising untouchability.
May I present to you another survey - this time from EPW. https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/2/special-articles/continuin...
You can see a summary of this research here: https://newsmeter.in/more-than-40-of-brahmin-households-prac...
You are looking for anecdotal data when I am presenting you with actual survey data. You want to extrapolate from your own situation (as well as mine) to decide what the situation is nation-wide. That is not how things work.
In your particular situation - which may not be representative of the situation of others, you may not be a racist/casteist in your thinking, but you certainly can't extrapolate from that for what the situation is like across the board.
Good, so these figures are not even close to the 50% figure for urban Rajasthan. Why do you think the figures differ so drastically? Also, clever of the "researchers" to inflate figures using "households". Absolutely zero among my hundreds of colleagues have demonstrated casteist attitudes, so let's ask about their grandparents. That's how you get "households".
> You are looking for anecdotal data when I am presenting you with actual survey data.
Correct. Because sociological "studies" are rife with methodological failures. They drive an agenda worse than any autorickshaw driver drives his auto. This is the field that gave us "one in five women on college campuses are raped" and "India is the least safe country in the world for women". All obvious bullshit, but here we are.
> from your own situation (as well as mine)
This is the interesting part. We don't know each other. You could have told me anything at all about how you have been discriminated against by the "upper caste". Yet you didn't. It goes to show how believable you, yourself, would consider such stories would be.
There is an interesting parallel between believing BS of the holy men in the past (the priests, the prophets) and believing the BS of today's holy men (the academics). Some fields are taking active steps to addressing the replication crisis. Sociology is not one of them.
You have been so internalized into the caste system that you count only explicit and physically hurting ones as forms of discrimination. You are either incredibly privileged possibly a Brahmin or you're ignorant so much that you deny the suffering of more than a billion people as outright false!!
Source?
[..] India is home to over 200 million Dalits. According to Paul Diwakar, a Dalit activist from the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, "India has 600,000 villages and almost every village a small pocket on the outskirts is meant for Dalits."[..]
Indian population is 1400 million
Presenting you some data on how this works: https://paa2015.princeton.edu/papers/153481
Just consider the Indian judiciary. The vast majority of judges are brahmins when they constitute just 5% of the population of the country.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ravikiranshinde/one-too-many-mishra...
As for the undertrials and those in prison, the vast majority are from lower castes. https://www.newsclick.in/how-caste-plays-out-criminal-justic...
What has this got to do with the French? ‘Upper classes’ are not all aristocracy. I think you are confused.
Numbers from here or wikipedia https://www.statista.com/statistics/1001016/india-population...
Unless you are stating that Dalits are a larger number than a smaller population of Brahmins.
And that the latter is oppressing the former?
In which case: source?
Thanks.
Once again: source?
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9873/w9873...
So we don’t really have a standard for perceiving an issue, only acknowledging an area ripe for abuse and aiming to mitigate it.
I don't know enough about the issue in the article to determine how widespread it is - but I don't think it is fair to compare them.
> "To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone."
> The Court supported this conclusion with citations—in a footnote, not the main text of the opinion—to a number of psychological studies that purported to show that segregating black children made them feel inferior and interfered with their learning.
I think that in general if a bunch of people say they're experiencing a problem than that's enough evidence that there is really a problem. But the Civil Rights movement did have objective factual support from the beginning.
Also caste determines my job, education, wealth, where I live, where I pray, who I marry and many more.
There are ways to find it from the ornaments and things, clothes you wear. It would be simply called 'tradition'. Caste segregation is the way of life here in India and there are so many different and easy ways to figure out another Indian's caste.
To my knowledge there is no correlation to place of birth. While there may be statistical differences in the distribution of characteristics such as say skin colour among communities which I am unaware of, you will find a reasonable representation of all physiognomies? in each community.
(Speaking of, do all Sikhs count as Kshatriyas? Even the farmers in Punjab and Haryana? So confusing...)
Nobody seems to ask this question about the apparently rampant racism in the US.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not, but in case you're not from the US and genuinely confused about this... there are mountains of data on systemic racism precisely because it's one of the biggest questions. Academic journals are full of answers, not to mention endless books.
For example, if key individuals in certain positions hold the prejudices, it can have a systematic effect, since they have a lot of influence on the design of the systems in place and can easily create an unfair distribution of other people in charge/not in charge.
I'm not endorsing the idea of "isolated incidents" in general! But you can look at data to show that disparities in how certain groups are treated--e.g. employers being less willing to call back candidates with "Black" names on their resume. But extrapolating from the Cisco lawsuit to a narrative about a larger problem in Silicon Valley can have ugly consequences. It can be flipped around to broadly paint Indians who are in leadership positions in Silicon Valley in a bad light.