I was in the states for a decade and have encountered numerous cases of bigoted Indian and Indian origin people in power (both academia and industry) who discriminate against caste. Dalit discrimination is one, but there’s actually a more common Brahmin superiority thing as well, which I tend to find easily because I look Brahmin (don’t ask me, that’s what these guys tell me) but I’m not one, so I’ve had 4-5 instances when these Bigots found me because I was eating chicken and they had to lecture about my sin.
The irony I point to them is that If they truly are trying to follow scriptures or whatever then they should remember that their caste is not allowed to cross oceans lol.
Oh haha that has happened to me as well, I’m an “upper” caste fellow and eat meat on occasion and have been lectured by one of these guys on how I am doomed to be reborn as a worm or something! Shitty people exist everywhere I guess..
I feel like being unable (or unwilling) to ask these sorts of questions is the realm of the head-in-the-sand people who claim they're "colorblind", and somehow believe that if we just ignore race and racism it'll somehow magically just go away.
Do you think that will tend to increase or decrease discrimination in the companies against various caste groups? Note that caste is much harder to find than race, and many Indians in the US don't care enough about caste to try and find out, but some may now subconsciously or consciously discriminate in both illegal and legal(friendships, dating, invites to social events etc. like racism in America) ways.
This is a straw man to represent fighting caste bias. Clearly, asking folks to self-identify their caste and somehow creating a list of low-caste folks is not going to be very productive. This is like that scene in "The Office" where Michael Scott makes a "do not mock" list which turns into a "do mock" list.
Ideally what we're looking for is a setup wherein, given the situation that someone who is low-caste is working with a lot of high-caste individuals and files a report about caste discrimination, that this is taken seriously and that a procedure exists to prevent retaliation / yields outcomes that protect the victim.
It's not that different from general discrimination right? How do you prove someone is racist or sexist? There are just different markers, and different lines that can be crossed. If a male coworker gives unwanted contact e.g. touches a female coworker's thigh, that's crossing a line; even if it's not easy to prove that it happened, you would hope that your workplace would know how to react to this & help your female coworkers to achieve psychological safety. Folks suffering from caste-discrimination deserve the same.
Solving all of these problems is clearly not easy. We don't have to come up with the solutions in internet comments, but there are very big, very obvious problems with discrimination in the workplace and to date it generally sucks to be on the victim side of it. You can't just say "nobody suffers from this because caste is hard for _me_ to personally understand or find, and I haven't _personally_ seen it." You don't work at every company, and you don't have to in order to understand that Indian representation is higher at various companies, and some people do care about this and do wrongly mistreat those they view as inferior to them. Why can't you just say you agree that this is wrong, understand that some folks are saying it happened to them, and leave it at that?
I mean if everyone just ignored race there would literally be no racism.
But that's the problem, it's not possible because even if you try, unconscious bias means we all fail to ignore race (and gender, and height, and all these other things about people). The only thing you can do is accept that race bias exists and learn about how to unbias as much as possible. A lot of corporate trainings involve unbiasing exercises that are really helpful if you go into it with the right mindset (discovering your biases and then working to be vigilant about them).
Being unable to replicate studies showing that something is real doesn't mean that thing is not real, it just means we don't know.
This is of course just my experience, but I know that I've had unconscious biases that I've later managed to surface and suss out (and hopefully eradicate). So maybe unconscious bias isn't as common as these studies you don't like seem to suggest, but it certainly is real, as I've experienced it myself.
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...
"The original IAT paper is worth revisiting. You only really need to read page 1475. The construct validity evidence is laughable. The whole thing is based on N=26 and they find no significant correlation between the IAT and explicit measures of racism. But that's OK, Greenwald says, because the IAT is meant to find secret racists ("reveal explicitly disavowed prejudice")! The question of why a null correlation between implicit and explicit racial attitudes is to be expected is left as an exercise to the reader. The correlation between two racial IATs (male and female names) is .46 and they conveniently forget to mention the comically low test-retest reliability. That's all you need for 13k citations and a consulting industry selling implicit bias to the government for millions of dollars."
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-20587-001
"IATs were poor predictors of every criterion category other than brain activity, and the IATs performed no better than simple explicit measures"
I think many people are a lot more tolerant of discrimination in dating, though, even if it's (IMO) unfortunate. People who don't date outside their race are really closing their minds and their worlds to a lot of potentially great possibilities. I get that many people do it because of parental approval/disapproval, and I can absolutely understand the desire not to piss off parents in that way, but it's still a shame.
>When I relocated from my predominantly Black suburb in Dallas, Texas to an immensely diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, I didn’t expect to receive so many matches on Tinder and Hinge from non-Black men. I had always found myself in mostly white spaces — college, jobs, vacations — yet white men never took a deep interest in me before I moved to the East Coast. And while I had spent two years dating a German guy who was studying abroad at my university, it was only by transplant that a non-Black person really showed interest in courting me beyond a “you’re pretty for a Black girl” comment.
>Eventually, I stopped swiping on non-Black men altogether. There had been several cases before when a white man would match with me and then DM me something obscure like my skin tone reminding him of chocolate or feeling the need to tell me he’s always wanted to fuck a Black girl. I found it ludicrous that these men actually thought that was the way to a Black woman’s heart — or panties — and would unmatch them instantly. But in New York City, the progressive melting pot of America, white men (and Asian and Latino men for that matter) wanted to take me out for dinner and drinks, probed my interests, and complimented my photos in a respectable manner.
Here on HN I have to question whether the voice of lower caste Indians is proportionally represented, and if not, why that might be.
The only time it ever came up for discussion is in the context of someone's parents in India preferring their own caste folks as brides/grooms for arranged marriages back home(similar to the very high rates of race discrimination in dating in the US) and even that has trended down a lot recently with everyone becoming more progressive. My sense is that there are isolated cases here and there, and that it's not systemic, and that it's also rapidly getting better with time both back home and with 2nd generation immigrants in the US.