How is that ironic? A part of anti-racism is understanding what's going on, how people identify themselves, and how people view others.

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.

So lets say the tech companies start requiring every Indian looking person to self identify their caste(with penalties if found lying later) on their employee profiles so that everyone in the company can look for signs of casteism to fight it. Same with all Indian looking interviewee to monitoring hiring bias.

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.

That's... quite the straw man you've come up with there. I don't think it's really even necessary to respond to it, because that's something that just wouldn't happen, and isn't even particularly related to what is happening, or what I was talking about.

> So lets say the tech companies start requiring every Indian looking person to self identify their caste

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 can't tell whether this is sarcasm laughing at how bad the parent's straw man is.

>somehow believe that if we just ignore race and racism it'll somehow magically just go away.

I mean if everyone just ignored race there would literally be no racism.

> 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).

Unconscious bias isn't real. The studies that claimed it existed don't replicate and were methodologically ridiculous to begin with.

It's kinda funny to claim that something isn't real, because some studies done weren't valid, but then not provide evidence to the contrary.

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.

Thanks for encouraging me to read more about the training my workplace required me to do. Based on what I've read, seems like there's no measurable change in people's long term behavior when given unbiasing training (sad...), but it doesn't change that you can in fact measure peoples' implicit associations (unconcious biases).

I wasn't actually talking about the training, I was talking about the concept of unconscious bias. So, keep reading. The implicit association test is what it's all based on but it doesn't have any test/retest reliability. You can test someone and it'll tell you they're a raging racist without even knowing it, and if you test them again 10 minutes later it'll tell you the opposite. It's junk science which is why unconscious bias training doesn't do anything - the problem it claims to be solving isn't real.

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"

Sure, but that ship sailed millennia ago.