> 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.
You should try that sometimes
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone is receiving racism but it's the truly privileged that can do so and claim they aren't guilty of it themselves.
Caste exists. It didn’t need to, but people invented it. Pretending it isn’t real and doesn’t affect people’s lives is not how to fix this.
You're not describing reality since there is no such thing as a "lower-caste person". Stop thinking, talking, and acting as if there is.
You can't legislate your way out of it, you just stop doing it, including the language.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
The only group of people this position is strategically beneficial for are racists who want to perpetuate racism.
That's racism. I think you're just trying to excuse your own racism here.