My dad once told me of how at his work (in the 1980s or early 1990s, I think), they had a team of two Indians assigned to a project. One turned out to be of a much "higher" caste than the other, and refused to work with the other, making him utterly useless to the project.
It's good that Apple, IBM and other tech companies are taking steps to prevent this sort of discrimination. It's a shame that Google seems be going in the opposite direction.
The real shame is that living in Delhi, I’ve seen caste come back very strongly in everyday discourse.
I’ve been here almost 20 years. This city used to be largely caste agnostic.
Now when I meet new people, especially outside the elite tech circles, they will casually mention their upper caste status (“As Brahmins, we don’t do xyz of course!”).
Even cars carrying caste stickers are more common.
It's nothing that requires much research. The current national government openly supports discrimination on religious and caste based backgrounds. 7 years of this, and people who used to think "Caste is a taboo subject, and we should be working around it", now think "Caste pride is cool".
Hmm the current Prime Minister of India is from a "lower" caste. The current president of India is from a "lower" caste. Curious how you come up with "the current national government openly supports discrimination on religious and caste based backgrounds".
The Indian caste hierarchy works in complex ways. The very top and the very bottom are confirmed, but everyone in the middle just kind of gets mixed together.
If you’re Indian, you know it too - the OBC category is just political hogwash (disclaimer: I’m from an OBC category)
Probably not, I do think the current government leans a bit more towards religious intolerance than co-existence.
I do however take issue with bashing the government for every social justice issue du jour. It’s convenient but very distracting for all sides involved. For example GP here accuses the current government of caste intolerance. If you think about it though it doesn’t make much sense, given the Indian government’s nationalist agenda of uniting all Hindus and instilling in them pride for their culture etc. Sowing caste divisions would be the exact opposite of what they would want to do in this scenario.
That’s precisely the problem: the current government has promoted blind pride in native (Hindu) culture but has never sought to promote any discussion on some of the flaws in that culture.
The Manusmriti, for instance, has been referenced and quoted by several ministers and politicians. Yet no one has addressed the deep casteism in it.
The government doesn’t promote casteism - I agree with that. But promoting Hindu pride without addressing some of its issues eventually gets you casteism.
> it is always the lowest ranks that complain about a lack of equality. It is the sour grapes fox story all over again.
I wonder if you'd complain about them grapes if your caste's job was to clean toilets/sewers and nothing else. With no hope or support to pursue any other line of work, irrespective of merit or personal interests. To be humiliated, looked down upon, shunned all your life and be denied access to quality education, water, public services just because of the circumstances of ones birth - and it goes for your children too.
Merit has no basis in the caste system. In fact, it exists only to maintain the status quo. Case in point...
>If you're a warrior, and you have a son, you train him in your ancestral warfare, thereby giving him the best of nature. And if you had begotten him on a warrior lady, you gave him the best of nurture too. Both his genes and his upbringing are designed to bring out the best potential, benefiting both him and society. And your son automatically has a job waiting for him (yours) when he finishes schooling.
The rest of your message lacks logic or signs of empathy for people who'd been dealt the wrong end of the stick. Sure, not all humans are born equal, but to deny ones right to a better life based on social hierarchy defined millennia ago is downright evil and should not have any place in modern society.
Religion, especially in public life, has made a big comeback under the current ruling party. This party is also generally considered an upper-caste party. I assume much of it is due to implicit soft support from the ruling establishment.
A lot of Vaishyas have been certifying themselves as Backward caste in order to obtain affirmative action privileges. Including the dominant caste in Gujarat, the Patels - with the Patidar movement.
Modis were added to OBC list in 2002. This is a subversion of affirmative action which was meant to help lower castes, not upper castes.
BJP is primarily composed of upper castes. Only performative functions like Presidency are granted to lower castes.
Can confirm this. My caste is OBC as well, even though it is among the most politically powerful and is classified as a warrior caste with high percentage of land ownership.
Heck, in my home state, Rajputs, former rulers, have been lobbying to get categorized as OBC because of the reservation benefits.
Strictly from a resource allocation standpoint, it makes sense to keep economic flows within a subpopulation rather than diluting them over a broader population. Consider, "buy local" initiatives.
I imagine that hypothetical Republicoin and Demacoin currencies would find strong support among the hard-core true believers of the respective groups for the same reasons.
Traditionally, Brahmins (the priestly caste at the top of the ritual hierarchy) weren't supposed to engage in commerce, landowning, etc. so some of the business-oriented middle castes were much better off economically.
But the very lowest castes which were outside the traditional varna division (i.e. untouchables, known today as Dalits) basically got the short end of the stick with little if any benefit (the only silver lining I can think of is lack of competition for ritually impure jobs that no one else was willing to do).
I remember reading that it’s a big problem at Cisco. In your dad’s example what ended up happening? From your description the guy who refused to work in the higher caste should be fired imo.
It says in the article that Google (and Microsoft, Dell, Amazon + FB/Meta) aren't (yet?) implementing this, but I didn't see anything about them doing the opposite. Additionally I don't imagine they'd gain much from doing so, as a business. Is there any more info on this?
> Just a few months ago in June, Google, whose CEO Sundar Pichai has Indian roots, cancelled a talk on caste discrimination where Dalit rights activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan was supposed to give a presentation. The talk was organised by Google employee Tanuja Gupta.
It’s not the opposite but probably what GP was referring to.
For those who don't know how to recognise a caste from the name, does anyone have any idea which caste Google's CEO might represent? Can it even be definitely derived just from name?
It's why I used the word "seems". It doesn't prove they're going the opposite direction, but it does give that impression. Hopefully Google is taking this issue more seriously.
Wouldn't lose much either. I'd argue they'd gain face in today's climate. "DEI best practices aren't just for white people anymore" is probably a good look.
Ironically it tends to be high caste Indians who push this stuff (perhaps because of higher education levels). Maybe they’ll be circumspect about dishing it out to white people after some sessions having to confess their “Brahmin privilege.”
>> Wouldn't lose much either. I'd argue they'd gain face in today's climate. "DEI best practices aren't just for white people anymore" is probably a good look.
> Ironically it tends to be high caste Indians who push this stuff (perhaps because of higher education levels).
High caste Indian immigrants or their American children? I have trouble imagining someone raised outside of the American cultural context getting enthusiastic about DEI in that way.
In my experience it’s overwhelmingly the second generation+, but my point is orthogonal to that. The folks socialized into the environments where those trends exist are much more likely to be Brahmin. The Indian side of Kamala Harris’s family is Brahmin, for example. That reflects social roles and culture back in India: social and political studies tends to be the domain of Brahmins.
> What about in the EU? You don't think there are people there enthusiastically discussing DEI?
There probably are but: 1) I understand it's often thought of as an Americanism there, and 2) Europe doesn't have the same history, which would make its ground less fertile for it (white people are aboriginal there, and I understand there's little to no history of domestic radicalized slavery, etc.).
They are light skinned (like many Asians) but they are not “white” in the racial sense. They’re indigenous people that were displaced and extinguished by Germanic tribes.
DEI is just rebranding of the struggle for equality, in which the fight against casteism has been raging for decades. This is a very western centric view.
And intersectional praxis is, overwhelmingly, an ideology of white people. Most people in the individual groups (Muslims, Hispanics, etc.) are advocating for their own interests. It’s white people that subscribe to a theory that ties these completely different groups together.
Shit, all those queer black women who have been telling me that intersectionality is important because they experience unique struggles because they are at the intersection of multiple sets of traits have been doing so because it's popular with white folks?
Intersectionality is the idea that multiple identities intersect, and like the intersection in a Venn diagram, the overlap is a unique zone.
There’s not enough queer Black women to make intersectionality more than an academic topic. White people are who give it prominence. Black people themselves are as conservative as republicans on sexuality: https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/blacks-conservative-repu.... When you see BLM-style advocacy that ties together Black+queer, that’s primarily for white people. Similarly, folks like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour have such prominence not because Muslims see themselves as having common cause with queer people (https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres...) but because white people do.
Put differently, Black people and Muslims may advocate in their own self interest, but otherwise believe whatever they believe. Ordinarily, such advocacy would seek to avoid issues that divide the community within itself. White people, by contrast, are not advocating on their own behalf, but on behalf of a variety of groups that are the object of their sympathy. Intersectionality uniquely reflects how such white people see the world.
What. You realize that much of mainstream culture is drawn from the queer Black community, right? Voguing, house music, slang like "yas queen", "slay", "shade", and "tea", Pride parades, and more.
And that BIPOC cultures have a history of third gender peoples? Two Spirit, fa'afafine, chibados, muxe, sipniq, etc.
To say these things only exist because of white liberal sexuality is patently absurd.
White people are the ones who control “mainstream culture” and decide what gets absorbed into it. That includes things pertaining to minorities. For example, “BIPOC” is a term popularized by white people to refer to a group that’s most pertinent to white people—people other than themselves. Most people who fit the label “BIPOC” don’t identify with some larger agglomeration of “people who aren’t white.” They identify as black, Pakistani, Cuban, etc.
LatinX is a good example that clearly illustrates the power dynamic. Although it was coined by a Puerto Rican, it is unpopular among Spanish-speaking Americans. If Spanish speaking Americans took a vote, they wouldn’t call themselves “LatinX.” The term has become a prominent label because it appeals to white people.
Third genders actually illustrate how “BIPOC cultures” view gender very differently from white people. Bangladesh, where I’m from, recognizes a third gender. But it isn’t associated with ideas of gender and gender roles being fluid, as it is in white societies. It instead functions to separate sexual minorities from everyone else in a society that is intensely gendered and heteronormative.
The Wikipedia article on third genders actually contains a disclaimer reminding white people not to project their own concepts of gender and sexuality onto superficially similar concepts in other cultures.
We don’t need to rely on our subjective experience with our respective “circles.” There is extensive polling and research on this. LatinX is extremely unpopular, and way more Latinos find the term offensive than use it: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/many-latinos-say-latin.... I suspect most Latinos have never even heard of “Latin@“ or “Latinao.” Most just don’t think Spanish needs to be “fixed.”
BIPOC is similar: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/us/terminology-language-p... (“In a national poll conducted by Ipsos for The New York Times, more than twice as many white Democrats said they felt ‘very favorably’ toward ‘BIPOC’ as Americans who identify as any of the nonwhite racial categories it encompasses.”)
It’s important for white people not to confuse their personal experiences with individual “BIPOC” as proxies for “BIPOC” communities: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/us/politics/elizabeth-war.... These folks are often activists who align with white power to overcome the majority opinion within their community.
In a way, atoning for privilege will allow them to signal their privileged status more openly, and try to angle for acceptance into high status white culture, because they're just like them.
This is a great example of the kind of hyper-reactivity that makes conversation on most of the internet absolutely impossible. The parent said they didn't see this in the article, don't imagine they'd gain from it, and asked for more info about it - all totally reasonable thoughts and expressed without negativity. And yet you responded with snide superiority, as though your dialogue with this person was already an argument before it even started.
I get where you're coming from, but you have to consider these comments in context. The article we're commenting on has an entire section (3 paragraphs!) on this specific Google issue, and it was a very widely discussed news story here at the time that it happened. When smcl took issue with mcv claiming that Google was "taking steps backwards", they were implicitly ignoring or disagreeing with the section of the article that outlined how Google was in fact taking steps backwards on the issue. Indeed, if you look at the follow-up response here, smcl very clearly read the section of the article about Google, and just disagrees with the idea that internal harassment and backlash against Dalit activism leading to a planned DEI talk getting canceled constitutes "taking steps backwards", basically on what seems to be trivial semantic grounds (see the follow-up posts by smcl, which basically boil down to either "how can they take steps backwards if they're already bad" or "they're not doing any ACTUAL discrimination, they just had the CEO cancel a planned talk based on complaints from higher caste people"). The argument was already started well before pessimizer did anything, it was just framed implicitly instead of explicitly.
Probably they could have responded more charitably here, sure, but frankly I don't think it's correct to categorize "please Google this and actually read the facts about the case before arguing with someone on the internet about it" as "hyper-reactivity". Sometimes people on the internet (occasionally myself included!) really do just look before they leap.
You guys really need to calm down and assume a bit of good faith. Again, it sounded like there was some broader caste-discrimination backslide going on I was missing. I didn’t realise they meant that talk cancellation.
I know there are weirdos who hide hatred behind “just asking questions” but this case I was legit was asking if I was missing something. Didn’t realise it would cause such a fuss
100%. I found the books “how to have impossible conversations” and “crucial conversations” helpful for me, but in a nutshell they’re basically “say things in a way that protect the other side’s ego”
I would love to see some social networks silently implementing something that rewrites comments in a more diplomatic manner when displayed to everyone else.
That would be an interesting alternative to shadowbanning, especially if it came with a label ("The comment has been autotuned.") I'd like to see them offer the submitter some alternatives or provide some analysis before they post ("Please avoid sealioning").
I think it was a fair question to ask, wasn’t it? Article says Google simply haven’t got an anti-caste-discrimination policy, someone says something implying that they’re actually getting worse re caste discrimination, so I ask for more info because that’s truly surprising.
Correct. But it is evidence someone doesn’t want to talk about this.
That might mean anything from complicity to ignorance to not wanting more workplace drama. In every case, it gives merit to Googlers claiming caste discrimination needs an independent investigation. (Versus relying on the company’s processes.)
> Where is their concern for other violence that is more prevalent?
Isn't this just straightforward whataboutism? If every person that is advocating against a problem in society has to advocate against every problem in society they will never get anything accomplished because there is always another injustice.
Not only is it just straightforward whataboutism, it's also implying, we as a society, can only work on one problem at a time. If we're tackling caste discrimination, we can't also be working to reduce violence. This is an either/or logical fallacy.
Along with anyone who found this a difficult decision once the facts were clear.
People with these beliefs don't belong anywhere in society where they can oppress others. Just as white people who think blacks are beneath them do not belong in any setting where they can affect a black person.
I'm not surprised some people found it a difficult decision to be honest.
I mean, discovering a new form of discrimination, which only Indians can perform? And none of your fellow managers have ever heard of this stuff? And you don't know WTF a caste is?
And I doubt the accused is telling HR "yeah, I discriminate on caste, got a problem with that?" - they might instead be saying "some of his behaviour towards me has made me uncomfortable, I don't want to complain formally I just think everyone would be happier if we were on different projects"
I can see why a person might decide that's not a minefield they're equipped to navigate, and pass the issue over to HR.
I mean, certainly gather information and follow due process, but once it's clear what occurred, there is no question that a person who refuses to work with coworkers based on lower caste does not belong in any workplace with lower caste workers.
And anyone who resists that principle is a co-conspirator in caste-based oppression and should leave as well.
Working relationships are complex and require a lot of trust. You can't just wave a magic wand over two people and say "discrimination be gone". The bigot can and will always find ways to harm the victim without accountability.
Well if you discriminate say based on race or gender, you’re fired. As people know they therefore can’t do this, they need to keep their feelings to themselves and deal with it.
The GP said:
> there is no question that a person who refuses to work with coworkers based on lower caste does not belong in any workplace with lower caste workers
Which I read as separate castes if they will discriminate. That’s like saying separate race or gender if someone will discriminate. That’s currently not how it works for other protected classes.
It's good that Apple, IBM and other tech companies are taking steps to prevent this sort of discrimination. It's a shame that Google seems be going in the opposite direction.