Isn't racism fundamentally a type of caste/class discrimination? Not as well defined castes like seen in India, but "black people" are discriminated as a result of slavery, "asians" as a result of mass immigration. To the point where in many countries you were not allowed or able to marry outside your "caste", had different rights than locals/whites etc. People today don't feel racism as caste discrimination, but to say that there's no precedent in the West is being pedantic IMO.
The word you are looking for is bigotry. That's the generalized equivalent of racism. Thing is, bigotry in general isn't illegal. Specific kinds of bigotry are in regards to hiring though. Racism is one of them. But caste isn't.
A lawyer might be able to make the claim that it would fall under "national origin or ancestry" since, to my knowledge, caste is hereditary and hard to change.
But if so then that makes these kinds of talks all the more important. Because it helps Americans recognize a form of illegal discrimination they would otherwise not recognize.
Being hereditary is necessary but not sufficient for a grouping to constitute a race. Blond hair and blue eyes are hereditary, but blue eyed people aren’t a different race.
“Race” is a fuzzy concept but generally distinguishes people of different ethnic origins. Indian castes aren’t different races—low caste and high caste Indians can come from the same ethnic group. It’s more like the European distinction between nobility and commoners. That’s also hereditary, but it doesn’t define different races.
Proportion of steppe/Aryan origin varies among caste groups (some places as you go farther from cow belt that were subject to Brahminization or like Kashmir are exceptions to this, however this doesn’t mean all Hindus in Kashmir were Brahmins regardless of what certain recent films might claim on the subject) Physiognomy as some of the British attempted is not a golf way to go about studying it (see Native American skulls as to why, brachycephaly etc can be influenced by environment over generations) Markers like sickle cell trait (which I possess incidentally) are almost always found among aboriginal/tribal lower castes . It seems that story of “dasas” and Nishadas largely matches up with being forced into lower caste hood or untouchability as a result of losing wars.
'Racism' is absolutely a caste system, since the fundamental point of a caste system is to proportion resource and opportunity between breeding pools, however devised those are. The differentiator is simply the terms used to draw these boundaries. Which matters because different terms, say religious terms vs medico-scientific terms, resource different graphs for further narrativization. Jewish folk from Europe know full well the difference between being narrativized according to religious lines and according to medico-scientific lines, neither even approaching something like true or right. Black folk in America have been hounded about their medico-scientific distinction from the get-go, right down to the resurgence of heritable IQ and multi-regional emergence theory today.
It might not be considered "racism", as such, in the same way that discrimination against women is not necessarily racism.
But it certainly seems like caste would be a protected characteristic under California law--"Race, Color, National Origin, or Ancestry" are protected characteristics. Caste seems to obviously fall under ancestry.
Because your caste isn't a race. Caste is just taking the class system further. That's why its bigotry but not racism. I've no idea why people seem to want to extend racism to mean all of these things when there already exists a word for it.
