Take a look at the brown-eye-blue-eye experiment that a teacher did with her students. Everyone already knew the color of their eye, but no one gave it much significance. But as soon as the teacher started talking about the socioeconomic-status associated with eye color, students immediately divided themselves and started fighting over eye color.
Never underestimate people's ability to segregate themselves using whatever demographic markers society tells them is important to their identity.
> The children with brown eyes were suddenly more confident — and condescending. They hurled nasty insults at the blue-eyed kids. The children with blue eyes made silly mistakes and became timid and despondent. The two groups stopped playing together. Fights broke out.
"as soon as the teacher started talking about the socioeconomic-status associated with eye color, students immediately divided themselves and started fighting over eye color"
It wasn't the teacher talking about socioeconomic-status associated with eye color, but explicitly telling the children that blue-eyed kids were better than brown-eyed kids.
So it wasn't just consciousness of differences, but explicitly telling some of the children they were better than others.
All that proves is that you can teach hatred.
But you can also teach peaceful coexistence, where people are aware of ethnic/cultural/biological differences without looking down on those who differ from you. You can be taught to value and celebrate your differences.
Same with people from other castes. There's no reason why one has to be looked at as inferior and the other as superior.
It really reminds me of a Star Trek episode where there's a war between two alien species which are identical except that one is black on the left side of their body and white on the right side of their body, and their enemy is white on the left side of their body and black on the right side of their body: [1] A ridiculous and meaningless distinction, and yet they kill each other over it.
It also reminds me of the religious wars among Christians over minutia like whether one should cross oneself from left to right or right to left. Sheer insanity.
This is not true, because caste is an (evil) artificial construct which only has ever had one purpose to begin with: To discriminate against people of a lower caste.
Caste is not an ethnic/cultural/biological difference, and it explicitly is about saying some people are better than others. You can't celebrate the differences between castes any more than you can between jailers and prisoners, or masters and slaves. Caste is codified generational inequality.
> It wasn't the teacher talking about socioeconomic-status associated with eye color, but explicitly telling the children that blue-eyed kids were better than brown-eyed kids.
Amazingly, the teacher had done the exact opposite and told the brown-eyed students that they were the smarter group. Now, is that your bias showing?
> Amazingly, the teacher had done the exact opposite and told the brown-eyed students that they were the smarter group. Now, is that your bias showing?
Rather famously, the point is that the teacher did both.
> But this time, something was different. Elliott noticed that the blue-eyed kids were not as condescending, not as mean, as the brown-eyed kids had been. She asked why.
Yep, and look how well it's working. We've gone from occupy wall st, which was about ultra-extreme-unbelievably-rich vs everyone else, to the "culture war", which is everyone except the ultra rich vs each other. I hate it so much.
This. The sleight of hand that replaced class awareness with false awareness based on race is all you need to know about where progressive politics diverged radically from the traditional liberal left in the past decade. This is poison for the Democratic party and for workers' rights. It's pretty much the hitlerian model of substituting racial groups and racial strife as a corporatist placebo for class awareness to keep the masses atomized and confused.
I don't think we should base DEI policy decisions on an uncontrolled experiment done 50 years ago on a handful of 10-year-olds.
I think you've also taken the wrong lesson from this: the teacher's point here was that most (all?) forms of identity-based discrimination are learned behaviors. And if a behavior can be learned, it can be unlearned.
Because for many people, the division actually doesn't exist.
Artificial divisions between people only exist as long as people pay attention to them. If you're unable to categorize yourself or others it's really going to be quite hard to have tribal opinions about those divisions.
Eventually "support" for equality among division simply reenforces those divisions. The best way to rid yourselves of the remaining small minority of people sticking to hatred around those divisions is to forget about them and the next generation simply won't understand what they're upset about. Forgetting the division is the last step, not every division is in that phase yet, but many are approaching that territory.
It's more like insecurity through obscurity. Caste discrimination among educated circles is viciously covert. You may not know your caste or your colleague's caste. But the ones who are interested will definitely know it and discriminate on its basis. The discrimination and harassment will make no sense to you, unless something or someone tips you off. It's not like discrimination based on color or gender, where the difference is immediately apparent. You can't distinguish people of various castes unless you go actively looking for it. It's better to be aware of possible avenues of exploitation than be negligent and vulnerable to it.
For what it’s worth, I am not of Indian descent.