I have worked in the Seattle tech scene since 1997 and sex and caste discrimination is rampant in the Indian tech community. I only know this 2nd and third hand as I am the stereotypical cis male white guy.
The biggest one to me is the sex discrimination across dev and qa, with a women making up the vast majority of qa even though they graduated with the same degrees as the men from the same Indian universities.
Even Indian men that I respected on multiple levels, when they get on an interview with a women they are overly harsh in ways they were not with men. So much so that I stopped interviewing all together. I reported to HR and they of course didn't know how to handle it. It really makes me sad.
I try to talk to my Indian colleagues about this and they stay extremely tight lipped about this for a multitude of reasons. I applaud this action. This shit has to stop, leave it in India, America is better than this.
Discrimination is fractal. All interview should be truly double-blind.
> I try to talk to my Indian colleagues about this and they stay extremely tight lipped about this for a multitude of reasons.
I notice this too. It's like someone brings up caste discrimination online (somewhere like teamblind) and a bunch of people come out of nowhere and say "that isn't real". Isn't very convincing to say the least
Living in Singapore for 10 years I talked to quite a few people from India living in Singapore.
It seems that it’s an older generation thing. The younger ones don’t care about caste at all but if their parents ask about their friends they will lie, because their parents care a lot about caste.
And while caste is illegal in India. It’s such a big country it’s difficult to enforce. So it’s still rampant outside of the big cities.
I used to donate to a charity which builds wells in India for small villages to ensure they have safe clean drinking water. They supply the materials but everyone in the village must contribute to building it and everyone must have access regardless of caste. If the village does not agree they won’t help.
One of the biggest ways in which caste discrimination is propagated is through denialism. That helps the quell the resistance against it. Caste discrimination is still alive among younger generation and in cities. Here we are - discussing caste in US cities - which makes no sense if it didn't exist in the above mentioned circles in a large way.
Now way its an old generation thing? I've seen "gang wars" among young adults of different castes in reputed Indian universities, located in cities.
I have first hand experience with people who chose friends based on caste. And caste is not illegal in India discrimination is, but politicians here are mostly caste mongerers and win elections.
We literally select our caste in govt forms,I literally had to get a caste certificate to prove for my college admission.Im not sure you know what you are talking about. Caste based discrimination is illegal not caste, we have a huge problem due to reservation quotas because govt still segregates people based on caste and tries to uplift them, but in turn sometimes it misfires.
But they have their own version of Affirmative Action, notably quotas for universities and government jobs, and a very common form of caste discrimination by upper-caste Indians in the US is to claim a lower-caste graduate from a prestigious university like IIT isn’t a genuine one because he was a “diversity admission”.
IIT has a common entrance exam and admissions are offered solely on your performance in that exam. If you see someone getting in with a very low score compared to the rest of the class, they will be rightfully branded as "diversity admission". It is no wonder that 60% of dropouts at 7 IITs are from reserved categories: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/parliament-proceeding...
How can reservation work without knowing the caste? You also fill it in every damned form (recently was called back to daughters school to fill it when I just left it as Hindu)
"Article 17 of Indian Constitution says:
Untouchability” is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of “Untouchability” shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law." - https://cjp.org.in/caste-discrimination-and-related-laws-in-...
There is more to the story and that's a good read, but in practice you can see cast discrimination still a lot in India, as I figured out recently when I have been a few weeks in the country.
> The caste system was outlawed ages ago. It very much is illegal.
As you'll note, the actual prohibition is on a narrow class of discrimination. That is what I was trying to emphasize. I live in India and am very much aware of the discrimination that still exists.
If you cannot discriminate on class, the purpose of class is abolished. After the british left, the caste system was outlawed. The constitution was written later to rule out class based discrimination.
I never said it wasn't still practiced. Just that its much more observed outside of the big cities than in it.
You've got it wrong entirely. Just because you dissolve discrimination, it doesn't magically kill segregation. Castes were created way back when they were used to classify people based on the work they do, and young ones continued in the steps of their older generations in their job so it was a mere classification of their family's work. Then it started going ugly when people in respectable jobs wanted to protect themselves from "outsiders" taking their jobs away.
But it just doesn't make sense anymore. No one is following their elders' job anymore. The caste system itself must be outlawed even to mention it.
As long as you still try to identify someone based on their caste, you are encouraging segregation. Govt forms must not include an outdated classification.
I shouldn't show proof of my caste to get a college admission. Marriages must not made based on it.
I kid you not, I was personally rejected from marriage with the woman I was in a relationship based on my caste.banning Discrimination did snt do shit.
You state I have it wrong then tell me proceed to agree with me. I never said that because it’s outlawed it’s no longer practiced. I’m fully aware it’s still practiced. And while it’s lesser in big cities. And much more wide spread outside. It doesn’t change the fact it still exists and is a stupid outdated system.
After the British came the caste system got worse. They used the caste system in their government and caused a lot of people to get upset.
We could literally blame all of India’s current caste issues on the British.
The government should be demolishing the caste system entirely based on the little I know from the people I’ve spoken to. It causes more harm than good. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is outlawed.
You're saying the caste system was banned - it wasn't. The ancient concept of being untouchable was banned after the British left, not the much more recent caste system, which survives to this day.
What others have been trying to explain to you is that only caste-based discrimination was banned, not the caste system itself.
Because they go on to say that the ban hasn't been very effective, you seem to miss that first point and start arguing that you weren't saying discrimination doesn't exist, which isn't addressing the intention behind what they were saying.
It was outlawed, and later written into the constitution.
I never said the caste system was abolished or doesn't exist. And I never mentioned 'untouchables'. It seems those replying and refuting anything I say are in favor of the caste system and want to keep it, which is utterly horrible.
If you cannot discriminate against caste, the caste serves no purpose, because you're effectively saying people are equal. But writing anti descrimination laws into the constitution obviously doesn't help society move away from it, especially when its so engrained into elders, or people who live outside the big cities.
In my last comment I said exactly that. Being outlawed does not mean it’s abolished. Something can be illegal and people still do it. People still commit murder and that’s been outlawed for like ever. So it can’t have been abolished if it still exists.
> How the fuck do you fix something if you keep pretending it's already fixed.
At no point did I say it’s a solved problem. My very first comment I said it happens outside the big cities more than the big cities. I never said it doesn’t happen.
You know. I heard a saying once: “people outside America know more about America than Americans know about America” it seems like the same is true here.
"old generation" probably means generations of immigrants. 1.5th and 2nd generation immigrants are much different from native Indians, they are basically raised outside India and have non-Indian friends.
There's no such thing as "an older generation thing" when it comes to discrimination. The haves are innately aware and will fight to keep what they have versus the have-nots. We've got plenty of other examples all across Western society and culture, from Britain's royal family to right-wingers actively fighting against the teaching of history in the US.
> right-wingers actively fighting against the teaching of history in the US
I don't think this is a fair characterisation. I have never heard of anyone wanting to stop this. If you mean CRT, that is something different, or at least the versions of it that are causing pushback are different.
For sure - I think that is a tricky one, as I don't feel I can trust anyone's take on it. I do see some of the activism training vs genuine historical education as being extremely disadvantageous, but also of course that black history needs to be taught well as a significant part of American history.
I would argue that the existing state wasn't "genuine historical education": I made it all the way through high school without ever being taught the state I was educated in had outright banned Black residents in its constitution.
My high school had our class go across the river multiple times to visit the same plantation house. They would show how pretty the property was, and give a history of the people who owned the property and how important they were.
We never got to be anywhere near the slave quarters, and it was never once mentioned that dozens of black people were brutally slaughtered there with their heads put on pikes at the entrance.
There has never in the history of the United States been a curriculum containing CRT at the K-12 level because children don't have the background and capacity to understand it.
And by bringing it up at all, you're proving that you don't either.
Older generations from the 90ies were much more liberal than Indian folks nowadays. The Indian politics and culture turned heavily right-wing, as in the 70ies.
Caste discrimination is not open, but still ongoing. Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras (the higher castes) will of course deny it, but still discriminate against the Dalit or muslims. If in private or in the workplace.
Indian movies became almost unwatchable lately. It's getting more and more extreme.
Lets say someone from the EU who's never been to the US keeps telling you, an American, "Don't go outdoors or you might be a victim of a mass shooting like I see in the news almost every day", and you say "that doesn't reflect the reality here", and they say "Isn't very convincing to say the least".
How can I or anyone prove a negative? I can only offer my life experiences as a non-high caste Indian whose both sides of the family eat meat, that caste never ever comes up with any of my Indian coworkers, managers, friends or family. Nor has anyone ever mentioned to me that they experienced issues because of their caste. In rural India and among older folks caste is more important, but in America it's pretty rare for people to care about caste. Any discrimination must be dealt with, but I don't like the generalization on HN than Indians are casteist.
> "Don't go outdoors or you might be a victim of a mass shooting like I see in the news almost every day", and you say "that doesn't reflect the reality here"
The initial example I gave was this: "caste discrimination exists". The response I see is "oh no that isn't real".
That's like someone saying "mass shootings occur in the USA" and me saying "oh no those aren't real"
A white American could say "racism is a thing of the past or is an issue somewhere else, because I don't experience it on a day to day basis". That's what your reply makes me think of
> How can I or anyone prove a negative? I can only offer my life experiences
You're trying to use your own experience to speak on someone else's behalf with respect to discrimination that you've admitted to never experiencing. Even trying to prove a negative in this context is missing the point entirely
Then is it fair to say that caste discrimination in India is akin to mass shootings in the US? In that they happen, but not a big deal for the rest of the society? Otherwise, something would have happened by now.
> Any discrimination must be dealt with, but I don't like the generalization on HN than Indians are casteist.
You get it. This is exactly the fear I have -- that clueless Americans will use an "Indians are casteist" excuse to justify not hiring us to management or positions of power.
There are already "keep it in India" comments on these threads that are going unmoderated, which would be totally unacceptable in any other context.
Imagine that people in Europe were afraid of American immigrants suddenly pulling a gun on them because they (the Europeans) had read a few articles about gun violence in the US.
That's how a lot of us Indians feel when Americans talk about caste discrimination.
Yes, it is absolutely real.
No, you probably don't understand at all how it works. It is kind of darkly hilarious to me that a comment from some guy saying "There are lots of Indians in Seattle, and they seem to stick together. I really don't know about the dynamics of the caste system..." is the second most upvoted comment on this discussion.
Yes, it is exhausting for us to teach you about thousands of years of history and how they contributed to discrimination. Go read up a few history books if you really want to know.
As an Indian, I kind of hate this generalization. It is absolutely our responsibility to explain and also to root out caste discrimination. Just because we had millennia long history with it (through foreigners, no less) does not mean we must not extricate it whence it currently stays.
For disclosure, I am not a high caste Indian, and both sides of my family eat meat.
The main issue is that a good chuck of tech folks upvoting and making this a big don't want to understand. They want to use this as an issue to not let Indians get promoted to managerial positions instead of them. It becomes easier now to say "hey, Indians are casteist, don't make them a managers'.
It's similar to how there is always mass confusion around here for the requirements for scouting for local applicants for work visas vs green card applications.
They don't seem to be looking for facts, that's why the discussions are so strange with real experiences downvoted, and some vague notions of high rates of caste discrimination in the US are upvoted.
Thanks. Why is it history sources I must add? I just try to speak out against it whenever I see it. Sadly it's usually the older Indians who insist on it, unfortunately.
This doesn’t follow to me. We brought a system of oppression and subjugation over to your continent, and now it’s your responsibility, racist westerner, to read a history book about it?
Most of us in the West never wanted anything to do with caste! This is a uniquely Indian problem which requires Indian efforts to fix, this isn’t something that can be passed off to western social justice movements to solve for you.
No sorry, you don't get to say this in America. Europeans brought guns, slavery, and racism to America, and I live with the consequences of it every day.
I don't pass off racism or gun violence as "a uniquely European problem which requires European efforts to fix". I study the nuances and try to help where I can.
If you're trying to compare the entire concept of human violence to the very well-defined and narrow concept of caste discrimination, you're not going to get very far I don't think. And for the record, caste politics rears its ugly head in the Desi community in my country of Canada all the time, yet somehow we've managed to avoid the ugliness of gun violence and slavery that you somehow found relevant.
It makes for uninteresting discussion of the misgivings of different countries when the first thing you're able to reach for is "well what about colonialism?"
It's mainly meant as an illustration of the OP's "We never wanted Problem X, take it back to your country!" argument, which is simplistic and uninteresting.
Pardon the ignorance but why does one need to understand history or the caste system in this context? The fact of the matter is dead simple, are you or are you not making decisions that hurt someone in any way based on biological factors they cannot control?
This is not politics or history, or even western thinking. It is fundamentally unfair and unjust. Treat others as you would like to be treated. This concept of justice is not foreign to any country or belief system as far as I am aware, please correct me if I am mistaken here. But every culture has ways and means by which laws, norms and traditions have been established that subvet the most basic senses of justice anyone can have.
I do not need to understand the history between tutsi and hutu in rwanda or serbs and bosnians or native and white americans in latin america or black and white people in the US.
Again I ask, unless you are arguing to justify the injustice, why is the reason behind it unjust?
I would say that I personally don't think any generalizations about "indians in seattle" or elsewhere is correct but individual experiences are not to be ignored either.
I don't see why HR and EEOC won't treat this like any other type of discrimination.
Matter of fact, I don't think seattle should need to ban caste discrimination. It is already illegal at the federal level!
It’s just gatekeeping. The idea behind such gatekeeping is that you don’t want people who don’t understand the nuances of it to apply it blindly to situations where it doesn’t apply. For example, I have on a couple of occasions struggled to get along with other Indians. Nothing related to caste, because neither of us knew the other’s caste (AFAIK). A well meaning but ignorant person would have made this situation worse by applying a caste lens to it.
I get what you’re saying - it’s just discrimination like any other discrimination and all discrimination is outlawed implicitly. I mostly agree. I just wouldn’t want this to become the first and only thing that people think about while trying to mediate relations between Indians.
As an American, your metaphor makes absolutely no sense to me.
Why would a European think an American would possess a gun in their country? And how would they get it there through customs - it’s not an idea? And a gun is a lethal weapon - is the caste system?
Sorry, I’ve spent a bit of time in Europe (including living for a stint). I’m also from a part of the US that has plenty of firearms. I just can’t make sense of this metaphor.
> Why would a European think an American would possess a gun in their country? And how would they get it there through customs - it’s not an idea?
Yeah, you know how stuff works in Europe, so this transparently sounds like nonsense to you. Similarly, the OP's assertion that caste and sex discrimination is "rampant" among Indians in Seattle sounds like nonsense to me.
> And a gun is a lethal weapon - is the caste system?
Definitely, in a bad way. People have been murdered in India over inter-caste marriages.
> I just can’t make sense of this metaphor.
I'll try to explain it point by point:
- Caste-based discrimination is a terrible thing that happens all the time in India, similar to how gun violence is a terrible thing that happens all the time in the US.
- But if a European said to you "You Americans in my country are super argumentative! You seem to be ready to pull a gun on each other all the time against each other, it's just like what I read in the paper!", you'd think it was nonsense that was basically stereotype-matching.
- Similarly, I find OP's comment about rampant caste discrimination nonsensical because it relies on simplistic stereotyping.
The downside to telling people to do their own research is that many of them will end up on your opposition's articles and websites, who will take the time to explain their side while denying you the ability to refute them.
Yeah, people dont understand _at all_ how it works because they were not and are not directly involved, The other side of the coin is they simply condemn all Indians as the modern equivalent of racists.
You are also not obliged to teach people anything, but as you've seen the people will judge you based on the information presented. Not contributing to the narrative only leads people to base judgement on the supplied information.
Reading about Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who led reforms against casteism and wrote the equivalent of affirmative action into the Indian Constitution is probably a good start. He was the Indian equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King.
His writings are mostly in English and present a deep study of the subject, especially given that it affected him personally.
> wrote the equivalent of affirmative action into the Indian Constitution
Reservations are not equivalent to affirmative action in America. Dr. Ambedkar was the Chairman of Constitutional Drafting Committee. In popular imagination, he is often called the author of the Indian constitution. Reservations are a small part of it.
> He was the Indian equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King.
I understand that you are trying to make the context relatable to an American audience but I find this framing rather grating. I don't mean any disrespect to Dr. King but this is selling Dr. Ambedkar short.
An op-ed piece from the NY Times? Not what I would consider an authoritative source. The author says caste discrimination is illegal, but goes onto suggest that other than people avoiding discussing the topic, and aside from a few high profile and moderately successful social initiatives, it’s still very much a thing. The piece doesn’t quite support your assertion, e.g.:
> As India transforms, one might expect caste to dissolve and disappear, but that is not happening. Instead, caste is making its presence felt in ways similar to race in modern America: less important now in jobs and education, but vibrantly alive when it comes to two significant societal markers — marriage and politics…
> Inter-caste marriages in India are on the rise but still tend to be the province of the liberal few. For much of the country, with its penchant for arranged marriages and close family ties, caste is still a primary determinant in choosing a spouse…
…and a bit more. Why do you believe caste discrimination isn’t real? That seems like a strong stance.
I think for most part, this is what Indians want to believe. Even the folks on this thread. When I was a kid in school I didn't think the caste system existed in "modern" India because it wasn't something I spent any time thinking about. Caste and religion didn't matter to me in my every day interactions, didn't factor into any decisions I made, therefore it didn't matter to others either. Or so I thought. That's privilege speaking. These things didn't matter to me because I had never suffered because of it. But they do exist, and Indians need to accept that.
Why you might find people being defensive on this thread is that it might feel galling to be talked down to by Americans on this subject. The Indians on this thread, like me, have never thought about caste and yet they’re being told to stop being casteist, to fight casteism etc by people who found out about it 10 minutes ago. For others, being told about casteism makes them feel bad because it’s a reminder that India isn’t as great as it could be, it’s not the land of equality and opportunity that we’d like to believe it is.
Not saying they’re right to feel that way, because we must do our part regardless of what others say. But it just gives you their perspective, so you might understand.
Technology firms in India have a better female to male staff ratio than the tech giants of Silicon Valley [1]. India has a much better male-to-female ratio compared with the U.S. Engineering male-female ratio in India is 1.96 as compared with 4.61 in the U.S. [2]
The 2015 stackoverflow survey has this interesting statement: "Developers in India are 3-times more likely to be female than developers in the United States." See https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2015 Actually it is worse than it sounds because most of the female developers in the United States are first generation immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe.
Just because there are more female devs doesn't imply that there isn't discrimination. You're ignoring that parent said many of the women are (conspicuously) in QA
Just because there are more women in engineering doesn't imply that there isn't a pay gap, or that they're assigned to tasks of equal urgency
Indian here, in India, and here are my anecdotal experiences in decade+ experience
1. Worked with a tech team of 10 with no females, for over 8 years. Manager hired one once HR pointed it out categorically to him. Even she didn't last. Super co-incidentally, she was in QA. I should mention that she wasn't the problem.
2. Worked with design teams in 3 companies, the ratio of females was never more than 2:8 with respect to males.
3. Newly married women generally find it really hard to get back into workforce since it is expected that they will soon be planning a child and hence require a paid maternity leave. HR is explicity told about this by management.
4. Even unmarried ones are usually asked about their marriage plans when getting interviewed.
I would like to add, there is a dearth of skilled talent too with respect to women. Along with the lot less opportunities available to women for higher education, lot many women in India only join workforce to get more qualified for arranged marriages - "having working life" is somehow always in demand, higher skills or salaries do not matter to suitors usually - it is usually expected in both families that males will likely earn more than females so much so that the ones looking for prospective brides do not go for ones earning more than the prospective groom - something that perhaps works as a motivation for some women to not to vie for higher compensation jobs. This of course ends up making them more dependent on their spouses for money matters.
Again, this is not a commentary on all women or all men either but just a perspective of someone on the ground, in India.
"women in countries with higher gender inequality are simply seeking the clearest possible path to financial freedom. And typically, that path leads through STEM professions."
I know plenty of American women who would be outraged at the suggestions that the reason there's fewer women in high paying tech jobs is because they enjoy better gender equality! That's some twisted logic there.
Is it really? Plenty of women in computer science during it's early days weren't in it because it was their first choice. Other fields, like law and medicine overtly discriminated against women. Many med schools capped their female student representation at 10%. This displaced women into other fields, like CS. When those sexist policies were removed, those women got the chance to pick the field of their choice. The women that would have been in CS had these sexist policies still been in place aren't taking jobs at a corners store: they're entering other high-status fields.
Many fields that were once dominated by men are now either at parity, or even majority women. The fact that freedom from sexism stopped displacing women into CS doesn't seem like much of a bad thing.
> The fact that freedom from sexism stopped displacing women into CS doesn't seem like much of a bad thing.
Such a convenient explanation... CS is one of the highest paid professions, and women are taking advantage of lack-of-sexism and choosing to stay out of CS... because umm... they don't need the money? You should consider speaking at the Grace Hopper Conference, because there's lots of women there that haven't been told this truth.
It’s a well known fact (supported and replicated by research in multiple countries and societies) that women are less motivated by money than men. Women also prefer to work with people vs things (also well replicated result).
Obviously if a choice is starving vs CS, most women would prefer CS. That’s the choice for many women in Iran (most equal country in CS) or India. That’s not choice for most women in US or Europe. We are talking averages here - obviously there are a lot of women much more motivated by money than average men.
> women are taking advantage of lack-of-sexism and choosing to stay out of CS... because umm... they don't need the money?
As I stated in my previous comment, it's because other high paying industries stopped being sexist against women, and then the women that would have been pushed out of those industries and into CS can now study and work in the field of their choice. Nowhere did I write that "they don't need the money", and I even said that they were choosing other high paying fields once medicine, law, etc. stopped enforcing overtly sexist policies against women. Discussions are more productive when you engage with what other commenters are writing instead of your own inventions.
That’s quite clearly not what they were saying. If you want to argue with yourself, do it in a Word document and don’t involve the rest of us. I’d like to think that this community is above being intellectually dishonest in the name of starting internet fights. I have very very little time or respect for this mindset. What are you hoping to gain from this interaction?
I mean, the hard data is out there. Applicable not just to the US but also to other advanced countries like Scandinavian ones. I know that correlation is not causation and maybe there is some other common cause. But it is undeniable that better gender equality is correlated with fewer women in STEM.
> That's some twisted logic there.
I prefer the term "counterintuitive". And the world works in ways, many of which are counterintuitive. Another famous example - poverty trap, where people are incentivized to stay poor when you offer them means tested welfare. While each of the pillars of such programs (means testing, helping poor etc) sound good in isolation, they have a devastating impact in practice. Moynihan (a liberal, fwiw) was skewered when he suggested as such.
Software Development is competing with all the other possible fields out there for talented people. When we fail to address or mitigate sexism, our profession loses out to the professions that do.
And our evidence that software has more sexism than other fields is...? People tend to simply point to the lower than average female representation, but I don't find that convincing. 80/20 gender split is actually about average. Furthermore, studies measuring callbacks and recruiter interest show preference for women: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
Honestly…I’m happy to operate under the assumption that tech has a sexism issue purely based on my personal experience with coworkers, superiors, peers online and at conferences, etc. I’ve never even worked in Big Tech! The stories I hear from friends that do, sound ridiculous. I’ve seldom seen a study that meets the standards of objective-ish academic rigour that I feel could even remotely capture all the nuanced ways in which women are (in my experience) screwed by our shitty culture.
If I applied the same line of thinking, I'd be operating on under the assumption that tech has a sexism issue against men based on my experience of being explicitly directed to discriminate against men, and being given gender quotas vastly different from industry representation - often demanding as much as 2x the representation of women. Most of my co-workers, men and women both, have similar stories . That's a lot more concrete to than a hand-wavy "it's nuanced" explanation.
But rather than listening to anecdotes, I'll listen to evidence, which also indicates that tech at best does not discriminate against women and likely discriminates in favor of them.
> 74% of women in software development have experienced gender discrimination
Wrong. 74% of women say they have experienced gender discrimination. This is not measuring discrimination, this is measuring perceptions of discrimination - which is a substantially different thing than actually measuring discrimination through things like anonymized applications, or sending identical applications with different genders. Imagine I had an orchestra. I poll them about gender discrimination, and loads more men say they experienced gender discrimination in hiring. But when we switch to blind auditions, men actually fared worse than women. Which is more compelling evidence?
Perceptions of discrimination could be caused by all sorts of things, like a media ecosystem fiercely promoting the idea that women are being discriminated against in tech - which doesn't always match reality. For instance, Google was constantly said to have been paying women less than men, until they actually studied their salary disparities and found men were underpaid: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
However, you do raise a good point. The fact that so many women believe they are being discriminated against could very well be part of suppressed representation of women in STEM. The fact that perceptions of discrimination are so strong could dissuade women from entering the field, even though there's little evidence for actual discrimination in tech.
It is/was easier to become financially independent in the states without a STEM degree, although I think it is becoming harder as inflation demands $300k/year FAANG salaries.
And our evidence for this discrimination is, what exactly? As I pointed out in the other reply, the evidence shows that tech companies are if anything discriminating in favor of women. If we measure by job satisfaction, computer science and engineering are among the lowest disparity: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/wome...
As I pointed out in my other reply [1], this is a poll asking women if they think they have been discriminated against - it's measuring perceptions of discrimination. It's not measuring discrimination.
If I poll orchestra members and a lot more men say the face discrimination in hiring, but when I conduct blind auditions men do even worse what does that tell me? Or tells me that their perceptions of discrimination are out of line with the reality of discrimination.
A very large part of why there M:W ratio is different for immigrants than those back in India is also very sexist - parents don’t want to send their daughters abroad alone because… <sexist> reasons whereas the sons all get pushed to try and get out.
It's always difficult to compare cross countries: for instance it's prettty usual for bigger companies in the US/EU to outsource whole areas that are low paying with high turn over to avoid dealing with the HR. Facebook is famous for outsourcing content moderation, but I'd expect QA and other lower pay "engineering" jobs to be outsourcedas well.
If Indian companies have incentives to keep them in-house, that simple structural difference would completley chaange the numbers.
I'm not sure we havr "facts" (numbers) that are immune to these discrepancies.
This is an American problem too. I've worked with a lot of women in QA who have CS degrees, and lots of male programmers who were shocked to discover that the testers they were working with had exactly the same qualifications they did.
In America companies, women who struggle to find software engineering roles due to discrimination are often able to get lower-paid roles in QA where they are less likely to be pre-judged for not looking like what people think engineers look like. The result is that 38.8% of American QA testers are women, compared to 14% of software engineers.
Fields that hold fixed-mindset beliefs, where success in the field is attributed to innate talent, "being smart" or other unchanging characteristics, have significantly more discrimination against women and traditionally-marginalized racial groups than do fields that believe success relies on hard work and practice: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1261375
Or another possibility is men and women are wired differently, and the things that make a good dev (such as coming up with a novel solution to a problem) is different from the things that make a good QA (testing every possible edge case to make sure the thing does what the thing is supposed to do).
See my comment above about "women in QA". Also, "no female engineers" is laughable because that is 1 anecdote. There are plenty of Indian female engineers. You know that right ?
Hint: It is not casteism. It is cultural. Women in India want to get into IT (best way to make decent money) and QA has lower barrier to entry with less pressure. Nothing to do with casteism. This is why GP's comment is extremely reckless and dangerous.
I read your post, then I we back to again read the original post.
To quote:
The biggest one to me is the sex discrimination across dev and qa, with a women making up the vast majority of qa even though they graduated with the same degrees as the men from the same Indian universities.
No where in that sentence does it say anything about casteism. (Yes, I know the original post was discussing both casteism and sex discrimination.)
Also, you wrote:
Nothing to do with casteism.
Yes, in this particular case. Casteism results in lower human development for low caste people. As a result, they are likely to perform worse in the workplace due to multiple reasons, including education, confidence, etc.
It is not casteism. It is cultural.
Why do you think that they are separate? Any university-level sociology professor would tell you that they are clearly intertwined. Sexism is also cultural.
About "extremely reckless and dangerous": On HN, each time casteism is the topic, it evokes strong, emotionally defensive responses from Indian-descent people (both nationals and the diaspora). Something that I often see repeated: "Oh, you just don't understand." "Oh, you cannot understand this ${thing} in our ancient culture." It's hard to understand if you don't ask. Yes, you may perceive their asking as a slight, but in many cases they are making an effort to learn more about this complex social issue. I see similar reactions during discussions about transgender rights and Black Lives Matter _in the United States_. There seems to be a small, vocal minority that wants to deny these are real, very serious, and important social issues that need our attention.
When a non-Indian descent person sees what they perceive as casteism or sex discrimination towards Indian descent people, how would you like them to raise the issue with you?
> GP's comment is extremely reckless and dangerous
Unless sitkack thumbed their comment into an iPhone while simultaneously driving drunk and having unprotected sex with a prostitute, "extremely reckless and dangerous" is an awfully weird commentary on their post.
Caste System exists in India but you are generalizing way too much by saying "My Indian Colleagues". I am an Indian-American and I hate the caste system. I love that America is multi-cultural and allows people of all cultures/races to come here and make something for themselves. If you are going to assume by default that I believe in caste system, you are mistaken. But I am not interested in explaining too much. So yea, I will probably be tight lipped in front of you because you don't understand the complexity and roots of this practice.
Just be careful about generalizing a country of 1.4 billion people. Someone more ignorant will automatically assume that all Indians are the same and they all believe in caste system.
>> I try to talk to my Indian colleagues about this and they stay extremely tight lipped about this for a multitude of reasons.
> but you are generalizing way too much by saying "My Indian Colleagues" ... I will probably be tight lipped in front of you
All OP said is their Indian colleagues are tight-lipped about caste, which it sounds like you would be too. I'm not sure why you feel that's unfair generalization. OP isn't claiming they all support it, just that they're silent about it.
I can't speak for others but I may be tight lipped personally because it is a very complex issue that a non Indian cannot just understand. I see this tendency that people of non Indian origin throw the keyword "caste" without really knowing what it is.
OP is making sweeping generalizations. Another example: All women in QA. So what ? May be because women find it easier to start with QA (lower barrier to entry) and has less demanding work. Sure, some of it may be cultural but tieing to casteism is a stretch.
> I see this tendency that people of non Indian origin throw the keyword "caste" without really knowing what it is.
Shouldn't we be talking about it then? Openly? Educating others.
> I hate the caste system
This is where being tight lipped doesn't make sense. It falls under the "it's our problem so you can't talk about it". If it's a bad system then let it be just that, why defend it by not talking about it?
A similar analogy would be police doing brutal/illegal things and defending each other. If you're a cop and you hate that, then being tight lipped about the "internal problems and complexities" only keeps the problems going.
> All women in QA. So what ?... Sure, some of it may be cultural but tieing to casteism is a stretch.
There should be equal ratios of women in Dev vs QA for all races. Sure maybe saying casteism is the root cause is too much, but denying it is also wrong. It's like saying racism is never a factor. It's not 100% the factor, but it's definitely a portion of a problem.
I guess... we should talk about it and learn - and not be afraid.
> Sure maybe saying casteism is the root cause is too much, but denying it is also wrong.
I agree with everything you said, but just a note that OP was talking about sex and caste discrimination as separate things, not conflating them as your parent implies.
From OP:
> The biggest one to me is the sex discrimination across dev and qa
> There should be equal ratios of women in Dev vs QA for all races
But it is flawed - it could be easily argued that this group of people are way more sexist than others which could account for that ratios being off vs inherently Caste.
> May be because women find it easier to start with QA (lower barrier to entry) and has less demanding work.
OP is talking not just about casteism but also about sexism, and in the US this would be considered a badly sexist remark. Why do you assume that women seek jobs with a lower barrier to entry and less demanding work?
I didn't say All women seek jobs with lower barrier to entry. I am talking about QA and why it tends to attract mostly women in India. Plenty of women go into other fields including Engineering.
> I am talking about QA and why it tends to attract mostly women in India
Disclaimer: I'm speaking as a Scandinavian with no knowledge of this situation in India. I can only share what we have learned here, as I think it could help explain some of the reason why it ended up this way.
This could be an example of gender inequality. We had the same issue in our countries where the women chose jobs with lower barrier to entry with more dependability and stable work hours. The reason was that they had (and some still do) a lot of responsibilities outside work to take care of their family.
There was also a cultural thing where men didn't feel "manly" enough when they took time off work to take care of the children. The government provides a long maternal/paternal leave, and made an equal part of it reserved to men and women. That quickly changed the culture where it became more acceptable for men to take time off work to raise children.
It turned out that women actually wanted the same careers as men :-) The expectations from society made it hard for them, and when those expectations changed the pattern also changed.
Sure, we still have some types of work that are dominated by women, but it is increasingly their own choice. We are not finished yet, and there is still work to do, but the gap is closing.
From my experience, it seems that female developers in my country go through a different path. Instead of going to a lower entry job, they frequently start as regular developers and often end up as managers and other positions of influence.
>OP is making sweeping generalizations. Another example: All women in QA. So what ? May be because women find it easier to start with QA (lower barrier to entry) and has less demanding work. Sure, some of it may be cultural but tieing to casteism is a stretch.
It isn't a generalization to point out that there's something strange when the distribution is skewed that strongly considering that men and women are generally equal. Some slight bias is understandable, but the larger the deviation gets, the more unrealistic it is. There is nothing inherent about being a woman that would lead to them unanimously choosing to go with a lower barrier to entry and similarly there is nothing inherent about being a man that would lead to them not choosing said lower barrier and easier work.
As an Aristotelean the thought that I need to understand the Platonean idea of a caste system seems vain.
I think it is distracting.
What we should talk about, and what we can talk about, is the inacceptable behavior of (some) people, in this case (some) Indians in the US work place.
There's nothing complex about caste-based discrimination. It's a laugh and a half that Indians like you try to defend it like this. This shit has no place in the West.
Caste discrimination is strong in male Indian immigrants to the USA. The higher the caste, the stronger the discrimination. Just as you ["...you don't understand the complexity and roots of this practice."], most will defend their Indian society's attitudes. They certainly won't accept lower castes as equals.
I have no experience regarding Indian womens' attitudes.
I don’t think he generalized in a way that makes assumptions about you or all Indians. It was across his Indian colleagues, maybe he only had 2 Indian colleagues
The ones that hate the caste system are often from the lower castes, who are the ones that see the unfavorable side of the system.
The ones from the higher castes (which are the most likely to be wealthy enough to come here) are the ones favored by the system and are more likely to approve of it.
Very coarse racial/religios groups, (caucasians/asians/africans or christians/jews/muslims) discriminate against each other. But those groups are each divisible into smaller groups, which discriminate against each other just as hard, and those groups are also divisible into yet smaller groups, which discriminate against each other just as hard.
There's a famous old Emo Phillips joke about this problem, which goes as follows. Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
Probably that groups discriminated against often discriminate internally. Recurse a couple times. Rarely is someone only discriminating or discriminated against. Most people are both.
Think of the fractal images, when you zoom in, you see more fractals (discrimination). Discrimination happens even within sub groups that are being discriminated against. It is rarely one-way.
A common example is women discriminating against women co-workers by gossiping and backstabbing them in the social aspect of the workplace. We may not see that it is discrimination (on the basis of gender) because it's women doing their thing.
In the Deaf community, we experience discrimination every day from those who are hearing. Then there is a big one against people who identify as "D" deaf [those who identify with the Deaf community as an identity] and those who identify as "d" deaf [those who identify as having an impairment]. Those within the deaf community additionally discriminate those who aren't "deaf" enough, and then in turn, even discriminate against deaf who are mentally handicapped.
regarding sex discrimination. Did you actually asked women in qa whether they chose to be in qa or were forced to be in qa or you came to this conclusion solely based on the observation that there were more women in qa than dev?
My anecdotal experience is that lot of south asian women choose to go in QA. I have several women in dev jobs coming to me asking for transfer in QA when they needed predictable office timing and wanted to concentrate more on their family lives but without losing thier touch from corporate jobs. I also have women transferring from QA back to dev jobs when their kids were slightly older and well adjusted to school when they needed more challenge.
I have had similar requests for going into program management jobs too for similar reasons.
This was before pre-pandemic i don't know the current state as i am out of corp. world but i don't subscribe to this idea. I think there is cultural angle to it as well.
When I was working for an American tech in China, my boss would joke about the QA team being all female while there were scarcely another girls in the engineering team. I guess that kind of thing doesn’t just happen in India (although things are much better now at the company I worked for in their Beijing office).
I worked for a Chinese tech giant in India. I just realised that all the female Chinese engineers I interacted with were SDETs. While the skew existed in India, it wasn't as pronounced.
I'm seeing a lot of Indians replying to this post's point about sex discrimination, but I'm assuming they're men. Are there any Indian women on HN who can sound off on their own experiences with sex discrimination?
Newspeak™ terms like 'cis' should be kept out of the general discourse, they have no place in a society where people live and thrive based on what binds them together. This type of language only serves to divide and create more 'us versus them' which may be a boon for those who want to push identity politics but is a bane for the rest of society.
That being said, it does provide some recourse for those who can show they’ve been discriminated because of their caste against the perpetrator. It doesn’t fix the root of the issue, and cases might be difficult to prove, but seems like a net good to add this protection. Might force discrimination on these grounds to be more subtle, but that means blatant discrimination would have consequences. Which again, seems better than the status quo.
But from a practical perspective all of this is already done and kept on the DL even before the law was in place. The social pressure already stops the blatant treatment from occurring.
Nonsense. People respond to incentives all the time. I recommend reading up on "zero-determinate strategies": all it takes to change someone's behavior is changing your behavior in response in ways that impact their payoffs.
We are rationalizing creatures, not rational creatures. Once racism, sexism or caste discrimination stop being strategic, people stop buying into them. The book "Pax Ethnica: Where and How Diversity Succeeds" describes several instance where this worked. Voluntary legal protection of minority rights by a historically-dominant group has repeatedly dismantled long-standing ethnic conflicts.
Nonsense my ass. What fantasy incentive are you talking about? There's no incentive preventing someone from not hiring someone because of their caste and then completely fabricating a different reason.
>We are rationalizing creatures, not rational creatures. Once racism, sexism or caste discrimination stop being strategic, people stop buying into them.
Sure but the point is, it will never be "not strategic".
It's only strategic when it incurs social rewards from some people and no countervailing social condemnation from others.
It's up to us to be that countervailing social condemnation. Even imposing that cost of making up a totally different reason raises the cost of discrimination, and raising the cost of something means people will do it less.
Promoting cancel culture? Personally I find cancel culture too reactionary and too extreme and irrational. Additionally cancel culture often gets shit wrong and ruins the lives of the wrong people. I would say in this case if you participated in such a mistake you should be the one that's put down.
But let's disregard that. For this specific case you can't even know who to socially condemn. If the law can't determine it how can you?
20 transexual people who identify as furries applied to my job post. I didn't hire any of them because they didn't have the technical skills to perform the job.
copying from earlier where I posted this answer....Kshama Sawant is exploiting the ignorance about Hindu religion and ground reality about India among US audience to get a political bill passed which makes "Hindu= castiest" to avg ignorant american and opens them up for hate attacks....
the problem is certain groups thrive on the American's lack of information about Indian society to spread their misinformation as truth. Caste, being a complex issue, has been reduced india to rural areas. Any cases about caste favoritism or discrimination area dealt with public outcry and government laws. Meritocracy is the currency in the new Indian tech space.
Caste as portrayed by American newspapers and "human rights" agencies is that every Hindu (they single out, even though caste problem exists in all religions in India Pakistan Bangladesh etc) comes with caste lense, which is untrue. There has been a deliberate attempt to make Brahim = white so that US left liberals can easily make oppressor-opressed connections. Reality is way different and complex but nobody wants to read sources. In many parts lower castes are in high power, and they exert atrocities on everyone else - other lower castes and higher castes. Whole India is riddled with examples like that. Person in power exploits poor person. Caste is just a tool. Again, with public outcry and strict laws, it has been relegated to deep rural areas of India. You won't find it easily in cities. What all this points to ? This is an attempt to dehumanize hindu population, attack hindu tech workers (who are micro minority in USA) and erode any goodwill around India.
Take this article for example, it doesn't go into the Dalit activists obvious misinterpretations but paints Rajiv Malhotra as devil incarnate. Propaganda pieces rarely show their teeth this easily. Any follower of reuters will form their opinion by reading such propaganda piece.
Salvatore Babones, american statistician warned about same thing -
For a western audience, India is becoming a fascist state even though ground reality is entirely opposite because they are surrounded by media reports which say so. If you repeat lie long enough, it becomes the truth.
> No, women do not all want to be QA, I assure you.
Of course they don't! People make their own choices!
My point was that QA teams are often more welcoming to women, and don't have a ton of male brogrammer "let's crush some LeetCode" types. This also tends to be a self-reinforcing cycle. Where would you rather go, the team that treats interviews as a hazing ritual, or the one that conducts a good conversation and respects your time?
I tried to make this more clear in my comment, since clearly I didn't do a good job of communicating it the first time.
Interviewing double-blind in a discriminatory system is still going to reproduce existing discriminatory dynamics.
That solution works in situations where performance is individual, the standards are largely agreed-upon and the access to training & opportunities are equally-accessible. That's why it was so effective for orchestras.
Unfortunately, computer science education remains one of the most discriminatory part of our industry, and the decades of discrimination mean people's resumes and post-education training vary already.
And finally, what makes a developer effective varies by team and context, and we don't have any consistent way to judge those things.
Luckily, there are plenty of techniques that can successfully address bias even under those situations. They just tend to be harder to sell to anxious people who want to stay centered in the majority, because they all require admitting that discrimination exists.
He is rhetorically saying an "ought", not "is", although grammatically it is an "is". At least that's how I read it. (Disclaimer: I'm not American and English is not my native language though.)
> India is not dealing with this issue, America is.
India is not dealing with caste discrimination? Is this a joke?
India has implemented incredibly wide-reaching and aggressive policies to both combat present-day casteism and remediate the effects of past/historical casteism.
Yes, caste discrimination still happens in India - that's why it remains an ongoing effort with a multi-pronged approach. But it's very much an issue that is actively being addressed at nearly every layer of society, to a degree that would be inconceivable in the US or Europe.
Honestly, if you compare the tangible and concrete steps to combat casteism that India has undertaken (a currently active effort) to the incredibly milquetoast anti-racism efforts within Europe (for example), it makes the latter look like mere lip service by comparison.
I'm interpreting it as that the issue of caste discrimination being perpetuated by immigrants in America is, by definition, not being dealt with by India. India has to deal with the issue of caste discrimination being perpetuated in India.
I think most people would agree you’re far less likely to be victimized for your caste in America than in India, which means for all intents and purposes it is better than this.
So I work at Microsoft and I live in Redmond (Seattle suburb). I live in a large neighborhood that is 95% Indian families. My family is white and my daughter is the only white girl on the playground. It's a weird change from growing up in a place that was 95% white people for most of my life. Everyone is friendly but it hasn't been easy for us to integrate hyper-locally. I sometimes feel like our family is intruding in this neighborhood with our non-Indian-ness.
I've noticed that there are lots of teams that are primarily Indian folks and this is true not just of the contractors and India based teams. I really don't know about the dynamics of the caste system and whether not they are at play within MSFT, AMZN or other Seattle/tech companies, but just like most (all?) ethnicities there is certainly a tendency to stick together and live in the same areas / work on the same teams from what I've seen.
On a mostly unrelated note, Seattle proper (as I mentioned, I live in a suburb which is an affluent one) has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless/drug problem is very bad and the local government seems so entirely incompetent to do anything other than woke signaling.
> On a mostly unrelated note, Seattle proper (as I mentioned, I live in a suburb which is an affluent one) has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. The homeless/drug problem is very bad and the local government seems so entirely incompetent to do anything other than woke signaling.
I don't mean to be unduly harsh (yet probably will come across that way anyway) but did we have to drag that into this conversation? I have lived in Seattle my entire life, was born in Ballard, and raised two kids here. It's getting kind of frustrating that every time my hometown comes up, someone inevitably mentions this without bringing up any of the complexities as to why. (For one, it would be nice if your suburb, nominally one of Seattle's regional partners in the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, would actually do their part and construct some social services for various groups.)
Our mayor, who lives half-time in Bellevue I hasten to point out, is busy saying it's all the Council's fault and the Council passes budget items and ordinances that the mayor simply ignores. Meanwhile, every city in the region is busy shoving everyone who looks like they earn less than $75,000 per year over to Seattle and then crying about how Seattle is "doing nothing".
The Council is attempting to do something good, so sure, let's bring up the massive social services crisis that's by no means unique to Seattle or Puget Sound, but probably looks like a Seattle-specific problem from a perch on the Eastside.
> It's getting kind of frustrating that every time my hometown comes up, someone inevitably mentions this without bringing up any of the complexities as to why.
Maybe because it is true and that’s hard for you to face?
I didn’t grow up in Seattle, but I lived in the city for 25 years. The problems have only exponentially increased over the last decade. The pandemic didn’t help things either.
For all the posturing, Seattle doesn’t ACTUALLY want to fix anything. They want to do things that get them karma on social media, that keep politicians getting re-elected. Politicians, churches, average citizens, doesn’t matter. A dramatic change is needed in Seattle to make it better for everyone involved, but I don’t see that happening in my lifetime.
FWIW I lived in Seattle for 4 months in 2019 and was shocked at how abhorrent the downtown has gotten, compared to how it was in 2013. I’ve lived in cities all over the east coast, and none of them have compared to the amount of poverty and drug culture I saw in Seattle.
I moved to NYC and couldn’t be happier. I’m genuinely of the opinion that Seattle, Portland, SF, etc are broken and any comments which try to downplay that are only making things worse in the long run.
Maybe the issue lies with America not Seattle? A harsh unforgiving society coupled with a lack of a social safety net.
Throw in easy access to drugs and things go to hell quickly.
That is so easy to disprove. SF spends 1.1B on homelessness (more than 50K per homeless person). Federal government spends 6-700B on medicaid (health services for poor). California's 2022-23 spending plan provides over $25 billion from the General Fund for human services programs.
Maybe, you can complain that that spending is "inefficient", but that becomes a political barb-trading after that.
These cities also have a housing affordability issue. They all refuse to build enough housing - especially mixed development. It’s not really a shock as to why homelessness is rising when you literally can’t afford a roof and everything else gets more expensive because of landlords leaching all the money out of the economy.
It's replicated all over America, because the zoning policies adopted in the 70s-90s have proven disastrous, but Seattle is absolutely responsible for its part in failing to build enough housing to keep up with growth.
These problems don't exist in NEARLY the same magnitude in the rest of the country. Fucking Detroit is a much nicer place to be than Seattle now, because _they're working on fixing their problems_. Seattle just blames Trump and warns against hobophobia, then continues along blindly.
Homeless services have probably gotten better in the last 10 years (I assume) while homelessness has gotten much worse. I assume the underlying issue isn’t the services but rather something else. My guess is housing has become too expensive.
Because it has endless strings, hoops, paperwork, and relinquishing freedom attached to it that no one in their right mind would go through or agree with, let alone people who are homeless and barely have the capacity to wake up in the morning.
For some yes, but I'm specifically talking about the cohort who choose that lifestyle and wouldn't take housing no matter what. They prefer to live in a tent in the hillside, with not a shred of responsibility or authority telling them what to do. Many use substances. Our modern society has largely given them the Ok to live this lifestyle with minimal friction, and so they will continue to live it because it's what they desire to do.
My understanding is that around 60-70% of the homeless in SF used to have a home/work and wish to be productive members of society but have fallen on hard times for one reason or another. So 30-40% are in the "wouldn't take the housing if you gave it to them" group.
Housing has gotten more expensive and there's been a huge wave of immigration to the region. I've lived here 35 years, the resistance from single family homeowners on any push to improve is staggering.
I’m not as plugged into local politics as you seem to be, but I’ve lived in Redmond and now live in Seattle. I have never felt unsafe, or like things were “very bad.” There seems to be a lot of pearl clutching because some homeless people exist in a large city. A city that has grown significantly in the last decade (and the decade before that). I’d like for those folks to be thrown a ladder as much as anyone.
Credit where credit is due, the east side has way nicer roads. Money helps, I suppose.
Eastside also buses homeless folks out (or at least used to). They very much care about the facade of cleanliness on the Eastside but not about people nearly as much.
And yeah, agree with you and the parent poster - the issue isn't unique to Seattle, local areas aren't doing enough, and housing has not met demand.
They don’t bus anymore. They just enforce laws really strict so Seattle looks appealing (where laws are more loosely enforced), and then metro won’t stop you from boarding if you can’t pay the fare.
If only. KC judges and prosecutors are loathe to put people in jail these days. They were even talking about releasing that guy who bashed in the head of an Amazon worker in beltown.
In Seattle you can throw up a tent and you might have to remove it a few weeks later. In Bellevue, you lay down on a bench and swat is out in 5 minutes (even if you won’t go to jail, the police will harass you enough that you’ll leave). Bellevue makes it annoying to do illegal things, Seattle makes it convenient, so of course they are going to head to Seattle, it’s simply the path of least resistance.
It is illegal to ban camping unless free housing is available: https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/october-2022/new... It's Bellevue that is violating the law by enforcing an unconstitutional ordinance, rather than the people sleeping on benches.
It’s basically enforce laws aggressively, and make the problem go to the more permissive city. It wouldn’t work if Seattle police started enforcing laws, Bellevue would be screwed at that point.
Bellevue doesn’t really have to directly shunt people to Seattle. All they have to do is be annoying enough in strictly enforcing their laws (via arrest, even if king county won’t prosecute), which just makes it more convenient to be in Seattle if you want to sleep on a bench or something (Bellevue will have swat out in 5 minutes if you so much as lay down on a bench in a park). And there is a huge fentanyl crisis going on, and Seattle’s drug permissive law enforcement just means we get more of it (especially here in Ballard).
I lived in the city proper for a long time and only moved out (Tacoma - I wonder what your opinion is of here?) post-pandemic, and honestly the city was never that bad for the most part. Now, there are tougher parts, sure. But I think a lot of the city is fine. You may see someone doing drugs in broad daylight but that is never actually dangerous to me in my experience.
Why wouldn't the caste system be in play? If you imagine a company in a foreign country that hired a lot of Americans, would you not expect the same problems with racial discrimination that happen in the US to arise among these American employees?
Having worked at the overseas operation of an American company that had a lot of American expats, no, not really, because those expats are not a random sampling of American society: they're overwhelmingly white and Asian, and the few that weren't were all upper class/highly educated and not viewed as threats.
You can see the same effect in the Indian diaspora in America as well. I'm having trouble finding stats on this, but by and large it's also highly educated, from the upper crust of society in India, overwhelmingly Brahmin and many groups (eg. Gujaratis) are statistically overrepresented compared to the Indian population at large.
I have this theory that caste discrimination is more common in the US for some of the reasons you told. First of all India banned caste discrimination a long time ago and has an affirmative-action-like law that discriminates in the other direction against upper castes for things like university placement. Caste discrimination (upper caste against lower) is still a thing there but I wasn't really aware of it being seen as a pressing issue in India and it gets merged into religious and ethnic conflict.
My friend is Brahmin but non practicing. For her it's just something she is proud of and a lot of upper caste Indians end up going to the US for school because they didn't get into IIT. There are big differences between the older and younger generations but I wonder if maybe the immigrants from India come here with kind of their own distinct culture where caste is a part of identity so not having that caste makes you an outsider here. idk =/
Not necessarily: foreign workers are a not at all representative of the country they come from, there's huge selection bias at play. For a real-world case, the vast majority of Russian co-workers I've met over the course of my software career are very much against the invasion of Ukraine versus ~70% of the Russian populace as a whole. I don't think this is preference falsification, given that they're open about other things like opposition to NATO expansion. This disparity exists even inside of Russia, professionals support the war less than average, but I bet among people who choose to work abroad there's greater degree of cosmopolitanism [1]. And for discrimination, I bet foreign workers are more empathetic about discrimination being a minority themselves in a different country. Of course every company should be vigilant against discrimination, regardless of the demographics of their workforce.
Yeah this is very true. I'm Indian born in the Bay Area and oddly enough there's entire apartment communities that end up being 95% indian families because of costs/school districts. This translates to housing too (Mountain House, San Ramon) though it typically has nothing to do with caste, just circumstance.
I just came back from attending a conference in the US. I stopped by san francisco to visit a friend before going to DC for the conference. I hadn't been in DC before but visited California 10 years ago. I was surprised by how pervasive homelessness and drug use was in both places too, especially San Francisco where it definitely felt like things took a turn for the worse. Even in DC there were guys just collapsed on the sidewalk, not sure from drug use or whatever (there were people there who called an ambulance). People also just didn't seem very happy in general, although I could be imagining that since I was only there for a few days. In any case it was very surprising and not quite what I expected.
I've lived in Seattle for almost 40 years. The homeless issue is not really unique to our city, and there's a hugely complex systemic set of issues causing it. (Not least of which is the incredibly high median income driving up home prices, due in part to tech immigration).
The city council has been trying to fix the issue, but had been stalled by the mayor, stalled by other cities in the region, and stalled in how they can build systemic fixes.
Eastside is tougher on crime, more conservative, and actually enforces laws frequently unlike Seattle, which is more progressive and extremely soft on crime.
A man bashed in the head of a female Amazon software engineer in Seattle and last I checked, they were considering letting him go free.
But getting back to my original question, I seriously doubt "tough on crime" policies in Redmond were implemented to help the homeless. More likely, they were implemented to keep poor people away.
My theory is that most people complaining about homelessness in cities like Seattle don't actually care about the homeless people. What they care about is that they have to see homelessness. So long as homelessness isn't visible then it's not a problem and whether that's done through charity or relocation or incarceration is irrelevant.
But I hope I'm wrong! I'd like to believe people aren't that cruel, so if Redmond has a solution that is compassionate and helpful I would genuinely love to know what they're doing.
How would living in Seattle proper provide a qualitatively different perspective from living in Redmond and visiting? Are you saying you eventually get used to people on mind altering drugs living in tents (sometimes growling at you as you walk by), and it stops bothering you? Genuinely asking. I have a similar opinion of the city but also have never lived on that side of the lake, and I wonder what I am missing…
It gives you an actual sense of what is dangerous rather than one built upon fear of the unknown and media spin, mostly.
I went up to Seattle recently and spent an evening running around Belltown. Not the nicest area of the city but also not the worst. I lived there for years. It was fine. I did see and interact with homeless people and I wouldn't be surprised if some were high.
Thanks for the reply. The Eastside is for sure boring. I agree that media consumption in general leads to instinctive overestimation of danger, since our brains are built to live in small villages where if you hear about 10 people being assaulted in a year it means you are really in serious danger of being assaulted personally. Whereas in a city, 10 assaults barely moves the needle in terms of actual risk to each person, and our instincts can’t tell the difference.
It’s interesting though, if I’m hearing you correctly you are indeed basically saying that you do become desensitized to the ambient homeless through exposure over time. This is assuming that a person without any media exposure at all would still find the homeless situation shocking and unpleasant to be around, which I imagine you wouldn’t disagree with?
“Shocking” — hardly, given the aforementioned extensive media coverage of the situation.
“Unpleasant to be around” — I personally find lots of folks unpleasant to be around; the homeless fall somewhere in the middle of the scale. I’m far less concerned with their drug use than with the intoxication of people owning and operating cars, for example. I know far more people negatively and physically impacted by DUI than by random assault by the homeless.
I’m also less bothered by the existence of folks without homes than I am by folks who — upon registering their own discomfort with the situation — seek to move the problem out of view rather than addressing the root cause.
The process you’re seeking to describe as a “desensitization” is instead a growing comfort with a larger swath of communities than folks who don’t live in such cities are fortunate enough to encounter. In reality, it would seem that desensitization actually occurs when folks are exposed to endlessly “othering” media, with very little personal experience to speak of.
Policing has taken a similar path from “community engagement based decision making” to “birds eye statistical algorithmic policing”. It’s going about as well as addressing the actual causes of homelessness.
To split hairs: I would have to assume any person capable of visiting an American city, but somehow without any media exposure at all would have to be homeless themselves, and people are generally not shocked by others living their same experience.
I’m trying to think of another scenario where such a hypothetical person might exist, but my imagination fails me.
Yes, you are totally correct that such a person would probably not visit Seattle. That part of my reply was an abstract clarifying question aimed at "It gives you an actual sense of what is dangerous rather than one built upon fear of the unknown and media spin".
I.e. the negative feeling one gets when one is in a city with people living in tents as they do in Seattle today is not necessarily strictly or even primarily due to media consumption, because (I assert) a theoretical human unexposed to media would still have a qualitatively-same instinctive negative reaction. Do you disagree? If so I am interested in why you disagree.
For example, if you somehow talked an orthodox Amish person into visiting Seattle with you (and perhaps had them read a few books about what cities are like in general first), they would still be shocked by the tent areas and find them unpleasant, despite never being exposed to whatever news outlets you consider inflammatory, immoral, incorrect, etc (and I do agree that all news outlets are all of these things, I personally avoid the stuff).
Relatedly, if you then asked the Amish person if they would prefer to stay in Seattle and help try to fix the problem, or to just return to their Amish village and ignore the problem, I think they would 100% of the time go with the latter? Are they wrong?
No the Amish person is not wrong to return home in such a situation -- in that scenario, it sounds like the Amish person doesn't like the realities of city life, and therefore chooses to remove themselves from the situation, as they dislike elements of the city, and are unwilling to work to address them at their root causes. As opposed to trying to get someone else removed.
My position is that people who do not want to do the work needed to actually combat homelessness -- not simply shift it around -- should move out of the city. They are a selfish drain of city resources, demanding with their greater personal resources that ever greater public resources be spent on their personal peace of mind. A peace of mind that comes at the expense of additional resources directed at actually addressing the issues, long-term.
City life and its advantages are guaranteed to nobody. You have to contribute to your community in order for it to improve. Same with rural life, just in another direction.
But to return to your initial point about a visiting Amish -- the Amish have an existing modern culture and plenty of exposure to media. The real test would be a member of an uncontacted tribe.
Should such a person suddenly find themselves downtown, which do you think they would find more "shocking and unpleasant" -- the group of people living communally and nomadically, or the individual folks in giant metal machines spewing cancerous fog into our shared atmosphere, so they can get to work on time?
Let me dwell for a moment on your nitpicking dismissal of the Amish example. My understanding of the spirit of Amishness is basically to live within a cultural snapshot of preindustrial Germany, since with postindustrial life comes a huge web of dependencies on other people where, if the web collapses, most of us will die. The Amish have placed a very long bet, and it is not clear to me that it will turn out to have been an unwise bet in the end. Sure, more liberal Amish do accept some technology and contact with the outside world, but I believe orthodox Amish, at least aspirationally, do not.
We today are culturally massively(!!!) more similar to preindustrial Germany than to hunter gatherer tribes, and the orthodox Amish are at least abstractly aware of modern technology existing in the outside world. Jumping all the way to hunter gatherers drags in a huge amount of unnecessary confounding factors. Yes, quite obviously, hunter gatherers would be more surprised by cars than by tent people. I believe the Amish would see cars as dirty mechanized wagons, whereas hunter gatherers would see them as (evil?) magic. Also, one can be shocked by more than one thing at a time, and the presence of one type of shock does not invalidate the others.
Just because homelessness is not the worst modern problem, does not mean it is not a problem. The fact that it is a recent problem here in America (to the degree we see it today, anyway) suggests that it may be more tractable than, say, cars or industry (which I don't disagree are also problems).
I agree that people who do not want to contribute to a community should leave. There is an interesting symmetry here though - do you feel the same way about non-native (to the city) homeless? Are the homeless contributing? Or are they exempt from this requirement? I assume you will say they are exempt or that they are contributing in some way, and if you don't mind I am interested to hear your reasoning.
Answering this earnestly with the assumption that the final paragraph is in good faith. And stating for the record that the below summarizes my attempt to imagine the best we could do with the ingredients we have. If I were building a world out of whole cloth, my ambition would be grander.
To be clear about the whole Amish/uncontacted tribe/et all scenarios -- the point I intended (but perhaps did not make) was that I'm not especially interested in what hypothetical people think about anything. They don't exist. Every single real world example suffers from problems in the vein of those present with the Amish example. Kowtowing to the needs of hypothetical people has, historically, caused far greater harm than good.
To your questions -- my beliefs in this arena largely boil down to this: each member of a community has an inherent responsibility to contribute that which they are able, both in terms of ability and in terms of resources. No more, but also no less.
The reason this responsibility exists is that every member's success is inextricably linked with their community -- because success (beyond sheer survival) is measured by community. One cannot exist without the other -- and a high tide lifts all boats. In our current global system, living outside of any community is, practically, impossible -- so the responsibility is inherent.
Homeless are not exempt, but consideration would be made for the distinction between folks of comfortable means versus those living on a day-by-day basis. One group has resources and ability in excess of their needs. Another group lacks the resources to sustain ability. To lift them up is to lift the community. Sure some folks would refuse to change in accordance with societal standards -- but a lot less than you might expect, once the barriers of social shame, inefficient and needlessly cruel bureaucracy, and infantilization are removed. And yes, were we to implement this tomorrow, the above wouldn't happen overnight. The point is consistency and transparency in service of making everyone understand that they the individual is part of a greater whole.
Which is to say: I believe that the more one contributes to a community, the more the community becomes what it's meant to be: a collection of disparate people making up a symbiotic human ecosystem.
Obviously this system assumes folks acting in good faith, which feels lacking at the moment. But I'm hardly alone in believing that lack is due in large part to the current lack of everyone having skin the game, due to policies pushing problems back and forth, costing everyone money and attention, and accomplishing nothing but creating frustrated factions.
I mean, someone from rural America who never watches the news would likely feel scared in Seattle. Doesn't mean they are an any point during that fear in any danger.
Framing it as desensitization isn't quite right. That implies that the city folk are mistaken in their perceptions and can't see how bad or dangerous their surroundings are. The city folk have a more correct view of the city than suburbanites and out-of-towners.
If anyone is desensitized to homelessness in the city, it's the people who no longer treat the homeless as people imo.
(sorry for the delayed reply - I would've preferred to be prompt to keep things conversational. But HN said I was going too fast and blocked me from commenting for a while. Which makes me think I got muted due to flagging or something. I posted 3 replies here about Seattle and got immediately hit with it).
Thanks for a level headed reply on this contentious topic.
By desensitization, I mean with respect to the negative instinctive feeling an unacclimated human has when they are in such an environment.
So then, you are saying that city folk eventually stop feeling this feeling, and it starts to feel normal (again, purely at an instinctive feelings level, not saying city folk start to think it is “okay” that people are homeless).
Agree that people living in a place always have a more accurate view on its qualities than outsiders do, and also agree that dehumanizing the homeless is an even greater degree of desensitization.
I wonder then if the normal feeling that comes represents the instinct actually turning off, or the instinct being habituated and simply no longer noticed by the conscious mind? If it’s the latter, then could this result in long term increased mental stress for people living in such cities? That sort of tracks…
The irony in Seattle being Kashma Sawant the socialist city council member for Capitol Hill being partially responsible for a lot of the chaos. I guess it just goes to show you can’t really generalize based on ethnicity.
I want to share a personal anecdote here. It may be tangential, but I think it’s worth sharing anyway.
I live in a cosmopolitan city in India. I am an “upper caste” Hindu. I have been brought up in a relatively liberal environment and have not experienced much first hand caste-based discrimination (because of my sheltered upbringing no doubt). I have always thought of my family as liberal.
A few years ago, I wanted to marry a girl who was out of my caste. My family did not accept her immediately. They never uttered the word “caste”, but made snide remarks about “her community”, and about how “our community” is full of “ambitious intellectuals” and hers is not (implying moral superiority to ambition and intellect). They had not even met her. They just knew her surname and had seen pictures. Made me wonder where all of these assumptions came from.
She was not privy to these conversations but she realised that something was not right, and asked me if caste was being an issue.
And that’s when it struck me that maybe it was caste that was being the issue. My mind swirled with nasty thoughts for a few weeks. “Should I marry this girl who is outside of my caste?”, “What if no one accepts me? I’ll be alone”, etc. For someone who is fairly liberal, well educated, and well travelled, I was shocked at the kind of thoughts appearing in my mind. They were more powerful than I ever thought they could be.
Thankfully, due to my meditation practices, I had developed the ability to “witness” my thoughts without simply giving in to them. That way, I could let my thoughts flow, and wait for my fear to pass. After the fear had passed, my mind would settle down and I’d think rationally again.
What’s the point of this anecdote? I had an important realisation. It is quite possible that the things we call “casteism” is nothing but a flavour of the fear of abandonment, or the fear of being expelled from society by not conforming to societal standards. I realised that the standards can be absolutely absurd, but it is the mere fear of being abandoned by society that can make a human being conform and commit the most ridiculous actions. All out of fear.
Take whatever conclusion you may from this. It is an insight into the mind of someone who never thought would discriminate on the basis of caste, and yet my mind veered into that abyss, if only for a short duration. I escaped and lived to tell the tale. Thanks for reading.
Thanks for sharing this! Those who are not exposed to the caste based discrimination or even the concept of caste can't begin to appreciate how insidious it is. Your comment brings forward perfectly how caste acts at multiple levels and is pervasive in the Indian society.
My favourite example about this is from a (for the lack of better word) sub-religion named "Lingayats". It traces origins to a philosopher named Basavanna. He wanted a community sans discrimination so that every one from regardless of caste would be treated equally. And yet here we are, after hundreds of years, where there are 50+ castes/sub-castes in Lingayats too.
I had a classmate in France whose father was a Catholic Indian from Mangalore, a former Portuguese colony, and he mentioned that there were Catholics from right and wrong backgrounds for marriage (he married a French woman). Muslims have not escaped the caste system entirely either.
> exposed to the caste based discrimination or even the concept of caste
I think there's two sides of caste. One is the socio-economic and the other is religious. It's very very hard for me to make a generality about the Hindu religion but my understanding is that (at least from what I have seen in one specific location) Hindu priests and religious leaders had to be Brahmin. It seemed like cleaniness, washing, and purity for things like pooja were taken extremely seriously. I don't see how you can hold those beliefs and not be exposed to the concept of caste. I know Hinduism has many sects and Brahmin is not even the only upper caste, so there might be other views and I have seen non Brahmins claim to be priests, etc. But at least mainstream, traditional Hinduism seemed like caste was a part of it. I would also distinguish that in India, a lot of Brahmin priests were actually poor so it's not necessarily higher in socio-economic status.
I would be interested in hearing other perspectives though on views of caste because I definitely don't know a lot about Hinduism.
From what I recall, theoretically, and perhaps actually in the very distant past, caste was not hereditary. You gained your caste by your own actions. If you became a Hindu priest, and acted as a good one, you'd be a Brahmin by your acts.
From what little I understand of Indian systems the sub-castes are basically just extended family networks and allied families. The entire population of Scotland is less than 6 million, yet according to Wikipedia there are 16 named Scottish clans that begin with the letter A.
> From what little I understand of Indian systems the sub-castes are basically just extended family networks and allied families.
This isn't really true. Castes and sub-castes are endogamous. But the groups are large enough that members wouldn't really have any discernable familial ties with majority of the group.
It's the same with Scottish clans and allied clans. The oldest clans date back over a thousand years and sprouted off-shoots that would be 20 or 30 generations removed when counted back solely from the paternal (named) line (though sometimes the name passes through the maternal line, but this remove still holds). And while less endogamous than Indian castes, historically marriages between antagonist clans would likely be less frequent than between allied clans.
Sometimes clans have expanded themselves by basically recruiting distant relatives who have a different surname. Offering them food or money to change their surname to the clan name.
Well yes, tribalism was a survival trait why is why conformity is so deeply ingrained in human minds and social organization.
That said, in India caste (varna and jati) correlate with genetic clusters that have maintained for millennia by higher levels of endogamy than, say, Ashkenazi Jews:
“What the data were showing us was that the genetic distinctions among jati groups within India were in many cases real, thanks to the long-standing history of endogamy in the subcontinent. People tend to think of India, with its more than 1.3 billion people, as having a tremendously large population, and indeed many Indians as well as foreigners see it this way. But genetically, this is an incorrect way to view the situation. The Han Chinese are truly a large population. They have been mixing freely for thousands of years. In contrast, there are few if any Indian groups that are demographically very large, and the degree of genetic differentiation among Indian jati groups living side by side in the same village is typically two to three times higher than the genetic differentiation between northern and southern Europeans. The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations.”
Excerpt From
Who We Are and How We Got Here, Chapter 6, “The Collision That Formed India”
by David Reich
Ostracism is a well known punishment in the western world. Greeks used to practice it. So are the recent woke cancellation standards. It is not unique to India.
The Athenian practice historians call "ostracism" was a specific system used to exile individual political rivals. It was rare, codified, targeted, and usually used against the powerful or ascendent.
It shares a word with a modern broad concept of shunning, but shouldn't be confused with it. It certainly doesn't relate to broad discrimination or "woke cancellation."
It wasn't even social shunning, just a political defence against extreme popularity to prevent tyranny. After the expiration of ostracism you could rejoin Athens exactly as you were before.
I don't say this to defend the practice, but shunning is not modern. Shunning was advocated by Paul the Apostle (or whoever wrote those letters to the Corinthians) about two thousand years ago. Banishment and social exclusion has also been observed in many social animals besides humans.
"Woke" is just the latest term for social justice. There are people who don't want a society that is just but they can't say it in the open (as much) any more, so they come up with euphemisms. The previous was "politically correct."
I think it is against the spirit of HN, because it is a shallow discussion terminator and an ad hominem all in one.
It is too ambiguous to be about anything in particular, so we should just talk about the real issues specifically and in depth. If it is an issue to be against caste reforms, discuss that, don't just call someone woke and close the book.
It is also a bit of a dog whistle even if accidentally, since it isn't actually about any specific issue, but people can still identify that they are against it. Call something "woke" and suddenly people who never cared about the issue before will have a problem with it.
Language is weird though, the word has evolved a weird meaning and been co-opted by political agendas, so it is just nice to not drag that shitshow into real discussions as well.
> There are people who don't want a society that is just but they can't say it in the open (as much) any more, so they come up with euphemisms.
There are also reasonable and good people who have legitimate disagreements about what a just society looks like and don't appreciate the "you're either with us or against us" attitude you're projecting.
For example, I can be 100% on board with treating everyone respectfully and equally under the law while still thinking it's harmful to try to erase the contributions of good people from centuries past on the grounds that they weren't good enough by our modern standards. That's the kind of thing that I label "woke cancellation", and you'll never persuade me that judging a historical figure based on our modern values is just.
You know that the contemporary abolitionist Quakers of the time condemned slave owners by those contemporary religious standards, right? And that various contemporary religions were against the kind of hagiography and 'idolatry' embodied in statues. You don't need to impose modern morals to find fault with heroes of the past (or the statues made to them).
Otherwise I agree with roguecoder. Telling more of the truth about people and situations is to the benefit of history and civics. It shows us that flawed people can lead, and it shows us that our present leaders and politicians may have serious flaws, but that doesn't mean they aren't effective leaders. It just means they have stuff to work on, and we shouldn't okay whatever they do as long as it is to our benefit (i.e. the ends don't always justify the means).
> It shows us that flawed people can lead, and it shows us that our present leaders and politicians may have serious flaws, but that doesn't mean they aren't effective leaders.
If this were the goal, I would embrace it wholeheartedly. I have no problem with historians telling true stories in all their messy details, and I'm fine with removing historical figures from pedestals and showing how they were flawed humans just like those we have today.
What I strongly object to is that in most cases telling and learning from the truth is obviously not the goal: see the massive witch hunts surrounding James Webb. It was never important whether or not the accusations against him were correct, the important thing was to drag another name through the muck in order to score virtue points in modern politics.
The attitude driving most of these incidents isn't one of respectful-but-full disclosure, it's more reminiscent of people in the Middle Ages digging up and mutilating corpses to make a political or religious point.
I think the problem here is that politicians are mixing what happens in schools and what happens in the public. The public sphere has a bunch of people and interest groups very vocally airing all of the dirty laundry that they can find. And this will rightfully never change as long as we have a free society. I hope the vast majority of schools are more academic in class (especially K-12, there's room for more leeway in college as it's important to provoke and teach critical thinking).
Parents are mostly exposed to the hateful heretic-burning historical revisionism, not the careful, constructive, academic approach to telling the full story. When the kids come home saying that they learned X, Y, or Z about a historical figure, the parents assume (right or wrong) that they're being fed the hateful garbage that they see in the public sphere, so they lash out at the curriculum.
Some in the Left use that as evidence that conservative parents are hateful and (to quote OP) "don't want a society that is just", but what actually happened is that the parents were never given the opportunity to engage with the full story: they were taught the saintly version in school and then in later life exposed to the demonic version. As far as they can tell those are the only two choices they're being offered.
This is a good point I hadn't really thought about.
I think the lesson to pull from all of this is to try not to be a demagogue, and do your best to communicate in such a way that you can't be misinterpreted or misquoted as a demagogue.
... which "good people" are you talking about here? I haven't heard anyone talking smack about Hildegard von Bingen, for example, or Isaac Newton.
I have heard people who believe we should tell the whole truth about historical figures like Thomas Jefferson, who raped a teenage slave he owned & perpetrated genocide of Indigenous people, or Christopher Columbus, whose contemporaries condemned the genocides he committed, but that isn't "cancelling" anyone: it is just no longer being willing to lie for the comfort of the powerful.
hey i just wanted to say thank you for writing this - it gives a really interesting insight into a set of complicated social/cultural practices. It's so easy to proclaim "i am above this" or "i would never", but I appreciate the vulnerability and honest self-reflection here.
It’s pretty common everywhere to avoid socializing or marrying someone from a place doesn’t share values. For instance you’d almost never see a woman from a well to do family marry a tradesman even if he’s a good man who would provide and is handsome.
Apart from some very common surnames like Tripathi, Dwivedi, Gowda, Reddy, etc. it's going to be very hard to learn to associate names with castes. Each state and each region has its own traits, which don't translate across that region. For example, my state, Karnataka, has a handful of regions of its own. I can sometimes tell that a person is from south coastal KA or north KA, but as for caste, I'd have no clue.
> How can I learn more about which names belong to which class?
Any name that is overtly Sanskrit in origin and invokes some Hindu god(dess) is a tell-tale of upper-caste origin. Sometimes the name embeds the caste itself. This rule works across the North-South divide in India.
North Indian examples: Dwi/Tri/Chaturvedi, Bharadvaj, Mukherji, Chatterji, Bandhopadhyay, Bhattacharya
South Indian examples: Iyer, Iyengar, Rao, Murthy, Murali, Srinivasan, Vasudevan, etc.
Generalising such rules you either end up getting into tangled mess of argument similar to sibling thread or it'll be too generic to be of any use or worse.
So no, please don't do it by North/South India etc., You go state by state and learn about common upper class surnames. To pick a Maharashtra sized hole in your rule, how would you categorise Chitpavan brahmin's surnames? Godbole, Phadke, Godse etc., don't even trace their origin to Sanskrit.
How about elaborating on what is wrong, instead of merely saying so?
Furthermore, are you claiming that a Bhattacharya or an Iyengar is not of an upper caste, or that their first/surnames are not explicitly Sanskrit in origin?
I don't claim to generalise—there are always exceptions to the rule.
- Iyengar is not of Sanskrit origin. On the other hand the unambiguously Dalit surname Chamar is.
- First names are dictated more by fashion than by caste. And the names of deities are used across castes. The idea that first names are markers of caste will sound patently absurd to anyone living in India.
- Rao and Murthy are used across castes. No South Indian will mistake them for caste markers.
> I don't claim to generalise
Really? Because "is a tell-tale of upper-caste origin" and "This rule works across the North-South divide in India" sound like generalizations to me.
Do you really think propagating these misconceptions is productive?
> - Iyengar is not of Sanskrit origin. On the other hand the unambiguously Dalit surname Chamar is.
You are cherry-picking examples from my list to prove a point.
Furthermore, the etymology of 'Iyengar' is contested, and possibly cognate to the Sanskrit 'ārya'.
Perhaps I should clarify: there are always exceptions to the rule. However, I resolutely assert that Sanskrit-derived first and last names are markers of upper-caste ancestry. Yes, there are people of lower-caste with Sanskrit-derived names, and there are people with Dravidian/tribal names from so-called higher castes. That said, the latter is a highly unlikely combination.
My experience has been that even beyond caste, huge tech companies get these weird race/ethnicity based fiefdoms embedded within them. The company might be “improving diversity” but there are whole teams from director down that are 90% Indian immigrants and the Indian team members are promoted from within, same for East Asian, haven’t seen Slavic type yet but probably out there. Had some strange experiences where 7/8 coworkers were Chinese and routinely spent the entire day talking together in Chinese and excluding me from like regular work convos high impact projects and general progress early in my career.
> My experience has been that even beyond caste, huge tech companies get these weird race/ethnicity based fiefdoms embedded within them.
I've had the same experience. It's very weird when you realize you've been hired into such an ethnic enclave in which you aren't that ethnicity, and then learning that your boss's boss is looking for a way to trade you to another team without ever meeting you, mere days after you joined. Thankfully that trade went through and I ended up on a less racist team..
>...and routinely spent the entire day talking together in Chinese and excluding me from like regular work convos high impact projects and general progress early in my career.
Outside the US, I've seen companies with a diverse work force implement "english only" policies in the office.
It’s not that it’s racist to bring it up, it’s that if your an IC eng experiencing this your manager, skip level and 2x skip are likely in on the whole race based fiefdom thing and the next person to talk to is a senior director/VP who is a very important person that you rarely see and never talk with.
Take it for whatever it’s worth but I have an Indian-American friend who worked at Google and said the Indian immigrant managers there form a clique that discriminates against US-born Indian-Americans as well.
> The 39-year-old immigrant from India, who works in Seattle on a H-1B visa, said as soon as he heard the question “Do you eat meat?” from his Indian manager he knew he was in trouble.
> By admitting to eating meat, the tech worker had exposed himself as a member of an oppressed caste, or a Dalit, formerly known as an “untouchable,” in the social hierarchy that is pervasive in South Asian countries.
(EDIT: if the article and allegations are true)
I say the following as an outsider, an
American, and with the utmost respect for other cultures and their right to dignity and the integrity of their traditions within our society:
Jesus Christ. What the fuck is wrong with this person.
This is an unacceptable behavior, and it should be banned as a condition of entry to the country. This supposedly enlightened and woke country. Although this is a cultural tradition -- and it's not our place to judge what may or may not go on in India -- all humans are equal here, and this tradition should not be allowed in the United States.
(EDIT: Maybe this story is a false flag, maybe this is all fake, to justify layoffs, purges, etc... but if not, the above is my opinion as an anon.)
> By admitting to eating meat, the tech worker had exposed himself as a member of an oppressed caste, or a Dalit
This is nonsense. The majority of Indians, upper caste or otherwise eat meat. Vegetarians make up less than 2% of the population of my home state.
I have no trouble believing that Indians abroad act out their casteist bigotry in vile ways. But when I read something that gets the details so wrong, I start to wonder how much of it is just made up.
I am from Punjab, & certainly there are more than 2% of vegetarians in Punjab (maybe more people drink alcohol & but not eat meat). A google search says 33% of Punjabis are vegetarian. Stereotype is typical Punjabi eats chicken, saag, butter, liquor.
Another complexity is, different levels of vegetarians. One who eat egg only. One who eat fish only. Or chicken only, no mutton. Or no pork. Or never beef. Or any combination. Or depends on season, day, weather, people. People might be secretly eating meat without telling parents or family.
Although your statement may be completely true, less than 2% vegi, (stereotypes) for South Indian states, Bengal, Orissa etc.
Yes, Punjabis are very caste aware in USA, Jatt & such, and that absolutely come into play here in California while making social connections, gathering, groups. At works, retail locations, hiring, Punjabi owners care less about caste & more about cost.
But diet isn't the only data point here, pretty sure diet plus home state/region (maybe discernable from accent and/or surname) is likely enough to determine it
> pretty sure diet plus home state/region (maybe discernable from accent
You would be wrong. There is absolutely no way to tell a person's caste based on where they come from.
> surname
Surname could be an indicator but that doesn't need questions about diet.
I know people who were raised in vegetarian Hindu households in India who became beef lovers after they moved to the US. I'm skeptical that questions about diet are particularly useful for a would-be caste discriminator.
A lot of non-Dalit people eat meat in India. The only thing eating meat proves is you are not a Brahmin, the priest class, who were long considered the most pure and closer to God. In addition Jains and Gujaratis also do not typically eat meat.
If some Indian were to ask me if I eat meat, I wouldn't immediately associate malice with that enquiry. Talking about food back home, is a common source of connection for a lot of the Indian diaspora.
OP is correct by and large. But Hinduism is full of contradictions, for every rule there are are half a dozen exceptions so your observation isn't an anomaly.
The thing is, there's no master text (unlike Indian constitution) that one can consult and conclude "Brahmin == no meat". Someone would cite a scripture from an ancient Hindu text (for example, Rigveda, or Manu Smriti etc.,) and draw a conclusion, however the same text might as well contain a scripture few pages down that says exactly the opposite.
I was indeed responding to this meaning. I was commenting that it's perfectly possible for a community to be Brahmin and yet be meat eating. Just that it's not mainstream. In India, the very first assumption one makes the moment they hear Brahmin/Jain is that they must be pure vegetarians.
> Not eating meat however is a strong signal though
I also personally know several counter-examples to this rule.
If meat/no-meat is the only signal people are using, there must be a lot of false positives and negatives. Or my sample of the population is somehow atypical.
Yes it is not, plenty of soft cues are signals - today's generation isn't good at identifying them ( a good thing!).
Meat/no-meat is the most common signal, certainly not the only one, surname would be another, language (ethnolect or dialect) is sometimes another.
There are no perfect methods short of asking, some older people and more overtly racists (even they aren't aware) straight up do ask.
Also most racists only really care whether you are their caste or not, it doesn't matter what you actually are, so classification into their group or not is easier than do it precisely.
There are a lot of false positives and negatives, which is why this is a broken system in cities and places where you couldn't possibly know their caste from their diet or their surname.
Nothing short of explicitly asking for their caste would let you know 100%, people are just really good at generalizing.
The real question Ive heard being asked is "Veg or Non veg?" This in many places is used to ask the caste question without explicitly asking for caste.
The other question I've heard being asked of Indians is "what is your full name?" as most upper caste Indians indicate their caste in their surname/family name. If your surname isn't upper caste, you are likely to be silently dropped in many social situations.
So someone who eats meat and doesn't have an uppercaste name is a lower caste. However since some upper castes do eat meat the surname question gets them through.
The color of your skin is the third SELECT. At some point all of it seems like a DB query.
In many localities and apartment complexes across India you will find it difficult to get houses because of these simple questions. A brief stint in Bangalore was eye opening with real estate agents being super frank about caste specificity.
Veg or non veg will get different answers from my family. Dad eats meat because liquor. Mum doesn't because she never did. We siblings are split half & half.
This question may get different answers based on season, day, time, or even people around, or even meat options. Navratre no mean, no meat on sundays, Tuesday, Saturday, or such. No meat in front of parents or relatives. No meat if preparing for some big exam. No meat if it is pork or beef. Chicken, egg, fish ok.
I'm guessing the journalist made the wrong simplifying assumption. A lot of people from the brahmin caste don't eat meat, so maybe the anecdote is about a brahmin and not-a-brahmin interaction. There's plenty of people who're not dalits and eat meat.
The journalist may have attempted to "simplify" the anecdote instead of explaining all these details, but ended up screwing it up. To anyone who's Indian this comes across like it's "fake news", whatever their intention maybe.
Americans already have enough damaging stereotypes of Indians, it would be nice if reporters were careful reporting subtle problems instead of editorializing everything to fit their audience.
Facts. Quite a few ignorant comments on this post follow the classic "discrimination has nO pLaCe iN tHiS cOuNtrY!!!" by amnesiacs who need to be reminded that just 6 decades ago it was a COMMON & POPULAR American cultural practice to hog-tie pregnant black women upside down on tree branches and burn them alive for fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States.
Should we talk about how equally they treated Native Americans? (they've slaughtered 99% of them and stolen their land which they continue to live on and enjoy as their own).
And remember, they're going to teach the world about human rights and equality!
This is laughable and absurd. Eating meat has nothing to do with caste. Please don't make assumptions based on some shitty article. It clearly has an agenda.
Now, let me tell you what Indians do make fun of. If you are a hardcore vegetarian, meat eating Indians will make fun of you calling you "Grass Eater" as a joke among friends. But that is not too different than American culture as well. Even the legendary Arnold Schewarnegger in the movie "Escape Plan" said "You hit like a vegetarian".
That's simply incorrect. Meat consumption correlates strongly with caste and the traditional reason is that it's a signifier of high social and religious purity. The American equivalent to this is teetotalling which is more prevalent among high social status Protestants. (essentially the US Brahmin class).
And even today of course vegetarianism has the same function. Vegetarians in the WWest as well as India are still more affluent and educated and it's a sign of civilized behavior, self-discipline, moral status etc. Arnold, as a bodybuilder (derogatory term "meathead" is no accident) may be rich but as an actor isn't a traditional upper class member.
I've always associated religious teetotalism more with low church/Evangelical protestantism (e.g. Baptists and Methodists) rather than 'high church' denominations in, say, Anglican/Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or some Lutheran sects. The former doesn't exactly seem like high social status to me.
Uh, there are a lot of supposedly upper caste people who eat meat. Maybe in the old days but I thought the caste stuff was no longer a thing. It’s really the wokeism / sjw finding their next supposed cause.
But I agree with you. By putting that statement in quotes, I implied that the OP had said that. And they didn't. Wasn't fair of me to do that. Apologies.
> This is an unacceptable behavior, and it should be banned as a condition of entry to the country.
Or, we could embrace everyone, establish equal rules for participation in our society and show them a better way. I think this “Jesus Christ” you invoke would agree.
I live in SF, and I've had co-workers here open "brag" about being able to tell whether someone is a brahmin or a kshatriya (sp?).
I had one co-worker who would brag that he isn't discriminative to anyone, except other Indians. We (non-Indians) would kind of have a response of "ah ha ha ha yea... you could do that we can't".
Because of course as team members who aren't minorities we can't be found to do any of that stuff, but there's plenty of minorities who have taken over in discriminating against others based on their own cultural criteria and seem to get a pass.
I would imagine a big reason why you can get away with this is that most people who are not Indian have very little understanding about it and would find it hard to detect a pattern of misbehavior.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong in being able to identify certain groups. The issue is when the identification is followed by a different behavior.
I can identify different breeds of cats but it doesn’t mean I will mistreat bengals.
This may sound crude, but I think is pretty close to reality. This is Indian activists trying to muscle in on the massive DEI industry in the US, from which they are currently excluded.
There is zero evidence that caste is a causal factor in the US, in the sense that those of lower castes can have signigicant discrimination imposed on them by upper castes. Of course there will be many casteist Indians in the US. There are many in India, so moving to the US will not make their numbers zero. But their ability to impose casteist discrimination in the US is pretty close to zero.
I moved to the US 40 years ago, have dozens of Indian friends, but have never heard of even a single significant case. There is a grand total of one case (the Cisco one) in court, and that's still to be decided.
> There is zero evidence that caste is a causal factor in the US ... There is a grand total of one case (the Cisco one) in court, and that's still to be decided.
The plaintiff in that case is presumably putting forward evidence, so "zero evidence" is putting this rather strongly. You say that you've never witnessed it, but I've never witnessed overt racial discrimination and I don't try to claim that therefore such things don't happen.
Here's what I see every time this topic comes up: I read plenty of horror stories from victims and from non-Indian witnesses, and plenty of fervent denials from admittedly-upper-caste Indian Americans. Could there be some massive astroturfing campaign propping up false anecdotes? It's conceivable. But a much simpler explanation is that there are lots of lower-caste people who are discriminated against and lots of upper-caste people who are blind to it or won't admit they perpetrate it.
The point was that there was just the one legal case, and even that isn't decided. Before creating a law to fight an evil, shouldn't there be some examples of the evil in operation?
That's my point: there's plenty of evidence (at least one ongoing court case and lots of personal anecdotes), and there are plenty of people denying that the evidence is real (lots of personal anecdotes). Governments have to weigh the evidence for and against and make a decision.
In general, when weighing evidence, negative evidence cannot be given the same weight as positive evidence.
For example, I have never seen an elephant in the wild, but it would be a very foolish process that takes my testimony as proof that elephants are extinct in the wild without at least listening to the people who claim to have seen elephants in the wild. A more likely explanation for my negative evidence is that I have never been in an elephant's natural habitat.
In the same way, if there are lots of voices saying that caste discrimination happens and lots saying that it doesn't, it would be irrational to listen to the negative evidence to the exclusion of the positive evidence.
This is exactly the kind of comment that leaves me more persuaded that the accusations are true. A single-purpose throwaway account appears and rambles for a while about how privilege is all subjective anyway, tries to distract from the question by crying "imperialism!", and throws out vague allegations about an anti-Hindu conspiracy.
If this is the best defense that can be mustered, Seattle is on the right track.
Caste discrimination in the US manifests more as social "discrimination", where people from a caste lean towards others from the same caste than others due to perceived brotherhood. I feel like this especially manifests in groups where there are already a large number of Indians, such that being Indian itself isn't enough brotherhood. Eg, when choosing between two equally qualified Indians, choosing the person from the same caste (which is slightly ironic since a similar idea applies to diversity initiatives).
As another commenter said, it's a sort of "fractal" discrimination.
I used to work in a FAANG and witnessed caste discrimination firsthand. It’s one of those things that most don’t notice at all unless one is either directly involved or a direct witness to it in America. Since the concept is so culturally foreign to a lot of people it simply goes unnoticed in the workplace to a lot of people who are not privy to the possibility of it happening.
There is no possible positive justification for the existence of castes: It's plainly just a softer version of slavery. It should be of the utmost importance to not only prevent the spread of castes, but to utterly destroy them as a concept.
> It should be of the utmost importance to not only prevent the spread of castes, but to utterly destroy them as a concept.
I don't think castes are spreading ideologically outside of India. A lot of Indian immigrants in the US completely ignore caste once they get here.
One problem is that the upper castes benefit from the system. They're sometimes wealthier and speak better English, so it's easier for them to immigrate and become managers at companies.
My experience is, an Indian born in India never leaves caste behind. Yes, Jatts pay no importance to caste when hiring, but them & every other caste makes matrimonial connections, social groups, gathering etc only in their caste. Only the third or fourth generation I have seen is kind of out of that shadow.
Indians born in India 90% of the time want to marry indian only, maybe by choice or by parent's or society's pressure. That too in same religion and caste.
Like I said in my original comment, caste mostly doesn't matter when hiring at work, but people don't marry out of caste, religion. Intercaste Love marriages happen, no doubt, but maybe in a single digit percentage in USA in Indians.
First few generations still know & believe in caste for matrimonial. Brahmins, rajpur, jatt etc still is the factor. The third or fourth generation born starts paying minimal attention to caste when finding love.
That will never work. Caste discrimination is bad and deserves to be gutted but there are aspects of caste that are deeply intertwined with the religion. For instance, certain families(regardless of their own caste) only permit Brahmins to carry-out certain religious rituals at their household. Castes also ensure that benign traditions are forwarded to the next generation. Affirmative action and criminalization of discrimination are much better approaches than attacking castes as a whole.
It isn't. However, attacking harmless religious practices isn't always wise. It might work in the west but it can have disastrous consequences in a religious country like India.
Not all schools of Hinduism recognize caste, much less consider it unchangeable.
People can practice their religion however they want, but it is also entirely fair to judge religions on the basis of the actual impact they have on the societies where they are dominant. I certainly do with Evangelical Christianity & its support of racism, classism, and sexism.
While I agree with you in this case we do have to acknowledge that such a statement can only be made from a position of moral superiority. That’s an uncomfortable position to take in the general case.
Yep. So am I. But we have to acknowledge that requires enforcing our morality on other cultures. And the consequence of that is that we believe our morality is superior.
I don't feel bad about objective moral superiority. Just beacuse the caste system is ingraind in Indian culture doesn't mean it should be respected or allowed.
Your sentence is what a typical fence sitter would say, where they think you can go through life not offending bad people and thinking that makes you tolerant.
Another thing I've noticed aside from caste discrimination (as a white guy) is how much Indians talk about marriage (and the way it's talked about)
I saw this post on blind a couple months ago where a woman engineer reported her manager to hr because he asked her if she was married point blank. Most of the top voted comments were really nasty towards her, calling her mentally ill etc. I have other examples on top of this from work or uni but this was the most poignant one
Then I saw this* article like a week later, good read
> Many landlords see renting to single women alone or in groups (and single men, to a lesser extent) as a risk — to the stability of families, to the reputations of neighborhoods.
Yeah, no. Landlords don't like renting to single people of either gender. The rental listings usually say Families only or No bachelors. I don't know from where the author got the idea that single men are less likely to be seen as a risk. But that doesn't match my lived experience of more than 7 years in Bengaluru . In one particular instance though, the landlord was willing to rent to spinsters but not to bachelors.
Indian women face plenty of structural issues and discrimination. But this particular issue is not gendered. And it is disingenuous that the article tries to spin it that way.
I wish the article had pointed out the Hindu American Foundation's long history of support for Hindu-supremacist nationalist causes, in addition to its denial of the impact of caste discrimination.
It is good to see Seattle stand up for what is right here.
Hindu American Foundation works against Hinduphobia in USA. You are falling in the same trap of working for Hindu causes = modi supporter which borders on racist attitude. Raising voices for Hindu representation doesn't mean that person is batting for Indian govt in US. This is actually racist thinking. Japanese faced the same thing during WW2, russians and chinese during the red scare and now Hindus in America.
It actively supports a narrow, reactionary view of Hinduism, including (unsuccessfully) suing Hindu activists who actually are fighting against Hinduphobia. Hindu nationalism is a massive problem, just like Christian nationalism is a massive problem here in America.
Supporting Hindu nationalism is not required to support Hinduism any more than supporting Zionism is required to support Judaism.
Hindu nationalism in US doesn't make sense. HAF works in USA. Your argument is flawed. Why should I care about India and connect it to HAF ? That is as i pointed out, flawed and racist thinking.
- How is this implemented?
- How is caste defined under American law?
- Is there an enumerated list of all castes?
- How does one demonstrate under American law that person A is of caste X and person B is of caste Y?
- How is caste "assigned"?
- Can one switch castes? Is ones caste immutable?
- Does one register a caste like a political party?
This feels like a massive green field of legal questions under Western law.
These are all reasonable questions, but probably irrelevant for this kind of law: the law is not (necessarily) interested in determining a person's caste, but instead whether the defendant acted under a belief about a person's caste.
> - How is caste defined under American law? - Is there an enumerated list of all castes?
The US is a common law system, so the answer is "it doesn't matter, it's up to court interpretation."
> - How does one demonstrate under American law that person A is of caste X and person B is of caste Y?
This starts to get to the heart of the matter, what does a plaintiff have to show to be able to demonstrate discrimination on the basis of caste. My guess is that caste discrimination is already effectively covered by existing protected classes, but trying to convince a judge that the fact pattern is working towards establishing caste to thence be used for discrimination is likely to be exceedingly difficult at present. Add in "caste" as an explicit protected class, and, well, the plaintiff's job is much easier.
> - How is caste "assigned"? - Can one switch castes? Is ones caste immutable? - Does one register a caste like a political party?
These are all more or less irrelevant for the purposes of discrimination. It's the defendant (alleged discriminator)'s belief of the plaintiff's caste that matters. If that belief is incorrect, but was still used for the purposes of discrimination, it's illegal.
People are born in caste. One caste in one geographic area might have better prosperity than sane caste in other. People can leave religion, but in practice, never the caste. There are broad groups of castes, then sub groups, & more sub groups, & then numbers of layers of surnames. Father's cast goes to kids usually, but intercaste marriage usually gets the worse of both castes. Each side thinks the newly wed couple is not their member any more. Having money, power & reputation sometimes covers all the bad things of a caste. A high caste but poor person will face more difficulty than a super rich powerful politician of a lower caste.
1. Indian legal and governance systems maintain a list of recognized castes , these exists for reservation for government jobs, loans, elected seats[4] university admissions or promotions in government companies/departments - there are many problems with the list (outdated, lot of politically influenced changes ... )
2. Caste is hereditary, caste originated from family profession , somewhat akin to occupational surnames in some western countries like Smith [1]. Indian surnames also can indicate caste, the Self-Respect Movement from last century in the South evolved to drop surnames to reduce discrimination [2], and many people in parts of the country ended up use mononymous names.
3. Switching castes while occasionally practically possible was extremely hard, in the traditional orthodox system caste can be lost but not switched, typically lost when the parents are from different castes marry. In practice changing your profession or your son's profession would be the way to switch.
Education and vocational training however was denied back in olden days to keep it hereditary if you couldn't prove your caste background [3] you wouldn't be able to get a teacher or be apprenticed under a master. If you could get away by lying about it or someone from that caste vouched for you then yeah it could be changed.
4. Caste based registrations are a thing in India, mainly used to claim affirmative action in government
5. There is case law in Indian Juriprudence albeit in a different framework. Legal affirmative action frameworks(not the same as anti discriminatory approach in U.S law) are fraught with problems - Indian law has tons of problems of enforcing equitably.
it doesn't matter. caste discrimination is very similar to racial discrimination - of course, race, as well as caste, has no strict definition under law. in fact, i would go as far as to say race cannot possibly be defined in a way that is useful.
to put it differently, if you don't actually belong to "race x", but fulfill someone's stereotype about "race x", you can still become a victim of racial discrimination.
the exact nature of what race or caste is, doesn't matter at all - it's the intent to exclude people based on one's preconceived notions of caste/race that does.
Does this include people with disabilities? The normal interview process is setup to weed out people with neurological disorders, since it requires you to be personable and make a "good impression".
Part of the challenge is that the ADA is different than other anti-discrimination laws. We do usually allow discrimination on the basis of ability. That is, after all, what an interview is trying to do: establish whether someone has the ability to do the job at hand.
What the ADA requires is that a company make accommodations for specific disabilities, in both interviewing and the job itself, to ensure the ability being screened for actually is relevant to the work. https://www.hireautism.org/resource-center/interview-accommo... has examples of accommodations you may request.
"Getting questions ahead of time" and "perform an at-home work sample" are the two I've seen have the most success in our field. Being able to communicate effectively on Zoom is often a part of our day-to-day work in remote positions, especially as either a junior engineer learning or a senior engineer effectively mentoring junior engineers, but being able to type in front of other people is only relevant in shops that practice pair programming and outside of incident scenarios we almost always know what we are about to work on.
Wow, maybe now they'll quit saying it's not a disability (if it's not a disability it's not a protected class by law, you do not actually want a condition reclassified as not a disability).
I'm a very senior person (20+ years) industry experience in India in companies like Msft, Goog etc.
In all these kinds of Multinational companies and even more so in startups (new or old) never see any 'caste' aspect being played out.
If it is there it may be happening in more bottom of the rung companies where meritocracy is not really thing during hiring and then when planning for growth of the employees. In these places one would also typically see 'company veterans' who have minimal tech skills but hold power positions.
Also, the article is not factually correct - being non-vegetarian does not indicate that one is from lower caste. Infact in eastern part of India people from 'higher caste' eat meat and fish.
Casteism is something which you cannot comprehend unless you are a lower caste person yourself.
Imagine how so many things are designed for right handed person and most of us never see that issue which left-handed people face on day-to-day basis.
That is why when you have discussion on caste-discrimination, you have so many upper caste indians defending with sort of "It does not exist anymore"
Its a legit vice in Indian community and I understand most liberal indians dont practice it. But by denying its existence, you are doing a greatest disservice to the community.
Whereas in India caste based discrimination is written in the law. Yes the so called "upper caste" are discriminated against at every step of their life. Be it college admissions or government jobs or getting elected, almost 50% seats are reserved for the "lower caste".
This was written in the law at the time of the formation of republic, as a temporary measure to uplift the lower castes. But no party in power has even talked about removing these even 75 years later, because you know.... Votes!!! It would be a political suicide for a party to undo these reservations.
Now I'm not against giving reservations to weaker sections of the society. But these must be based on economic status, not caste. There are many cases where even the third generation is taking benefits. I personally know a few where the be grand father retired from a plush govt. job that he got under reservation, the father is currently in a top bureaucratic job and the kids are getting reservation seats in medical college admissions. This makes 0 sense. This is only giving rise to more division among caste lines as the upper caste feel like being discriminated against.
The real question is why even with those techniques so few of the high-paying high-ranked jobs are held by historically-marginalized people, not why the country is using the extremely effective tool of affirmative action to mitigate that grave injustice.
Read my comment again. I agree it was necessary at some point. But not anymore. Does the third generation need to take these benefits? Do you think the children of a Deputy Commissioner, or an MLA are being discriminated against? They are the most privileged already with best educational opportunities. Why do they need reservation for college admission?
In the absence of a system to correct for historical and ongoing injustice, you get the English system where 73% of all government jobs are held by people with the generational wealth to attend elite high schools (who are otherwise only 7% of the population). And then you end up with the horrible mess of class-anxious governance by mediocre-but-born-rich folks that is the current disaster England is living through.
The reservation system needs tweaking and excluding privileged people from taking advantage would be a good start. There's already the creamy-layer criteria for OBC reservation, the same can be applied for all categories.
The fact that a small minority is able to corner the benefits of reservation when the overwhelming majority is left out is not a pursuasive argument that reservations are no longer necessary.
Any perceived critique of affirmative action will rustle jimmies. Especially one suggesting affirmative action may be motivated by voter demographics rather than by morality, in spite of the intense focus on voter files in US politics.
There's a striking scene in Naipaul's "An Area of Darkness" where he describes a team "cleaning" a staircase, and really all they're doing is sloshing dirty water around and making it as bad or worse than when they started -- but no matter, it is "clean" because persons of the right caste performed each step of the work.
For what it's worth, caste has fortunately ceased to have meaning in a tiny number of social and geographic circles.
But upper castes are in denial about how caste plays out in the rest of India.
They will claim it was something in the past. Wrong. Upper castes still often whisper about so and so being a *** (impolite way of referring to someone of a lower caste), or about such and such work (e.g. cleaning dishes) being the work of a *** and not a Brahmin like themselves.
Some now claim that caste was created by the British.
Wrong. Al Biruni (traveler from Persia) in 1020 wrote in Tarikh Al-Hind (History of India) about how when there was a communal meal in the village, a barrier needed to be put up between people of lower castes and people of upper castes.
I am an upper caste (meat eating) American Indian.
This stigma attached to caste, eating meat, is real among upper class Indians, especially Brahmins (me), and this needs to be put up as an issue, to hold a mirror to this community.
Many many Indians of these upper castes, especially if they're not meat-eating, tend to be conservative in their cultural and religious values. They disapprove of American culture. They consider meat eating a sin. Some, or many of this upper caste group will support the current Indian government's policy against meat eating. These people live in a bubble.
About caste in India, my upper caste has been discriminating
over the lower castes for more than a thousand years. And growing up we never once had these conversations, either at school or around the dinner table. These traits are ingrained in me, and one way I handle it is by embracing Americanism, and minimizing contact with Indian cultural groups (i'd be an oddball politically anyway). 70% of India is not upper caste. Only now are Dalits (lower castes) waking up in India . And I had to remind my vegetarian wife, 70% of India is meat eating (which she was reluctant to accept) - so you want to judge 70% of Indian people?. She grew up in a Brahmin area of Bangalore where most of her school mates were Brahmins, I grew up in a catholic school where most of my classmates were meat eating Christians. Such factors can dictate cultural attitudes. (I've managed to tutor her well, and bring her around). Many ancient religious texts mention our gods feasting on meat, beef, etc. Yet we act as if we are some holy sacred shit. I've debated disowning my caste (brahmin) but that would offend my SO. Thankfully my 2 kids are a healthy mix of American questioning of such bullshit, and non-religious.
The only defense I can offer is that Indians operate with a mob-mentality - too timid to standup and take a bold stance, and secondly it takes a generation to wear down this kind of ingrained thinking. Critical thinkers we are are not, especially in our personal lives, we tow the line, the existing lines. We're not trailblazers. Our excellence is within the straitjackets of corporate structure, within already established frameworks. The desensitized, one-dimensional corporate American culture is fertile ground for our achievements.
We lead our lives inside the elite tech bubbles, where all that matters is academics, tech elite jobs, and toxic out-dated traditions. We politely smile, but in private within our upper caste living rooms, our families look down on 'other' cultures for their meat consumption, for sexual openness , for the lack of 'spiritual enlightenment' etc.
I welcome this naming and shaming of my community. This flaw in our community should be brought out and talked about. That's healthy.
It feels cathartic to read this. On blind (the anonymous workplace app) the way some Indians speak about the west/women I find super backwards to the point where I’m not sure if it’s real.
I've worked with plenty of Indian engineers who are overjoyed to be in a place where we don't hold systematic power & aren't on the hook to either upholding or fighting these systems of oppression.
But I've also worked with a few dudes who think I'm going to agree with them, and those dudes have said things to me that make my jaw drop. So even here, because I work in tech, I've had to make the choice: do I go along with it? Or do I try to mitigate the power they have to make their beliefs a reality for the people they pre-judge?
If we don't speak up when it happens, it becomes the standard we walk past. But if we do, we're burning the bridges that could help us in the face of racism and bullshit here.
Most Indians (that I have met) - have not grown up in their thinking. The more they mingle with their own, the more the old ways of thinking get re-inforced.
Always makes me wondering - why do these people work in Indian-managed companies? Outside of Indian expats, no one knows or gives a damn about castes. And this is probably the most toxic environment to work in, anyway - Indian companies are known for their power games and nepotism. Why choose them?
Just not caste discrimination. No one who isn't from India or Bangladesh (and partially, Pakistan), has a slightest idea what a caste is and which of them are "better".
My point is that people other than management influence your career. From interviews to mentorship to peer feedback there's lots of places where discrimination can creep in.
We Russians face the same problem (except all us are a "bad" caste). Solution is to try hard to work in environment with no other Russians or Russian-speakers.
This is all virtue signaling. If they really cared about stopping discrimination then they could change it from being a civil issue to a criminal issue. Right now if someone is discriminated against they still have the same old two choices; either they ignore it or they sue. Suing anyone much less a company with deep pockets costs a ton of money and in order to win there has to be a "smoking gun" or a mountain of evidence to prove there was discrimination. And the problem with collecting that evidence is that such discrimination usually happens in person and without any written evidence to show for it at a later date.
Video evidence of personal interactions is very hard to collect in Washington state because it is a "two party consent state"[1]. And people's personal behavior changes when they know they are being recorded[2][3].
I think a better solution to this is to get US Federal "Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964" updated[4] to include caste based discrimination as that will bring this issue to national attention and hopefully enable other people that are not being directly affected by this discrimination to be cognizant of it. Once enough people become aware of the problem then it will start changing the US culturally and societal accepted behaviors which is the only real way to stop this type of discrimination. Of course while dreaming of a better and brighter future I might as well add the removal of all cliques to the list as they are another form of discrimination.
The Dutch constitution explicitly mentions faith based discrimination.
"Allen die zich in Nederland bevinden, worden in gelijke gevallen gelijk behandeld. Discriminatie wegens godsdienst, levensovertuiging, politieke gezindheid, ras, geslacht of op welke grond dan ook, is niet toegestaan"
The civil rights act covers faith based discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodation, etc. The constitution here prohibits the establishment(or preferential treatment) of a religion by government.
The US Constitution sets out what our government can and can't do. And one of the things it can't do is discriminate based on religion. But there is almost nothing in our Constitution restricting the actions of private citizens; that is left for normal laws to take care of.
Seattle is a third world city filled with rampant vandalism, used drug needles, and drug addled vagrants lining every street corner in makeshift tents. The city government may have banned the caste system but they have made the city worse to live in than the poorest parts of India.
By "good kind of discrimination" do you mean affirmative action? Han Chinese is pretty over represented at a lot of tech companies, so I doubt they'd be sought out based on any diversity initiative.
I wonder what the first non-Indian complaints under this law will look like. Is "blue-collar" a caste that office workers can no longer discriminate against?
As a non-veg Indian who does not come from an upper caste and has worked in Seattle, I have yet to experience any instance of caste even being mentioned in Indian circles, let alone experience any semblance of discrimination or see it happen near me.
> By admitting to eating meat, the tech worker had exposed himself as a member of an oppressed caste
This is backwards. Most upper-caste people eat non-veg food, and continuing to be pure-veg is viewed as being behind the times in urban India. On the contrary, I know many people who started eating non-veg food because they didn't want to be seen as prudes.
> dominant castes are unwilling to eat with those from oppressed castes
I'd believe it if someone told me IITians didn't eat with those from other universities. Or that 2nd gen Indian-Americans didn't eat with 1st gen immigrants. But this sort of thing is practically unheard of. Our Indian circle is pretty huge, and I haven't ever even so much as heard a whisper about this.
> Cisco
Might be that such stuff is prevalent in certain companies. I don't know anyone at Cisco, so I won't know. It must suck to have caste follow you from your rural town in India. But, these stories sound pretty cherry picked to me.
I find that Americans have some bizzare views and opinions about India. Like they read some colonial era British report about the nation, watched slum dog millionaire and that's it. India has changed an insane amount since independence, and it has changed even more than that just in the last 20 years.
I consistently find that HN threads about India are among the lowest quality of discourse on this forum. Highly opinionated while still being misinformed. The worst combination.
> Kshama Sawant
if you know, you know....... why am I not surprised
My experience mirrors yours. In my large groups of Indian coworkers, family and friends, mention or discussion of caste comes up zero times.
It's so bizarre to read HN articles and comments on caste and they feel surreal. I think there is a certain section of HN'ers who make a big deal of this and upvote nonsense posts so it helps them compete against Indian Americans for promotions to managerial positions.
For disclosure, I am not a high caste Indian, and both sides of my family eat meat.
Have you spoken to your American colleagues about their opinions on these topics (unfiltered)? My experience on the internet essentially has been that you cannot discuss a topic even peripherally related to India with Americans on the internet without a mention of Hindu Nationalism, Caste, Religion and "It's not racist if it's actually true"-isms.
Does this belligerant ignorance extend to IRL interactions (maybe more polite). The HN discourse on India and related topics is giving me a serious feeling of Gell Mann amnesia.
The lack of intellectual rigour and over generalisation of a few cases has been making me adjust my priors on the weight of any discussion here on other unfamiliar topics which can't be proven to be objective fact.
A lot of the supposed cases of casteism seem to be willful ignorance of linguistic/regional/other cliquey behaviour that is common among Indians (and the rest of humanity). This makes it hard for me as an Indian who hasn't worked/lived in America to actually judge if these people actually know what they are talking about.
I try my best. I have given long spiels to friends who I could convince to sit down for a 60 minute lecture. But, It is difficult talk about such a complex issue in a 5 minute conversation without being grossly misunderstood.
I usually leave it at "this is piece is terrible. India is a vast civilization. The problem is nuanced and if you ever have an hour & an open mind, then I could run you through the reasons."
Privately held businesses are treated as persons and can have sincerely held religious beliefs, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores.
I have no idea if the conservatives on the SCOTUS would permit caste discrimination as a sincerely held religious belief, or if they consider only Christian religious beliefs as sincere.
Ah yes interesting. There was a Christian political party in the Netherlands that refused membership to women. The Dutch high court obliterated their religious beliefs.
Constitution preempts all.
Everything about that article is ridiculous. It's not just the Dalit that eat meat. McKFCburgers are everywhere in India. Asking if someone eats meat has nothing to do with castes or oppression.
When I visited a few McDonald’s in south India they didn’t serve chicken or beef, just paneer. At the time I assumed paneer just meant chicken. I soon was sad to learn I was mistaken.
I have lots of Indian and Indian American friends and coworkers. Not once have they suggested that we hire someone on the basis of caste or not hire someone on the basis of caste.
I'm not saying caste discrimination doesn't exist, but let's not paint 1.4 billion people with the same brush.
The problem with this thought process is the same reason systemic racism is often brought up (Which I don’t entirely agree with, but there is probably an element of truth to it). Most people are not going to openly admit to being discriminatory. And they might not even be self aware enough to realize they are being discriminatory. So it’s not even a thing of explicit bias but your coworkers could be making decisions subconsciously because they perceive a caste a certain way.
While I agree with the point of your message, I don't think your personal experience and relationships with Indian is a good argument.
There are many stories of employees or managers that could not believe that their sweet quiet coworker bullied other coworkers of a different cast for months or years. People are complex and sometimes end up doing stuff we never thought they would be capable of. That's also probably why this is such a hard problem to fix.
So your solution to caste-based discrimination is to replace it with racism, which would harm a far larger number of people? It's repulsive to think I'd ever work with you or someone like you.
This is categorically false.
Caste has been hereditary for ~800-1200 years.
Sure, it was considered more flexible in the 4000 year old literature, but it doesn't really make sense to blame the British here.
Not so, the discriminatory aspects have existed for thousands of years. However it is always convenient to blame an unpleasant aspect such as this on a foreign scapegoat.
Paraphrasing:
Muslims who invaded/robbed the subcontinent were ALREADY divided into vocation based social "classes" , including priests, nobles and others. Further, a racial segregation demarcated the local Muslim converts from foreign origin Muslims . The foreigner Muslims claimed a superior status as they were associated with the conquerors and categorized themselves as Ashraf ("noble").
Remember two things before you post next time:
1. Wikipedia is well-cited, and social strata issues are rampant amongst all people, including Muslims.
2. Messenger of Allah said “Even if he observes Saum (fasts), performs Salat (prayer) and claims to be a Muslim, the hypocrite does three things: When he speaks, he lies; when he makes a promise, he breaks it; and when he is trusted, he betrays his trust.”
The oppression of the caste-less was not new: it is described in both Dharmasutras and Manusmriti. The English exploited it, certainly, but they didn't need to invent it.
We wouldn't have all the saints of the Warkari tradition, who fought against caste oppression, without caste oppression to fight against.
The British saw a highly fragmented society with fragmented territories, and realized that all the Divide and Conquer work they had to do was essentially already done.
They just had to get the ball rolling by making each group fight each other.
Good job! You did over 50% of their colonization work for free.
So when do you think is a good time to address is? For the people suffering from caste discrimination, what would you tell them? "Sorry, we couldn't legally protect you because we can only do one thing at a time, and there's a lot of traffic right now."
I feel like more than one issue can be worked on at a time by a given city council. There will always be something that's either more or less important, but it would be a greater failing to only address the most glaring immediate catastrophes than to work on various problems concurrently.
For one thing, the city council voted to oppose war with Iran. That’s great and all, but who asked the city of Seattle for their thoughts on an international relations dilemma? I’m sure the vote only took up perhaps 15 minutes or less in government proceedings, but it shows where the council’s head is at. The city has very real problems with safety, policing, taxing, transit, homelessness, and so on. Instead they opt to be performative.
I've lived here almost 40 years. In the past 15 years homelessness has risen by 50% but so has population. Rent has doubled, but crime is falling.
In fact, we're seeing record low property and violent crime rates. The last couple years have seen some uptick from the record lows of the 2010s, but Seattle is much safer than it was at basically any time in it's past.
I think that “record low of the 2010s” is the main driver of the perception that Seattle is declining. Many of us moved to Seattle in that era and the 2020s are dramatically worse than the 2010s.
And the time, resources, and expertise required to solve those timeless problems are relevant to discrimination policy how? Could we solve homelessness and crime by repealing all discrimination laws?
The context of the question isn’t about how it’s related to the caste policy. Maybe I missed something?
Not addressing the homeless and crime issues is a kick in the face to us tax payers in her district. Not to knock on the caste system policy but there’s biggest issues to tackle before anything else. Just my .02
I guess you didn’t read my comment. How is discrimination policy detracting from efforts to reduce crime or homelessness? From where I sit you invoked unrelated issues to a discussion on anti-discrimination policy. Is there a connection I missed?
I have been living in the CD for about 25 years, and I have noticed an increase in drive-by shootings over the last five years. While it's not as bad as it was in the early 90s when Deuce 8 was more active on my block, the situation has deteriorated compared to 10 years ago
Fantastic. I do hope Seattle also attends to what used to be kind of core govt functions for qol items. Been a bit bummed at big govt performance on crime, education etc
Law doesn't do anything "magically." It does things by shifting incentives and establishing punishments.
You can't legislate bigotry out of a bigot, but you can minimize the suffering they cause other people. This is what anti-discrimination laws aim to do.
Are you just here to sneer or do you have an actual point as to how effective this legislation is likely to be? Anything from obviously effective to utterly pointless laws can be derided as an attempt to ‘magically get rid of’ a problem.
Legislative action moved women from holding 13.97% of professional roles in the United States in 1966 to holding 50.56% of professional roles in 1996. Even rarely- and poorly-enforced laws can, over a period of just 30 years, dramatically shift the corporate landscape.
Gotta read this post. It’s a quick one and explains how India’s caste system is being used at the workplace by fellow Indians to remind the that they are still ‘untouchables’ and do so in a matter that materially impacts employment.
That diversity stuff OUSD really working out great. We now have a diverse set of problems, not just all of the original problems too. How wonderful that when we imported India, we also got the diversity of India problems.
No, guys, it’s fine. This OSS a great thing to have all kinds of diverse problems of all the different cultures from everywhere all at the same time.
Think about how many white Americans will be able to see that this is wrong, when they think anti-Blackness is a matter of culture and assume people who speak African-American Vernacular English are less educated.
When we have a mix of problems, we can build large enough anti-discrimination coalitions to make none of those discriminatory beliefs advantageous to hold.
The biggest one to me is the sex discrimination across dev and qa, with a women making up the vast majority of qa even though they graduated with the same degrees as the men from the same Indian universities.
Even Indian men that I respected on multiple levels, when they get on an interview with a women they are overly harsh in ways they were not with men. So much so that I stopped interviewing all together. I reported to HR and they of course didn't know how to handle it. It really makes me sad.
I try to talk to my Indian colleagues about this and they stay extremely tight lipped about this for a multitude of reasons. I applaud this action. This shit has to stop, leave it in India, America is better than this.
Discrimination is fractal. All interview should be truly double-blind.
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