Related, Washington Post previously published an anonymous open letter from Dalit women in 2020 in the wake of Cisco being sued for caste discrimination: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/a-statement-on-caste-bias-in-silicon-valley-from-30-dalit-women-engineers/d692b4f8-2710-41c3-9d5f-ea55c13bcc50/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_17" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/a-statement-on-caste-...</a><p>One of the most interesting things that stood out to me from this letter and that lawsuit was the assertion by those affected that discrimination on the basis of caste was more impactful and more severe than discrimination suffered due to immigration status, race, and gender in US society, and the letter goes so far as to state "We know that we thrive when we work under a non-Indian boss. Our work is seen and evaluated on merit, and we are integrated rather than being excluded."<p>It makes these discussions of castes even more important, especially as Indian immigration continues to rise and Indian culture begins to take precedence in the tech industry. Being a white American from the Midwest, I had no awareness of caste or caste discrimination when I began my career, but as I got more experienced began to learn about it and unfortunately I have personally witnessed some incidents in the workplace during my career. I wish that Google had allowed this talk to move forward, because I think ending workplace discrimination is a critical path to ensuring a merit-based free market open to all.
A good read for some additional context on caste discrimination in the American tech industry: <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidden-caste-system/amp" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidde...</a>
Hmm...<p>> To Soundararajan, Google was long overdue for a conversation on caste equity. Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told The Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.”<p>> Soundararajan said Pichai has not responded to letter she sent him in April. Google declined to comment.
I’m a white Australian and am in my last few weeks of a decade long stint in a large company, caste discrimination is certainly not the only discrimination in Australia, but it is the most overt explicit discrimination that I see every week. We have laws and company policies on other forms of discrimination, but the predominantly white corporate culture hasn’t figured out how to talk about caste discrimination without sounding like it is criticizing Indian culture so has just turned a panicked blind eye to it. I regularly see or am told of behavior that should lead to arrests, but because many Indians in Australia are on fragile visas it is swept under the rug.
Question from a layman. How does one know that someone is from another caste? If I was someone from India, how would I know what caste my fellow Indian is from? Is there some kind of code? Or where you are from?
I observed it multiple times during CS graduate school. An Indian high caste classmate refused to let his roommate sleep in the same bedroom. The higher caste guy told us that his roommate is of lower caste. The other poor guy ended up very obedient and sleep in the couch for 2 years. They have a group of high caste guys and talk sht about a few fellow low caste guys in the class<p>Eye opening.
After a quick google search I can see some very controversial comments by Thenmozhi Soundararajan.<p>Hopefully the world is changing and demonising ones race, even if that race is white or Hindu, will soon be neither celebrated nor even acceptable.
California sued Cisco over caste discrimination in 2020 and it was discussed here.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083</a>
I can believe caste discrimination is a serious problem. Though not in anything tech related yet, I've had Indian bosses and colleagues, and among them were some of the most spiteful and vitriolic people I've ever known in my life, especially to people from the 'wrong' parts of the Indian subcontinent. I dread to think how they'd abuse others if they got into higher management.
How many folks here know about the word 'pariah'?<p>Do you use it in regular conversations or writings, or come across it in new articles/quotes etc and don't flinch at all?<p>Can you consider if you would have the same reaction if the 'pariah' word was replaced with the dreaded N-word?<p>I think this could be an educational issue.<p>This too is a slavery issue, instead of a group of people we know suffering through centuries of mistreatment and worse, these people in India have suffered for millenia...
The real reason why Google canceled the talk is because the speaker has a long history of anti-hindu rhetoric and multiple employees complained about the talk to HR.<p>That Washington Post article is lying (or being extremely disingenuous) to take advantage of outsiders without context of the situation.
Lower and upper caste divisions are made by government for reservation. Mostly they use them as vote bank.<p>50-60% of seats in govt. are reserved for so called lower castes defined by govt. Along with promotions.
50-60% of college seats are again reserved.
The law is extremely favorable to lower caste.<p>Now discrimination is everywhere in India. It is in the blood of everyone including both lower and upper caste. Once the lower caste reach higher status, they discriminate against others.
Even many caste with in lower caste discriminate among themselves. Similarly, castes within upper caste discriminate among themselves.
Both castes discriminate against citizens of other counties. Infact, discrimination is everywhere. Even among lower caste. Even among upper caste. Even towards each other.<p>There are particularly some castes in India like Brahmins in Tamil Nadu. Choudhary in Andhra. They show extreme favoritism. Once they are in a company, they only recruit or promote only their caste. One should not think this favoritism as discrimination. Because they show this against other castes too including upper caste.<p>Now, at least in this corporate companies. Many people find respite that this has not infiltrated in them. Any start of this conversation within corporate world itself should be looked with suspicion.
There’s another dimension to this that people outside Google don’t understand.<p>There’s a lot of disengaged Googlers specially in the traditional AdTech part of the business.<p>Career progression is very slow and the performance review process which has been in place for god knows how long was so damaging to individuals, on top of consuming an amazing amount of time 2x a year as people desperately tried to piece together “packages” proving they’re better than mediocre, that it’s been completely replaced with a new system.<p>My point being, there’s lots of people bored, feeling like they can’t “win” and with a high degree of uncertainty as to what metrics will have an impact on their career prospects or the company.<p>combine that with a culture of speaking your mind and potentially a feeling of superiority for being special enough to work a Google… you get some very disparaged but entitled people who I think consciously or not, are trying to denigrate the company.
It'll be interesting to see how this issue evolves with more american-born Indians entering the workforce. Hopefully it'll fade like a lot of other old-fashioned discrimination has.
This is a followup to that news article - <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/equality-labs-demands-accountability-from-google-to-address-caste-discrimination-after-employee-resignation-301560319.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/equality-labs-deman...</a>
Ah! Perfect occasion to quote from the paragon of pacifism and morality.<p>“The ideal bhangi of my conception would be a Brahmin par-excellence, possibly even excel him. It is possible to envisage-the existence of a Bhangi without a Brahmin. But without the former the latter could not be, It is the Bhangi who enables society to live. A Bhangi does for society what a mother does for her baby. A mother washes her baby of the dirt and insures his health. Even so the Bhangi protects and safeguards the health of that entire community by maintaining sanitation for it. The Brahmin’s duty is to look after the sanitation of the soul, the Bhangi’s that of the body of society. But there is a difference in practice ; the Brahmin generally does not live up to his duty, the bhangi does willy-nilly no doubt.<p>But that is not all. My ideal bhangi would know the quality of night-soil and urine. He would keep a close watch on these and give a timely warning to the individual concerned. Thus, he will give a timely notice of the results of his examination of the excreta. That presupposes a scientific knowledge of the requirements of his profession. He would likewise be an authority on the subject of disposal of night-soil in small villages as well as big cities and his advice and guidance in the matter would be sought for and freely given to society.<p>It goes without saying that he would have the usual learning necessary for reaching the standard here laid down for his profession. Such an ideal bhangi while deriving his livelihood from his occupation, would approach it only as a sacred duty. In other words he would not dream of amassing wealth out of it. He would consider himself responsible for the proper removal and disposal of all the dirt and night-soil within the area which he serves and regard the maintenance of healthy and sanitary condition within the same as the summum bonum of his existence.” – Mahatma Gandhi<p>More: <a href="https://scribe.rip/@dalitdiva/why-it-is-time-to-dump-gandhi-b59c7399fe66" rel="nofollow">https://scribe.rip/@dalitdiva/why-it-is-time-to-dump-gandhi-...</a>
Google outsources more than people realize. A lot of things happen out of India. The minimum amount of customer support that Google provides happens out of India. The mystery account bans, that sometimes get a lot of attention, happens out of India.
Related threads - others?<p><i>Trapped in Silicon Valley’s hidden caste system</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515099" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515099</a> - March 2022 (543 comments)<p><i>India’s tech sector reinforces old caste divides</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29994226" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29994226</a> - Jan 2022 (5 comments)<p><i>The Casteism I See in America and American Tech Companies</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29133517" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29133517</a> - Nov 2021 (5 comments)<p><i>How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435117" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435117</a> - March 2021 (195 comments)<p><i>Caste discrimination in some of Silicon Valley's richest tech companies</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952698" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952698</a> - Oct 2020 (322 comments)<p><i>India’s engineers have thrived in the tech industry. So has its caste system</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24923338" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24923338</a> - Oct 2020 (6 comments)<p><i>How India's ancient caste system is ruining lives in Silicon Valley</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24555492" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24555492</a> - Sept 2020 (47 comments)<p><i>Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24552047" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24552047</a> - Sept 2020 (613 comments)<p><i>Silicon Valley Has a Caste Discrimination Problem</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065132" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065132</a> - Aug 2020 (14 comments)<p><i>California sues Cisco alleging discrimination based on India’s caste system</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23798922" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23798922</a> - July 2020 (56 comments)<p><i>California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083</a> - July 2020 (592 comments)<p><i>Ask HN: There is caste system in the Silicon Valley?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704504" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704504</a> - Feb 2017 (6 comments)
I’ve got this impression that all these diversity and equality programs employed by large American corporations are annoying to some and lame generally because they are astoundingly myopic.<p>Like, they do a vastly simplified, explain-like-I’m-five take on these issues (blah blah white male middle- and upper-class are evil type of thing) and tackle it with full ineptitude of five-year-olds.<p>I think a lot of people benefit from such approach.<p>First, hordes of people are generating busywork and you don’t really need mad skills or even basic competence to be doing it.<p>A lot of busywork paints a picture of the company press and shareholders will love.<p>Meanwhile, all the bullies keep on bullying.<p>There’s this culture where you will be treated better or worse based on the color of your badge. Race/religion/gender are off-limits, but discriminatory employee-contractor dynamics are blessed!<p>There’s this other bit of corporate culture that flew under the radar of any and all equality/diversity effort where managers of Indian origin would treat their also-Indian reports like shit because the poor schmucks happen to be of a lower caste. They would also make an effort to halt their career progress.<p>Those same managers would treat their overseas office teammates (in Poland) as if they were below the lowest caste possible.<p>Speaking about companies that have offices in both USA and, say, Eastern Europe, the Eastern Wuropean teammates are often treated as second-class people. They don’t get to participate in any project discussions of importance, presumably because those discussions happen informally, at the watercooler, in the US office, and should be content with all decisions handed down, like it or not.<p>I’m seeing the same kind of attitude starts happening now with onsite/WFH workers: since you don’t see the latter ones face to face, they are not quite real people.<p>Oh, and if you want to see a full-fledged rampant racism and supremacism, you should try working for a Korean company as a worker of their European branch office.<p>But apparently such issues are way too complex to be actually worked on by your off-the-shelf diversity and equality teams, for whom the white/nonwhite and male/female divide is the upper limit of comprehension.
I am surprised at how far from reality many of the comments are! I am an Indian living in both USA and India and I never witnessed cast-based discrimination to the extent some of the comments describe (I do understand it exists subtly) .. at least in the urban part of India where we live it is almost non-existent.
I want the cast system to diminish - for me, the casts of my colleagues never mattered and so does for many of my Indian friends. but some people will link everything and anything to caste bias - they like to live in that shit. If you are telling them they need to improve performance, they will say you are saying this because I am so and so caste. There is a law called 'atrocity' heavily skewed towards victims where if a lower cast person complains of abuse, police will make immediate arrests. I know many upper cast people unfairly in jail due to misuse of this law. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduled_Caste_and_Scheduled_Tribe_(Prevention_of_Atrocities)_Act,_1989" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduled_Caste_and_Scheduled_...</a>)
Brahmins are the most abused community in many parts of India for something their earlier generations did ..
I read wome people complain about groupism in colleges - why there won't be, when upper cast person has to get 90% and above to get into a good college and due to reservation policy (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India</a>), lower cast person will get into same colleges even for 50-60% that too for free .. many people are reaping the benefits for reservation for generations now and getting richer and richer .. while poor Brahmin boys have nowhere to go.. Somebody needs to tell this part of the story as well..
Bias exist in us all. It's innate. It's what makes us alive.<p>However, We've never been able to effectively label our bias. We build up these preconceived notions based on our experience and we put them in certain categories that often turn out to be mis-categorized. Taking an example from the article<p>>I think we would perform better under a non-indian manager<p>Instead of labelling your bias with 'Race/Class/Caste X', label behavior. We as a society need to be more honest about our bias and use stronger words like "Incompetent, lazy, scattered, arrogant, ineffective". Otherwise you have miscatergorized an entire group of people, not based on behavior but because of some inherited trait.
As a leftist, one of the things that gives me pause about identity politics and the language of identity divorced from class struggle is how easily it is repurposed by reactionaries:<p>> But Google employees began spreading disinformation, calling her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders, documents posted on Google’s intranet and mailing lists with thousands of employees.<p>I don't have a solution, just a depressing observation.
Can someone with information on the caste system chime in on how caste members recognize one another (especially outside of their native environment/homeland where cultural modes of expression such as clothing may be vastly different)?
Genuine question, what is stopping you from identifying as another caste in 2022 with the mass adoption of the concept of identifying with different genders?<p>Just like being assigned a sex of Male or Female at birth, those who don’t want to associate can identify with another gender identity or even transition their bodies to whatever sex they please.<p>I don’t buy the notion that once a Dalit by birth you are destined to a lifetime of suffering, especially if you made it to FAANG in the USA, you won the lottery are in the top 1% of Dalits that are in the cohort of successful, wealthy, educated technologists who can break down the walls of caste identification back home. With the protection of civil rights laws and freedom of religion in the USA, you can use your money and influence to start a movement that breaks the chains of caste identity for the oppressed community back home.<p>I know the college youth in Delhi are very progressive and champion Women’s rights and protesting as a movement emerged when the horrific rape trials were brought to global attention. Maybe tap into this educated youth cohort to be the change for future generations to come and break caste identity at a conceptual level.<p>Money and freedom in another powerful country = power and influence to change the narrative back home as a symbol and poster child of Dalit role models changing the world.<p>Sorry I’m rambling, but if you made it to FAANG and aren’t paying it forward to your oppressed communities back home, then is your inaction to take a stand against Caste discrimination benefiting your oppressors because the top 1% of Dalits who can affect change left India as part of the brain drain of skilled individuals trying to make a better life for themselves abroad?<p>Let casteism die with the older generations, start a movement with the youth to turn the tides in favor of fluid caste identity until it is no longer relevant conceptually.<p>Someone please help me articulate this stream of consciousness into a single concise paragraph that is actionable. Thanks for listening, I would love to help in any way I can.
I was walking with an Indian coworker once, past another Indian.<p>After the guy passed, he mutters "remember, don't ever trust the dark ones"
Sadly most caste accusations come from a place of extreme hatred for Hindus. I have seen this when questioned by people who talk of Caste and the Hindu religion and when I dig deep, they often have a extreme dislike of Hindus more than anything.<p>Caste comes from the Portuguese word "Castus". There is no literal translation found for this word in ancient Hindu Sanskrit texts. The quoted article comes written from a time under British Raj where peoples backgrounds were used to further divide society so that they would not rise up against the British.
Caste in the same sense of occupational background exists in all cultures but was never used in such a divisive way like the British Raj did. For example people of the "Smith" surname used to be Goldsmiths or Blacksmiths. But the British put a sense of elitism into some communities in India, telling them they are higher than others. There is no Hindu scripture which says who is high or low, but merely responsibilities.<p>Skilfully sidestepping any explanation of the metric being used to measure “high”, the educated spiritual priests in British Raj times and intellectuals were all banded together into one and labelled "highest caste" because they represented the “highest threat” to Anglican domination and those who represented the “lowest threat” to the Anglican were pushed into the lowest caste.<p>During the British Raj of the 540 principalities existent at that time, over 400 were ruled by Shudra Kings (Professor Vaidyanathan, IIM Bangalore) which the British denoted as low caste. When the British left, the second largest landowner in India after the Indian Government, was the Church and thus it’s reasonable to note that the largest transfer of assets and land from was in fact from the Shudra groups (Lord Harries’ so called low-castes) to the Church. Further, there is readily available overwhelming historical evidence that the Dalits “the Untouchables” were themselves a creation of the crushing sanctions created and imposed by the Anglican Colonialists of the Church of England as is clarified below. The castes and tribes “notified” under the 1871 Act were labelled as Criminal Tribes for their so-called “criminal tendencies”. As a result, anyone born in these communities across the country was presumed a “born criminal”, irrespective of their criminal precedents.<p>Mixing castes was normal as it was based on deed back few thousand years ago, only recently caste mixing wasn't allowed. Some further reading:<p><a href="https://pragyata.com/caste-system-pointers-for-the-social-media-world/" rel="nofollow">https://pragyata.com/caste-system-pointers-for-the-social-me...</a><p><a href="https://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-gene-data-reveal-two-millenia-of-caste-relations-in-india-081213" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-gene-data-reveal...</a>
Oh just fuck off with these Marxist bullshit already. If you suck you aren’t going to be hired. If you are good you will succeed. Whatever discrimination there is against Indians, it’s way less than what they deserve. Actually Americans give them too much credit, which then we have to fix it Eastern Europe.
> “We also made the decision to not move forward with the proposed talk which — rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness — was creating division and rancor,” Newberry wrote.<p>This doesn't surprise me one bit. Even on HN, every thread on this topic turns into a flame war with a bunch of people crying racism/religionism. How dare we discuss something we don't fully understand? How dare we criticize another culture when we have our own problems? It's the same arguments every time, and then the article ends up flagged to death.<p>The role of caste within the US is a super important conversation to have, and every resident of the US is entitled to participate, but there are a lot of people with a vested interest in shutting it down and the tools to do so.
> <i>Soundararajan appealed directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who comes from an upper-caste family in India, to allow her presentation to go forward. But the talk was canceled, leading some employees to conclude that Google was willfully ignoring caste bias.</i><p>> <i>Pichai, the CEO, “is Indian and he is Brahmin and he grew up in Tamil Nadu. There is no way you grow up in Tamil Nadu and not know about caste because of how caste politics shaped the conversation,” Soundararajan told The Post. “If he can make passionate statements about Google’s [diversity equity and inclusion] commitments in the wake of George Floyd, he absolutely should be making those same commitments to the context he comes from where he is someone of privilege.”</i><p>Sounds like Mr. Pichai has some explaining to do...
Corpos naturally have split personalities, but it wasn't "Google's plan". Mid-level people proposed it and high-level people blocked it.<p>What's not often said clearly is that corpos don't want social justice which might come at the cost of rancor, they want "DEI PR" that they can charge to the marketing budget.<p>In other words, they want the low-hanging fruit they can get by having recruiters source employees from more places, and artists and photographers draw multicolored graphics, and asking people to be less cruel <i>when all other tradeoffs are neutral</i>,and if that makes the world more fair, that's great.<p>But they management won't allow anything that risks disrupting the moneymaking operations, regardless of long term potential benefits (which almost certainly don't exist -- racism exists because it works, locally, for economic and social benefits, not because people are moustache-twirling comic-book supervillains).<p>This is why free markets alone can't solve injustice, and broader social movements are the tool that works.
> After Gupta posted a link in the email group to a petition to reinstate the talk, respondents argued that caste discrimination does not exist, that caste is not a thing in the United States, and that efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division.<p>> Some called caste equity a form of reverse discrimination against the highest-ranked castes because of India’s affirmative action system for access to education and government jobs.<p>> Others said people from marginalized castes lack the education to properly interpret Hindu scriptures around castes.<p>Wow. I did not expect saints; every person and organization will be fallible and all that. Yet this is still so... absolutely stunning.
"rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness — was creating division and rancor"<p>Insert every social movement in the last 10 years. Absolutely hilarious that a company that goes out of it's way to participate in the US culture war identifies an actual systemic issue in the country where the CEO just happens to originate from, it is suddenly a divisive action to make half baked hyperbolic social statements.
There's a lot of bias in the tech industry, not just caste. if your company is sufficiently large it will have various HR policies on this and in my experience they will enumerate the kinds of discrimination they don't tolerate.<p>Here's an exercise for you: go through the list of US protected classes [1] and see which ones are explicitly stated and which ones aren't. It's actually enlightening. For example, I don't think I've ever seen ageism specifically called out.<p>As for the impact of the Indian caste system in US tech, I can't really comment on that. It's not my lived experience. I've worked with many Indians. No idea what their castes were. Saying that, just like racism I find it incredibly plausible that if you grew up in such a system, the effects are pervasive and linger.<p>So should Google allow such a talk? That's a difficult question. It's clearly a divisive issue. It reminds me of Meta telling employees to stop talking about abortion [2]. Now that issue <i>probably</i> doesn't lead to workplace discrimination (alleged or actual) although you might be able to argue that your political views could hurt you. There's something to be said to keeping your political views to yourself, particularly at work.<p>I imagine (but, again, don't know from experience) that this might be on the level of racial discrimination in the US workplace. So it seems worth examining. I imagine to mahy outsiders it might not look "real" because at the end of the day they're all Indians (which, to be clear, is also a form of racism).<p>Is a talk the best way to handle this? I honestly don't know. I can sympathize with avoiding divisive issues and also with the desire of a company to cover their ass and not create an HR nightmare. I really wonder if this ends in a lawsuit.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group#United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group#United_States</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23131714/meta-ban-abortion-discussion-at-work-facebook-workplace-roe-v-wade" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23131714/meta-ban-abortio...</a>
The talk should have allowed to go through. The post I think said it right, people wanted to shut it down and the only way to do it is to discredit the speaker because they know there is truth to the arguments.<p>However we should step back and think about how important it in the American context. What purpose is that talk going to serve? I don’t know if it does anything other than satisfying esoteric learning needs of a few. It may be an issue in he US but the problem may be among single digit or double digit individuals at best. Is it worth spending cycles on it?
Is there a Wikipedia list of obscure 'race'-isms? I find reading about other cultures or other time period's biases to be informative and wonder what the common elements might be.<p>Off the top of my head, issues I can think of where an outsider may be oblivious between the "sides" are:<p>Indian caste<p>Japanese Barukumin caste<p>Protestant/Catholic in Europe<p>Jewish people in Europe/US/USSR<p>English Class System, or Southern/Northern<p>Jim Crow, or North/South or Midwest Vs coastal, WASPs, or Nativism.<p>Ainu in Hokkaido.<p>Ukraine vs Russian is topical at the moment.
Google has cancelled many discussions about various bias; their "Talks" have not been thought-provoking or even relevant for some years now, probably since middle management from other mediocre companies percolated the organization.
Do we need every mega-corporation to weigh in on every social issue globally? The thing I like most about work is that its a relatively diverse group of people working together on shared goal. People have known for a long time that work should be professional and you should avoid politics and religion. But I guess people have to relearn these lessons every few decades.
This is likely an example why it may not always be a great idea to discuss politics at work. I know a lot of us have strong personal opinions on a lot of subjects, but making sure everyone on my team aligns with my beliefs is likely not conducive to teamwork. Quite the opposite.<p>If I was not an IC now, I would definitely be trying to cut discussions like that in a bud.
The most number of Hindus in west support RSS and in these western countries are so much vocal about minority rights and discrimination. In fact, most RSS support is from the creamy urban layer of Hindu society. It's not surprising to see the bad PR for Hinduism prevention is being done.
This is what happens when a for profit company LARPs as an ethical one. On one hand they talk about diversity and on the other they desperately hire people they can pay less from areas of the world where "diversity is our strength" isn't really the norm. So in the end the company makes more money thanks to the cheap labor and it becomes even less inclusive and diverse.
Google’s culture is dominated by arrogance. Management repeatedly tells employees they work on the world’s hardest problems using the world’s biggest computers and the world’s smartest people. Doing anything less is “ungoogley”.<p>It doesn’t necessarily follow that this would encourage racism. But it sure isn’t surprising.
> In April, Thenmozhi Soundararajan […] was scheduled to give a talk to Google News employees for Dalit History Month. But Google employees began spreading disinformation […]<p>That is not journalism. That's editorializing — and in the very first paragraph, no less. This is how media like the <i>Washington Post</i> encourages a kind of <i>caste</i> of its own, by signaling "right-think" to its readers.
Google is so morally bankrupt at this point they have no idea what is right. The far left has given everyone the impression that standing up to this nonsense is racist
Extremely dishonest article. Tries very hard to trick people in believing "Hindu nationalists" didn't like her talk because they're great fans of the caste system. Yet it's common knowledge they're against the very idea of caste.<p>> sites and organizations that have targeted academics in the United States and Canada who are critical of Hindu nationalism or caste hierarchy.<p>Whatever the real grievance is, the article definitely doesn't talk about it. Presumably people felt her activism actually strengthens the caste system/division rather than combats it.
Every couple of months an article about caste is posted on HN. The article and the reactions are always the same.<p>* Shallow allusions to how caste dynamics = white-black dynamics in the US<p>* Any one in opposition = caste supremacist = hindu nationalism<p>* Belief that caste dynamics in the US = caste dynamics in rural India<p>I am going to buck my own trend of writing explanations about how western interpretations of issues faced by foreign civilizations are wrong. I will instead link to older comments [1] I have written before:<p>Choice quotes:<p>> Caste related pieces in the western press miss the entire context around 1st-world-discrimination among Indians. It annoys me to no end, because discrimination is still a major problem in certain communities. But, the western media has cast it onto their agonizingly shallow concept of privilege and bigotry.<p>> caste is not caste anymore. The nature of internal sharding, class division, and discrimination in the diaspora has its own patterns that don't abide by caste lines.<p>I have some strong suspicions on why caste has suddenly become a major issue in California politics over the last decade. I know better than to talk about on a pseudo-anonymous account.<p>[1] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22India%22%20%22caste%22%20%22screye%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...</a>
There are 200+ million Dalits in India. These are the people which were previously called “untouchables”.<p>I work in medicine, many Indians work with me and most are Brahmins with a few Christian Malayali from Kerala.<p>I think the Malayali have shown it is possible to escape the caste system and to have success.<p>However I am worried Dalits have been at the bottom and treated as such for thousands of years that it has effected more than just their psychology. In a high population density area with food insecurity there will be high baseline stress, malnutrition, and starvation. Those will cause epigenetic modifications to DNA which are (surprisingly) heritable. Over thousands I imagine these effects will produce behaviors which are going to be hard to overcome.