Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
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."
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.
I've also seen this in smaller companies and startups, but there it is usually the Indian CTO or manager hiring an Indian contracting company, where big surprise, there is some prior relationship. I haven't ever had these arrangements work out.
I have nothing against Indian people - but this is an issue in tech, and I feel like it is becoming a larger issue.
This line of arguments will not work with the sensibilities of the priestly caste not native to India.
One question I've always had is, how do you know you're Dalit if you were born outside of India? How do others?
Especially, say, when meeting other Indians in some tech company in the US?
I highly suggest that you consult the works of Patrick Olivelle and Susan Bayly to get at the real History of "Caste" (Varna vs. Jati etc.). That way you can present what is actually stated in the Hindu Scriptures vs. Their misinterpretation and later practice within Indian Society.
Excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism) :
Recent scholarship suggests that the discussion of varna as well as untouchable outcastes in these texts does not resemble the modern era caste system in India. Patrick Olivelle, a professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions and credited with modern translations of Vedic literature, Dharma-sutras and Dharma-shastras, states that ancient and medieval Indian texts do not support the ritual pollution, purity-impurity as the basis for varna system. According to Olivelle, purity-impurity is discussed in the Dharma-shastra texts, but only in the context of the individual's moral, ritual and biological pollution (eating certain kinds of food such as meat, urination and defecation). In his review of Dharma-shastras, Olivelle writes, "we see no instance when a term of pure/impure is used with reference to a group of individuals or a varna or caste". The only mention of impurity in the Shastra texts from the 1st millennium is about people who commit grievous sins and thereby fall out of their varna. These, writes Olivelle, are called "fallen people" and impure, declaring that they be ostracised. Olivelle adds that the overwhelming focus in matters relating to purity/impurity in the Dharma-sastra texts concerns "individuals irrespective of their varna affiliation" and all four varnas could attain purity or impurity by the content of their character, ethical intent, actions, innocence or ignorance, stipulations, and ritualistic behaviours.
Olivelle states:
Dumont is correct in his assessment that the ideology of varna is not based on purity. If it were we should expect to find at least some comment on the relative purity and impurity of the different vamas. What is even more important is that the ideology of purity and impurity that emerges from the Dharma literature is concerned with the individual and not with groups, with purification and not with purity, and lends little support to a theory which makes relative purity the foundation of social stratification.
Do you need identifying papers?
Is there a big market for forgeries?
Like all unjust discrimination, this one triggers on things one has no control over. Doing that to others is completely unacceptable.
I feel sad and sorry.
I have no problem with this, after all immigrants are by no means obliged to be assimilated. It becomes a problem when politics come to play. E.g. Turkish nationalism, Erdogan has pretty solid approval ratings among German based Turks. This doesn't affect German culture much, so. In case of Indian nationalism, heavily leaning on India's caste system, it is different. Indian immigrants tend to end up in managemebr positions more often than, e.g., Turks do. So they affect company policies and culture more. And in the case of caste discrimination, something most non-Indians have a hard time understanding, it can co-opt whole organisations. And in the case of social media it can have a massive impact on culture in general.
That's why those talks, like the cancelled one at Google, are so important.
This is nothing unusual for emigrants to support the preserving, conservative and strong-arm political position for their former home countries because many feel obligated to do so.
The demographics of formerly rural Turks that immigrated to Germany is also relevant but I think the feeling of obligations for such "defensive" choices is a main driver. You can see this trend with a lot of immigrants, Turks are just an example here.
My N=1 experience is that this can be related, but not always directly about discrimination or sexism. I would need to include cultural oppression, personal confidence, and others to accurately reflect a summation. I do not doubt that bias or discrimination exist, just that I culturally do my best to have a positive influence.
A few years ago I wanted to understand better, so I asked for feedback from a previous amazing Indian female SDET (whose husband is the CTO of one of the big retail chains). She explained a lot to me about how a woman's position being higher than a mans was culturally challenging. She also had self-doubts about her ability to thrive in a mostly-male driven engineering organization. I worked with her on a transition into a Development team, and the resistance came mostly from her fears of cultural bias and discrimination. The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position.
The bias and discrimination exist, but localized, the teams I've worked with are always very supportive and welcoming.
Sidenote: I once glanced around a team I was working on a few years ago and found most of the product/program managers were gay or lesbian. Didn't strike me as discrimination, since there are, of course, gay and lesbian hardware engineers, gay and lesbian software engineers... it just happened that we all found each other on a particular team.
So that's why I think that's what's going on here, but I'm eager to hear your thoughts, as they differ from mine.
The biggest problem I've encountered is that they are sometimes socially isolated because Western colleagues don't know how to approach them, when they're really easy to talk to and have a lot to say!
I also think it's counterintuitive to fixate on this stuff. It doesn't have to be sexism- it could be a fluke.
I actually had a pretty balanced department that only slightly favors women. As a male QA/QE I tend to hire for detail orientation with a back up of actually caring, and a level of either assertiveness or grit in holding the line.
Anecdotal survey of 10 years of QA, and I haven't found any corrrlation with sex and QA, except that women have tended to be easier to work with on average, and the men I work with are either really good, or meh. Amusing historical point though: programming was considered women's work originally.
> 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.”
> Soundararajan said Pichai has not responded to letter she sent him in April. Google declined to comment.
Oh boy. I guess pichai would have quite a different story about this and
Google did the right thing by keeping her out.
[1] https://twitter.com/dalitdiva/status/1465358123640655875
Do you think casteism is an essential property of India that should not be changed, throwaway_1928?
both the OP and your citation are her complaining about a tech CEO being Brahmin and avoiding the caste conversation...
Could you give some examples?
In all of these cases the managers responsible were higher caste than the workers, who accepted the mistreatment despite Australian law being strongly on their side.
Trying to get a house in Delhi as a single, straight male is an exercise in discrimination 101. Landlords will ask you if you drink alcohol, eat meat, have female friends, belong to a non-Hindu religion (especially if you're muslim), your caste, and heck, even what city/state you're from.
My friends have been denied housing simply for being from a state with a somewhat poor reputation. Some were denied because they were lawyers AND from a specific caste (the landlords feared that my friends would somehow take over the property through legal shenanigans). And I won't even get into how hard it is for a muslim male to find housing in India, especially outside of big cities.
So much of this simply never gets talked about in Indian society. But its just accepted as something that happens. Sometimes feel that we're developing backwards as a society.
I am someone who was not given a caste-based last name because my parents were influenced by a regional movement against caste. (I didn't even have a last name to begin with but eventually added a non caste-based one to avoid visa issues.) Whenever I traveled by train and chatted up with a co-passenger, almost surely they would ask my name and would never be satisfied with just knowing my first name. They would get visibly confused when I would tell them I didn't have a last name.
Edit: Curiously, based on the last name of the person (Soundarajan) whose talk got cancelled, I would actually have guessed that they were upper caste (Brahmin - the highest).
This is most likely because her parents/grandparents changed to using patronymical last names, precisely to avoid this problem. There was a very popular movement in South India (particularly the state of TamilNadu), called the self-respect movement, which a large part of society (except for the upper castes - who had a lot to lose), adopted.
This is why my own name does not give away my caste. Because my grandfather switched to patronymics from the existing caste based last names.
(In Telangana, surnames are almost exclusively used as just an initial preceding the given name, and sometimes that’s even all that ends up on official documentation.)
What happens of they find out you’re a lower caste, so they just stop talking to you, talk down to you, etc.?
Generally you wont be able to figure the caste of someone but there are clues like skin color, fairer skin generally is "upper" caste, sometimes your surname also gives away your caste.
Unfortunately some Indians specially from the "upper"caste take this very seriously and think they are superior compared to other Indians.
caste certificate
In a nutshell, people can sometimes tell by your last name, and if they can’t, they will ask you questions about your background, such as what town and/or neighborhood your family is from, until they figure it out.
In one example in the story, a guy is outed as a Dalit by a coworker who knew him from college.
That said, one of the reasons I'm really skeptical claims that casteism is widespread in Silicon valley is that I have a last name that's caste-ambiguous (could be anything from dalit to brahmin) and yet I've never been asked my caste. So it's rather bizarre that casteism could be so widespread without me having ever encountered it.
Eye opening.
And I have no data to corroborate this, but I've felt caste chauvinism increase in the last few years.
...as has Hindu nationalism, as noted in the article.
For more context, Dr. B R Ambedkar was the main architect of the constitution of India. He also formulated the affirmative action for Dalit representation, called the reservation system. He was one of the so called Dalits who faced extreme caste discrimination in India despite his brilliance and all his achievements. There are documented instances where upper caste government officers refused to touch files that he signed. The discrimination was so bad that he and 500K of his followers converted to Buddhism.
These days, some sections treat him like an ideological revolutionary (sort of like marxism or leninism). Many are openly calling for replacing his ideas with those from manusmriti - an ancient text that is a huge source of racism and misogyny in India. Hope this gives you some insight into the problem.
[1] http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_...
In this case believe it or not, it’s a personal anecdote and true story. I’m not interested in revealing the identity or source in case of internet violence
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.
I've definitely been to a few of those in person that were more controversial than talking about caste (and also did not have the benefit of actually being useful, like addressing workplace discrimination is).
Do you use it in regular conversations or writings, or come across it in new articles/quotes etc and don't flinch at all?
Can you consider if you would have the same reaction if the 'pariah' word was replaced with the dreaded N-word?
I think this could be an educational issue.
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...
That Washington Post article is lying (or being extremely disingenuous) to take advantage of outsiders without context of the situation.
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.
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.
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.
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 a lot of disengaged Googlers specially in the traditional AdTech part of the business.
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.
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.
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.
I *don’t believe* it should be discussed out in the open within a “for profit business”. Leadership should acknowledge the issue, state their direction clearly and end the conversation.
I have Indian colleagues and a one of them became a good friend. I asked him once or twice about castes and how it worked etc. He said it’s all bullshit and it didn’t matter and I felt like it was a topic he was felt awkward discussing so I made a mental note not to ask him about it.
I Googled around and found his surname was from basically the 2nd highest caste. A few years later a young Indian woman joined our company and I was very impressed by her.
She was confident, eloquent and seemed eager to make an impact. I told my friend something like: “man the newbie is here to kick ass isn’t she?! Loved how she spoke at that meeting”
To which he made the only comment on castes I’ve ever seen him make, something along the lines of: “She’s a brahmin bro, she thinks we all work for her”.
That’s when I knew it wasn’t “all bullshit”.
“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.
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.
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
More: https://scribe.rip/@dalitdiva/why-it-is-time-to-dump-gandhi-...
Trapped in Silicon Valley’s hidden caste system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515099 - March 2022 (543 comments)
India’s tech sector reinforces old caste divides - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29994226 - Jan 2022 (5 comments)
The Casteism I See in America and American Tech Companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29133517 - Nov 2021 (5 comments)
How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435117 - March 2021 (195 comments)
Caste discrimination in some of Silicon Valley's richest tech companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24952698 - Oct 2020 (322 comments)
India’s engineers have thrived in the tech industry. So has its caste system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24923338 - Oct 2020 (6 comments)
How India's ancient caste system is ruining lives in Silicon Valley - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24555492 - Sept 2020 (47 comments)
Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24552047 - Sept 2020 (613 comments)
Silicon Valley Has a Caste Discrimination Problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24065132 - Aug 2020 (14 comments)
California sues Cisco alleging discrimination based on India’s caste system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23798922 - July 2020 (56 comments)
California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083 - July 2020 (592 comments)
Ask HN: There is caste system in the Silicon Valley? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13704504 - Feb 2017 (6 comments)
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.
I think a lot of people benefit from such approach.
First, hordes of people are generating busywork and you don’t really need mad skills or even basic competence to be doing it.
A lot of busywork paints a picture of the company press and shareholders will love.
Meanwhile, all the bullies keep on bullying.
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!
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.
Those same managers would treat their overseas office teammates (in Poland) as if they were below the lowest caste possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
>I think we would perform better under a non-indian manager
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.
> 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.
I don't have a solution, just a depressing observation.
Peoples feelings about fairness and justice are always valid, but hell, many people suck so hard at putting it into words.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Since this is a genuine question, there’s something you should know about not conforming to the gender you were assigned at birth: we’re not accepted for our identity either. The concept of self-identification is separate from cultural acceptance of it.
Moving to a place, however unrealistic the prospect, where autonomy in identity is more common doesn’t automatically make it safe or practical. Generally speaking, people who would benefit from emigrating, and can, already do. And they’re facing much more entrenched biases of racism and xenophobia.
However, to maybe see why people don't do it (I imagine, I have no personal experience on this), let's put it in a US perspective. What if a visibly black person identifies as white? Or vice versa? Do you think it would be taken seriously by even the most ardent liberals?
EDIT: For context, let's remember the case of Rachel Dolezal [1]
After the guy passed, he mutters "remember, don't ever trust the dark ones"
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.
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.
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.
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:
https://pragyata.com/caste-system-pointers-for-the-social-me...
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-gene-data-reveal...
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.
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.
Is there a term for shutting down a discussion by turning the belligerence to eleven? Such that people outside the discussion tune out not the views of those being belligerent, but the discussion itself?
We really need one, because it's a known phenomenon without a known label. If we can't assign a word or phrase to it, we'll struggle to communicate the concept to others when we see it happening. That, in turn, makes calling this behavior out monumentally more difficult and far less likely to succeed in pressuring people to stop. Imagine if we didn't have the term "ad hominem" and how much more difficult it would be to confront someone making such underhanded attacks in arguments. It would be a lot more difficult to discredit the person, despite recognizing what they are doing.
The most appropriate ones here are probably:
> 2. Become incredulous and indignant. Avoid discussing key issues and instead focus on side issues which can be used show the topic as being critical of some otherwise sacrosanct group or theme. This is also known as the 'How dare you!' gambit.
> 5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule. This is also known as the primary 'attack the messenger' ploy, though other methods qualify as variants of that approach. Associate opponents with unpopular titles such as 'kooks', 'right-wing', 'liberal', 'left-wing', 'terrorists', 'conspiracy buffs', 'radicals', 'militia', 'racists', 'religious fanatics', 'sexual deviates', and so forth. This makes others shrink from support out of fear of gaining the same label, and you avoid dealing with issues.
> 18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can't do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how 'sensitive they are to criticism.'
I'm still astounded by how consistently contemporary defenses of Apartheid blamed the objections to it on "anti-Boer bigotry" in order to derail the conversation.
"Trolled into oblivion", perhaps?
Maybe, Google, instead of just giving up you should be asking why a speaker on Dalit rights and inclusion is causing "division and rancor" in your community? Or is that also a difficult conversation you'd rather not have?
>> Longtime observers of Google’s struggles to promote diversity, equity and inclusion say the fallout fits a familiar pattern. Women of color are asked to advocate for change. Then they’re punished for disrupting the status quo.
I'm not a big culture warrior, but I believe that if as a company you choose to do a thing, you do it fully, from top to bottom.
Yet the outcome described is exactly what you get when you have {status quo} + {new initiative from leadership} + {failure to dedicate time and resources to following up and implementing}.
People are always going to be resistant to change. Middle management is especially resistant to change, not unreasonably.
Consequently, effective change takes follow-through, verification, reminders, and eventually termination to actually implement. Otherwise, everyone shrugs their shoulders and returns to what they've always done... and punishes whoever is still dancing off the beaten path.
99% of corporate DEI initiatives are performative in nature. I realized it when the majority of companies were pushing employees to read a book on systemic racism written by a white woman who was obviously using it as an advertisement for her corporate consulting and training business.
The same reason speakers on Palestinian rights often can. While they may be on the right side of the issue, it's also very easy for closed discussion spaces to rapidly devolve into pretty viciously anti-semitic tropes.
These discussions need to be done with some strict moderation and sensitivity, usually with actual historians who can properly contextualize the issue. If all you're doing is bringing in "activists" from a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well.
First, some members of group found at a disadvantage are upset. This is regardless of how many other members of that group express that they themselves are not. You can dispute facts, but you can't deny people's feelings.
Second, the disadvantage is then used by some people to justify something that fits their agenda, prejudices of beliefs, whether it makes sense or not.
So I can hardly blame anyone responsible for managing a huge number of people of avoiding sensitive topics. Besides, a corporation is not exactly the place to discuss these things: they need to be dealt with as a society in general. If you try to introduce these topics into your workplace, you might even achieve the opposite of what you want, because people will do whatever you expect them just to keep their jobs, but won't change their opinion because their manager told them to, or because they attended a workshop where it was explained to them that their culture is inferior, for example.
It's not that Google gave up. They were never going to allow it to begin with and the organizer likely just hoped it would fly under the radar.
Isn't that the first step in the flame war, attacking, dismissing, and blaming one side (and before they even say something)? How will someone with a good faith interest in discussing concerns about racism or religionism act, seeing this comment - they will feel shut down, and like they won't be heard and will be attacked. There's already no room for those discussions.
There is a lack of trust - a situation that is the goal of people trying to disrupt open societies and the trolls that help them. Whatever we say or do, the primary goal needs to be to build trust. People who are alarmed act badly - that's why trolls try to alarm people (even if they aren't quite conscious of how it works). Even when people are acting badly, if you can build their trust then very often the situation will improve.
It would be extremely valuable to society to find a way to conduct constructive conversations; I think we are improving, but not nearly quickly enough.
It's tough.
I mean this sincerely - It requires heavy moderation.
The government can uphold a free speech ideal, but the good conversations happen in bubbles where someone can't create a burner account and start talking shit as loud as anyone else.
Some years ago, Christopher Hitchens gave a talk about free speech. It's very compelling. Nobody yelled "FIRST!" over him, cause it wasn't an Internet comment thread.
Maybe we should distinguish between free speech and "free-for-all" speech. I'll listen to Hitchens saying we have the Right To Read about Holocaust deniers, but I don't want any given thread to be over-run by the same Holocaust deniers.
Because there are now 4.6 million Indian Americans and they are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the US.
So it's our own problem now too.
The point being made is that people who don't want this conversation in public (i.e. people in favor of and/or who benefit from the caste system) will flood the comments with this type of rhetoric which instantly turns the conversation into to a flame war rather than a helpful discourse on how to improve things.
The fact that you and I both instinctively fell for this reaction is evidence that parent is quite correct in the effectiveness of this tactic.
I don't believe HN's current moderation policies/leadership make this the place to have that conversation though. Participate in good faith all you want, you'll still earn a ban/warning for "arguing" if you piss off the right people.
And that message, "You're replying too fast, slow down". Lol. What duplicity.
In some regions, there were also some devout worshippers of one God that take adverserial position about worshippers of another God (Shiva versus Vishnu)
Luckily most of these (I think) are on their way out and don't manifest in professional workplaces of today.
These tendencies must have definitely shaped careers and unfairly disadvantaged people as recently as a couple of decades ago.
> 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.”
Sounds like Mr. Pichai has some explaining to do...
Prompting an employee of a tech company, even its CEO, reminding the audience of its ethnical background is what i find suspect.
Truly puzzling decision.
[1] https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/the-brahmin-files-why-atro...
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.
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 when all other tradeoffs are neutral,and if that makes the world more fair, that's great.
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).
This is why free markets alone can't solve injustice, and broader social movements are the tool that works.
> 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.
> Others said people from marginalized castes lack the education to properly interpret Hindu scriptures around castes.
Wow. I did not expect saints; every person and organization will be fallible and all that. Yet this is still so... absolutely stunning.
As an America-born Indian-American, I honestly don't know what my caste is beyond knowing I'm not Brahmin (I didn't do the string ceremony some of my childhood family friends did), and have basically zero idea of how I'd identify someone else's caste. I imagine that that's not terribly uncommon among ABCDs.
Educating people like me about that would suddenly create the ability for them to identify a difference that they wouldn't have noticed before. This makes it unlike gender, racial, or age discrimination, where the categories are usually surface level obvious. That in turn could have a star-bellied sneetches effect, where people identify with the new categories that they wouldn't have considered before.
I've heard some pretty horrible stories about this in particular; like Brahmin kids being legally adopted into Sudra families in order to get into a reserved position at a State University, and rich kids with private tutors getting given further advantage over poor kids doing all the work themselves because they happen to be of a lower caste.
Just like in every other country, affirmative action does nothing but help members of a specific group who are already advantaged.
"If you're one of them, you're too ignorant to understand why we're right". Absolutely repulsive.
The term gaslighting gets thrown around a lot these days, but…
I think is a real point and is true of many issues - the problem is how do you fix a problem silently in the background? Can it be done with better results than hyperfocusing on it? I would guess and hope there might be a way but don't know how.
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.
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.
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.
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 probably 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.
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).
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group#United_States
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/19/23131714/meta-ban-abortio...
Ageism is illegal in the US, however the way the law is written it specifically only protects people over 40. I've always personally theorized that this is why tech ageism tends to start affecting people in their 30s, so that it doesn't wait until it's illegal and gets the job done of oppressing more senior employees earlier on.
First off, activism is uncomfortable - it’s about changing the status quo and anyone who benefits will take issue with it even if they don’t actively perpetuate the system. MLK wasn’t met with open arms; he was harassed, arrested and ultimately assassinated.
Personally I’ve worked with many Indians too and I have never heard anyone one of them bring up caste; but I’m not Indian, so why would they?
A better benchmark is how many people of lower caste have you talked to and how do they feel about it? It may be the case that the structures of American Indians have already expunged all the lower caste Indians from your workplace.
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?
It’s a very prevalent problem. A lot of people come from India and keep their cultural values - including caste discrimination.
It’s a small issue in the general US but a huge issue within SV. Same as any Asian topic tbh. Most Asians don’t exist outside the coasts - yet we talk about their issues cause they’re in important cities in significant numbers.
Source please.
>> the problem may be among single digit or double digit individuals at best.
Why do you think it's in single or double digit "at best"? This is a huge problem in India and moving to US doesn't make a racist person inclusive automatically.
so it just goes to show how hypocritical Google is being when they are mega woke on every other facet. probably because their ceo harbors a like for the caste system
Off the top of my head, issues I can think of where an outsider may be oblivious between the "sides" are:
Indian caste
Japanese Barukumin caste
Protestant/Catholic in Europe
Jewish people in Europe/US/USSR
English Class System, or Southern/Northern
Jim Crow, or North/South or Midwest Vs coastal, WASPs, or Nativism.
Ainu in Hokkaido.
Ukraine vs Russian is topical at the moment.
The South gets it the worst. When I was in college (University of Cincinnati) engineering students from the South were sometimes encouraged to lose their Southern accents because it made them sound "stupid." I heard a few stories about this.
The youngest French Canadians generally speak English. However the oldest generations (50+ or 60+ depending on the region) couldn't and mostly still can't due to the way the system was set up. And since a lot of companies came from either the US or the rest of Canada, they had no hopes in climbing ranks or being competitive as businesspeople. There are some records of French Canadians being sent to unusually harsh missions during the great wars too.
There are casual insults such as calling French Canadian "frogs" and English Canadians "square heads" still in use today.
It is still present even in tech companies where English speakers are sent to client meetings as it is sometimes perceived "rude" to sent someone with a French accent to the front.
These days, it's mostly about not extending the classic "warm Canadian welcome" to the other category. But in some situations, it can get more serious.
(That being said, in 2022 it does not really compare to some of the other examples listed above.)
The word you need is “xenophobia” (hate of the others, of those who are different). Race is a limited, artificial concept and by focusing on it we miss the forest for the trees. Xenophobia is as old as humanity and can be based on anything: physical features; ideas, religions, languages, family ties, etc.
A persecuted minority in France.
Dominicans and Haitians
Colombians and.... the rest of Latin america
People are hardwired to perceive outsiders as a threat and usually this originates from good reasoning.
English vs French speaking Canadians?
Russian Nazism is very real, leads to rape, murder, forced deportation and torture.
It's not about Google weighing in. It's about Google being aware of these problems, and doing the work to keep those problems out of its workplace.
Regardless, I’ve come to realize that not talking about politics and religion doesn’t make political or religious action and impact go away, it just stays insidious.
It’s called “leadership.”
If I was not an IC now, I would definitely be trying to cut discussions like that in a bud.
If you're seeing discrimination in the workplace then it's no longer about politics, it's about the workplace and professionalism among staff.
It doesn’t necessarily follow that this would encourage racism. But it sure isn’t surprising.
Also - which companies are saying they hire the worst people?
I've worked at several companies - every single one of them claimed to hire the best. It's just corporate psychobabble at this point.
That is not journalism. That's editorializing — and in the very first paragraph, no less. This is how media like the Washington Post encourages a kind of caste of its own, by signaling "right-think" to its readers.
“…according to copies of the documents as well as interviews with Soundararajan and current Google employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concerns about retaliation.”
> sites and organizations that have targeted academics in the United States and Canada who are critical of Hindu nationalism or caste hierarchy.
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.
* Shallow allusions to how caste dynamics = white-black dynamics in the US
* Any one in opposition = caste supremacist = hindu nationalism
* Belief that caste dynamics in the US = caste dynamics in rural India
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:
Choice quotes:
> 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.
> 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.
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.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
I work in medicine, many Indians work with me and most are Brahmins with a few Christian Malayali from Kerala.
I think the Malayali have shown it is possible to escape the caste system and to have success.
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.