Sr Manager at Google Resigns After Dalit Activist Disallowed from Giving Lecture
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https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/01/tech/cisco-lawsuit-caste-...
In reality, it's probably impossible to understand how big or small a problem caste discrimination really is in context. The folks who don't face any negative experiences mostly aren't going to pipe up.
Don't you think this might have something to do with the representation of low caste Indians in the US, and that they have to be their own advocates? Minorities have to make disproportional noise to get issues that affect them to be heard to the same degree as others. That's just how it is, otherwise our systems would always only advocate for the majority and every single minority would group would be systemically disadvantaged.
I think to side with your point ... the vocal extremists have the mic.
The thing that is the issue, again from the little I read, is that such discrimination is brought by other Indians on the Dalit and it's most defyingly bit something they want imported. I didn't figure or yet what is wanted and how but it's not like this is sintering you can blame them for.
> If someone drags it here with them they need to understand its their baggage.
If you're a low-caste Indian working in the US, and your high-caste boss discriminates against you, I think you'd feel pretty pissed at someone trying to claim that you're dragging your baggage with you. It's the high-caste boss that's doing the dragging.
Something like 90% of the Indian immigrants in the US are high-caste (big surprise, lower-caste Indians are less likely to be able to get work visas and travel), so of course this is a minority problem. Certainly not all of that 90% wants to perpetuate the caste system here, but I expect it's not easy to be vocal about it. Doesn't make it any less worthy of investigation, though.
Why do you think this is the case despite one of the most active affirmation programs in the world (just search "Reservation in India" on Wikipedia)? Something like 50-60% of seats in colleges and jobs in the government are reserved for lower castes (not a typo, the Wikipedia page should link you to official Indian constitution websites). I am from India and I genuinely don't know the answer myself.
A lot of industries are based on the idea of "I don't care if people think they're superior to me as long as they pay me." The savvier ones even exploit this: "I'll get people to think they're superior to others because they pay me" (see: Apple, Rolls Royce, DeBeers, BMW, Louis Vitton, and every other luxury brand). American society is uniquely suited to this sort of mercenary economic climbing, because it brings together lots of people who have no knowledge of each others' previous social hierarchies anyway.
Por que no los dos? This is such a tired take -- how is activism at odds with getting good at what you do and working hard? You can absolutely do both. In fact, some of the most helpful activists are folks who made it and give a helping hand to others (e.g. successful black businessmen teaching other black folks to be successful businessmen; successful women in tech helping other women to succeed in tech).
You do realize that this very "capitalism as the great equalizer" take ignores that being underrepresented / disadvantaged also very negatively affects one's economic prospects. Say I'm a woman -- looking at that rare woman in tech who's overcome many sexist hurdles / gotten lucky enough to make it to the top, are you telling me I should be cool with my odds being shittier?
White folks already love yelling about affirmative action because it lowers your already-low odds so very slightly when it comes to Ivy League college admittance. But you'll tell minorities "shut up just work hard activism is stupid" in the same breath.
> There's a collectivist, political, external-locus-of-control assumption to your point.
First of all, minorities ARE collectives even if we don't all contribute equally to our collective causes. And representation is political because policy shapes how we are treated and what our lives look like. A democracy by design favors the majority, so minorities need to be politically convincing that their needs are important too. It's okay to work hard at this, it's okay to want the world to be more meritocratic.
Frederick Douglass could have lived as a free black person and had a much better life than other black folks in the US. There were other free blacks who did less for the collective. Instead, he gave a crap about activism, and used his education and ability to make a difference. Wasn't that great? Plenty of white folks running plantations at the time were inconvenienced by this guy saying black folks should be free and that slavery is bad, and I'm sure they said "you're free why do you give a damn." But some people do give a damn about the people around them and the world they hand to their progeny.
Not every activist is their minority's Frederick Douglass, but you can certainly be a point along that spectrum of activist, in accordance with your ability and concern. Saying that minorities should be "too busy making money" to give a crap about how their children will be treated is some hot garbage.
> American society is uniquely suited to this sort of mercenary economic climbing, because it brings together lots of people who have no knowledge of each others' previous social hierarchies anyway.
Guess I won't convince you of the many glass/bamboo/whatever the fuck ceilings that exist, but it seems obvious that people are _absolutely_ bringing knowledge of previous social hierarchies. Talk to some {black folks, women} in tech and see what kind of bullshit they have to put up with that you don't have to. How many female founder stories can you find that talk about counterparts assuming something due to their gender? You simply cannot escape social prejudice and hierarchy (oh wait, you can, if you're a white male! maybe this is why you're confused).
It's like how if you ask for a raise, you will probably be denied. If you make yourself invaluable to the business and then threaten to quit, you will get that raise.
Slavery and Frederick Douglass is actually a pretty good example. White Northern factory owners won the Civil War - look at the Gilded Age that followed, and how "industrialized society" is just "society" now. Blacks did not. The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction; which was followed by Jim Crow; which was followed by 50s segregation; which was followed by the Civil Rights era; which was followed by Nixon's criminalization of crack, marijuana, and all drugs that were associated with "Black" culture, which led to the creation of a permanent Black underclass. We are still having this debate 150+ years later.
There's an order to acquiring power, and it goes technological -> economic -> cultural -> political -> military. If you try to skip steps (forcing economic development without technological modernization, or political power without acquiring economic and cultural power, or military power without consolidating political power) you don't get durable gains, and your system collapses after 10-15 years.
And I was one of those minority children that was treated as hot garbage. I haven't forgotten. That's made me a pretty avid observer of which tactics actually lead to durable shifts in power balance, and simply asking for more power is not one of them.
Isn't this all obvious stuff? None of which refutes the idea that activism moves the needle and is _required_ for minorities to equalize how they're treated.
> Time spent developing skills and seizing opportunities will not be, because it can be done in secret, and if you hit roadblocks just go around them and find other people to do business with.
This sounds untethered from reality. Consider being a black kid who wants to be an engineer in silicon valley. Your entire ethnicity is heavily underrepresented, so you don't have role models / might not even view working as an engineer as something attainable. Okay say you get past that and work hard, you still get fewer opportunities because bias is real and there are so many unwritten rules about how to play this game (get an internship at these companies! talk to startups! this is how to leetcode!) -- you find a lot of these things out via your connections. But if your entire network is underrepresented, how do you break in?
This is to say nothing of unconscious biases that affect you as a minority. Less favorable interpretation of your interview results, less insider information about how to play the game, fewer opportunities offered due to prejudice about your potential, pay gap.
If you hit these roadblocks, pray tell how you "just go around them" ??? If your advice is "don't protest, just work hard and be that lucky 1 person who made it to the top for your race/gender/whatever" that's pretty shit advice.
> It's like how if you ask for a raise, you will probably be denied. If you make yourself invaluable to the business and then threaten to quit, you will get that raise.
That's the problem though. You can't make yourself invaluable or succeed in your career if folks don't take risks on you. If folks don't give you opportunities. There is a huge opportunity gap for folks born black, born female, in systems of power that disadvantage them. Participating in activism to rectify this isn't a waste of time -- if it doesn't directly benefit the participants, it benefits their children.
> And I was one of those minority children that was treated as hot garbage. I haven't forgotten. That's made me a pretty avid observer of which tactics actually lead to durable shifts in power balance, and simply asking for more power is not one of them.
Pray tell what tactics you're talking about other than "get lucky and work hard and hope the system is less biased and more meritocratic than you think" because that's all I'm hearing in your comments. What "durable shift in power balance" was achieved as a result of this advice?
Activism has a great track record. Consider LGBT rights in the country 20 years ago vs today. Would gay marriage be possible today if not for the tireless work of activism?
You're folks to essentially shut up and work hard in the unfair systems they were born into. It's just not going to work for most of them. And it's not "asking for more power" -- it's _fighting_ for equal treatment and _exercising_ the power they already have to multiplicative effect.
Maybe your main gripe is that this takes a long time and doesn't generally pay off monetarily or career-wise for individuals, since you have to spend your money and time for the collective?
But instead of calling this stupid and at odds with success, why not be more honest and realize you can do that AND also work really hard and succeed with the opportunities you've been given. The existence of full-time activists doesn't diminish the contributions of folks who contribute in other ways, and that you can contribute in other ways does not render full-time activists unnecessary.
At the first level, the Indians who say there’s lots of discrimination against Indians—the folks getting Apu cancelled—get a lot of air time, but aren’t representative. My point is that the same thing may apply to low caste Indians too. The views of this Dalit activist may or may reflect the experience of low caste Indian Americans.
But aren't often those the people who need that sort of representation the most? Even if 90%[0] of Indians aren't discriminated against, the 10% who suffer discrimination absolutely deserve representation and redress.
[0] Apparently 90% of Indian immigrants in the US are high-caste, so funny how that statistic might seem to line up. This of course makes sense, since low-caste people are probably less likely to be able to obtain the education and financial resources necessary to move to a different country.
When you engage in activism on behalf of $GROUP you’re affecting the relationship of everyone in the group with the larger society.
On the other hand, if you are successful at being convincing (and loud enough) for a minority community you can achieve a lot of good! LGBTQ+ activists have made the lives of young non-binary folks so much better in just the last 30 years: they are a minority, but they were loud and convincing that "maybe we should treat people equally (e.g. right to marry) even if their sexual proclivities are different from our own!"
Groups that really change the shape of society ultimately have to be loud if they're underrepresented, and make a lot of people uncomfortable. Frederick Douglass was a free black man, which was rare for the time. He used his very minority voice to make a racket that helped propel centuries of social change for the better. Would you prefer he didn't succeed / couldn't have a platform? It's still up to loud minority communities to actually be convincing, after all. All the hate campaigning like those "god hates fags" stuff won't ever get anywhere because it's not convincing to most people.
It's talking about the kind of racism you see on H1B threads here, like the outright confession of violating federal law that I once saw in a comment "I stopped giving interviews to Indians because I found they lie in the resume".
I disagree with that—the question matters either way. Activism creates conflict, and ordinary members of minority groups may or may not feel like the conflict is justified in comparison to the actual scope of the problem.
Other Indians at Google objected to this activist as being anti-Hindu. At the very least bringing this sort of advocacy into the workplace creates the potential for conflict. Depending on the actual scope of the caste discrimination problem, members of lower castes may or may not feel like the potential for conflict is worthwhile.
Ofcourse they would. They are mostly those whose parents (or themselves) were privileged enough to make it to the US.
I keep seeing this thrown around, but I am yet to see anyone respond exactly what form this "privilege" takes as it pertains to caste. The Indian constitution was co-written by a very forward thinking Dalit and affirmative action for lower castes is literally written into the Indian constitution. The only "privilege" I know of is that only upper castes can conduct priestly duties etc (at least used to), but I mean cmon that's just clutching at straws...
Even if you have affirmative action, if you feel like you're going to work or school in a hostile environment, this is a disadvantage to you. Psychological safety is one example of a privilege (e.g. women in silicon valley have inherently less psychological safety than men in the workplace because there are more men, and enough of them make unwanted advances with high enough frequency to force them to think about it).
Dalits have to deal with the stress of potentially being treated differently on the basis of their caste. Even if laws say "you can't discriminate," that doesn't change the interactions they have to have. And even if only a small number (let's say 1%) of people are discriminatory, but you go to a school with 300 people, you're now dealing with 3 folks who you're very uncomfortable around and may bully or hurt you. That's still going to suck. Privilege is not having to think about any of that.
Another example is being gay. You might say "well if you're gay and you live in SF, you are worry free!" But at work, school, or even at the grocery store there could be people who harbor discriminatory feelings and even unconcious biases against you, and it can affect how they treat you. If you're straight, you're lucky (privileged) not to have to deal with that. You also are lucky (privileged) that you can visit Alabama without fearing for your life. I mean, unless you're a straight black man and you encounter police in Alabama. Again, your expectations given that situation are a matter of privilege.
The reason folks harp on privilege so much is that privileged folks often say stuff like "X doesn't happen to me or in my proximity, so it doesn't happen ever." But the only way to know it _really_ doesn't happen is to exist as someone who lacks those privileges and to see what that's like. Since we can't do that, everyone argues about the validity of minority folks sharing their personal experiences.
There are also levels to it, as with anything. Within minority groups, there can be folks who have more relative privilege (e.g. black men vs black women, or dalits vs brahmins, or dark skinned vs light skinned black folks). Most people have some privileges relative to other people, so it's good for us to all understand what those things are when we interact with one another. We already do some amount of this very naturally (e.g. unless you're an asshole, you probably won't tell your poor friend to just buy better clothes if you know they are less privileged than you, and you might not expect your female friend to walk to your place through the city at night).
In addition to surname, these are all questions that can be used to gather details about someone’s caste.
Or so I’m told.
Buts it’s funny when we start to care about a tiny portion of the poor people.
I think you're talking about this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_discrimination_in_the_Un...
First of all, that poll is about discrimination against Indian-Americans (presumably based on race or ethnicity), while TFA is about caste-based discrimination.
Secondly, the option below "major problem" in that poll is "minor problem", there is no in-between. In other words, 90% or Indian-Americans think it isn't a major problem, but over half do think there is a problem.
Most importantly, polling opinions about this is the worst method of determining if discrimination exists. A better method would look at objective measures like salary/job/hiring rate/layoff rate/etc of lower-caste Indians compared to Indians as a whole.
I think nowadays most people use "TFA" (no leading "R") in a fairly benign way, without the aggressive tone of the original.
I don’t get this at all. If we treat a group as fairly as possible and on average they perform worse than other groups, is that evidence of discrimination? Is there a hypothesis that they need to perform equally as well.?
The other, much more reasonable explanation, is that these differences are explained by the fact that lower-caste Indians are actually _not_ treated "as fairly as possible" by society.
At the individual level exceptions exist, but when you scale out to sufficiently large populations there aren't random demographics that magically perform worse than everyone else because they're all lazy bums.
Becuase I do not believe an Indian's caste affects their inherent ability to perform IT work. If you do believe that to be true, of course you should expect a difference even in a perfectly fair society.
> Can't some groups perform worse than others by random chance?
This is extremely unlikely once you get to higher sample sizes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
> Are there really no other factors besides discrimination that could cause this?
Well of course there are. For example, if one group is more educated than the other they're going to perform better.
I made it sound as easy as "just see if the numbers don't match up", but in real life the statisticians that do these kinds of analysis account for other factors that could impact performance, so that if there is a difference it's purely "because" of the caste.
This the discrimination problem -- if you are not in the minority, it is much more difficult to appreciate how common it is.
And yet somehow that makes it not worthy of awareness and fixing? It's a very odd argument to make.
rayiner's comment about 90% of Indian-Americans not thinking discrimination is a big problem is about perceived racism from non-Indian Americans. If you read the link it's about racist Twitter posts about an Indian American by what looks like white folks. No mention of caste. Nothing about internal casteism in the Indian community.
I say this as a HN'er but sorry HN can be just dumb sometimes.
At the very least, it might mean you don’t bring in an activist that antagonizes members of the majority group, as was allegedly the case here.
Activism undertaken on behalf of a minority group affects the relationship between that minority group and society as a whole. All members of the group have a stake in the overall relationship between the group and other groups.
It’s all relative. My mum (in her 80s) is, as they say, “quite fair”. She’s lived in Boston for decades and when I was visiting a couple of weeks ago I could see she was still subject to the usual Boston racism. But I noticed it was mostly older people — ppl my age (50s) or younger were a lot better, and not just because they don’t notice older people.
I got a lot of appearance genes from my white dad so this issue doesn’t come up for me.
Where I live in Palo Alto the kids I interact with don’t appear to care at all and seem to mix pretty indiscriminately, which is great.
I was just visiting a few weeks ago and a couple of my friends told me "it's not as bad as it used to be" but when I asked, admitted it hadn't improved that much from the late 70s/early 80s that we remembered.
Just a casual example: my mum entered her retirement home with some groceries, using her own electronic key, and was told "deliveries are to be made through the service entrance." This to a woman who has been living there for years and whom the "diversity board" keeps trying to recruit (as it's always been 100% white people).
This attitude is deeply rooted. Remember, though Massachusetts was famously abolitionist, its immense wealth started out from funding slave voyages and slave mortgages. And of course the Bay Colony was founded by a shipload of notoriously intolerant people.
The only time it ever came up for discussion is in the context of someone's parents in India preferring their own caste folks as brides/grooms for arranged marriages back home(similar to the very high rates of race discrimination in dating in the US) and even that has trended down a lot recently with everyone becoming more progressive. My sense is that there are isolated cases here and there, and that it's not systemic, and that it's also rapidly getting better with time both back home and with 2nd generation immigrants in the US.
>When I relocated from my predominantly Black suburb in Dallas, Texas to an immensely diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, I didn’t expect to receive so many matches on Tinder and Hinge from non-Black men. I had always found myself in mostly white spaces — college, jobs, vacations — yet white men never took a deep interest in me before I moved to the East Coast. And while I had spent two years dating a German guy who was studying abroad at my university, it was only by transplant that a non-Black person really showed interest in courting me beyond a “you’re pretty for a Black girl” comment.
>Eventually, I stopped swiping on non-Black men altogether. There had been several cases before when a white man would match with me and then DM me something obscure like my skin tone reminding him of chocolate or feeling the need to tell me he’s always wanted to fuck a Black girl. I found it ludicrous that these men actually thought that was the way to a Black woman’s heart — or panties — and would unmatch them instantly. But in New York City, the progressive melting pot of America, white men (and Asian and Latino men for that matter) wanted to take me out for dinner and drinks, probed my interests, and complimented my photos in a respectable manner.
I think many people are a lot more tolerant of discrimination in dating, though, even if it's (IMO) unfortunate. People who don't date outside their race are really closing their minds and their worlds to a lot of potentially great possibilities. I get that many people do it because of parental approval/disapproval, and I can absolutely understand the desire not to piss off parents in that way, but it's still a shame.
Here on HN I have to question whether the voice of lower caste Indians is proportionally represented, and if not, why that might be.
I was in the states for a decade and have encountered numerous cases of bigoted Indian and Indian origin people in power (both academia and industry) who discriminate against caste. Dalit discrimination is one, but there’s actually a more common Brahmin superiority thing as well, which I tend to find easily because I look Brahmin (don’t ask me, that’s what these guys tell me) but I’m not one, so I’ve had 4-5 instances when these Bigots found me because I was eating chicken and they had to lecture about my sin.
The irony I point to them is that If they truly are trying to follow scriptures or whatever then they should remember that their caste is not allowed to cross oceans lol.
Oh haha that has happened to me as well, I’m an “upper” caste fellow and eat meat on occasion and have been lectured by one of these guys on how I am doomed to be reborn as a worm or something! Shitty people exist everywhere I guess..
That's an interesting comment. "little chance I would have noticed it." . I found this NYT article that pointed out we've long had our own caste system that we don't seem to notice. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson...
" a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip. Off camera, two other men in uniform, who looked like the lighter man, were holding down the darker man from the other side of the police car as dusk approached in Minneapolis. Yet another man in uniform, of Asian descent and thus not in the dominant caste, stood near, watching, immobilized, it seemed, at a remove from his own humanity and potential common cause, as the darker man slipped out of consciousness. We soon learned that the man on the ground, George Floyd, had been accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, and, like uncountable Black men over the centuries, lost his life over what might have been a mere citation for people in the dominant caste. "
It is unclear what you're trying to communicate. Would you like to clarify? Are you saying I don't know what caste is?
I will respectfully disagree strongly. I have read the wikipedia links you provided to back your prior claim that 'caste' is not analogous to 'race'. My readings so far, even based on the very links you provided, shows that it appears to be very much race and skin color related. Literally, the word you mentioned, "Varna" means skin color! "Varna contextually means "colour, race, tribe, species, kind, sort, nature, character, quality, property" of an object or people in some Vedic and medieval texts.[4] Varna refers to four social classes in the Manusmriti.[4][5]"
My understanding from a brief examination of published papers is that it is a significant component of it though.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285414433_Mapping_C... " Color and Caste Discrimination The belief in Aryan racial supremacy dominates social hierarchy practices in India. Upper caste members claim a superior lineage by tracing their “genes” to Aryans, connoting a “natural superiority” over “Shudra” and “ex-untouchables.” (The term “ex-untouchables” refers to Scheduled Castes, also known as Avarna (outside four Varna), Outcastes, Panchama, Antyaja, etc.) This chapter uses terms such as Dalits, ex-untouchables interchangeably, to refer to this population, though the socio-legal term defined to this population is Scheduled Castes—deemed as non-Aryans. Aryans textually are described as a pure, noble, and superior race: physically tall, with sharp noses and lighter skin color. Dasyus or Dasas, on the contrary, are considered of lowly origin and racially inferior due to their dark skin. Such stratification based on skin color is perhaps one of the oldest forms of discrimination and domination in human society. "
Another point of view [0]:
> The view taken by many that caste is invariably related to the skin color variability found in India’s population, and that all Dalits and the lower caste in India are darker skinned, seems a grossly erroneous view. Throughout India, one can find individuals with varied degrees of skin tone in each of the different caste groups, Dalits, or Brahmins alike. However, skin colour is more location specific than caste specific because of India’s widely varied temperatures and geographical conditions. Most of the population in Jammu and Kashmir and other northern states will share fairer skin tone irrespective or their class or caste as compared to their southern Indian counterparts. In states like Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh, many lower caste men and women have the same colour shade as their upper caste counterparts and vice versa.
> One can find dark skinned Brahmins as well as very light colored Dalits.
The author agrees that skin tone discrimination is a serious problem in India, but she sees skin tone and caste as mostly orthogonal dimensions of discrimination.
[0] Neha Mishra, “India and Colorism: The Finer Nuances”, Washington University Global Studies Law Review, vol. 14 n. 4 (2015)
This is a classic American argument.
I don’t think you can use the same strategies that work with other minority groups in the US.
The ultimate question is whether that discrimination gets carried forward into the US and continues to be executed here; not whether caste-discrimination happens somewhere in the world
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/27/indian-...
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/923736245
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-11/how-big-t...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-lawsuit/california-...
>Devesh Kapur, a professor of South Asian studies at Johns Hopkins University, found that in 2003, only 1.5 percent of Indian immigrants in the United States were Dalits or members of the lower-ranked castes.
>Dalit engineers said that most Indian workers from upper castes do not seem aware of their caste privilege and believe caste bias is a thing of the past, despite the fact that high-profile tech CEOs and board members, such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon board member Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of Pepsi, are Brahmins, or members of the highest caste.
What does this even mean? With 1.5% of Indians in the US, just with the probability of numbers, why would anyone expect a high profile CEO out of two examples to be a lower caste Indian? And also with those examples they seem to be implying that Americans are casteist? How does the ladder of managers who decide promotions look like at, say, Pepsi? Were they all Indians that are holding the other 1.5% of Indians from rising up to the level of CEO of Pepsi?
It's a hell of a deal with the devil they have to make: put up with the same discrimination they suffered at home, but without any kind of social support network, in exchange for the possibility getting a green card 10 or 15 or 20 years down the road and thus gaining some security residence-wise.
Sure, the US society should strive to eliminate caste-based discrimination occurring in the US.
But that it occurs in India does not mean that it’s been carried forward in the US.
A history of discrimination leading to a disadvantaged position today, and as a result needing additional support, is a separate problem — an argument for affirmative action — but ultimately is nothing different than all the other classes of peoples who’ve been fucked by history struggling to find security in the US (that is, any solution to the problem is not really particular to Indians, or the caste-system).
It doesn't mean that, certainly, but it seems plausible that it would be, to some extent. And while some lower-caste Indians in the US don't believe they've suffered caste-based discrimination, other do. So... it's here?
I have no idea who is "right" here; I'm neither Indian nor living in the US. But I will add a general comment: experiencing discrimination is not the same thing as being discriminated.
For example, let's say I – as a man – have a disagreement with a female coworker, and maybe I'm a bit of an asshole about it. She might genuinely feel discriminated, belittled, man-splained, or whatever you want to call it. It might be I'm doing this because she's a woman and that she's right, or I might just be having a bad day, or I might be an asshole to everyone I disagree with, or I might just have accidentally phrased things in a bad way.
This is a big problem; there have been a few cases where this actually happened and people accused me of being racist or sexist, usually online. Sometimes I could have phrased things a little bit better maybe, but I sure didn't do it because of someone's identity. People will say it's due to "subconscious bias", but I find that's what the kids nowadays call "gaslighting". Maybe subconscious bias exists and influences people's behaviour in significant ways (not so sure it does, but that's a different discussion), but all but one of the times it happened I wasn't even aware who I was talking to until they "outed" themselves when accusing me of discrimination.
To be clear: no doubt discrimination happens in various ways for various people, but in many instances it can be really hard to say if a specific incident is an instance of it, of if it's due to other reasons. This is problematic because 1) it makes it very hard to actually do something about (systemic) discrimination because you can't punish/fine people easily, but also 2) people will still genuinely feel discriminated against even if there is no actual (or very little) discrimination happening (or is no longer happening).
To be clear: I'm not "accusing" those people of "making things up" or anything like that, I really believe that almost all people report genuine feelings and experiences. As one of those white male types I have it easy: if someone is an asshole to me I can fairly safely assume that person is an asshole to me on account of just being an asshole, but for some other groups this can be a lot harder, either due to current or historical discrimination.
My point is that experiences aren't everything when it comes to these kind of topics, no matter how honest and genuine. They're also not worthless, and some experiences do describe clear-cut cases, but in general I'm careful.
It’s interesting why this happens, the people in this caste have to work harder to get Higher education due to quotas biased against them, and they’re not necessarily more well off either. It’s probably a mix of a focus on education and excellence in their families that compels the children to aspire this way, alongside a community that encourages this as well I suppose. Sad that recent decade has started to radicalize more and more of them (and other castes) due to a religious fanatic government among other things, I would have loved to understand more about what caused the extraordinary success of this community in producing this many talented individuals (like the Hungarian Jewish population did before WWII).
Based on my non-scientific observation of looking at the 300+ Indian origin folks in my LinkedIn profile, the upper castes are likely 60%, though they make up 10-15% of the population in India. The "middle" castes a. k. a Other Backward Castes or the so called merchant castes make up the remaining 35% and likely are 30% of the Indian population.
If you go head to head with one of these guys in the office, expect to lose. They occupy CEO positions in Google, Microsoft, and 100 other big companies, and their inner circle of top lieutenants too. This is partly due to capabilities and partly due to 2000+ years of being the managerial class, inherited by birth.
Biases I've noticed:
Chinese have positive bias toward whites
Chinese have strong positive bias toward other chinese
Chinese have slight negative bias toward indian
Chinese have strong negative bias toward blacks
Indians have strong negative bias toward lower caste
Indians have moderate negative bias toward muslims/pakistan
Indians have positive bias toward white
White women have positive bias toward black
White women have negative bias toward white men
White men have strong positive bias toward other white men
White men have positive bias toward asian
White men are neutral toward chinese, hispanic, indian, pakistan...
White men have slight negative bias toward older women
=========
not enough personal data points to tell about muslims, hispanics, black and other groups and subgroups.
you can see this dynamic play out during lunch, in voting, and other various social interactions.
The level of sexism and racism I see on a daily basis in tech is mind-boggling.
I’ve been in trainings (multiple), in fortune 100 companies (multiple), where white men were asked to apologize for the sins of other white people hundreds of years ago.
I’ve been in trainings where pictures of brains were put on screens and little sections were pointed at as the “racist” part of the brain. That’s, exactly what racists did (great scene in django unchained https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2prpdjkDIO8).
Is there racism against Asians absolutely, all people have bias and it’ll have an impact in particular situations.
The reality, is the focus on “women in tech” and “racism” is largely unnecessary and is leading to the caste system mentioned.
If you look at the office as “oppressed” and “oppressors” and do that based on race, you’re the racist. That’s what’s happening everywhere and frankly I know tens of people who have left these companies because of it.
Surnames and to a much lesser extent skin color/facial features indicate caste quite easily to people who have grown up in India. Often castes / surnames were historically also linked to professions which followed down family.
In fact in early medeival Europe too surnames historically indicated profession (Smith, Wright, Cooper, Ward, Chamberlain, Shoemaker...) but I believe the major labor shortage and dislocations caused by the black death and frequent warfare requiring conscription across all social classes pretty much ended any likelihood of social rigidity coming out of this. It will be interesting to see though how the capital and political power accumulation by the wealthier Americans plays out over the next few centuries.
In India, the way society developed was to restrict warfare largely to be carried out by certain upper castes and for most of the society, it didn't really matter who the ruling king was - at least until late medieval periods when proselytization started with Islamic invasion. So the caste system developed into something deep rooted, pernicious and divisive.
Interestingly in India, while Christianity and Islam don't have castes in theory, in practice it is commonly observed that their adherents too observe such distinctions which tells you how deep rooted the problem is.
Specifically to the community of the activist, the Dalits were actually considered to be "people with no caste" historically and were treated as "untouchables". Very likely they were the people who got the wrong side of the stick during the Aryan invasion ~3000 years ago which forms the basis of much of Hindu culture though there are obvious deep rooted integrations from the pre-existing pre-invasion culture (Shiva, Durga etc..) likely from the people who were integrated into the Aryan society.
You don't really see "untouchability" today especially in urban largely as a result of efforts of freedom movement era social reformers like Gandhi and Ambedkar followed by "vote bank politics" in the nascent democracy. Some communities also stopped using surnames. However i still recall when we were very young, our great grand parents generation still observed some of the discriminatory structures. So it has taken a couple of generations to get rid of untouchability - ie parents who saw discrimination as children but don't practice it raising children who understand it but haven't seen it raising kids who only know of it intellectually). It will probably take a couple more to eliminate caste discrimination but we are half way there.
Surnames and to a much lesser extent skin color/facial features indicate caste quite easily to people who have grown up in India. Often castes / surnames were historically also linked to professions which followed down family.
In fact in early medeival Europe too surnames historically indicated profession (Smith, Wright, Cooper, Ward, Chamberlain, Shoemaker...) but I believe the major labor shortage and dislocations caused by the black death and frequent warfare requiring conscription across all social classes pretty much ended any likelihood of social rigidity coming out of this. It will be interesting to see though how the capital and political power accumulation by the wealthier Americans plays out over the next few centuries.
In India, the way society developed was to restrict warfare largely to be carried out by certain upper castes and for most of the society, it didn't really matter who the ruling king was - at least until late medieval periods when proselytization started with Islamic invasion. So the caste system developed into something deep rooted, pernicious and divisive.
Interestingly in India, while Christianity and Islam don't have castes in theory, in practice it is commonly observed that their adherents too observe such distinctions which tells you how deep rooted the problem is.
Specifically to the community of the activist, the Dalits were actually considered to be "people with no caste" historically and were treated as "untouchables". Very likely they were the people who got the wrong side of the stick during the Aryan invasion ~3000 years ago which forms the basis of much of Hindu culture though there are obvious deep rooted integrations from the pre-existing pre-invasion culture (Shiva, Durga etc..) likely from the people who were integrated into the Aryan society.
You don't really see "untouchability" today especially in urban largely as a result of efforts of freedom movement era social reformers like Gandhi and Ambedkar followed by "vote bank politics" in the nascent democracy. Some communities also stopped using surnames. However i still recall when we were very young, our great grand parents generation still observed some of the discriminatory structures. So it has taken a couple of generations to get rid of untouchability - ie parents who saw discrimination as children but don't practice it raising children who understand it but haven't seen it raising kids who only know of it intellectually). It will probably take a couple more to eliminate caste discrimination but we are half way there
I really do not respect people who obsess about race and gender in the workplace.
I think many people feel like you...the problem is that some races / gender receive discrimination that the majority might not see.
If we take it to gender, a male might have never received any sexual harassment in his entire life and so might think it's a waste of time to talk about this in the workplace (spoiler: it's not). If a minority of the people in the office are women, maybe a majority of people will feel talking about sexual harassment is a waste of time.
For those it affects, that is.
I can't talk to this particular activist's positions, but Dalit Activism is a very relevant and worthy cause - it causes pretty significant discrimination even in the US.
Social, political, religious, or just generally ideas that are likely to make people uncomfortable are, generally, not good things to talk about at work. I shouldn't have to worry about my well meaning coworker wanting to save my soul, win my vote, or whatever. My coworker and I need to work together to solve the problems of our business - those other topics don't help us coordinate and might hurt our ability to coordinate by sowing dissension.
Until very recently it was well understood that certain topics are better off not discussed at work. This is not a dearth of curiosity but a surfeit of common sense.
Yes it is a workplace, but also a community of curious and open-minded people
Or at least used to be
regarding caste, toss in skin tones, name, accents, etc…
Given that "white woman" is such a rare category to interview, and, I assume, Dalit is pretty rare as well, AND I don't even regularly interview with the same set of people - how could I possibly tell when another interviewer is motivated by prejudice? Unless the interviewer says they are motivated by prejudice I'm either going to have to give them the benefit of the doubt or make a heckuva leap to accuse them of something.
Can’t think of a more important talk to be given to them tbh.
It makes as much sense as a talk on racial discrimination or gender identity discrimination to me, so I'm curious what's perceptively different about it to others.
This doesn't provide any context. Was Gupta resigning because she was for the presentation, or was she involved in blocking it?
The recent WP article explains this much better:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/02/google-...
> Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google News who invited Soundararajan to speak, resigned over the incident, according to a copy of her goodbye email posted internally Wednesday and viewed by The Washington Post.
> Gupta, the senior manager at Google News who had invited Soundararajan to speak on the matter, thus put in her papers on Wednesday.
Particularly, the most I've been able to hunt down are vague claims that her organization is Hinduphobic. If that's indeed the issue, what are the concrete examples of this?
Although if you think that term is hard to understand, I'm sorry to inform you about literally anything written by Europeans, which is more or less made to be impossible to understand on purpose.
I don't think most reasonable people will make that mistake.
> people who want to do philosophy without studying any of it
strikes me as unnecessary gatekeeping. The context here is fairly basic logic and critical thinking that clearly does not require formal study. I hope that more people who haven't ever been formal students of philosophy employ critical thinking, not less!
The people who say “steelman” a lot aren’t just busy with other things. They’re like full time bloggers and write huge essays constantly about their own system of critical rationalism and thinking correctly and all that, all philosophical topics.
Avoiding the literature is more intentional. Part because they want their community to use all different words so they’ll sound different and engineer-y. Part because they’d be annoyed that midcentury philosophy already tried their project and now thinks it doesn’t work.
Language is mutable and redundant. Different people come up with similar concepts independently over centuries and that's fine. Nobody has a copyright on philosophy.
Making your scarecrow out of steel doesn't make them a better arguing partner.
Interesting social contract.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...
I find it very interesting that the group in power is trying very hard to suppress any criticism, basically silencing the disadvantaged minority (within the Indian diaspora).
Two options arise out of it:
Hire someone else not prone to or going through this societal conflict at the moment ($$$), or forbid the topic and risk losin conscientious objectors amongst workers/leadership.
The executive case with a shareholder value tilt would be avoid and reject the conversation, sink the risk, evaluate fallout, and hire replacements as necessary. You've still done your fiduciary duty, but damn those meddlesome cats.
The Stakeholder value executive prioritizing social change would likely engage with the topic, seeing it as an opportunity to raise awareness, get free press, attract talent, etc.
I can only really see a case for suppressing it if it were something you couldn't afford to not have.
This is the same company that makes and throws away products and apps continuously?
The goal is trying something out, if it doesn't measure up, it's yeeted in the bin.
Besides which, you're expecting rationality and consistency out of people in positions of power. You already lost. People concerned with the issue of maximally optimizing for wealth accrual are seldom burdened with a burning need to be rational and consistent. At least I've seen precious few positive examples thereof.
> Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder of Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organisation
Hm ok https://www.equalitylabs.org/mission
> Equality Labs is an Ambedkarite South Asian power-building organization
What is this Ambedkarite thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit_Buddhist_movement
> The movement was launched in 1956 by Ambedkar when nearly half a million Dalits – formerly untouchables – joined him and converted to Navayana Buddhism
So it's a Buddhist deal. Is Buddhism anti-hinduism? Um, it isn't exactly pro-hinduism, now is it?
I'm not sure that's the steeliest man, but it's a start.
But they "they want to preserve their culture". I chose apartheid to avoid Godwin'ing the discussion, but it applies there as well. Or the US South in the 50's, and all those other places where a group feels threatened by "them" and are disinterested in expanding the definition of society or even citizenship.
I just don't think these issues are as simple as "good or bad". At the end of the day, English overtaking French is a real phenomenon. Are they supposed to just sit there and let it happen only to end up with a possibly more divided society where half the population can't communicate with the other?
I'm not saying the solution they came up with is right (actually I think having to pass these types of laws is just a sign of weakness) but at the same time I refuse to think that it's fuelled by xenophobia.
Hell, lynching black folk were "supported by the majority" in the US back then. Might still be, based on where you look. Change-or-leave isn't a terribly even-handed approach when you expect it to NOT be applied to yourself when outside of Quebec.
And as others have said and written, if you have to take such aggressive measures to preserve one's culture, it's already dead. Trying to make the internet be something other than English or Mandarin is a fools errand. I would think it's being driven by the boomers who have spent their lives in pursuit of a goal. They'll accept the scorched-earth "victory" independent of the cost, as otherwise their adult lives were mis-spent or wasted. Their counterparts had 'Nam to deal with, or the wars of the 80's and 90's.
They could have tried to make the situation positive and played along with the rules of civil society. But they chose not to and Montreal (again) will pay the price. The rest of the province couldn't care less.
Say, by analogy, what if another manager in a different situation, who made the 'cancel' decision on a talk, was concerned that the lecture they were being asked to approve was extremist? Then say, if Americans knew Hindu culture they might agree, just as they understand why they wouldn't invite their own untouchables to speak.
In this activist case, it's absolutely offensive to compare the Hindu untouchables with our untouchables because theirs are born into it where ours are just uneducated or indoctrinated and it would be such a grotesque insult to those people living in India, or anywhere in the world, that no serious person could even compare them out loud, and I'm even taking a considerable personal risk to write the comparison hypothetically.
But what if that's how that manager felt? How would "we" (progressive, though still mostly white, hegemonic We) respond to a speaker representing our own untouchables, and even though the comparison itself is so disgusting?
The steelman case for the protests and for the manager is that they are acting on convictions as strong and (they believe) principled as any of our own, however unjustly in this case. Even though they're wrong, until we understand their own complete revolt that caused them to take such a reckless stance in this case, there is no way to engage with them, or understand the source of the conflict. This isn't mere empathy or a "both sides,"-ism, as I don't think we can empathize with someone we fundamentally know is so wrong. However, I do think one can have compassion for everyone involved, and it is immensely difficult, as it requires imagining something you are truly revolted by, and then imaging what it would be like for someone like a Dalit friend or someone you loved to see you feel that way about them. The tension between the heartbreak at imagining their eyes in that moment and then also the feeling of what can only be described as disgust for people with the most offensive values, is I think, the compassion, where you feel both the revolt at being confronted with the very worst of the worst, and also what it feels like that no matter what you do and how much goodness you bring that you will always be an object of social disgust. This is why compassion is hard, but beautiful, but so very hard! Being able to do that suggests a greatness of soul to me.
The steelman case here isn't about pretending the broken logic of the protesting managers beliefs was somehow true, it's from asking, what if someone you loved or were responsible for felt one way or the other in this conflict about you? There is a basic misundertanding between two parts of a culture, where maybe these Brahmins don't trust the Dalits and the Dalits interpret that as contempt, which is returned by being provocative and giving the other just what they might expect? Bit of a homily, but in this sense, the steelman case shows how a specific kind of compassion might provide some future basis on which to establish both trust and respect, even if it's a very high bar.
Working a bit with one Indian company, I was puzzled by their mandated usernames of the form FirstnameInitialDigit, e.g. johns1 if you're John Smith.
It was sad learning that people had to give up using family names for practical reasons.
Perhaps an alternative idea can be considered: this ontology people have latched onto isn’t accurate and there can be people who don’t know the above answer because indeed they aren’t exposed to a whole lot of social issue talks at work.
Because most of the people in these roles aren't actually well-educated in 'best practices', you get stuff like mandatory non-anonymized surveys that ask whether people are trans and send the results to managers, or slideshows talking about minority representation that omit Asians, Hispanics, and other 'common' groups.
https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidde...
Maybe US Westerners…
it’s just that the managers are deliberately choosing to ignore the issue, because they themselves actually support (or have nothing against) casteism
can’t make a diversity meeting bout that
For the more controversial topics, the talks are vetted more carefully, to make sure they align with the political position of the company, and that they don't raise too much opposition from any groups within the company.
The goal of the speaker is to convert as many (preferably influential) people as possible to their viewpoint. The goal of the hosting employee is typically the same, at least for the controversial issues (since those are usually highly politicized). The goal of the host company is to promote themselves as a bastion of certain (good, from their perspective) ideas, and/or as a place for thoughtful discussions.
I first learned about effective altruism when GiveWell did a tech talk.
Also, in 2008, all the major presidential candidates stopped in Mountain View to give a campaign speech. And then there was the time OK Go gave a concert, due to the YouTube connection I presume.
Those were different times. That was mostly before the anti-tech backlash, when Google could seemingly do no wrong.
Even in the early days there were frequently minor controversies, but things got much more fraught by 2015 or so.
The website says, "The world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers and doers all in one place. Talks at Google. Where great minds meet."
The last 5 talks in my feed: - LGBTQ & Spirituality - Neurdiversity: How to Love, Live, and Work Better - A Discussion On His Book "Jews Don't Count" - A Lookback at Japanese Internment & a Storied Writing Career - No One Understands You and What To Do About It
https://talksat.withgoogle.com/
I don't think I've directly answered your questions, but these talks touch on social issues, tech valuations, Mars and space exploration, physical and athletic performance, health and diet, and I guess anything else that Googlers would be interested in hearing about.
A pastry chef at a café on the Google Mountain View campus put out some nice little cakes with Tibetan goji berries. The sign said "Free Tibet Goji Berry Cake". This was obviously a sly nod to the Free Tibet campaign, and also true, as the cake was free, this being Google.
Some local Chinese Googlers complained to kitchen management, saying that the idea of freeing Tibet was anti-Chinese. The pastry chef was suspended by the catering company.
The story soon reached the high traffic "misc" mailing list. Many US Googlers objected to the pastry chef being punished for what they considered inoffensive free speech. A fund was started to compensate the cook for lost wages. There was a campaign to reinstate her immediately.
At least one Chinese Googler threatened to quit if the cook was not fired, and was encouraged to go ahead and quit by people who sided with the cook. Some Chinese Googlers shared their interesting opinions about Tibet, e.g. they said the Dalai Lama is a Nazi, he is a secret CIA agent, etc.
This new information was met with skepticism and failed to win anybody over to the Chinese side.
Anyway, eventually the pastry chef was reinstated. I don't think anybody quit. It all blew over.
It's illegal to discriminate against a person's characteristic of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief. But not caste.
This was pointed out at the time, but was unfortunately ignored.
Since then, successive Conservative governments have shied away from making any legislative corrections, preferring to rely on case law to resolve this.
I have a hard time believing that was accidental :-( It seems essentially impossible to believe that British politicians would be unaware of Indian caste issues, so I would have to assume it was viewed as too dangerous / too low political benefit to address.
Not discounting your experience, but I couldn’t imagine that Sorrento Valley would have larger issues about it than Silicon Valley.
People from higher castes, even if they're open-minded on the topic of caste, likely have relatives who aren't -- especially if they're the only member of a large family who has left India. Children have been disowned or even murdered by their relatives for marrying a member of a lower caste; it's really hard to escape that sort of prejudice.
We are already so far away from home, atleast we can look out for each other.
I'm not in tech so I've never lived anywhere with many Indians. I'm guessing these types of issues start to crop up when you have higher chances of meeting many people in your exact social group back in India and end up forming cliques.
And there are other indicators; I've been told upper casts are usually lighter-skinned, and Brahmins are often vegetarian.
however, in retrospect, the pauses and looks I received when I asked people where they were from in india and whether they were vegetarian make more sense now. Woosh.
they have whole departments consisting exclusively of Indians and i believe their biggest non-US office is actually in India
a manager may know somebody on their team who can tell your caste or maybe suggest your caste based on the region you were from
this is as far i understood it
The "I don't understand" part is interesting. I learnt one way to contextualize something 'foreign' in a quick way is to apply it to something we're familiar with. For example, in the US, one could easily describe the black-white divide as a more violently enforced caste system. Thus, I presume 'how does it work' is the same way we (American) know the 'caste' of someone applying for a job. Just based on the way someone is named, eg: Hunter, Tanner, Abigail would perhaps be identifiable as 'upper caste' individiuals while names like DeShawn or Laquisha would be identified as 'lower caste'. Then comes linguistic traits and such.
My understanding from a brief examination of published papers is the opposite.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285414433_Mapping_C... " Color and Caste Discrimination The belief in Aryan racial supremacy dominates social hierarchy practices in India. Upper caste members claim a superior lineage by tracing their “genes” to Aryans, connoting a “natural superiority” over “Shudra” and “ex-untouchables.” (The term “ex-untouchables” refers to Scheduled Castes, also known as Avarna (outside four Varna), Outcastes, Panchama, Antyaja, etc.) This chapter uses terms such as Dalits, ex-untouchables interchangeably, to refer to this population, though the socio-legal term defined to this population is Scheduled Castes—deemed as non-Aryans. Aryans textually are described as a pure, noble, and superior race: physically tall, with sharp noses and lighter skin color. Dasyus or Dasas, on the contrary, are considered of lowly origin and racially inferior due to their dark skin. Such stratification based on skin color is perhaps one of the oldest forms of discrimination and domination in human society. "
It sounds like you're saying the research paper I linked to is incorrect? Is there some evidence you could help to cite. Thanks.
I suggest reading the Wikipedia articles on varna and caste in India as an introduction. There’s a lot to learn and very little of it is about color and even less about skin color.
I'm sorry but it does sound a bit hilarious to me when I read from your link that the word 'varna' means skin color! The actual research on the topic gives me stuff like:
"What we call caste is referred to in Sanskrit sources by two concepts—varna and jati. They both assume identity through being born into a group and following a particular occupation. The first literally means color and was used rather metaphorically as such when referring to the four major caste groups—Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra, sometimes listed as white, red, yellow, and black. Sociologists sometimes render the concept of varna as ritual or status ranking or alternately as the broader divisions of society. In the latter case, the meaning can be traced to “cover.” The word jati comes from the root ja, meaning to be born. This refers directly to identity based on birth and also extends to occupation, but it is a narrower category than varna and there are hundreds of jatis observing various rules of endogamy and exogamy."
That sounds exactly like the 1 drop rule, just that it is more fractally stratified beyond black, mixed, white categorization that happens here.
The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood")[1][2] is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.[
> skin color
If you look at the varna article you’ll see the concept is quite a bit more capacious than “skin color”.
> The word appears in the Rigveda, where it means "colour, outward appearance, exterior, form, figure or shape".[4] The word means "color, tint, dye or pigment" in the Mahabharata.[4] Varna contextually means "colour, race, tribe, species, kind, sort, nature, character, quality, property" of an object or people in some Vedic and medieval texts.
Anyway caste, varna and jati prejudice exists in India and in dispirit communities with lots of first generation immigrants. So does colorism, where lighter skin is preferred. But they’re not the same thing and acting as if they are confuses much, much more than it illuminates.
But your own comment "So does colorism, where lighter skin is preferred. But they’re not the same thing and acting as if they are confuses much, much more than it illuminates." seems to indicate that it is possible, at least in part to determine caste visually as does the origin story you mentioned "Rigveda" which describes 'upper caste' 'Aryan' conquests over the 'lower caste' dark skinned indigenous population. Hence, 'varna' which you have now acknowledged means 'color' albeit you're claiming a more 'advanced' meaning beyond skin color which I'm sorry, but I perceive as an attempt to spin a racist/caste origin story into something more sophisticated. Let me guess, you're going to say the 'dark colored' here is something more sophisticated then just light skinned chariot driving nomadic invaders subjugating dark skinned indigenous city dwelling people?
"Through fear of thee [Agni] the dark-coloured inhabitants fled, not waiting for battle, when, O Agni (fire) burning brightly for Puru, and destroying the cities, thou didst shine." (VII, 5, 3)
Yes, that’s still true. Compare Kerala Dalits and Brahmins[1] or Uttar Pradesh ones[2] or Punjabi Dalits and Tamil Brahmins like I did yesterday[3]. Caste isn’t skin color.
> But your own comment "So does colorism, where lighter skin is preferred. But they’re not the same thing and acting as if they are confuses much, much more than it illuminates." seems to indicate that it is possible, at least in part to determine caste visually
You can’t tell what caste someone is from their skin color. The entire range of Indian skin colors is in every caste. The distributions are almost certainly different but there are Brahmins as dark as any African and Dalits who look like Afghans.
> Hence, 'varna' which you have now acknowledged means 'color' albeit you're claiming a more 'advanced' meaning beyond skin color
At no stage did I use the word advanced. I suggest you reserve quotation marks for quotations as it aids clear communication. I do not speak Sanskrit but I bow to the expertise of those who do that it means a lot more than color, never mind skin color.
> which I'm sorry, but I perceive as an attempt to spin a racist/caste origin story into something more sophisticated.
You may not know this but the Vedas are stories of events that happened 3,000-5,000 years ago. The origins of caste prejudice are not super relevant to its modern particulars because Indians in the same region have overlappping distributions of skin color. We’re not talking Chinese and Egyptian here. More like Austrian and Lombard.
[1] https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/kerala-dalit-man-assau...
https://medium.com/@jawadakhtar/wedding-rituals-typical-to-k...
[2] https://english.varthabharati.in/india/dalit-groom-takes-out...
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.craftsvilla.com/blog/the-...
Yes, you could use a wildly inaccurate analogy to show a lack of understanding.
Caste (varna) and jati are not about race. They’re culturally transmitted and not based on easily visible characteristics.
I mentioned in my other comment.
My understanding from a brief examination of published papers is the opposite.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285414433_Mapping_C... " Color and Caste Discrimination The belief in Aryan racial supremacy dominates social hierarchy practices in India.
[1] https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tamil_brahmins_at_... [2] http://sanhati.com/articles/20079/
Even things like putting a hand on someone's shoulder to feel if they are wearing the thread the upper caste sometimes wear under their clothes.
Apparently for those raised around the system it can be fairly easy to figure out over extended co-working.
Both are not the same scenario, which the headline seems to conflate.
So I'd say it was both.
Looking at social media, I know discussing caste is quite taboo. People who celebrate their caste openly are mocked.
Is caste dead, or has it been driven underground? Does it still play a role in places like SV?
His bosses Sergey and Larry are Jewish. They are smiling from on higher.
EV Ramaswamy, revered even today as Periyar (elder one) in Tamil Nadu, (in)famously gave a speech calling for their genocide in 1973 [1].
Brahmins are mostly persona non grata in Tamil Nadu. There are 3 Tamil Nobel laureates, apart from the mathematician Ramanujam. Unfortunately all 4 of these were/are Brahmins. While laureates like Tagore are celebrated in their home state (West Bengal), you won't find any institute, road or even classroom named after these worthies in Tamil Nadu. Not unlike how Ahmadi Nobel laureate Abdus Salam was treated in Pakistan.
1. https://hindupost.in/history/when-e-v-r-naicker-aka-periyar-...
And their friends no doubt all agreed.
This is why free speech absolutism is a good thing.
I'm unaware of N American laws where you can't treat people fairly independent of how they're treated elsewhere. If this occurred in India or a 3rd country, the article should have been more explicit about this. Google probably has offices damn near everywhere so seeing glass and their logo's pretty ambiguous.
Here's how my "CEO for a day" fantasy would work...
The DEI department is de-solved immediately. All non-work slack channels closed. The new hiring strategy is merit-only, using tests that are as neutral as possible, with transparent salary scales and promotion paths. Equality but not equity.
Anybody having a problem with this policy, stirring up shit, doing walkouts, trying to get colleagues fired and other wildly unprofessional behavior can leave.
Surely many think this is aggressive and that I'm a creepy authoritarian. No, this cleans up the obnoxious 5% that makes everybody's lives miserable, so the outcome is a pleasant, fair and peaceful workplace.
A DEI department is a discrimination machine. Division is their output, because if there is none, it's obsolete.
Treat it like any form of behavior that creates a hostile work environment and thereby lowers overall workplace productivity. Businesses are incentivized to keep things running in the most productive method possible.
Discrimination costs your business in lowering employee productivity and other affects like possibly losing talent or opportunities. Warning discriminating employees that their behavior could cost them their job or simply firing them depending on the severity of the situation seems like a simple enough solution?
As to how to address it, a first step is the method of reporting. The accusation of discrimination is a serious one, and I'm against hotheaded employees randomly shouting things in slack or emails.
I'd offer an institutional channel to report it to, which will investigate each complaint seriously. The person making the report needs to have a good story, something tangible, some evidence. And I'd take it from there.
If the story checks out and is beyond any doubt, the offender gets disciplined. Preferably a single and last warning. If the story holds no ground at all, the reporter gets a warning for defamation.
Wild generalizations like "all people of caste X discriminate" is a discrimination in itself and not actionable. Keep making generalizations and I'd fire you. This is work, not a postmodernist philosophy class.
Ideally all employees would have the time and capacity for that care.
What specific proposals do you have to ensure that this happens? Which perfectly neutral, bias-free tests would you employ? How would you ensure that the humans delivering the tests or screening candidates were neutral and perfectly bias-free?
Also, would you be doing all this yourself as the CEO? If so, seems like an inefficient use of your time.
Perhaps you'd employ some staff to ensure this gets carried out at the scale of Google. These folks would be assigned to creating the sense of fairness, merit, and justice you describe at scale, so that everyone felt included in the same way. You could even put them in their own department. Hmm...
Devising which metrics to measure is tough, but your objection isn't really a checkmate like you think it is. OP presumably is against the type of DEI initiatives that are in the form of "group X makes up Y% of the overall population but only make up Z% of the employees at this company. This means there's discrimination going on and we need to enact affirmative action to increase the participation of group X". I can arguably ask the same questions about the approach given there. I doubt that it's "neutral, bias-free", nor do I think the people in DEI would be "neutral and perfectly bias-free".
Yes, coming up with objective metrics is hard, but it's not something that's solved by DEI. Using that as an objection against getting rid of DEI doesn't make sense.
It does though. The objection isn't simply "coming up with objective metrics is hard" but more honestly "there are not objective metrics". This is true for a variety of reasons. A sort of overarching one is that in a Goodhart's law sense, if a metric is public, people will game it. People with more resources ("power", "privilege", "class", whatever you want to call it) will be able to make themselves appear to look better according to the metric, all else equal.
In that sense, a lot of DEI is akin to an abuse-prevention org: figuring out how particular ways of measuring can mislead or harm, and how we can improve or account for those in the absence of any single perfect measurement.
But something tells me that if management decided to use some obviously flawed way of measuring performance (eg. # of commits), that DEI won't step in unless it turned out that black workers committed less code than whites or whatever. In that respect you don't really want DEI, you want an anti metrics abuse department.
Then other people, including perhaps members of the DEI department can step in and point out that this is a bad idea. The DEI department doesn't have a monopoly on management's ear. You're doing the same thing, trying to invent a perfect department to solve all of the problems. Don't do that. Stop trying to invent perfect systems or perfect metrics, they don't exist. Focus on making incremental improvements in people's lives. I don't want a "metrics abuse department" because that's so vague and missionless as to be pointless.
If management does something stupid that upsets everyone, they'll know. If they do something stupid that only upsets the 1% of black employees, they're not going to notice unless someone (the DEI department) is specifically looking.
If there was, Google interviews (and interviews in general) would be MUCH less of a shitshow, and hiring would be much less stressful overall.
But there isn't - brilliant people present very differently depending on their backgrounds, and the unfortunate truth is that asking people to judge this subjectively ends up creating tons of bias.
The constant stream of DEI fluff (like banning the words "blacklist" or "master") can get annoying, but pretending that there are no problems or that these departments exist for ideological reasons is worse. If you believe in meritocracy, you should believe in recruiting from HBCUs and doing outreach to other URM.
As if a company full of "well, actually" techbros wouldn't be completely dysfunctional too
I'd first say that I do not share the default assumption that discrimination is widespread. As if it is some default, rather than an exception. You're far too cynical.
I base this on 2 decades of work experience. I work in a small tech hub with 80 nationalities. It literally cannot get more diverse. We don't have DEI departments, social justice slack channels or activists. And somehow it all works fine. No tensions, no outrage, happy workers.
A mystery, I guess? It's almost as if people are pretty good, by default.
How to make a test neutral? Background check before the interview, to verify claimed education/credentials. Then a test similar to what you do when going on one of those certification exams.
Then the "softer" in-person test, where you collect multiple inputs to prevent the bias of a single interviewer.
I pretty much think that's good enough to give the candidate a 3 month trial period where actual work performance is measured by some agreed metric. Pass that and you're permanently in. The end.
By the same logic SRE is responsible for breaking my software because if the site is always reliable then they’re obsolete.
How much of your top 5% are you alienating and losing?
Is it worth it?
If so, I suspect all the companies would've already done it.
Slowly, more and more companies are taking a stance against activism. Coinbase did it, BaseCamp, and recently Netflix drew a line in the sand.
They don't call me The Cleaner for nothing.
Three people out of 50 quit. They were absolutely the most toxic and unproductive people in the office and nearly everyone was happy to see them leave.
There is a high correlation between unproductive employees and activist employees.
A company is like a sports team that is working together towards a singular goal. It is not a family. It is not a microcosm of the world nor the community.
Most activism has no relevance at work, but worse: it typically achieves the exact opposite of making the workplace more fair. It's regressive, not progressive.
It's the government's responsibility to deal with exploitation and create laws to prevent it.
I must be the last person still alive that keeps their opinions to themselves while on the job.
Also non-Indian managers are very unlikely to be interested in discriminating against specific subgroups of Indians even if they're huge bigots or something, so this is a pretty specifically inter-Indian issue.
https://www.wired.com/story/trapped-in-silicon-valleys-hidde...
to me it seems that people got carried away by political debacle so much they forgot what they should actually be doing on their job
moreover i doubt Basecamp had a caste problem to begin with
Economic activity is an outcome that happens in the presence of a stable civic situation. Economic activity does not spontaneously create polite and cooperative groups of people.
If anything, civic/political matters take primacy over economics any day. Once your political landscape degenerates, your economic underpinning is generally quick to follow in the ensuing chaos.
How have people not realized this yet?
why talk shit about politics when we can spend time together making money!
we already contribute a significant portion of our income to taxes
maybe we should have political debates with the very people we sponsor and not our coworkers?
This policy only came into play after leadership was called out.
the management said no funny names no more
and this has made some of the employees very upset
they just couldn’t accept they won’t be able to call their customers funny names no more while being hired to do a job
The luxury of ignoring politics is usually reserved for those who are not threatened by the dominant politics. And that luxury is one that most people in tech management have, so it can produce unintentional harm.
I previously worked at Unity Technologies (3d game engine company) and as well as a CRM Consultancy, and I was amazed by how much time people spent arguing their political agenda. It was a major contributing factor of why I left both places. I had this feeling of "Why are these people chatting about things irrelevant to our work, while I am working? They should be working too-- they're paid to work, not chat & check their slack feed for 30-60 minutes a day about politics"
Honestly, this seems boring as hell.
I've often discussed politics, religion, and all sorts of things with coworkers, and we've often disagreed. And then we went about our day working together, or having a beer after work. No problems. It's just part of normal regular socializing, and I'd argue that socializing with co-workers is somewhat important for a healthy workplace.
Excessively pushing politics is a different thing of course, but "absolutely no politics allowed" has just a kind of boring superficiality to it. And also leaves us with the rather tricky question on what "politics" is, exactly.
I love the lack of politics at work. It really makes it more pleasant-- almost an escape from an otherwise over-politically involved society. I can't turn on the news or open the browser (sometimes even IRC) without politics seeping in.
It allows me to stay focused on work, not on what people think about/how I might be judged on my non-work related opinions. Nor that there could be favoritism based on such things.
It levels the playing field.
There are numerous articles discussing any non-liberal voices resulting in people being let-go/fired at various California-based technology companies.
The Civil Rights Act and its consequences have meant that America will forever be politicized along every fault line of human identity. Whether it can withstand this burden and remain a functional civilization remains to be seen.
Companies should reject candidates who have are so clouded by their social identity that they can’t make good objective decisions.
This goes both ways, a candidate who takes pride in their identity as someone from a higher caste should be rejected as should one who feels oppressed because they are lower caste. Anyone who can’t focus on the work because of their social identity is a liability.
The only kind of talk they should hold is how to grow and get better at your job.
You can take any arbitrary characteristic of a person and find someone who likes/dislikes them because of it. The solution is to take power away from people who care about those characteristics that don’t pertain to work.
Tired of this nonsense that has taken over the world, wish we could go back to a time when we could appreciate the pure technical contributions of Einstein, Turing, Ramanujan and Marie Curie instead of primarily viewing them as a Jew, Gay, Indian and Woman.
Google publicly defending this decision via an official spokesperson, rather than apologizing and backtracking, makes me think that someone close to the top is personally bothered by the content of the talk. It seems like it would be easy for leadership to brush off complaints about it from further down the chain.
Seems like exhibit A for something the rest of us should be aware of, and balance opinions on. Since there are many people from India in the US.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cisco-lawsuit/california-...
when I was in Mountain View, and again on Blind App, I got the feeling that it was a completely distinct culture that found like company. Everything from relationship woes, to the role of an employee at first could hide behind the maladjusted software enthusiast stereotype, but it crumbles and reveals itself as a high concentration of South Asian transplants which isn't obvious at first, but makes more sense when its noticed. For a region that diverse, it could be useful to understand what is disproportionate in the pipelines from there to Google.
But also, "castes aren't based on anything real and are obvious bullshit" (paraphrasing the original comment) is not going to be obvious to everyone and not a very helpful statement. Kind of like saying "the world really isn't flat" -- we know, but it's not gonna help anyone because you're not going to stop flat earthers from existing or being sincere about their beliefs.
But I've worked with ~100 Indian co-workers and several were very vocal about their caste because they were from the "higher" caste; well-educated, children of politicians and scientists and vegetarian.
It may be.
But there are enough examples in history to understand that this may not be a trivial matter, either. Could you tell if someone is Jewish or not? Could you tell utus and tutsis apart?
Interestingly I had the same experience going on a vacation to the Balkans. To an outsider, Croat/Serb/Bosnian are all basically the same - your languages are mutually intelligible, your food is all tasty meat cuts and flatbread, you look more or less the same. But apparently within this region, this is a life-or-death distinction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
I think it matters if it's causing discrimination at my workplace.
I’m not sure that this is as insightful of a post as you envisioned.
https://www.bloomberg.com/letters/2021-03-18/caste-based-dis...
100% this goes on at amazon all the time. One time, I googled the last name origin of a whole orgs management structure. All of them were from the same part of India, without exception.
brā̠hma̠ṇō̎-'sya̠ mukha̍māsīt । bā̠hū rā̍ja̠nya̍ḥ kṛ̠taḥ । ū̠rū tada̍sya̠ yadvaiśya̍ḥ । pa̠dbhyāgṃ śū̠drō a̍jāyataḥ ॥
There it is - right there.
Of course, no where in the text is it mentioned that you should be violent to those of other castes. In fact it all points to the following - that we all come from the same universal truth, but that people are of different talents, and this variety of talents is what helps society function.
The problem is when our egos get in the way.
vidya-vinaya-sampanne brahmane gavi hastini suni caiva sva-pake ca panditah sama-darsinah
The humble sage, by virtue of true knowledge, sees with equal vision a learned and gentle brahmana, a cow, an elephant, a dog and an outcaste.
So when we can learn to put our egos aside for a moment, and remember that we are all part of humanity, then we can learn to coexist and thrive.
Unfortunately, caste has just become another crutch that the advantaged use to take advantage of the disadvantaged, just like skin color (white skinned people vs. black skinned people) or race (gentiles vs. jews).
It is a tale as old as time.
"Someone suggested sharing baby pictures across our team. A googler said that wouldnt be inclusive because googlers might not have photos from childhood or not want to share them."
Isn't this incredibly backwards? A culture where co-workers are being encouraged to self-censor sharing baby photos because someone might be offended is not very healthy IMO.
"Postmortem" is apparently next on the chopping block because it's triggering to people who know somebody who has died.
Representative democracy is not a fruit of technological impediments, but a conscious decision by the founding fathers after learning of the plights of direct democracy (which they equated to anarchy).
Companies like Apple firing people on employees just in time judgements is the failure of justice and the decay of modern society.
Hot take, but you know…
If there are specific policies at work that effect you (meaningfully, not tangentially) by all means seek to change them.
If you just want to wear your woke flair and bring all general outside politics inside…get a hobby, start a religion, join a movement…leave the rest of us alone.
If you are protesting SOCIETY at work, I encourage you to leave the building.
The office is not your church.
So people from India come here and sniff out Dalits based on their last names and then discriminate against them?
What if the Brahmins are discriminating against White people? Would we even know?
All of this discrimination hunting by the Witchfinder Generals at all hours can't be good for Google's productivity. What a shit show.
Good riddance.
Just because it doesn’t affect you personally doesn’t meant it’s not important.
Not to diminish her activism or the meaning of her resignation. I just thought to clarify since many tech journalists either don't understand corporate titles or purposefully try to mislead readers by using them in a specific way.
https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-India-Malhotra-Aravindan-Nee...
Equality Labs is a known offender.
https://cohna.org/repurposing-hate-and-hinduphobia-the-uc-da...