Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination | Hacker News Reader

Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

indiatoday.in

601 pointsgunvantsr590 comments

I worked at a company where this was an issue at one point (granted this was one situation among a lot of employees). A manager was pretty much dismissive of everything anyone of a lower caste did / wouldn't communicate with them effectively.

HR absolutely struggled with the issue. The HR folks tasked with dealing with discrimination issues largely had spent their time constructing company wide emails and classes that revolved around white folks discriminating against others / concepts of privilege, absolutely froze when faced with a discrimination issue outside that stereotype.

Long story short legal eventually was the brave one and decided that yes it was discrimination and the manager in question was asked to move on. The folks he refused to work with were compensated and their status in the company (pay scale, etc) was corrected.

As one of my Indian college's observed about the manager in question "If he was white this would have been dealt with sooner."

Credit to my Indian coworkers who really pushed this issue with HR and made legal act in the end. They wanted nothing to do with this kind of behavior.

> HR absolutely struggled with the issue. The HR folks tasked with dealing with discrimination issues largely had spent their time constructing company wide emails and classes that revolved around white folks discriminating against others / concepts of privilege, absolutely froze when faced with a discrimination issue outside that stereotype.

Cue the pro DEI (i honestly don’t know what it’s called anymore) people claiming this wasn’t “real DEI”.

Maybe "no true Scotsmxn" etc

Lol. I think it'd have to be "Scotsperson" or "Scotshuman" or "Scotsfolk" - the X is usually reserved for a vowel that indicates masculine or feminine, like the super popular "latinx" that's totally used by more than just rich white liberals.

Fortunately you can just use "Scot" :-)

"Scotsmxn" just reads to me as "Scots-mexican".

Haggis tacos!

Not sure what point you're trying to make here. Are you arguing that companies shouldn't have DEI initiatives because they didn't help sufficiently in this case? Do you interpret this as evidence that DEI is somehow bad?

I don’t think this is some sort of malicious conspiracy or evidence of anti whiteness or whatever. Processes are created for the common case and when there is an uncommon scenario, it is new territory for everyone involved and someone has to be responsible. In most corporate environments, nobody wants to be that person so inaction is generally the norm unless the course of action is straightforward or has precedent.

It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

Agreed. In tech especially, certain minority groups (East and South Asians) are over represented so our processes must evolve to deal with the situations that result from them.

I'd rather the processes evolve to treat all discrimination on factors such as race or caste as bad, regardless of the race or caste of the people doing the discriminating.

> It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

what's really bleakly funny is that you're right - that's how it's taken, but that's actually a major _point_ of intersectionality.

Well, "DEI" in the end is the neoliberalization of (the capitalist-corporate-compatible parts of) intersectionality, so it's not really surprising that something of significant value was lost in the appropriation.

How does one "neoliberalize" intersectionality? What parts of intersectionality are "capitalist-corporate-compatible"?

That's... Exactly the opposite of a blind spot in intersectionality. The idea that those in the intersections of marginalized groups suffer more doesn't come from some bizarre belief that those at the top mistreat them twice as much. It comes from recognizing that more people feel comfortable mistreating them.

It's well-documented at this point that black women in the USA during slavery were mistreated just as much by white women as white men, despite the weight of patriarchy causing white women to be mistreated by white men as well: oppressor in one situation, oppressed in another.

Intersectionality is calling out that those differences are present within groups, and that no analysis based on only a single axis can ever explain the full situation.

> ... the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual.

I think this is a textbook description of intersectionality[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

you may be thinking of something different from intersectionality.

this situation is a perfect example of one of the most basic foundational concepts of intersectionality.

- person A is discriminated against because of some trait

- person A may use whatever power they have to diminish another person because of some trait their own group has historically oppressed.

discrimination isn’t a direct straight line. it’s much more complicated, it intersects in many strange ways.

That’s the theory, which, if you actually took to its logical conclusion, would result in treating and evaluating every individual as an individual, and the entire concept of group identity as a short-hand mechanism for assigning “intersecting identities” would have to be abandoned.

That’s not how it is applied in practice.

It does not logically follows at all. Nothing in what previous poster said prevents analysis of group behavior or treatment. It does not make it impossible to talk about race or gender or age - it only makes it less naive.

It makes it impossible to assign an individual identity — and evaluate individual behavior and status — as merely a function of their coarse-grained group membership.

It does not make it impossible at all. And it also does not need to. You can talk about how groups are influenced or how they interact without making all the interaction to be result of "merely" just that.

It does not follow logically but it still is prudent to do exactly that for reasons that intersectionality doesn't have a perspective on.

I'd imagine this type of situation could also be especially tricky since both sides of it have _some_ claim to minority/victim status.

Not that it isn't still fairly clear what needs to happen, but it's not hard to imagine how even doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons could end up spun as if it's a squabble over a prayer room or something, like "clueless white HR department fires productive manager after disrespecting his cultural and religious background. When will they ever learn??"

From what I saw I don't think it was malicious at all either. I think the HR team really just sort of froze for a while and didn't know what to do when faced with something new to them.

The frustrating thing for everyone is that it was an obvious case of discrimination and HR stalled for a long time. I don't want to get into details but it played out more like HR had a playbook that was stupid simple and suddenly the role players weren't what they expected and they didn't act.

Meanwhile everyone knew it was discrimination.

True. This explains maybe the first 5 minutes of the issue. In practice, HR usually leans on Legal for these types of questions. It likely boiled down to “do we want to be sued by a whole team/department because of a bad manager doing unethical thing? Or do we want to get sued by that one manager?” They had to weigh the risk of each since it probably wasn’t clear either way which was the legal thing to do (much like the debates here). They chose wisely in terms of risk and that’s why it came off as “legal’s” choice.

Most likely they struggled because the legal language in policies was ambiguous on how to handle the situation, therefore opening the room for the manager to pursue action against the company for consequences for their behavior.

It would have been dealt with sooner if the employee was white because (assuming they meant white as in western white skinned person) culturally there isn't an equivalent of caste that would make sense for a white person to act on, and they could have acted based on the other groups listed in the anti-discrimination language.

I think it's good they found a way to go forward with dealing with the manager and compensated the employees. In a visit to India a few years ago I saw a shopkeeper make someone leave the store because of caste, not sure if there are actual laws/regulations about this in place there to simplify the process of handling discrimination. The issue of discrimination is very easy to find anywhere, though, and most often presents in a subtle form of prejudice because many people feel a certain way toward others in another group. Anywhere there aren't enforced laws with legal language that protects a group there will be difficulty dealing with discriminatory practices against said group, because laws have to be specific in the way they are written to allow for their enforcement being simple/easy.

> Most likely they struggled because the legal language in policies was ambiguous on how to handle the situation, therefore opening the room for the manager to pursue action against the company for consequences for their behavior.

How? Do you really think their language specified that discrimination could only happen from white people to minorities?

My understanding of the situation is that Western countries/companies don't usually have protected class status on basis of caste. Those protections exist for race, gender, age etc.

Ok are there also specific legal protections for Eye color, Hair Color, presence of Freckles, etc? Does every possible way to discriminate need to be clearly spelled out for it to be illegal?

No, there are not. (In the USA) You are legally allowed to discriminate based on non-protected classes as long as the non-protected class is not being used as a proxy for a protected class.

I was trying to find out if you could really discriminate based on freckliness and before my attention span terminated I found this interesting list:

https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/employmen...

[Edit/spoiler: does not cover freckles!]

Your question seems to stem from the belief that discrimination is illegal, which it is not. Discrimination is completely legal, including in hiring practices, as long as you're not discriminating against a protected class (either directly or by proxy). That's why the classes are explicitly enumerated, because if it's not in that list you can discriminate based on it.

If you want to open a shop and put a sign out that says "No customers with blue eyes permitted" you're completely within your right to do so. But let's say you discriminated against some other form of eyes, that maybe disproportionately affected groups of a particular race or national origin, that would be illegal.

Quibbling with your hypothetical: blue eyes are disproportionately possessed by people of a particular race

But most people of that race have non-blue eyes.

Still probably enough to fall under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

Discrimination against eye color would definitely be forbidden as discrimination against race; you can't ban everybody except those with blue eyes without having a racially disparate impact. This is probably true of those other physical characteristics too.

But speaking more generally, the principle in America is that if something isn't forbidden, then it is permitted. You could probably get away with some nonsense like "Don't hire anybody who owns a red car, because red car owners are too impulsive and hot headed"

Thinking about it, astrological sign is probably safe; it shouldn't correlate with any protected class.

Yeah, I can't think of anywhere in the US this would overlap with a protected class - so long as it was consistently applied. If someone says they discriminate based on your sign, it would warrant a very close look to be sure they aren't actually only checking the birthdates of people of certain protected categories.. this sort of red herring discrimination does happen, but if it was truly and consistently based on someone's sign, that would likely be defensible everywhere in the US.

Yes, and by the same token, discrimination on the basis of caste would likely be judged to have a disparate impact based on nationality, race, and religion (against Hindus / Indians), since such discrimination won't impact people of other races. We just don't have actual precedent about it yet, but any company that doesn't take action over it is playing with fire.

In practice, in the US, the categories you listed have all been used as proxies for race and/or ethnicity. Making a claim of discrimination based on proxy characteristics isn't always clear cut, but it sticks often enough to make companies cautious of it.

But yeah, fundamentally, in the American system, something needs to either explicitly or implicitly be a protected class. Otherwise it's legal to discriminate based on that characteristic. Plus the list of protected classes varies by jurisdiction.

I'm guessing they weren't sure whether caste was a protected class.

Discrimination in law revolves around protected classes (race, religion, national origin, age and sex are the "big five" in the US, and subsequent acts and decisions have added sexual orientation/gender identity, familial status, pregnancy, disability, veteran status, and genetic information). If you act on the basis of that, someone can, well, make a federal case out of it.

On the other hand, if you discriminated on the basis of eye color -- pretending for a moment it wasn't correlated with race -- you might be a shitty manager, but it wouldn't be a legal issue.

Why is caste not a subset of national origin or race? Do Indians who discriminate on the basis of caste also discriminate against non-Indians of a lower caste, or is it solely confined to other Indians? If not directly a protected class, why would this not clearly be a disparate impact type of case?

It might be!

I'm not a lawyer, and have no idea if there is already precedent in the US specifically regarding castes, but there is a motion that national origin covers ancestry.

It's entirely possible that the legal department in the story above thought it was a cut and dry case and that's why they pushed hard to shut it down before it became one.

Yeah it sounds like legal saw it as cut and dry at least that he could be fired (and possibly that they also had a requirement to do so), while HR folks were making nonsensical arguments of the kind we're seeing here from non-lawyers.

It’s not that it is or it isn’t. The US legal system is based on precedent so if there’s little history of previous cases where this was decided then it’s very hard to know how it will go in court.

Everyone loves citing precedent but nobody wants to be the first one to try and set it.

My understanding is that non-Indians are simply outside the caste system entirely. So to the extent that there are Indians who view themselves as better than non-Indians, that's less caste discrimination and more good old fashioned racism.

Do you know of any Indians who treat all non-Indians as inferior? My understanding is that non-Indians are judged based on their skin color. That is most certainly racism, but not based on nationality.

Another thing that puzzles me is how you differentiate caste discrimination from racism. The underlying motivations are different. But the treatment, politics and tactics used are almost the same in both cases. I'm curious about your perspective on these.

Personally I think they're the same - equally abhorrent, and people who act that way should be shunned from the industry entirely (there's a comment I made I think a week ago saying basically the same thing).

Legally though, racism == illegal discrimination while caste discrimination == legal discrimination.

Morally, it may be obvious to us that that's how it should be, but the law doesn't work like that. The law runs on precedents. Taken another way, the law is like code. The "architects" of the code are the legislature who write the laws, and the "programmers" are the judges, who decide exactly what goes in the if-else conditions, based on their interpretation of the law, and those become precedents the next time someone revisits that condition.

The U.S. law on the matter doesn't explicitly mention caste. There are constitutional originalists who take a very "conservative" approach to applying the law, and they might say it isn't illegal until the law is changed to explicitly forbid caste discrimination. When I was growing up, I knew some conservative Indians who would've taken that stance.

The Cisco discrimination suit is the first test of the law, and is likely setting the first precedent. Apple has decided its position (make of that what you will), and chosen to get ahead of the game.

Applicable precedent is basically already set for this, especially in the liberal Ninth Circuit. This is the language of Bostock regarding LGBTQ discrimination, decided in 2020 6-3 and written by a conservative constitutional originalist (Gorsuch):

"An employer who fired an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit."

Replace "homosexual or transgender" with "different caste" and "different sex" with "different race/national origin/ancestry (in California, ancestry is a protected class)" and the passage quite obviously still applies:

An employer who fired an individual for being [from a different caste] fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a [different race]. [Race/National origin] plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

I think that word replacement, in a court of law, might be harder to do than you think because caste is not officially recognized by American law. I'm not sure how you could prove equivalence without a definition to work from.

It seems this is all being activity worked through now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_discrimination_in_the_Un...

I don't think a subset is a protected class. If you don't want to hire/promote/etc people from Oklahoma, that's not explicitly prohibited, because state origin isn't a protected class.

If you only hired/promoted/etc people from upper castes, that would be discrimination on national origin, because anyone who isn't from the historic India region wouldn't be eligible. But if you're promoting upper castes and not lower castes, and you promote people from outside the region, there's not a clear discrimination on national origin. I'm an outsider to the caste system, but I don't think caste is considered to be the same as race? Especially not in the US, where federal race has very limited categories {(select one: Hispanic/Latino, not Hispanic/Latino), (select at least one: American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black/African American, Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, White)}.

Of course, IMHO, the underlying anti-discrimination intent is to treat people based on their skills and abilities etc, not based on the circumstances of their birth, and discriminating based on caste is clearly not within that intent.

> Of course, IMHO, the underlying anti-discrimination intent is to treat people based on their skills and abilities etc, not based on the circumstances of their birth, and discriminating based on caste is clearly not within that intent.

This is what really bugs me about DEI policies and the people who advocate for them. A lot of comments seem to say "well, caste isn't a protected class so they didn't know what to do," which to me means "the company isn't afraid of getting sued for explicit discrimination because it isn't illegal, so no one is going to do anything."

HR is not interested in making things more diverse, or helping the oppressed, or any other "good thing" that DEI claims to do. They are interested in preventing lawsuits. It is disgusting to me that so many people seemingly know this full well and still advocate for DEI policies as if their HR department was founded by MLK.

> A lot of comments seem to say "well, caste isn't a protected class so they didn't know what to do," which to me means "the company isn't afraid of getting sued for explicit discrimination because it isn't illegal, so no one is going to do anything."

The company is probably also afraid of getting sued for firing the Indian person doing the discrimination that's not explicitly prohibited. With the right presentation, that looks like discrimination based on national origin, because only Indian origin people would be fired for caste discrimination.

Sure, I completely understand that. But a wise man once said:

I think we agree and I appreciate the insight. I am just very against deceptive advertising, and the way people advocate for DEI policies seems very deceptive to me.

Yeah, I think we agree. HR is likely to follow the explicit portions of the law, and not follow the intent, and that's part of what makes DEI policies often feel hollow or performative. I had to take a 'managing within the law' course given by HR at a big corp once, and it was immensely clear what they were most concerned about, and also immensely clear that I didn't want to be associated with being in management ;) From the HR perspective, their job is to reduce employee lawsuits, and managers are their tool to gather information so that HR can do their job effectively. I'd rather just be in charge of computers and not people, thanks.

The argument is not that caste is the same as race but that the use of caste as a marker is an additional burden placed ONLY on Indian employees and is therefore based on race or national origin. If you promote only upper-class Indians and no lower-class Indians while promoting other races regardless of caste then you are discriminating against Indians because other races/national origins do not have to clear the additional caste hurdle.

The rough equivalence in american terms is probably someone from a well established New England family discriminating against an underprivileged southerner assuming both are white.

If you’re not Indian you don’t have a caste. Discrimination against you would be covered under other forms of discrimination (national origin, religion, color, etc..).

Maybe university-pedigree in the US?

"Ivy league" isn't quite as closed as the caste system, but multi-generational matriculation is at least perceived as common, pop culture equates attending one of a select number of universities with success/intelligence/power/wealth, and 8/9 SCOTUS Justices graduated from 2 law schools. You also get a hierarchy of social standing with Ivy league at the top, community colleges and no-college at the bottom, and some arcane ordering of various public and private institutions in between which you need to be a cultural insider to parse.

I'm not sure why laws about protected classes would be directly relevant in the case described in the top-level comment here, which is a manager who "was pretty much dismissive of everything anyone of a lower caste did / wouldn't communicate with them effectively." That just sounds like an ordinary problem with basic job performance. Surely most company policies would have ways of handling employees who are just blatantly obstinate and hostile towards other employees regardless of why they decide to act that way.

The history of employment law suggests this is not the case. See for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Country_(film)

> Josey quickly befriends several other female workers at the mine and soon realizes the women are constant targets for sexual harassment and humiliation by most of their male co-workers, who, like Hank, believe the women are taking jobs more appropriate for men. The union in real life was USW, and did nothing to stop it. Josey in particular is targeted by Bobby Sharp, her ex-boyfriend from high school. Josey tries to talk to her supervisor, Arlen Pavich, about the problem, but he refuses to take her concerns seriously. The women experience additional harassment and even abuse in retaliation, and Bobby spreads rumors that Josey attempted to seduce him, leading his wife to publicly berate and humiliate Josey at Sammy's hockey game. Sammy begins to resent the way the townspeople treat them and comes to believe the gossip about his mother's alleged promiscuity.

> Josey takes her concerns to the mine's owner, Don Pearson, but despite his previous assurances that he is there to help, she arrives to find that he has invited Pavich to the meeting, along with several other executives and offers to accept her resignation immediately. She refuses, and after Pearson implies he believes the rumors about her promiscuity, leaves devastated. Later, after being sexually assaulted by Bobby at work, she resigns and asks Bill White, a lawyer friend of Kyle and Glory, to help her file a lawsuit against the company.

I didn't mean to express confidence that all or nearly all companies actually do have reasonable policies that are well enforced (but I see how my comment could be interpreted that way). I am not at all surprised that many companies are dreadful environments like the company in that lawsuit. What I meant is that it's not reasonable to hold companies only to the standard of legally protected classes. That's a good standard, of course, but a very low bar.

Companies have to protect people from protected classes. That doesn't mean they can't fire people for being assholes to non-protected classes. (It's a separate question of whether casteism would count as discrimination against a protected class - arguably it should, since only people of certain nationalities / races are subjected to casteism.)

My point was that even people in protected classes will be abused with impunity, if the business doesn't believe that credible case law and/or regulation will actually be able to punish them if theey fail to protect them. Expecting business to randomly protect people from abuse is just wishful thinking.

> Expecting business to randomly protect people from abuse is just wishful thinking.

Excellent point! Unfortunately, at least to me, it seems like most people who are pro DEI _do_ think that such policies are enacted for moral reasons. Which would be fine, think what you want, but it’s pretty frustrating to be told that my actual problem with it is that I’m just a privileged white guy who’s afraid.

It's an open legal question for state and federal courts today, so it makes sense companies are struggling with it. The legal language is ambiguous at best, and corporate lawyers/HR exist to mitigate exposure and not take a moral high ground.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/u-s-civil-r...

Both the manager and the victim were part of the same minority as far as the law was concerned.

/IANAL

> culturally there isn't an equivalent of caste that would make sense for a white person to act on

Sure there is. People from English-speaking countries & Western Europeans vs "Eastern Europeans" and Latinos.

Ignoring for a moment that using the term "Eastern Europe" is itself hugely problematic, though usually because of ignorance not racism, I have worked in one and heard of several examples where there were huge discrepancies in salaries (much more than CoL-related), raises, promotions etc. between native English speakers and people from the CEE region.

There's absolutely a "caste" system among white people in tech. North Americans, UK, NZ, and AUS first, western Europe second, everyone else fifth.

At least the north Americans think so.

I cannot really confirm that within Europe where I live at least. Using Eastern Europe isn't problematic either. It doesn't have negative connotations where I live, it simply refers to the country of origin. Southern Europe perhaps, but that isn't really meant too seriously and more referring to fiscal policies.

Companies pay their workers the lowest wage they can get away with. In some regions the wage level is smaller so people tend to accept lower wages. Unfair of course if they live and work in the same place but also not really discrimination. They have to demand more.

I doubt this is comparable to castes in these cases.

> I cannot really confirm that within Europe where I live at least

Brexit literally happened because of among other reasons too many "Eastern Europeans". Germans have zero qualms about using phrases like "Barely stolen, already in Poland"...

> Using Eastern Europe isn't problematic either. It doesn't have negative connotations where I live, it simply refers to the country of origin

If you can give me a concise definition of "Eastern Europe" that doesn't have a bunch of asterisks and doesn't use effectively colonial groupings (i.e. when the USSR occupied/puppeted countries usually considered EE) I'll concede this one. But I doubt that you can give me such a definition.

> Companies pay their workers the lowest wage they can get away with. In some regions the wage level is smaller so people tend to accept lower wages. Unfair of course if they live and work in the same place but also not really discrimination. They have to demand more.

I know how capitalism works. But when you see someone with 10 years of experience quit because they couldn't get beyond $x regardless of what they did and how much they asked for more get replaced with someone with 3 years of experience making 150% of x for 50% of the same job... The difference being the former was Polish and the latter an American living in Romania (i.e. with an even lower CoL than Poland)...

Does it seem incredible, considering companies should optimize for profit? Absolutely. But I've seen it happen with my own eyes and I've seen the work of both.

ironic how discrimination classes kinda discriminated against other minorities by focusing mainly on white people. this has to be a The Office plot line

Curious, why did HR "struggled with the issue", and why it was a brave thing to decide that it was discrimination? I hope it's not the so-called multiculturalism.

Not sure why the question, an honest one, got down voted. My assumption was that discrimination is bad, no matter which culture it comes from. So, the HR should investigate or intervene per my assumption. And then per my experience with the western movement, people hesitate to judge other cultures because of the multiculturalism, hence my hope it's not that.

In the UK, class and ethnicity and accent intersect to create some similarly “invisible to HR” discrimination situations between people who would otherwise be lumped together as white.

Could you explain what you mean, a bit more?

Class discrimination is a big thing, and it’s related to accent discrimination and somewhat to ethnicity too. There is no shortage of stereotypes associated with regional accents (apologies, but to illustrate: cockney = untrustworthy; West Country = unsophisticated; Yorkshire = blunt, miserly; RP = haughty). Accent is judged alongside class (which I won’t attempt to define here). Ethnicity comes into the picture with groups such as travellers (who have only recently been recognized as an ethnic group) and showmen (who disclaim being one), and Jewish ethnicity is also often ignored as “just another kind of white” (see David Baddiel’s book Jews Don’t Count). Then there are Scottish and Welsh people and maybe even sub-national groupings like Cornish, where ethnicity and accent and class interact in complex ways.

These groupings have fuzzy edges and can be hard to disentangle as identity markers (and thus hard to make anti-discrimination rules against), which is fertile ground for under-the-radar discrimination.

The UK has multi-dimensional racism!

We have this in the US as well. People with a southern drawl may be thought of as country bumpkins and whatnot.

Some (most?) of humanity's constant behaviors over our lifetime as a species is pretty sad.

The UK has racism/tribalism built in. It started there and worked upwards. The founding Anglo-Saxons are the Angles and the Saxons, two competing and merged races. The word England means land of the Angles.

The class system overrides any racism, you are judged on much more than your race. Where you were born, your education (what school and university you went to), your friends, where you live now (by area name and distance to better spots), your family connections, your accent and word choice, your dress and behaviour (manners and mannerisms), your job history, the clubs you belong to, and much more.

If you work with some people or someone really cares about you, they'll do homework on you to find out all this stuff.

The UK has mapped out discrimination far deeper than american style racism. There are many more ways to slice up your image than just tribalism and ethnicity.

I remember reading an article by someone from the UK who loved that in the US you could move somewhere new an “be someone else”.

I had no idea what he meant until I visited the UK and some locals explained to me the scale of associations / assumptions involved based on many factors.

I don't understand how you can be so dismissive of HR talking about discrimination while at the same time praising legal for firing someone for discrimination, and compensating people for being discriminated against.

What would you like HR to do about caste-based discrimination? Apparently not send emails, or mention it in classes? You just want them to go straight to firing?

The commenter was saying that the classes and emails were geared towards evil whites, not caste issues. That is, they had no idea of how to approach the topic because they (probably?) had no idea about what caste is.

From parents comment I understand: the emails and classes were apparently only addressing white people who discriminate and did not address cast-based discrimination. HR did nothing about the cast-based discrimination. And so parent is dismissive of HR. Only legal took any action there.

Maybe deal with it the same way you would with any other discrimination situation?

A lot of people are frustrated because if you ask anyone who works in HR at a company with DEI policies, they would say that they are "committed to diversity and inclusion and helping the oppressed" and whatever else they were trained to say. But given what seems like a textbook example of oppressive discrimination, they throw their hands up and say "well, we don't know what to do because the law says we don't have to do anything." Are we really still supposed to believe they're "committed" to anything other than getting paid?

"You just want them to go straight to firing?"

Assuming it is clear cut discrimination, yes. Especially when it's a manager doing it.

> If he was white this would have been dealt with sooner.

I think that if we more or less accurately map the situation into an analogous one involving the class system among whites in North America, then the "lower caste" white person would not even be working there.

I thought this too. “White” has a lot of gradients in the US

I'm a white dude, and had an incident a number of years ago in which a group of Indian contractors basically didn't want to work with me because I was a white dude. Used a number of slang racist terms in my direction. I didn't make a stink about it because I was a consultant just there on a short-term project, but it was memorable. As another commenter suggested, even the whole "white people" branding that happens in social media is comical, given centuries of one white group looking down on another white group. I'm glad to see this kind of social dialog about racism / classism in all of its forms and think it is very worthwhile to realize that it isn't just about the stereotype of white (males) hating on everyone else as is generally portrayed.

Out of curiosity, for Indians working in America, how hard is it to hide your caste or pretend to be of another caste altogether?

Is this something that comes up in conversation among Indians? Do names tend to correlate to you caste? And if so, do people change them as a way of hiding their family caste?

Your surname literally gives it away.

Not really. You’ve no way to find out the caste of a Prasad or Kumar or Deshmukh or a Muralidharan

But it's relatively simple if it's a Srinivasan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deshmukh

Upper caste

Wrong. Here’s what The article you posted says:

> However, the title Deshmukh should not be associated to a particular religion or caste

Not Indian, but a friend told me that most (if not all) of the names do correlate to caste. No idea if people change them, other than for the normal marriage changes.

>No idea if people change them, other than for the normal marriage changes.

Inter-caste marriages are also extremely rare.

Yeah, but if we're talking about people in the US, it's not that rare to marry outside of your caste, which includes marrying non-Indians. Right?

I'm not Indian American my origins are Caribbean but I have some Indian origins and can offer a few answers from my experience.

> Is this something that comes up in conversation among Indians?

It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive.

> Do names tend to correlate to you caste?

In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste. I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there.

> It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive.

Whenever I mention to a team member that I was interviewing somebody for a position on our team, they always ask: "are they in India?" I had never really wondered why before.

> I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there.

There is an interesting history behind this. When Christian missionaries first arrived in India to spread their religion (in the late 1700s/1800s) they were initially unable to make much progress, but then found success among lower caste Indians by promising them a life of equality. So the vast majority of Christian converts in India are from these castes.

LOL. The first Indian American I met with an English surname I assumed was adopted. Then I met another with the same surname and assumed they were related.

India also has a minority population of Anglo-Indians with British surnames. Williams, Jones, Norton, Barnes, Peters, O'Brien are names you can find in Mumbai and Kolkata and Chennai.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Indian_people

If I remember correctly, Sikhs are standing outside the caste system as well.

In principle yes, but in practice no: https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/who-are-dalit-sikhs-n...

And again I learned something... Perceived elitism seems to be universal, unfortunately.

Christian missionaries arrived in India much, much earlier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Christians

In fact Saint Thomas (as in literally Doubting Thomas the apostle in the New Testament) was supposedly martyred in India, according to tradition at least.

The history was more complex. There are Syrian Christians (600AD), Catholics (1500), Anglican Protestants (1800) and more recently, evangelical Christians. Each group is linguistically and culturally distinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_India

Mangalorean Catholics for instance are mostly Saraswat Brahmins who converted around 1700s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangalorean_Catholics

NB: "where are you from?" is a question your HR training should already explicitly tell people not to ask candidates. I'm not in HR or management and I still make sure to mention it to new hires before doing my first interview alongside them. National origin is a protected class. Even within the US , "where are you from?" can proxy for a protected class. Race, mostly, or possibly religion.

It's also a question that's very easy to ask in good faith while making small talk, which makes it noticeably dangerous.

Ugh, this is a classic example of skewed logic going way too far before the underlying truth can catch up.

I am in tech management (also a recovering attorney) who routinely conducts interviews, and it is perfectly acceptable to ask where someone is from in a professional setting.

The unacceptable part, as OP at least hints at, is using the response as a proxy for some other verboten criteria or perhaps to kickoff an overly intrusive line of questioning.

These behaviors are odious on their own and why HR should be explicit in training against antipatterns, not spreading meaningless FUD which miss the point and permit bad habits to foster elsewhere.

It’s really inane that modern software recruiting claims to focus on getting a proper picture of the whole candidate , yet untrained interviewers counterfeit the whole endeavor thinking they’re politically correct because they’re afraid to ask anything but the same broken whiteboard questions.

If you don't collect the data in the first place, you can't misuse it - and it's much easier to prove that you didn't misuse it, because all you have to show is that you never had the dangerous data in the first place. This is the same advice we give about handling PII in applications.

> In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste.

That is not always correct (but is true in most cases). There are caste-neutral names in India - especially Tamil Nadu. But that itself is a hint about the person's caste, since it is adopted mostly by people of the unprivileged caste.

Names in some regions of India correlate strongly with caste. Physical appearance can also be somewhat suggestive. There are however regions in India that have given up the use of last names are adopted new last names as a counter to casteism. Diet also tends to be somewhat indicative - in regions without high prevalence of vegetarianism, castes with high ritual status tend to be vegetarian.

A barrier to casteism in the diaspora (and in higher class circles in cosmopolitan cities in India) is that an Indian from one region of India is unlikely to know the last names of Indians from other regions of India. Likewise with diet, many Brahmins from a vegetarian background adopt a non-vegetarian diet so it's really not a useful distinguisher.

FWIW, I haven't perceived any casteism in tech companies, or anyone trying to ask my caste, and I have an ambiguous last name and eat a meat-heavy diet. There's a decent chance my experiences would be different if I worked in less elite tech companies (e.g. Cisco) rather than top startups / FAANGs.

> There are however regions in India that have given up the use of last names are adopted new last names as a counter to casteism.

That's not true afaik. It's usually to cover up cousin marriages.

I thought people lose their caste when they cross the "black water".

Yeah, going by the Smriti and Purana scriptures (which no one really follows), we're all polluted in America.

There are various caste markers that casteist people use to identify the caste of the other person. Some of them include food preferences, accents (yes Indian languages also have different accents). I have seen that people can be casteist on both ends of a spectrum and it’s really hard to tell what marker of yours will be noted by the other party. I’ve seen that most people these days don’t try to pretend about hiding their caste, especially due to the mainstream anti-casteism movements. I personally don’t give a damn about people guessing my caste based on my rural accent and dietary habits.

Edit: I must add that while I’ve seen discussions around caste privileges, but I’ve never been discriminated against based on my caste. The only discrimination I’ve faced is the standard discrimination against non-white peoples.

White americans do this too. Think ozarks. I know plenty of ridiculously smart people from this region, who if they talked about the food they ate or didn't work hard to extinguish their accents would probably not have jobs w/ coastal tech companies.

The discrimination based on accent is obvious to me but the food surprises me.. what kind of food from that region is looked down upon on the coasts?

It isn’t necessarily the food itself, it’s just that the food marks somebody as lower class. For example, not knowing how to order sushi or use chopsticks. Maybe a better example is not knowing anything about wine. People will think you’re stupid or have bad taste. What would you think of a coworker bringing bologna and ketchup sandwiches to the office?

I would assume they were frugal and trying to pay off a massive student loan debt.

But I’m also from the Midwest and don’t know how to order sushi.

> I’m also from the Midwest and don’t know how to order sushi.

So was I, and everyone thought I was a barbarian.

I grew up and got a CS degree in the northeast. Then worked in tech in Seattle and the Bay Area

I can tell you that a lot of coastal techies have stereotypically unrefined tastes in food and wine and they're still successful.

Ours is also a trade in which many are stereotyped as lacking various social skills.

Nothing. I would think nothing of it, because I am not a low-classed, stone-aged, rocked-brained imbecile judging people by superficial nonsense instead of the content of their character & quality of their work.

You can have all the money, power, and authority, but it doesn’t change the contents of your character. This type of judgement is indicative of low-class at a soul level — if such an impoverished soul makes judgement, it means absolutely nothing in the cosmic scheme of things.

What does it mean to judge someone on the content of their character? It can be just as easily superficial as choosing to bring in a different kind of sandwhich to work.

Taking food down to a homeless man on the side of a street and filming it, is noble and worthy of praise but has limited practical impact on your ability to judge the person accurately. He could be doing it for the wrong reasons. He could be doing it for reasons that do not reflect his character.

Someone who is willing to change for his/her colleagues and practically improve the work enviroment is easy to judge favourably. Superficially and cosmically valid or not, a well oiled ship runs on aligning a lot of little 'superficial' parts.

You think it is a good thing for people to change for their colleagues? “i see you are offended by my bologna sandwich, forgive me, I will switch to filet mignon in order to make you feel more comfortable.” Ridiculous.

A well oiled ship has not a thing to do with superficial parts. People need to lose this ego & trying to control every little thing about those around them. It is a job, not a church or a dictatorship.

Do the job, be accepting and friendly. And eat your bologna sandwich if you damn well feel like it.

Also, filming yourself doing a good deed like taking food to a homeless person is embarrassing, and completely invalidates the “good deed.” You can easily judge that person. They are exploiting an under-classed human as a tool to further their social status, which anyone with a brain can easily recognize as low-class behavior.

I forgot how pointless online discussions are. My mistake.

'Anyone with a brain' is not the compliment you think it is.

Scrapple.

Spam.

Iceberg lettuce.

True enough. Remote workers moving to non-Asheville Appalachia and some related tech companies could have interesting outcomes for the region. I worry about whatever you call Ozarks gentrification though. There’s a lot of cheap land away from the mining/coal environmental issues that the locals have a lock on right now but decent RSU grants more than pay for.

Food preferences? What if you happen to prefer food from a different caste?

They're referring to being vegetarian, which is a Brahmin marker. To be more precise, while a vegetarian is not necessarily Brahmin, a meat eater is unlikely to be a (practising) Brahmin, similar to pork and Islam/Judaism.

> a meat eater is unlikely to be a (practising) Brahmin.

It’s not always the case though. The Bengali Brahmins or the Sarasvat Brahmins of Konkan are predominately meat eaters. It’s all mixed up.

Your accent will probably give you away. Or your last name. Or your physical features. Or they'll just guess you're a different caste and treat you differently anyways.

Name is the biggest marker of all. Last name can give away the case pretty accurately. There are certain parts of India that don't use the traditional family name but even in that case, certain first names are more common among certain groups. (I'm pretty sure I have received mild positive discrimination - more like favorable pre-judgement - based on my name.)

In the USA you can, however, change your legal name for any reason to almost anything whenever you want to. I was a colleague of an eastern Asian immigrant who did exactly this, changed their family name to "King".

Not until you have a US passport and that takes a really long time for Indians.

In the Sikh way of life, first names are gender-neutral and everyone takes the surname Singh or Kaur (deleting the family last name) to specifically combat caste and gender discrimination. I'm speaking of the ideals of the faith here, I know in practice it's different - caste creeps back in, but the Sikh faith began in the late 1400's as a revolution against caste injustice and discrimination.

But isn’t caste still an issue in Sikhism? The very reason why Congress chose a lower caste Sikh chief ministerial candidate in the recent state elections?

"Singh" means "Lion", doesn't it? Is there any significance to "Kaur"?

Kaur can be roughly translated as 'warrior princess.'

Interestingly, I grew up in India but have no clue what my caste is. I could probably ask my parents and they'd know but it has never come up. Religion and sub ethnicity came up a lot more often while growing up. Funnily enough the only ones who have ever asked me about my caste were white people.

I had always assumed the caste system was a thing of the past but looking at how it's still present even at companies in other countries, I imagine I just grew up in a bubble.

I don’t think your experience is unique. Most people in my experience that grew up in Indian cities have very little interaction with caste.

Really not surprising considering the size and population of India, but I think the question of real importance is whether you where the one in the bubble or if there are just large bubbles in India were caste is still considered really important.

I am guessing that you are upper caste, which is why it didn't really come up. If you were lower caste it would have been a different story.

Paying people to alter historical genealogy records to hide caste origin was a fairly common practice in India, especially by new kings.

As a mixed-race individual, I don't face that question by default in the US. There are enough mixed people in the US that I don't get asked "where are you from." But as soon as they realize I'm half-Indian, they will hunt me down and ask me questions. They'll try to ask me my parent's names etc. (names signify caste)

It's sad behavior. If it helps, here's a comment I wrote about my travels in India that might shed some light on the phenomena;

My travels in India have been revealing.

Caste and class are inextricably linked, and a part of their daily vernacular. They're used as descriptors, "s/he's an X" (as if that means something to me!) And there's a huge coded language with inferences going on. It's a bit like saying, "s/he's jewish". Something that just doesn't happen in the US anymore (unless you're around rather unsavory folks)

It's such a deep part of the milieu that I'm not surprised when I hear stories about it being exported.

True story. I met this Indian woman while working out of the local hipster cafe. We had mutual friends. And ended up going out for lunch.

On the way back, she started asking questions about my background. They grew intensely personal. Until she was interrogating me on the sidewalk.

Unsatisfied with my responses, she just gave up & cut to the chase, "What's your mother's caste?"

Last I checked, she moved to the States and is a contractor for a FAANG.

She's hardly unique though. Indian people cannot stop asking questions. Where are you from? Where were you born? Why's your skin so pale? Where are your parents? What do they do? Where did you go to school? Why aren't you married?

What's worse is that the society is insular. Even in a big city, few people socialize outside of, in descending order of proximity, family > friends of the family > classmates from elementary school > people from their high school > college > (perhaps, sometimes) work.

I have met people who have gone through their entire life without ever meeting someone from a lower social class/caste. Casual greetings with people who clean their homes don't count.

There's a lack of je ne sais quoi. A certain lack of creative energy. A kind of absence of the meeting of free radicals that sparks interesting ideas and art. Culturally, it's as if, the society has submerged itself in halon, determined to not let the sparks of creativity and genius spark.

This problem is so acute that every free radical I've met has done their very best to move away as soon as humanly possible.

From what I understand, there's a huge ledger of names that is used to identify castes. I've seen great performers never get any promotion and the useless becoming senior managers because of their caste. Pretty vicious.

My dad once told me of how at his work (in the 1980s or early 1990s, I think), they had a team of two Indians assigned to a project. One turned out to be of a much "higher" caste than the other, and refused to work with the other, making him utterly useless to the project.

It's good that Apple, IBM and other tech companies are taking steps to prevent this sort of discrimination. It's a shame that Google seems be going in the opposite direction.

It says in the article that Google (and Microsoft, Dell, Amazon + FB/Meta) aren't (yet?) implementing this, but I didn't see anything about them doing the opposite. Additionally I don't imagine they'd gain much from doing so, as a business. Is there any more info on this?

Wouldn't lose much either. I'd argue they'd gain face in today's climate. "DEI best practices aren't just for white people anymore" is probably a good look.

Ironically it tends to be high caste Indians who push this stuff (perhaps because of higher education levels). Maybe they’ll be circumspect about dishing it out to white people after some sessions having to confess their “Brahmin privilege.”

I predict they’ll love the opportunity to indulge in theatrical ethnomasochism, just like high status whites do.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s a Puritan thing.

In a way, atoning for privilege will allow them to signal their privileged status more openly, and try to angle for acceptance into high status white culture, because they're just like them.

Discussing your “privilege” while inflicting the costs to atone for it on others is the humble-brag version of racism:

Wealthy whites are all too happy to brag about their privileges, while discriminating against poor whites to “atone” for that.

>> Wouldn't lose much either. I'd argue they'd gain face in today's climate. "DEI best practices aren't just for white people anymore" is probably a good look.

> Ironically it tends to be high caste Indians who push this stuff (perhaps because of higher education levels).

High caste Indian immigrants or their American children? I have trouble imagining someone raised outside of the American cultural context getting enthusiastic about DEI in that way.

You don't think there are folks in India interested in discussing DEI with respect to caste or colorism?

What about in the EU? You don't think there are people there enthusiastically discussing DEI?

“DEI” is both a very recent and a uniquely western ideological construction.

Dalit activism has been a thing in India for many decades.

> Dalit activism has been a thing in India for many decades.

I was specifically talking about the performative white liberal guilt thing, which "high caste Indians who push this stuff" brought to mind.

It totally makes sense that lower-class/caste people would be pushing for equality, wherever they are.

DEI is just rebranding of the struggle for equality, in which the fight against casteism has been raging for decades. This is a very western centric view.

DEI is intersectional praxis, not a “rebranding of the struggle for equality”

And intersectional praxis is, overwhelmingly, an ideology of white people. Most people in the individual groups (Muslims, Hispanics, etc.) are advocating for their own interests. It’s white people that subscribe to a theory that ties these completely different groups together.

Shit, all those queer black women who have been telling me that intersectionality is important because they experience unique struggles because they are at the intersection of multiple sets of traits have been doing so because it's popular with white folks?

Intersectionality is the idea that multiple identities intersect, and like the intersection in a Venn diagram, the overlap is a unique zone.

There’s not enough queer Black women to make intersectionality more than an academic topic. White people are who give it prominence. Black people themselves are as conservative as republicans on sexuality: https://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/blacks-conservative-repu.... When you see BLM-style advocacy that ties together Black+queer, that’s primarily for white people. Similarly, folks like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour have such prominence not because Muslims see themselves as having common cause with queer people (https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres...) but because white people do.

Put differently, Black people and Muslims may advocate in their own self interest, but otherwise believe whatever they believe. Ordinarily, such advocacy would seek to avoid issues that divide the community within itself. White people, by contrast, are not advocating on their own behalf, but on behalf of a variety of groups that are the object of their sympathy. Intersectionality uniquely reflects how such white people see the world.

What. You realize that much of mainstream culture is drawn from the queer Black community, right? Voguing, house music, slang like "yas queen", "slay", "shade", and "tea", Pride parades, and more.

And that BIPOC cultures have a history of third gender peoples? Two Spirit, fa'afafine, chibados, muxe, sipniq, etc.

To say these things only exist because of white liberal sexuality is patently absurd.

White people are the ones who control “mainstream culture” and decide what gets absorbed into it. That includes things pertaining to minorities. For example, “BIPOC” is a term popularized by white people to refer to a group that’s most pertinent to white people—people other than themselves. Most people who fit the label “BIPOC” don’t identify with some larger agglomeration of “people who aren’t white.” They identify as black, Pakistani, Cuban, etc.

LatinX is a good example that clearly illustrates the power dynamic. Although it was coined by a Puerto Rican, it is unpopular among Spanish-speaking Americans. If Spanish speaking Americans took a vote, they wouldn’t call themselves “LatinX.” The term has become a prominent label because it appeals to white people.

Third genders actually illustrate how “BIPOC cultures” view gender very differently from white people. Bangladesh, where I’m from, recognizes a third gender. But it isn’t associated with ideas of gender and gender roles being fluid, as it is in white societies. It instead functions to separate sexual minorities from everyone else in a society that is intensely gendered and heteronormative.

The Wikipedia article on third genders actually contains a disclaimer reminding white people not to project their own concepts of gender and sexuality onto superficially similar concepts in other cultures.

My experience doesn't match yours, we probably roll in different circles.

Agreed on Latinx vs the more pronounceable latin@/latinao.

We don’t need to rely on our subjective experience with our respective “circles.” There is extensive polling and research on this. LatinX is extremely unpopular, and way more Latinos find the term offensive than use it: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/many-latinos-say-latin.... I suspect most Latinos have never even heard of “Latin@“ or “Latinao.” Most just don’t think Spanish needs to be “fixed.”

BIPOC is similar: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/01/us/terminology-language-p... (“In a national poll conducted by Ipsos for The New York Times, more than twice as many white Democrats said they felt ‘very favorably’ toward ‘BIPOC’ as Americans who identify as any of the nonwhite racial categories it encompasses.”)

It’s important for white people not to confuse their personal experiences with individual “BIPOC” as proxies for “BIPOC” communities: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/us/politics/elizabeth-war.... These folks are often activists who align with white power to overcome the majority opinion within their community.

> What about in the EU? You don't think there are people there enthusiastically discussing DEI?

There probably are but: 1) I understand it's often thought of as an Americanism there, and 2) Europe doesn't have the same history, which would make its ground less fertile for it (white people are aboriginal there, and I understand there's little to no history of domestic radicalized slavery, etc.).

> white people are aboriginal there

The Picts would like to have a word with you.

> The Picts would like to have a word with you.

Would they? All the pictures that come up on an image search are of white people with tattoos.

They are light skinned (like many Asians) but they are not “white” in the racial sense. They’re indigenous people that were displaced and extinguished by Germanic tribes.

Hell, for a long time the Irish and Italians weren't considered "white".

In my experience it’s overwhelmingly the second generation+, but my point is orthogonal to that. The folks socialized into the environments where those trends exist are much more likely to be Brahmin. The Indian side of Kamala Harris’s family is Brahmin, for example. That reflects social roles and culture back in India: social and political studies tends to be the domain of Brahmins.

From the article:

> Just a few months ago in June, Google, whose CEO Sundar Pichai has Indian roots, cancelled a talk on caste discrimination where Dalit rights activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan was supposed to give a presentation. The talk was organised by Google employee Tanuja Gupta.

It’s not the opposite but probably what GP was referring to.

It's why I used the word "seems". It doesn't prove they're going the opposite direction, but it does give that impression. Hopefully Google is taking this issue more seriously.

A lot of racism is not explicit. Plausible deniability above all else.

They punished Tanuja Gupta for raising the issue, to the point where she resigned. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/googles-caste-bias-pr...

Google is taking the issue more seriously, but in an evil direction rather than a good one.

For those who don't know how to recognise a caste from the name, does anyone have any idea which caste Google's CEO might represent? Can it even be definitely derived just from name?

I remember reading that it’s a big problem at Cisco. In your dad’s example what ended up happening? From your description the guy who refused to work in the higher caste should be fired imo.

I forgot what happened, but knowing my dad, he probably did it himself.

I know who I would have fired without hesitation.

Along with anyone who found this a difficult decision once the facts were clear.

People with these beliefs don't belong anywhere in society where they can oppress others. Just as white people who think blacks are beneath them do not belong in any setting where they can affect a black person.

I'm not surprised some people found it a difficult decision to be honest.

I mean, discovering a new form of discrimination, which only Indians can perform? And none of your fellow managers have ever heard of this stuff? And you don't know WTF a caste is?

And I doubt the accused is telling HR "yeah, I discriminate on caste, got a problem with that?" - they might instead be saying "some of his behaviour towards me has made me uncomfortable, I don't want to complain formally I just think everyone would be happier if we were on different projects"

I can see why a person might decide that's not a minefield they're equipped to navigate, and pass the issue over to HR.

I mean, certainly gather information and follow due process, but once it's clear what occurred, there is no question that a person who refuses to work with coworkers based on lower caste does not belong in any workplace with lower caste workers.

And anyone who resists that principle is a co-conspirator in caste-based oppression and should leave as well.

Why can’t they work together, but force to not discriminate?

Working relationships are complex and require a lot of trust. You can't just wave a magic wand over two people and say "discrimination be gone". The bigot can and will always find ways to harm the victim without accountability.

But we already do this for all other protected classes.

I don't even know what this means, let alone if it is true or not.

How do you "force not to discriminate"? How is this currently enforced in companies?

Well if you discriminate say based on race or gender, you’re fired. As people know they therefore can’t do this, they need to keep their feelings to themselves and deal with it.

The GP said: > there is no question that a person who refuses to work with coworkers based on lower caste does not belong in any workplace with lower caste workers

Which I read as separate castes if they will discriminate. That’s like saying separate race or gender if someone will discriminate. That’s currently not how it works for other protected classes.

Ok, to clarify, I did not mean to say that bigots should continue to be employed separately. I meant they should be fired.

Yeah. "Caste", "Color", doesn't matter, all the same shit. If someone sees a problem there, they're unfit for a lot of other stuff.

My good friend's Indian and she loved when I described the caste system as "just racism for people who look alike".

Groups gonna group... it's good to see there's some pushback on the bullshit.

As usual it breaks down to tribalism and fear of "the other". It can cause racism, religious persecution, sexism, etc.

The real shame is that living in Delhi, I’ve seen caste come back very strongly in everyday discourse.

I’ve been here almost 20 years. This city used to be largely caste agnostic.

Now when I meet new people, especially outside the elite tech circles, they will casually mention their upper caste status (“As Brahmins, we don’t do xyz of course!”).

Even cars carrying caste stickers are more common.

Do you know why this happened?

Religion, especially in public life, has made a big comeback under the current ruling party. This party is also generally considered an upper-caste party. I assume much of it is due to implicit soft support from the ruling establishment.

Modi is of lower caste. Most of the BJP leadership is lower caste.

Modi is Vaishya or Brahmin - either upper or middle caste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modh

A lot of Vaishyas have been certifying themselves as Backward caste in order to obtain affirmative action privileges. Including the dominant caste in Gujarat, the Patels - with the Patidar movement.

Modis were added to OBC list in 2002. This is a subversion of affirmative action which was meant to help lower castes, not upper castes.

BJP is primarily composed of upper castes. Only performative functions like Presidency are granted to lower castes.

Can confirm this. My caste is OBC as well, even though it is among the most politically powerful and is classified as a warrior caste with high percentage of land ownership.

Heck, in my home state, Rajputs, former rulers, have been lobbying to get categorized as OBC because of the reservation benefits.

It's nothing that requires much research. The current national government openly supports discrimination on religious and caste based backgrounds. 7 years of this, and people who used to think "Caste is a taboo subject, and we should be working around it", now think "Caste pride is cool".

It sounds a lot like what has happened in the US over the last 7 years

Hmm the current Prime Minister of India is from a "lower" caste. The current president of India is from a "lower" caste. Curious how you come up with "the current national government openly supports discrimination on religious and caste based backgrounds".

In the same way Hitler was hardly a model, muscled, blond haired Aryan. Those without the traits advocate it more.

Uhh.. what?! I’ve seen some crazy takes on here but this one is definitely new and takes the top spot.

The analogy is incorrect. Hitler would need to be a Jewish rabbi for it to be accurate

Are you denying that the national government of India has taken a reactionary turn under the leadership of Modi?

Probably not, I do think the current government leans a bit more towards religious intolerance than co-existence.

I do however take issue with bashing the government for every social justice issue du jour. It’s convenient but very distracting for all sides involved. For example GP here accuses the current government of caste intolerance. If you think about it though it doesn’t make much sense, given the Indian government’s nationalist agenda of uniting all Hindus and instilling in them pride for their culture etc. Sowing caste divisions would be the exact opposite of what they would want to do in this scenario.

That’s precisely the problem: the current government has promoted blind pride in native (Hindu) culture but has never sought to promote any discussion on some of the flaws in that culture.

The Manusmriti, for instance, has been referenced and quoted by several ministers and politicians. Yet no one has addressed the deep casteism in it.

The government doesn’t promote casteism - I agree with that. But promoting Hindu pride without addressing some of its issues eventually gets you casteism.

The Indian caste hierarchy works in complex ways. The very top and the very bottom are confirmed, but everyone in the middle just kind of gets mixed together.

If you’re Indian, you know it too - the OBC category is just political hogwash (disclaimer: I’m from an OBC category)

This gives some background: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva#Upper_casteism

Strictly from a resource allocation standpoint, it makes sense to keep economic flows within a subpopulation rather than diluting them over a broader population. Consider, "buy local" initiatives.

I imagine that hypothetical Republicoin and Demacoin currencies would find strong support among the hard-core true believers of the respective groups for the same reasons.

Man do people really say stuff like this casually? That human beings are just “resources”?

Am I talking to a bot?

I have not had to work with the caste system before. In your opinion, are there any benefits for low-to-mid caste in such a system?

Traditionally, Brahmins (the priestly caste at the top of the ritual hierarchy) weren't supposed to engage in commerce, landowning, etc. so some of the business-oriented middle castes were much better off economically.

But the very lowest castes which were outside the traditional varna division (i.e. untouchables, known today as Dalits) basically got the short end of the stick with little if any benefit (the only silver lining I can think of is lack of competition for ritually impure jobs that no one else was willing to do).

I have never even stopped to consider the benefits - real or on paper - of a system of explicit discrimination.

It is morally repugnant and treating it as anything else is perhaps even more morally repugnant.

This is a good step forward but wait until Apple realizes that Indians discriminate on many other factors including but not limited to skin color, state of origin, region of origin (North vs South vs NorthEast), mother tongue, religion (Hindu vs Muslim), Political beliefs (Left vs Right).

political beliefs aren't a protected class

They are, legally, in California

'protected class' is just legal criterion that varies between jurisdictions. For example, political opinion is protected class in EU.

One of these is not like the others.

Political belief should not be a protected class. It's an opinion- everything else you listed, you're born with/can't change that classification (don't want to get into the weirdness of the religion part, but nearly all religious preference can be predicted by geography).

Why should only things you can't change be protected?

A tautology I suppose, but, because you can't change them. You didn't choose it and it's immutable. Not fair to discriminate against someone for something they can't control. This is, of course, personal opinion of mine.

I get why you shouldn't discriminate against things you can't change, but I am wondering why there shouldn't also be things you can't discriminate based on that you CAN change.

Religion is a good example of one... people can and do change religions, but we still shouldn't discriminate based on it. There are other examples as well of things that people can change that shouldn't be discriminated based on.

I agree completely, this is why I think the pro-gay "It's not a choice, I was born this way" argument is misguided. Even if being gay was 100% a lifestyle choice - there is still nothing wrong with it, and no one should give you any shit for it!

I think we should be able to discriminate based on religion. I personally don't see why this one opinion- and that's all religion is, an opinion- should be handled differently than any other opinion.

If someone thinks black people are innately inferior to other races, it's culturally acceptable for me to discriminate against them, but if their god tells them that black people are innately inferior to other races, I'm not? Heavily suspect in my opinion.

We do discriminate against things people can't control, like intelligence. If you have an IQ of 80, I can almost guarantee you will not be accepted to a college to become an architect, lawyer, or doctor.

But also, discriminating against things people can control is really just one party trying to apply soft power over another, and I am generally against it. You might be able to legally say you can't work at this company if you like to go bowling in your free time, but I don't think it would be a right thing to do.

Intelligence directly affects, and can be observed in, employee work output.

For some jobs, other it may not matter.

In fact, US courts have upheld explicit discrimination against people of higher IQ: https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

Both religion and national identity are changeable, they are 'just opinions', but both are key historical examples of protected class.

You can say that both are predicted by geography, but must conflicts happen in situations where populations of different identities are mixed in one geography. Then you can say it can be predicted by parents' opinions, but that is true for many other opinions, including political ones.

In some sense, protection of changeable characteristics is more important than protections of non-changeable characteristics, because bullying based on changeable characteristics can be effective to pressure conversions of victims.

And it is question how political opinion is just an expression of deep personal characteristics that are not much changeable and perhaps even partially given by genetics.

National origin is not changeable. National identity, I suppose.

If push came to shove I'd remove religion from any list of protected classes gladly.

Political belief is legally a protected class in California.

Also, political belief is highly predictable based on demographic information such as geography, race, religion, and sex.

I think this is a reason why Leetcode style interviews are popular. They remove at least one type of bias of race - the ability to solve coding problems. If you can solve Online Assessment, Phone Assessment and Onsites, you keep moving on to the next round, regardless of your race or ethnicity. It is a way for companies to claim that there is no bias in hiring.

I don't think this is true at all. People who pass the leetcode can still be passed over for "cultural fit" or they may not even make it to the coding portion of the interview at all.

well, no. First companies usually have separate interview for 'cultural fit'. Second, the thing with discriminations, they can be quite hidden. The 'leetcode style tasks' can be performed very differently. If I as interviewer don't like you, I can do a lot to make sure you don't pass it. Starting from making question harder to understand and end with plain 'strong not hire' for vague reasons even if you did well.

Correct. Seen this exact scenario and opposites.

In the end - many companies aren’t super rigorous about whether your code that was written passes a test suite and compiled correctly.

I’ve known a few (token) people who have said that they were able to just “talk their way out of having to do leetcode” when presented with the problems. In my personal experience - there’s no way to do that at FAANG and crew if you’re not part of a special group. You either solve all problems asked optimally while not being part of a group the person hates or you don’t pass.

It’s no coincidence that certain races consistently give me leetcode hards as I’m not in their specific group. It’s also no coincidence they still give me a no when I solve the problem optimally when others give me a yes. ;)

Yeah. “Cultural fit” is de facto discrimination, but you have absolutely no chance to prove it unless they haven’t been told by their lawyers not be stupid enough to put it in writing.

Have you seen the discussion boards of Leetcode? It’s all Indians

That's because we understand how the system works, and are competitive - it's ingrained in us from childhood how important it is to study and compete and understand the system because there are a billion+ of us and so few opportunities.

This just introduces another type of bias, the "did you just graduate from a top 30 CS school or are you able to spend 6-12 months teaching yourself DS/Algorithms while working full time" bias.

Lots of "Stockholm syndrome" surrounding Leetcode style interviewing practices.

Or are you smart enough to teach yourself DS/Algorithms in a couple weeks.

Which bias would you prefer? Immutable characteristics or those that can be build with hard work and intelligence?

So there is no possible way that people with intelligence and high work ethic aren't able to graduate from a top 30 cs school or spend a year outside work hours teaching themselves obscure algorithm trivia to pass an interview? I'm afraid you are a 22 year old recent graduate with little grasp on life outside School or Silicon Valley.

I don’t follow tbh. If you need a top 30 school or a year of prep then you’re doing it wrong or are not good enough sorry. But that’s okay there is a sliding scale of employers out there.

If you think I’m a 22 yo or in SV then you need to update your heuristics, cuz you’re incorrect.

From what I hear from my Indian friends, this behaviour is quite ingrained. Like other racism, it will be challenging to prove.

I work predominately with Indian coworkers. You are exactly correct in my view.

Racism has technically been banned in the United States wholesale since the Civil Rights act, yet we struggle with the effects still today.

This is a step in a right direction, but it should be seen as only as the beginning.

Casteism, while bad, is not racism. Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism.

The Caste system is as old as India itself, from ancient India: the varna, and the joti. The Indian Government itself recognizes how deep it goes, and based their Affirmative Action program upon it. To say it's not ingrained is simply choosing to ignore the problem is there. It's not saying "all Indians are casteist" but recognizing, much like the American South pre-Jim Crow, it was ingrained in society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India

I’m from what would be considered a backwards caste in my ancestral state in India, and thus qualify for affirmative action quotas. So I’m actually very qualified to say so when I say that casteism isn’t ingrained in the diaspora.

> Casteism, while bad, is not racism

Open to this argument. But every definition of race I’ve seen constructed to exclude caste seems contrived. The system has imprinted itself as far down as hair shaft diameter [1].

> Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism

Sympathetic to this. It’s like saying all white people are racist. It’s ingrained in the Indian culture, and I think anyone coming from India should be sensitive to the issue, but e.g. their kids born and raised here are obviously less susceptible. (This is true of all immigrants and their biases, though.)

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/29542824

There are some correlations between phenotypes and caste (and there is a lot of genetic stratification when you look at ancestry), but caste really cuts across race - there are lower caste groups in North India that look more "white" than upper caste groups in South India.

> there are lower caste groups in North India that look more "white" than upper caste groups in South India

Definitions of race don’t require a skin-color gradient. Plenty of Asians are lighter skinned than white Mediterraneans.

I'm not just talking about skin color.

> not just talking about skin color

Steve Jobs is ethnically Syrian. Most people would call him white. The fact that some e.g. North Africans may fit the classic conception of whiteness better than many Europeans doesn’t dissolve every racial boundary therebetween.

If Jobs had grown up in (say) New England rather than California, there is no way he would be have been treated the same as white people there. He would have clearly stood out.

Really? Looking at some pictures of him when he was younger (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#/media/File:Steve_J...) I think he would have been lumped in with other white kids here.

It's hard to tell from a black and white photo.

Middle eastern and north african people are generally considered white here in Europe. Using 'white' just as synonymum for 'european-ancestry' is some recent US quirk.

Many people from the Mediterranean and the surrounding areas are white-passing people of color. They've been flattened by the official US race forms into "white", but that's not the same thing as actually being white in terms of day-to-day lived experience.

See this book: https://www.amazon.com/Whitewashed-Americas-Invisible-Minori...

Genes which are responsible for white skin were introduced to Europe by “immigrants” from the middle east. It’s a very diverse region due to groups of people moving in/out for thousands of years.

So whatever label you try to attach to them you’ll find plenty of people for whom it makes no sense (e.g. there are groups of people whose ancestors lived in the Levant for at least thousands of years and amongst whom red hair and blue eyes are more common than in most “European” populations)

Race and ethnicity are related but different things.

Someone who is truly white-passing should be considered a person of paleness, not a person of color, no? Like sure they're an ethnic minority but racial minority?

I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to draw that distinction, but what I can say is that several people close to me fit that description and look at themselves as white-passing PoC, due to the ways they've been treated as a separate group from European-origin white people.

If by race or caste you mean “measurably distinct genetic groupings” then they are pretty similar.

>>Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism.

This is always fascinating to me. I would call it "culturalism", though I'll agree it does depend hugely on how the author meant it, and thus is open to interpretations. (I live in Canada now, and though I consider myself 99% "a Canadian" culturally, and very intentionally so, I'm still amused seeing people get Up in the arms when somebody makes a generalist comment about culture or societal norms of my country of birth, while I chuckle and say Yup. That is indeed the general culture and societal norm of that region.:)

I cannot change my race, or ethnicity, or country of birth (and "Indian" may refer to these immutable qualities) . But I can change my values and moral framework, my culture (and I have; consciously and determinedly so), and sometimes "Indian" or "Bosnian" or whatever is meant to refer to culture and dominant societal framework of that country. I don't believe I don't have right to judge other people's value framework, i.e. their culture. It is within each of our purview and ability and mandate to consider and evaluate and choose and as needed change our own value frameworks. If somebody's cultural values and habits say "it's ok to throw acid in girls eyes", or "people in this randomly selected immutable group are bad" I will judge that value framework or moral axiom or culture/society negatively and strive to change it and convince them otherwise.

This doesn't sound right.

Weren't castes based on race and conquering populations initially?

How would you describe casteism's status among expatriated Indian populations at a population level? Or is the fact one refers to a population at all to be help in contempt as "racism"?

> castes based on race and conquering populations initially.

No. Varnashram and Jati system were not formed due to any imaginary invasion from the outside, that’s the discarded Raj era AIT speaking.

Oh, the Indus valley was always Indian and never had external population migrations or conquests that left an impact on culture and dynasties analogous to England's Norman conquest of 1066 and earlier Saxon migrations that impacted the culture to the present day, reflected in socioeconomic class distinctions?

Man, guess history is completely wrong.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_India

How is all this diatribe related to the fact that AIT (not AMT) is a discarded theory, and jati vyavastha has nothing to do with imagined external conquests?

So you’re claiming that the Indo-European migration/invasion of Northern India is “imagined”?

No. They're saying that an invasion that came and imposed a caste system is imagined. It was a reasonable hypothesis a hundred years ago but has long since been discredited.

Migration on the other hand is the current consensus theory.

The statement was not a diatribe as it was neither forceful nor an attack, but I see that you perceive it as such and hence recommend re-reading it under a steelman approach.

1. My statement points out to another population that still has class-based bigotry from prior conquests and migration

2. If you note, you brought invasion into the conversation after my initial comment which neither supported nor refuted AIT, AMT, or other migration theories. I really don't care which theory people believe, because, ultimately, however history unfolded, it's today's Markovian state of the world that holds highest weight.

> Weren't castes based on race and conquering populations initially?

We don't know the exact process, but there were several culturally, ancestrally and often phenotypically distinctive populations that encountered and mixed with each over millennia in the subcontinent and engaged in both conflict and cooperation, mostly for arable and pasturable land resources and access to water.

The societal power and identity structures and population genetic patterns that emerged from that process manifest in, but are not limited to, the caste system.

A latter such migration brought the Indo European language and customs, and it has had an outsized impact on elite cultural artifacts like religious literature. Colonial philologists discovered the Indo European linguistic connection between Sanskrit and European sacred languages and some became fetishized on it due to their own ancestral connection to it, while discounting the relevance of other South Asian ethnolinguistic groups.

In response, current Indian nativists have promoted the wholly unfounded idea that South Asia was closed to human in-migration until the Islamic era, and that Indian culture and peoples are strictly indigenous in ancestry.

Both the colonial theories of a single conquering Indo European invasion and the nationalist out-of-india theory are highly oversimplified and marketed towards their respective societies' ethno-nationalist impulses.

> Weren't castes based on race and conquering populations initially?

No, that's a discredited theory from a century ago. The caste system as we know it began to come into being about two millennia ago, and the relative ancestries of some of the castes did to some extent reflect the impacts of invasions that had happened long before that. But the ancestry correlation is much stronger geographically and isn't even monotonic with respect to the traditional caste hierarchy.

> How would you describe casteism's status among expatriated Indian populations at a population level? Or is the fact one refers to a population at all to be help in contempt as "racism"?

If you're assuming that it's widespread amongst educated Indian-Americans in top tech companies, then yeah you're probably just engaging in racist stereotyping.

> If you're assuming that it's widespread amongst educated Indian-Americans in top tech companies

Apologies as I'm not in FAANG, so I am fairly uninformed as to their corporate plights and struggles. What population is using the Indian caste system as a basis for discrimination?

The ones I have direct anecdotes of myself involve strong subcultures with strong ethnic and caste ties (e.g. Punjabi Jatts in the Central Valley or to a lesser extent, Patels) sometimes retaining casteism (even inter-generationally). It also wouldn't surprise me if the Cisco allegations are accurate (less selective / meritocratic places are more likely to retain old prejudices), though the constant media claims of casteism in FAANG make me hesitant to take any allegations at face value.

Edit: to be clear, I don't want to imply those subcultures are always casteist - plenty of Jats and Patels are really chill and accepting, and to stereotype them as casteist would ironically be casteist in itself.

> Casteism, while bad, is not racism. Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism.

Doesn't caste have some deep origins with race? I'm under the impression that thousands of years ago Indo-Europeans invaded an India populated by darker-skinned natives, and formed an elite that now finds some expression in caste. I could be wrong, though.

No that's mostly wrong. A group of Indo-Europeans did enter India, but North Indians were likely relatively lighter-skinned at that point already. It's true that Brahmins (the priestly caste which had the most privileged status in the ritual hierarchy, though they lacked the economic wealth of business-oriented castes) have the most Indo-European steppe ancestry (controlling for region, as North Indian lower castes have more steppe ancestry than South Indian Brahmins), but beyond that the correlation is much more complex. Many tribals and untouchables in North India have more Indo-European ancestry than the wealthy business castes for example.

> Casteism, while bad, is not racism.

This relies on a fairly narrow view of what constitutes "race" or "racism".

The caste of a person is fundamentally based on their ancestry. Thus, discriminating based on caste is discriminating based on a person's ancestry. I think a lot of reasonable people would consider that to fall under the definition of "racism".

Yes, it's true that there is a lot of diversity of ethnic groups and e.g. skin color within castes in different regions of India. But just because people discriminate on certain aspects of race (ancestry) and not others (skin color) doesn't make it not racism.

> Casteism, while bad, is not racism. Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism.

There is literally no difference. They are both arbitrary categories of people based on ancestry that are used for discrimination.

I have this impression that casteism can commonly exist in people that are otherwise progressive and non-racist, is that true? I once had a pen-pal that worked for the UN that at some point told me that she viewed the caste system as a "useful way to organize society". I was rather taken aback since that viewpoint didn't seem to comport with my other impressions of her.

I find it endlessly impressive how people can hold two perfectly opposing viewpoints and never even notice any contradiction. Good reminder to do an occasional review of ideas one considers obvious.

The same people at the forefront of social justice nowadays would likely be considered unforgivably bigoted had they been raised centuries ago. People end up believing a net sum of their cultural and social influences, even if those influences contradict. It's so easy to imbibe nicely packaged cultural trends that people rarely scrutinize the actual moral makeup of their worldview. This pen-pal likely gathered a progressive and non-racist attitude from the UN's human-rights centered hegemony, and a belief in caste systems from the cultural inertia those old practices still have on Indian society, but never put in the effort to ascertain how those two worldviews contradicted.

non-racist

There is a fair chance that even low caste members will be brought into a team ahead of non-Indians for managers so-disposed.

I'm sure it happens all the time. I think people have blind spots based on their upbringing or ideology that can make them unaware of their own racism/sexism/casteism/whatever. Being progressive doesn't magically make you immune to this.

I'm not surprised. Even M.K. Gandhi said the same thing about caste. That without casteism the Indian society would crumble.

Gandhi also slept with his underage niece to test whether he can control his sexual desires after adopting celibacy.

California treats ancestry as a protected class, and discrimination by ancestry is illegal. Not being a Desi, I struggle to see how this is not already covered.

Existing laws don't make Apple execs look good

>> California treats ancestry as a protected class, and discrimination by ancestry is illegal. Not being a Desi, I struggle to see how this is not already covered.

It is covered, but not enforced because evidence is difficult. Caste discrimination in Silicon Valley is usually about putting someone from a lower caste into an impossible project that is destined to fail, and boom...now you've got your PIP quota ready for the coming season.

The insane cases you hear are the egregious cases that are court-worthy.

> It is covered, but not enforced because evidence is difficult. Caste discrimination in Silicon Valley is usually about putting someone from a lower caste into an impossible project that is destined to fail, and boom...now you've got your PIP quota ready for the coming season.

When I hear about insidious things like this it boggles my mind how some people can be so clever in order to be so hurtful. Thanks for educating me.

PIP quota? Really?

Not too different from "stack ranking". I'd believe it.

Yeah, search on "hire to fire", for more info on this. If your team is big enough, at a big enough company, you've probably got a target for attrition. If you don't have enough people with poor performance naturally, then you've got to do something to hit your numbers...

Here in europe, we have a large minority called Romany (derogatorily known as Gypsy). An indian people that apparently was a caste in india, migrated to europe some 400 years ago, later on ending up as slaves and then finally getting freed (to a certain extent). Sadly this group of indians is heavily misunderstood and massively discriminated against, and there is little to no effort in understanding their culture or helping them. A shame for a would be “fair” continent that unapologetically continues to discriminate against people based on ethnicity and other petty criteria.

Sources: https://m.timesofindia.com/where-do-gypsies-come-from/articl...

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/twin-researches-...

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/genetic-se...

Pretty sure the Romani were never slaves. Didn’t they always just live on the fringes of society?

Unfortunately they were:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Romania

https://www.europeana.eu/en/blog/roma-slavery-in-romania-a-h...

Also suffered greatly at the policies of Romanian fascist and German nazi governments:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-o...

As a result of that they lived on the fringes of society once “freed”. Basically they were not allowed to own land or property and when “employed” they were “paid” in food and accommodation - another form of slavery. Modern day the situation is improving but literally anywhere in europe they travel they are either marginalised or forced to hide their identity. The issue is deeply rooted. It really is an ongoing tragedy that europeans flat-out fail to acknowledge and repair.

This is good. I don't know how effective it will be in practice however since all forms of outlawed discrimination largely end up in the "culture fit" bucket.

"Culture fit" is really insidious. Like many forms of discrimination I don't think it's even necessarily a conscious bias but this absolutely still exists (eg [1]). "Culture fit" is an umbrella for de facto racism, sexism, ageism and classism.

[1]: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/18/name-discriminati...

To Apple they are all Indian.

Underrated comment. Not sure if roschdal@ intended it this way, but I interpreted it in a dark way.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant that way. But it is important that Indians who place so much importance and pride on caste understand this. To a non-Indian, you and that supposedly 'lower' caste guy you won't eat together at the same table with are both the same.

In my opinion, companies should produce "challenges" for leading personal, from a sort of internal investigations team, and among them should be corruption challenges, security challenges, nepotism challenges and discrimination challenges.

If you fail them, you get demoted or otherwise restructured.

Of course, this creates a atmosphere of distrust, but some things, like Meritocratic atmosphere, are worth it.

Hm. I doubt this would produce meritocracy, more likely the result would be highly political atmosphere where everyone would be covering their actions instead of working.

Do you mean audits? The problem is the incentive to do these things and be honest about them, and not skew metrics to keep the company looking good. Lets say they do these audits will full honesty and find that 50% of the management deserves to be demoted. Do you think that will actually happen and how does this make the company look from a PR perspective?

Third party audits would be the only way to make this work, and again what are the incentives? Security audits are common because the risk is high. Lots of money lost in a lawsuit on behalf of billions/millions of customers. The others not so much, because you would only expect a lawsuit from an individual employee, which your army of corporate lawyers can easily crush.

Reminds me of a passage from the great Jack Vance.

Paraphrasing:

"To construct a society based on caste distinctions, a minimum of two persons is both necessary and sufficient." - Baron Bodissey

Every tech company should do this. Civil Rights Act Title 7 should cover this. Lawsuits winning should happen to reinforce it.

I have mixed feelings on this.

There are of course things that aren't explicitly prohibited by workplace policies but are no doubt unacceptable - e.g. discriminating against left-handed employees. But it's still useful to have explicit policies against caste discrimination to make clear that it's unacceptable.

On the other hand, as an Indian in a top tech company we're more likely to experience racism than casteism (though both are relatively rare), and this policy is likely to increase racism and result in Indians (and other South Asians) getting singled-out and scrutinized for casteism.

Edit: as if to prove my point about racism, in this very thread there is already a comment talking about Indian nepotism.

> we're more likely to experience racism than casteism (though both are relatively rare)

I have seen zero evidence for this. The relative or absolute frequency claims.

> this policy is likely to increase racism and result in Indians (and other South Asians) getting singled-out and scrutinized for casteism

Strongly disagree. I have Indian heritage. I have no problem with such policy, and am increasingly convinced—in part by comments like this—that it needs the force of statute. (It’s almost certainly already law.)

Also, non-Indians can discriminate based on caste, albeit indirectly, if their information flows through biased channels. The same way someone not racist can further racism if a bigot runs on of their teams.

If I lived in India I'd be OBC. No Indian coworker (some of whom have had Brahmin last names) has ever asked my caste (white people have on occasion, but only out of harmless curiosity), or showed any signs of discriminating against me over it. I have encountered occasional racism in my career on the other hand. Nobody I know in real life has any experiences of casteism in top tech companies to report, but some do report experiences of racism.

> Nobody I know in real life has any experiences of casteism

But there are people claiming discrimination based on caste. It’s the matter of an ongoing landmark lawsuit [1].

Personal experience is a bad filter because it’s shaped by the same factors we’re measuring. I haven’t experienced real racism because I’ve consistently been in environments removed from racists. I recognise, however, that other environments exist.

[1] https://hulr.org/spring-2021/caste-in-cisco-understanding-ca...

>(It’s almost certainly already law.)

Is it? I suppose this will vary depending on which country we're talking about, but as far as i know there's nothing in the US that makes it illegal to discriminate based on caste unless the determination of caste overlaps with another -ism, like race.

Not a lawyer, but as I recall there's case law suggesting that the US laws on ethnic or national origin and religion in practice are a protection against caste discrimination

How is talking about Indian nepotism inherently racist?

>Edit: as if to prove my point about racism, in this very thread there is already a comment talking about Indian nepotism.

I was wondering if you could clarify this. Why is the caste system fair game to criticize but nepotism isn't?

I didn't say either was fair game to criticize. Criticism of both tends to provide cover to or be motivated by racism. Especially when there isn't equal emphasis on WASP or Jewish nepotism, when most early tech companies tended to have mostly WASP or Jewish leadership.

> Criticism of both tends to provide cover to or be motivated by racism.

Good example of association fallacy [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

I think even in diverse workplaces, there are a whole lot of islands of one ethnicity or another-- including very, very white groups. More than you would get by chance.

This means a whole lot of racist personnel decisions are being made in all directions, and in a diverse workplace they kind of net-out OK?

In any case, ignoring one awful problem because there are others that may be of higher magnitude (or may not...) doesn't seem like a good plan.

"This means a whole lot of racist personnel decisions are being made in all directions" - not necessarily actually. Unless you count team / company choice by a prospective employee as racist. People often self-sort into cultural bubbles they feel most comfortable in.

> People often self-sort into cultural bubbles they feel most comfortable in.

If I sort myself into an all-white cultural bubble, and then later hire all the people from my network into the groups I run, etc-- I end up making de-facto racist hiring decisions. So even the situation you describe does eventually trend towards racism.

And, in any case, I think back to one of my early experiences in industry. We had groups that were 95% one ethnicity. I am pretty sure based on organizational culture that I would not have been successful in one of the non-white ones, and I'm not sure that people from those groups would have been successful transplanted into in the majority white groups. I think in practice the organization was really bad from a DEI standpoint, but on paper probably looked really, really good.

Diversity of background in most VC funded companies tends to be quite high?

I have never seen a team lead by a WASP or Jewish manager that has hired exclusively WASP or Jewish team members in any FAANG company. I have however seen teams that are exclusively Indian, even in diverse cities. At some point it comes down to network for early stage companies. But why is this true in FAANG companies where hiring pipelines are robust?

Because it's a negative trait being generally applied to a people group based upon their race. And it comes more from a cultural stereotype than from any basis in observable evidence.

Are you in a caste that's likely to experience discrimination? Or is this widely accepted among people who'd be vulnerable to caste discrimination?

I'm from a middle-caste - one that currently qualifies for affirmative action quotas in my ancestral state in India, but is reasonably well off economically. Most Indian tech workers with caste names I can recognize are either Brahmin (priestly caste - highest in the ritual hierarchy, though often poor), or Agarwal (middle-caste but extremely wealthy). I eat meat. Most of the upper castes traditionally don't, but a lot of Brahmins for example eat vegetables.

If I went to an orthodox village or town in India, I would likely face discrimination from Brahmins. On the other hand, in educated circles in cosmopolitan cities in India, caste is unlikely to really come up. The one thing that could come up is diet though - in some regions of India, many or even most landlords (including "lower" caste ones) would deny me housing because I cook meat at home and bring non-vegetarian food home. In America, most landlords won't care, but many vegetarian students / residents do insist on vegetarian roommates (likely more because they don't like the smell of meat than due to the religious vegetarian fanaticism that's seen in some parts of India).

Is it possible that dalits (historically untouchables, who constitute something like 2% of Indian-Americans from surveys I've seen) could be discriminated against in top tech companies in America, unlike me? Yeah it's possible. But I'm skeptical, if only because few Indians could tell apart a dalit from someone like me, given the amount of diversity you see in top tech companies - someone from one region of India won't recognize dalit surnames from another region of India. I could, however, see it coming up in some of the less competitive tech companies, where you tend to see more clustering of people from individual regions of India. I have also heard reports (some from friends of friends) of heavy discrimination by more tight-knit ethnic / caste groups in the diaspora that don't tend to work as engineers in tech - e.g. Jatts in the Central Valley or Patels.

HN can never has a coherent discussion about casteism in modern India OR in NRI populations because they lack the nuance and lived experience required to understand how jati system works. Indians are more likely to be affected by racism than casteism in the west.

> Indians are more likely to be affected by racism than casteism in the west

Should we ignore sexism faced by black women because they’re more likely to be racially discriminated against?

No, but we can (and black women do) talk about how concerns about sexism get wielded disproportionately against black men. It's intersectionality 101.

> we can (and black women do) talk about how concerns about sexism get wielded disproportionately against black men. It's intersectionality 101.

None of which is relevant to the frequency at which black women experience racism versus sexism.

Why is it racist to discuss Indian nepotism? Racism can often take the form of an individual giving preferred status to others who share their own race over others, and examples are frequently, rightfully, pointed out when white people give preferred status over non-whites. But if white people are capable of doing this, is it really that unbelievable that non-white individuals and groups are also capable of this? If not, then how is pointing out racism perpetrated by Indian individuals, itself, a racist act?

Did we avoid explicitly banning racial discrimination because there might be a backlash against non-whites? Nope.

This is kinda a dumb argument, but if we have to constantly be reminded not to be racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic, etc we might as well throw casteist into the mix. I'm actually feeling a little schadenfreude now that there's finally an -ism where i'm not part of the demographic that's the "bad guy".

> and this policy is likely to increase racism and result in Indians (and other South Asians) getting singled-out and scrutinized for casteism.

Is it? Do Whites get singled out and scrutinized for anti-black racism? Maybe they do, but if it is I doubt it's a significant phenomenon.

I can’t speak to what whites experience on a personal level, but I can say that my company paid Robin deAngelo to give a talk on “white fragility”, which I found rather offensive, and I’m not even white.

I wonder is it really necessary to explicitly ban every sort of discrimination? Shouldn't it be simple 'discrimination is not allowed'? Otherwise we will be listing every type of discrimination and revisiting this list every now and then. And it leads to questions like 'is it acceptable to discriminate by boldness if it is not in the list?'

While I agree that such not-so-well-known discriminations should be publically discussed, I feel like 'banning' them one by one is the wrong direction to take.

Banning is the way to discourage it, and make people aware of the discrimination. How else do you propose we educate, spread awareness and discourage the act? Would you take something seriously if it wasn't banned and had consequences if you indulged in it? I don't think banning is wrong. But the punishment for it should be ideally mediation and education (with something like 3 or 4 strike rules because unfortunately some people are shit).

Cue the ambulance-chasers bringing discrimination lawsuits on behalf of paraplegics alleging discrimination in the field of carrying boxes up and down stairs.

Discrimination is allowed, it’s not even necessarily a negative thing - a company may discriminate against employees who are late, for example. What is not permitted are certain types of discrimination. Those either need to be enumerated or we need to all guess what they are.

But did they explicitly ban slavery?

I guess https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Comb...

Kudos to Apple - I wonder how does this work in practice. Policing discrimination is difficult period, however for better or worse racial and gender discrimination have a visual impact which makes it somewhat easier to identify. From what I've learned there are a lot of niche aspects to caste discrimination and I wonder what sort of guidelines Apple has built internally to monitor this. Does Apple know which caste their employees traditionally belong to?

There are nice short videos which talks about racism and tries to make people less racist. Similarly in India it would be good to develop such short videos so that people can become sensitive on this topic of caste and become a better society.

Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDPTVEqkGa4

Curious, does this include Apple enforcing the policy with contractors, partners, etc — basically any business relationship Apple has a significant leverage over?

Ask because Apple directly and indirectly consumes vast amounts of human labor in India.

If not, has any company of significant size ever successfully made this a policy in India?

Casteism is generally a smaller problem in urban areas and in South India, so technically casteism is a smaller problem in places like Bengaluru where the IT tech companies are based. A major reason for the issue might be based on the fact that there was a major immigration of upper caste Indians to the US around the time of the Cold War who kept to their old ways.

How hard is it to fake being of a higher caste like Brahmin or Kshatriya?

Since it’s not skin color but your heritage, can’t you falsify this information? Especially if you claim to be from some rural or remote location?

Just how involved would someone try to investigate your background?

I'm not Indian but my understanding is that you can typically tell someone's caste by their last name. I'd also imagine there'd be a host of cultural information that would be hard to fake, like knowing certain prayers or rituals. Brahmin's are vegetarian, so you'd have to only eat vegetarian at the office to pretend to be one. I even had a friend who told me his sub-caste had their own secret language they spoke.

It needs to be mentioned that casteism is less of an issue in the major urban areas and in South India. In these places it is possible to grow up and live your entire life without having to deal with caste, and Bengaluru is of the biggest urban areas in South India.

For the vast majority of Indians, their last name gives away their caste. If not their last name, their way of speech, their place of birth, what they eat. Caste-ism is so ingrained amongst a lot of Indians, that it is the first thing they try to figure out upon meeting another Indian. It's pretty hard to hide, unless you belong to the small minority of people whose habits and name don't give away their caste.

It’s about as hard as someone from Alabama trying to pass as someone that grew up in New York. It’s not super hard but people will probably eventually find out.

I could have misread or maybe it was some sort of propaganda but I thought I read somewhere that Silicon Valley's caste discrimination is the inverse of what used to be in India? i.e. the lower castes discriminating against the higher castes.

Lol no. Brahmins (the highest caste) are wildly overrepresented in IT, in and outside India.

IT is one of the least casteist sectors within India though.

In the US, you often see claims of "reverse racism", e.g. around affirmative action or just from general vibes. This is the equivalent - high caste people interpreting attempts at leveling the playing field as if they are being discriminated against.

Let's be clear though, in India these come on the form of explicit quotas. In some states, even if high caste applicants to university got 100% of the non-quota slots, they'd still be underrepresented because so many slots are reserved for caste. It's like if tech companies noticed their share of Asian tech workers was well above the 6% national average, and set a cap of only 4% Asians.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India

Speaking as a person with zero knowledge of SV and caste discrimination I will make the observation that 'accusations' of discrimination can and are made by people in almost every conceivable group.

So yes you could very easily have read something like that. And more reading would be required for background and context to figure out who's telling the truth in different situations

Slightly off topic I am anticipating discussions and media reports in the next few years where the antipathy between two groups manifests as clear discrimination by both groups towards the other. But if neither group is clearly in a stronger socio-economic then how will we describe and talk about that problem. To be clear I think these situations exist already but I don't think they are being reported in.

Inverseish caste discrimination does happen in some places in India, where demographically large "lower" castes seize political power and take the spoils and boss around everyone else (both upper castes who're easy to oppress in the name of equality, as well as other lower castes).

But I can't see that happening in Silicon Valley. There's too many Brahmins for other castes to be able to discriminate against them.

I would love to have the opportunity to see caste discrimination myself, I swear by god I will get the discriminator fired on the spot, right after making him feel very little. Caste/race discrimination is the dumbest/sickest thing I have ever seen.

Does employment law in India prohibit caste discrimination? If Apple's policy is more stringent than Indian law it presents interesting challenges in a pan-national workforce, especially with employees and contractors located in India.

I don’t understand how this isn’t already illegal

Just curious how this can be enforced when there are conflicts. In the US, how can it be proven someone belongs to specific caste.

Most likely apple has nothing to lose by doing this.

Where they do have something to lose: Taiwan v China politics - they side with China so they don't lose, going completely against any principled stand.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/07/apple-ask...

This is a good first step.

Anti racism/casteism is a cat and mouse game though. The only thing Im certain of is the rabid caste discriminators will develop some sort of coded language to keep discriminating without being caught.

My point is that we can never call this process done. Unfortunately the situation will evolve and so will our strategies to deal with it.

Ultimately we must uphold our commitment to liberal principles (I mean liberal in the sense of classical, not American liberalism). The rights of individuals must be protected.

It's kind of wild that it took so long, but this is great news and I hope others follow suit.

A lot of companies try to make policies against things that ought to be dealt with by law enforcement.

"Did inappropriate things to someone at the Christmas party" being the classic... That sort of thing should be dealt with by the legal system where the accused has the right to a fair trial etc.

Obviously the legal system might need some streamlining to take on the extra workload

The policies are more symbolic than anything, they would signify that the company doesn't condone such behavior. However, I think such policies should, by law, kick in after conviction and appeal processes have finished, when incidents are criminal in nature. If a person is not convicted, these policies should not apply. Too often, they apply upon arrest.

The difference is in the burden of proof. To be convicted in the criminal system the burden is "beyond reasonable doubt". In the civil system it's lower: "preponderance of the evidence". In the eyes of an HR department it's lower still. Theoretically, if you're arrested there's already "probable cause" - i.e. some evidence. It doesn't seem that weird or unreasonable that HR would act at this level. Does it suck if you didn't do anything? Yes. But people get fired for much less reason (or even no reason) all the time.

There are plenty of things that are not illegal that would also not be acceptable in many workplaces. For example: drinking on the job, coming to work without a shirt on, giving everyone a nickname (e.g. "beardy") and exclusively referring to them by such, etc. You don't have a right to a job, so companies can fire you for any of these reasons. It would be weird if committing a misdemeanour or felony on the job meant you would get to keep working until your trial is over, but you could be fired on the spot for having a beer.

Why isn’t caste discrimination already covered by race discrimination laws?

Probably because the perpetrator and victim often belong to the same race. Besides, it's hard even to prove that discrimination occurred. The usual strategy is to put lower caste people in no-win situations and blame them for the failure.

Caste in California: Tech giants confront ancient Indian hierarchy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32464756 - Aug 2022 (95 comments)

Google’s caste-bias problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32425308 - Aug 2022 (249 comments)

Google cancelled a talk on caste bias - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31593799 - June 2022 (946 comments)

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)

out of curiosity, how does casteism even work? Is it like racism in that you can look at somebody and usually figure out what caste they are visually?

Skin color is not a good predictor. You can make a guess by last name,

I know one of the identifiers is one's surname, for more detail:

https://www.quora.com/In-India-how-do-you-tell-what-caste-so...

I might be missing something obvious, but why doesn't everyone (particularly those living abroad) just change their name to a high caste one?

Nope, best indicator is the last name.

How hard is it to fake being of a higher caste?

Surnames are often used for determining caste apparently so as hard as changing your surname

Really hard. There are so many caste markers. Surnames are the least of it. Speaking accent, diet, clothing and several other habits can some among them. Even worse, people who believe in castes are part-time detectives who often do background checks on others. At least, that's the case in India. I don't know how bad it is in the US - but I'm sure there will be some.

Any tech company would be foolish to let caste discrimination go unchecked as a duty to their shareholders, with H1b and India IT outsourcing being dominant.

Great! Now Apple can move on to discriminating against Indians based on their adherence to the current progressive meta, just like at HQ!

seems like an odd decision for a company that is pro-slave-labor https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...

I love and hate this.

I like it because it is an objectively good thing. Caste is still a major issue in non-urban lower-middle class communities in India. While you're unlikely to see people from that economic starta at FANG companies (privilege leads to more privilege), you do see these problems arise in tier-2 companies who hire large numbers of vendors and temporary Infosys/IBM consultancy hires.

I hate it because it seems completely mistargetted an almost purposely malicious. I have spent my entire life among tech communities in India and the US, and caste simply never comes up. The type of people who get a job at Apple (FANG-companies) are usually from the far-far upper crust of Indian society that has usually moved past caste as a marker for class. I'm supposed to come from a lower-caste community, and I have NEVER been asked my caste and I have never felt excluded because of it in any Indian community in the US.

The loudest voices in this movement seem to be grifters who have no handle over the nature of discrimination faced by various Indian minority communities in the US or in India. They do not understand the intersectionality of various Indian identities an last and most importantly, they completely ignore new 'caste' systems developing among ethnic-Indian tech communities. The studies they publish are of a pathetic technical quality and the liberal pre-dispositions of the tech community mean that their claims are accepted with very little scrutiny.

I'll try my best to outline some types of discrimination / tribalism / culture-fit preferences and the emerging new caste/class system that I do actually see. (These are anecdotes, and not always 100% true)

1. 2nd vs 1st gen Indians

This is a prominent cultural gap. Survivalist-middle-class systems take a while to shed old perceptions. If your parents fled 'low class India' to give you a first world life, then the new immigrants land on a lower rung in your perceived class hierarchy. Indians are also deeply resentful/insecure about how they're perceived in media, and I suspect 2nd generation 'integrated' Indians feel some shame towards the perpetual faux-pas' of the fresh-off-the-boat immigrants. I have often found it easier to form connections with random white-people than 2nd gen Indians. Took me a while to even figure out what that weird sense of discomfort even was.

2. IIT-ians+ vs local-universities

This is a rising and prominent 1st gen Indian caste system. The ruthless meritocratic mentality of survivalist middle-class systems is directly to blame for this. After 20 years of being told that the IITs are the be-all-end-all of life, it leads to the natural formation of upper tier of Indians in the US. It doesn't help that certain universities like UC Berkeley or UMich are known to reject almost every non-IITian applicant. I personally know non-IITians at FANG companies who felt bullied (whether intentionally or not) as the only person from a small university in India in their group/team.

3. Reservations and the caste systems 2nd wind

This is the most prominent form of REAL caste discrimination that I've seen in the US. India has explicit affirmative action. Being completely blunt, it gives a massive advantage to lower-castes to get into premier Indian universities like IITs (to offset a very real socio-economic handicap). The brutal meritocracy rears it ugly head again as groups who missed out on a big opportunity feel resentful when someone with a significantly lower score gets in. This leads to an inherent bias where groups without affirmative action will not respect someone with a respectable profile on paper because they suspect that the person got in "unfairly". (I am merely commenting on how these perceptions develop. Not making a value judgement 1 way or another.)

Then there are other types of tribalism that are rampant in all communities. Linguistic & regional Nepotism; cultural integration = fluency in English, lack of a thick accent (I'd say even a southern drawl is looked down upon); preference towards in-groups (highly liberal, dress/present a certain way, hiring from alma matter). All of these signal that you come from privilege and have spent long enough among the cultural elites to have adopted their mannerisms.

One caveat is that 'capital-C-Caste' is very much very much an issue within certain parts of India and the nature of it in those situations is horrifying. None of my comments are meant to minimize their experience. Also, the affirmative-action candidates that I met in my time at a decent-indian-university were all incredibly hard working and came from some of most difficult socio-economic conditions that I know of. Massive respect to them and the meritocratic-resentment-driven-discrimination they face is pretty underserved.

Razib Khan (2nd gen American) goes into fantastic detail [1] [2] about the nature of the caste system (or lack thereof) both in the US and India. I would highly recommend that people check out his work/twitter.

[1] https://unherd.com/2022/06/americas-fake-caste-war/

[2] https://unherd.com/2020/09/how-brahmins-lead-the-fight-again...

[3] more here - https://www.razib.com/wordpress/category/caste/

”Recently, talking about the incident to the New Yorker, Tanuja said, "A number of e-mails got sent to my VP, to the head of HR, to our chief diversity officer, to our CEO directly, claiming that the talk was creating a hostile workplace, that people felt unsafe, that the speaker was not qualified to speak on the topic and several other allegations." She also claimed that in tech companies, including Google, discrimination based on caste was rife and that tech company needed to talk about it.”

Congratulations America. Now the ”felt unsafe”, ”hostile environment” etc. woke newspeak is used to protect the asses of the people who want to discriminate while victims get smoked out by these useless clowns that are called ”diversity officers”.

who's the victim here?

Accusations of victimization is a widely used strategy to deflect discussion of caste discrimination. And one common tool for that is the caste reservation system in India.

I wonder if we should coin the term "Brahmin fragility" - I assume this same behavior, if demonstrated by white people, would be labeled as "white fragility".

> ”felt unsafe”, ”hostile environment” etc. woke newspeak

Were these terms not in use 40 years ago? I'd think these two terms don't fall under whatever "woke newspeak" is understood to mean these days.

Those certainly existed. But they don't say much on their own. What is considered hostile or unsafe is very subjective.

For some people direct language is hostile but for others don't feel taken serious by reserved expressions that evade a point. It often far more depends on the disposition if it is received as hostile or not.

I believe the criticism of woke refers to the certainty of declaring terms as intrinsically hostile. Blacklists or Gimp come to mind. But it is just a lack of understanding that criticise these words and try to change them. I think the vanity of those complying here is hostile and that they lack integrity and this is a problem in our industry. The same lack of integrity will have of course more significant negative effects than not using certain terms.

They likely were, but with different connotations. They're now applied to much less dramatic circumstances.

E.g. the dictionary definition of "safe" (because "unsafe" is basically "not safe") is:

> protected from or not exposed to danger or risk; not likely to be harmed or lost

I would be hard-pressed to find a reasonable way that someone giving a talk on castes would expose the listeners to danger, risk or harm other than perhaps feeling a bit uncomfortable. I don't think feeling a bit uncomfortable would qualify as a danger, risk or harm 40 years ago.

Likewise, I don't think having a civil talk about discrimination is "hostile". It's uncomfortable, sure, but I don't think that rises to the level of unfriendliness or antagonism (unless they're publicly shaming individuals or something like that).

I don't care for the term "woke newspeak" because it tends to invoke people who are mocking the underlying feelings. People are welcome to feel however they want, and I respect that. I do think it undermines their own goals however, because it reads as hyperbole to me, which leads to wondering if hyperbole is used so heavily in other statements they make. A "Boy Who Cried Wolf" situation, if you will.

What I don't care for is diluting linguistic terms in an effort to create parallels with people in much worse situations. To me, calling this "unsafe" or "hostile" detracts from the experiences of people who are genuinely unsafe or experience hostility, e.g. domestic abuse victims, or victims of discrimination.

Just to spread awareness on how evil and ingrained this system is (this is from yesterday) - https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/jaipur/rajasthan-we...

Teacher beats their son to death and then offers them three grand. Jesus christ.

Ugh, this makes me genuinely... I was going to say sad, but... I don't think I have a word for this.

The post just shows one recent event. If that makes you upset, then I suggest that you don't go searching for it. That's for the sake of your sanity.

looks the other way when Indian director has all Indian SDMs reporting to him

It’s all lip service. Nepotism is rampant at FAANG

At a large semiconductor company, the same could be said for many groups: Chinese hiring other Chinese, one group hiring native Americans mostly, others with Hispanic origin…

Human tribalism is, unfortunately, present everywhere. Every country and every company.

True.

At a minor scale, all this is fine. People do hire colleagues from previous jobs or from the same Uni, for example

But there's a limit and managers, etc need to be very aware. You can't just have one person hiring all their acquaintances

A Native American group? I mean damn, that’s gotta be so rare I’d almost support it.

Or did you mean an American company hiring Americans? That’d be pretty rare too.

A lot of US semiconductor fabs are in New Mexico. Some were even built on Navajo land. It's an industry where Native Americans were well represented.

Which fabs are in NM other than Intel's 11x (and maybe Sandia)? Wikipedia [1] doesn't list anything, but I also don't see many smaller, exotic technology fabs on there. I'm really curious where they could site a fab on the Navajo reservation because of how profoundly inadequate most of the infrastructure is even for typical American households, let alone a fab.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

Also the Navajo/Hopi water rights issue is complicated, to say the least.

Yes, this was a local software engineering manager who is "Native American" as in, a native people original to the land, aiming to hire other Native Americans as well as majorly minorities.

As a whole the company reports figures showing mixed diversity within the company, but it is really sort of segregated inside because folks don't really mix within immediate groups or teams. So if you're from a typical Caucasian descent, it's hard to adjust within groups like that. One reason is because it is hard to connect - business thinking is different, world views, work ethics, communication style... so I don't blame folks for hiring similarly. For groups when you "need to get things done" it makes sense, but for creative thinking and problem solving, you really should have diversity within the team itself.

I worked for the same large semiconductor company and saw the same thing play out. It was hinted to me by some mentors that I was in a good position because my manager was White as opposed to Indian or Chinese.

>looks the other way when Indian director has all Indian SDMs reporting to him

I've seen it happen so many times now that I can call it ahead of time. Critical mass is when you get a VP. From there, you go from representational levels to >50% Indian in a matter of months.

Happened at my last company. They hired an Indian CTO and before long, all the management under him was Indian. He basically made life unbearable for the existing leaders until they quit and then brought in someone he knew. Seemed like blatant racism to me.

I don't know if it's nepotism, but Changi Business Park [1], a tech hub in Singapore, is nicknamed Chennai Business Park [2], for much of the same reason outlined in this thread.

[1] http://www.changibusinesspark.com/

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=chennai+business+park

Having done many interviews around silicon valley, the demographics of companies definitely seem very ... themed. Not necessarily monochromatic for a particular ethnic group, but a small set of ethic groups usually overwhelmingly represented.

And at that, this wasn't a thing that seemed particularly biased towards one theme.

Maybe not the exact place for this, but after a few years of working with "near-shore" development groups in Latin America, I can't believe how white the leadership is. For all who think the US is #1 awful place for non-White folks, just look at Brazil.

Brazilians. I know of one group of ~4 that basically follows the leader (a Director / CXO type) to every position. Whenever he moves, they all inevitable end up at the same exact company within 1-3 months. It's actually impressive how consistent their resumes are going back a decade or so.

That is something that always happens, regardless of nation, race or religion.

To some extent, people don‘t quit jobs, they quit managers.

In the same sense the opposite can be true.

I know many North Americans and Europeans who do the same.

They always travel in groups of five...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-b7-fLOjlY

its cause indian managers can have fiefdoms with other indians under them. total power.

If it is, is kept very secret between Indian employees, most American engineers (at least I would) will raise the issue. I don't care how high the is Director, I would just tell him that he is being racist , at his face, if he gets me fired, I would sue the company in a second. I have never seen this non-sense at FAANG in the 7 years I have worked here (Amazon first, then Google).

It’s not a secret? I recall having a discussion on this with a bunch of SV engineers a decade ago at a potluck and almost everyone observed how Indian managers tend to hire Indians at their respective companies.

Oh yeah, I was referring to discrimination in the workplace itself. So far all Indians I have met are amazing people, and I have not seen any type of discrimination against other Indians, otherwise I will whine very loud for sure.

I love when there is a position that sounds awesome but then says something like: "Hispanic or other underprivileged groups are encouraged to apply".

It's legal to say that out loud?

The most charitable interpretation is that they are attempting to increase representation in the pipeline of candidates, such that their unbiased, neutral selection process will naturally produce outcomes representative of their candidate pool.

That’s legal.

In reality, when you have companies literally setting hiring targets on the basis of protected characteristics?

It’s very unlikely that the selection process is neutral to those protected characteristics, which is not legal.

Yes it is, because statistically they do not.

To be fair: nepotism is rampant everywhere, and has been throughout history. How many groups have you worked in or seen where everyone got recruited from the same set of schools? Where everyone used to work together at some other company?

The difference with what you're seeing is all down to who is allowed to be nepotistic. When south asian engineers were predominantly junior immigrants, you didn't notice anything wrong. Now the casteists are doing the hiring too. But the effect is the same.

Nepotism where everyone hired is the same race is called racism.

Since we're sharing anecdotes and that's good enough for this thread, here's my own:

I'm a white guy - pretty much a typical one. My manager is a white guy - possibly even more typical, follow along North American Dude Stereotypes for both of us.

For most of the last 2 years, he had 8 reports - 3 managers, 3 product managers, and 2 principal engineers (me being one of them).

I was the only white guys out of 8 - the rest were all Indian.

Why?

Because the other 6 were the best people for the job. They applied for it (some external, some internal), and we hired them, cuz they were rad (and still are).

Demographically, that just happens sometimes, including all-Indian reports

Have white progressives kicked high caste Indians (which includes most Indian Americans) out of “people of color?”

Is this an article about white progressivism?

Any such policy at a California company run by white people is either spearheaded by white progressives, or adopted to appease them, and reflects what they consider acceptable versus unacceptable discrimination.

Ordinarily, discrimination by and between minorities is swept under the rug in such circles. So a policy that views Indians as capable of being oppressors is a significant.

Just so I'm clear here, your argument is that any policy a California tech company adopts to prohibit discrimination based on caste must either have been spearheaded by progressives --- a political ideology you have contempt for --- or adopted to appease them?

His statement is more specific than that. He said white progressives. So if an Indian progressive worked on the policy they did it to appease some other person, not because they believe in its progressive value.

Casteism is an elaborated form of Classism, which the West will not ban because the whole society depends on that discrimination to decide who’s “smart”

Casteism is much more worse.

You or your children or your grandchildren atleast have a chance on moving up in class in a capitalistic society like West.

In Casteist society you neither your descendants can ever leave your caste and will always face discrimination does not matter how much money you have.

Wow that is batshit. This article made me read up more in castes and. . . Wtf?

I mean the US had a system like this 60 years ago. South Africa 30.

Indian caste system is more a quantitive outlier (I.e the number of castes/classes is the outlier) rather than a qualitative change.

Arguably, the US still has a system like this. Redlining didn't end until what, 1980ish?

Getting rid of the explicit, codified practices of discrimination doesn't remove the discrimination itself. And until we've paid back the damages to the families injured by practices like redlining, we've inflicted financial and social wounds across generations of people descended from those we harmed.

Go to the American military and look for the absence of upper class mannerisms common to any private college…

Go to prisons and look to see the ratio of minorities to white peoples, and look for what portion of people there grew up in poverty

Go to the wealthiest institutions in America and count on one hand the number of people there solely on their merit

Our society is no different than the caste discrimination we claim to abhor, just different superficial rhetoric on top.

Both these cultures need to be overthrown.

You can just change your surname. Nobody will be able to tell your caste. Upward mobility in castes is a lot given the world has moved a lot from the traditional four profession system of priest, warrior, trader and labourer. People work in professions different than their so called caste. This is especially true of immigrants coming to US.

Why not tell all higher castes to change their names to that of lower castes to accomplish the same flattening, except that you'd prefer to leave it to the powerless to solve their own subjugation

You can not have any arbitrary surname because each surname belong to a caste. So if you take a higher caste surname then you will have to pretend like you belong to higher caste.

Also there are other factors which can tell which caste you actually belong to.

Your birthplace. Your parent's birthplace. Which part of the city you were born in. The accent you speak your mother tongue in.

These are benign questions that your indian colleague might ask or notice.

I dont think the current form in which casteism is practiced in India is related to profession.

Right now in India, lower caste people are mostly free to pursue any profession (unless you go to rural areas).

Discrimination comes from the fact that higer caste people simply despise/hate/consider lower caste people impure or inferior.

Don’t worry, the west is working it’s way there slowly but surely

> lawsuit about alleged casteism

Why is it just not called racism? Introducing new terms kind of derails the problem.

India (and Africa, China, Asia...) has a system where people with lighter skin are consider as "better". People with fair (whiter) skin are considered aristocracy, that never had to work outside on fields.

And castes could not intermarry for couple of thousands of years, it is legitimate to consider them as a race.

> Why is it just not called racism? Introducing new terms kind of derails the problem.

Casteism is the correct term for this. This isn't a different race of people, it's the same race of people in a different class. I agree with you that there are many similarities between Casteism and Racism, but I think it's good to separate it out.

From what I've learned on the topic, with Racism someone sees the color of your skin and can make assumptions from there. With casteism thought it's more about your family name, as someone from the lowest caste can look like someone from an upper caste.

Suing tech giant for racism is way more punchy, there are already laws and precedences... Educating people about "racism of a new type" is pretty complicated.

Reductionist approach "skin color"=="race" can be easily debunked. Could white German be ever racist to white Jew?

Just because you don't understand a term, doesn't mean you can just swap it for a term that you do understand.

Go read up on what the caste system is, its history and how it effects life within India. It seems you'll learn something new.

I understand casteism, I worked with indian devs for two decades. I would suggest you to read what Gandi said about negros. I have a news for you; "brown" people can be racist too. White westerners do not have a monopoly on racism!

I never said that Indian people can't be racist. I'm sure they can be racist, caste-ist or whatever the hell "ist" they like. But that doesn't automatically make them the same thing

Ok, sorry that was way too confrontational. I guess it boils down to definition of a "race". But given historical parallels, I still insist casteism is a type of racism.

> Why is it just not called racism?

You have a point. But Apple doesn’t want to continuously debate caste vs. race (they’re both social constructs). For statute, it should suffice to incorporate caste as an aspect of race.

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