From what I hear from my Indian friends, this behaviour is quite ingrained. Like other racism, it will be challenging to prove.
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.
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.)
Definitions of race don’t require a skin-color gradient. Plenty of Asians are lighter skinned than white Mediterraneans.
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.
See this book: https://www.amazon.com/Whitewashed-Americas-Invisible-Minori...
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)
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.
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"?
No. Varnashram and Jati system were not formed due to any imaginary invasion from the outside, that’s the discarded Raj era AIT speaking.
Man, guess history is completely wrong.[0]
Migration on the other hand is the current consensus theory.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
There is literally no difference. They are both arbitrary categories of people based on ancestry that are used for discrimination.