Confronting an Ancient Indian Hierarchy, Apple and IBM Ban Discrimation By Caste (reuters.com) 181
"Apple, the world's biggest listed company, updated its general employee conduct policy about two years ago to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of caste," reports Reuters, "which it added alongside existing categories such as race, religion, gender, age and ancestry.
Apple has more than 165,000 full-time employees, the article points out, and "The inclusion of the new category, which hasn't been previously reported, goes beyond U.S. discrimination laws, which do not explicitly ban casteism." The update came after the tech sector — which counts India as its top source of skilled foreign workers — received a wake-up call in June 2020 when California's employment regulator sued Cisco Systems on behalf of a low-caste engineer who accused two higher-caste bosses of blocking his career.... Since the suit was filed, several activist and employee groups have begun seeking updated U.S. discrimination legislation — and have also called on tech companies to change their own policies to help fill the void and deter casteism....
Elsewhere in tech, IBM told Reuters that it added caste, which was already in India-specific policies, to its global discrimination rules after the Cisco lawsuit was filed, though it declined to give a specific date or a rationale.
Meta, Amazon, and Google do not mention caste in internal polices, the article points out — but they all told Reuters it's already prohibited by their current policies against discrimination.
And yet, "Over 1,600 Google workers demanded the addition of caste to the main workplace code of conduct worldwide in a petition, seen by Reuters, which they emailed to CEO Sundar Pichai last month and re-sent last week after no response."
Apple has more than 165,000 full-time employees, the article points out, and "The inclusion of the new category, which hasn't been previously reported, goes beyond U.S. discrimination laws, which do not explicitly ban casteism." The update came after the tech sector — which counts India as its top source of skilled foreign workers — received a wake-up call in June 2020 when California's employment regulator sued Cisco Systems on behalf of a low-caste engineer who accused two higher-caste bosses of blocking his career.... Since the suit was filed, several activist and employee groups have begun seeking updated U.S. discrimination legislation — and have also called on tech companies to change their own policies to help fill the void and deter casteism....
Elsewhere in tech, IBM told Reuters that it added caste, which was already in India-specific policies, to its global discrimination rules after the Cisco lawsuit was filed, though it declined to give a specific date or a rationale.
Meta, Amazon, and Google do not mention caste in internal polices, the article points out — but they all told Reuters it's already prohibited by their current policies against discrimination.
And yet, "Over 1,600 Google workers demanded the addition of caste to the main workplace code of conduct worldwide in a petition, seen by Reuters, which they emailed to CEO Sundar Pichai last month and re-sent last week after no response."
Silly old world thinking. (Score:3)
Cultures with caste systems need to grow up, and understand that you can hide all the same wonderful benefits , such as excluding large swathes of undesirables, using tools like bureaucracy and "unbiased" statistics to justify iffy choices. That's modernity.
Re: Silly old world thinking. (Score:5, Funny)
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HR should do the needful.
Prepone the meeting about it!
The modern caste system is money. (Score:3)
Has been for awhile. No one cares what color you are, whose dick you suck, what your imaginary friend's name is or anything else as long as you can pay.
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No one cares what color you are, whose dick you suck
Sure. And Apple* is publishing diversity reports just for fun [apple.com]
* Note that I chose Apple as a quick and colorful example. All major corporations do this to a varying degree.
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Grow up and instead nibble the jerkey of some tortured corpse?
The real problem (Score:2)
Now imagine there are so few non-icelandic people in Iceland that it never occurred to anyone there that someone could discriminate based on race. Or people there might have never in the last thousand years of their history cared about someone's race. So there might be no law against di
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Americans may not realize the parallels. "Rednecks" versus "yankees", or "townies" versus "students" are old cultural dividers in many communities, and the segregation of blacks in America includes many of the ills of the Indian caste system.
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There is a huge difference.
The named differences,,, individuals, with difficulty, can migrate among the,
Caste is "divinely " assigned and there is NO migration possible.
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" individuals, with difficulty, can migrate among the [something],"
Tell me, how does a Black man "migrate" into being White?
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" individuals, with difficulty, can migrate among the [something],"
Tell me, how does a Black man "migrate" into being White?
I've worked with many POC in the business world. They were all very successful, some much more successful than me, and all of us had an interesting personal quality in common:
We learned to look beyond race to only consider the personal qualities of others that truly matter.
When anyone fixates, obsesses on race, the chance of making any progress magically melts away...like that "All Spark" thing in those Transformer movies.
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I'm paraphrasing here. That might not be it. Some could have seen it as dancing around acknowledging one group - I prefer to think that weaseling around treating people like crap for something that isn't expressly prohibited is not gonna fly.
Here's a wacky concept: (Score:5, Insightful)
I have personally been on the customer side of a project team which had roles delegated by caste. The project manager was incompetent, non of the competent 'resources' were allowed to contact us directly, and had no clue what their system level objectives were. We ended up 'shutting down' the project, maintaining some 'maintenance resources' for the 'project tail', the project managers didn't want a bar of it, so the team individuals now reported directly to us.
That was 7 years ago. Our 'maintenance resource' team continues to grow and advance in capability to this day.
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The problem there is that "ability, aptitude, and performance" can correlate with other factors like caste or race.
For instance members of a lower caste will often have less access to education than those from a higher caste which can then easily result in them having a lower average level of performance.
So despite the fact that you have done the right thing and only considered merit (and being from a different culture may not even be aware of the caste system or understand how it works), you may still end
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Except that once a society has first acknowledged prior discriminatory practices, elements of the society attempt to fix it by mandating that members of the discriminated group get special treatment to make up for it. After that has been accepted, the people who get special treatment will scream bloody murder if you try to take it away when it's no longer necesary whether or not they actually can compete on the basis of merit. The only solution is to eliminate the caste system without any compensation for
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What? Why, I never, where's my pearls that I could clutch, you abelist!
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Let's discriminate based on ability, aptitude, and performance related to the role being filled?
I have yet to see any unbiased, accurate way to measure those things. And even if they existed, they could only measure past performance which will depend on past circumstance, such as wealth and if that person was discriminated against at the time.
The incompetent always say this. But then we find research where if you are good at something, you can tell if someone else is good at it too. If you aren't good at something, you can't. So I guess you are just bad at your job. Not a surprise, you spend all day posting on /. instead of working.
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they could only measure past performance
Unless you're employing directly out of university, past performance is a pretty damn good indication of future performance.
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Unless you had a bad boss and the project failed through no fault of your own.
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Keep in mind that both our examples of applied communism come from countries
Stop hiring Indians (Score:2, Funny)
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So... exclude a huge number of people on the basis of sociopolitical factors in order to avoid caste issues?
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Fixed Headline (Score:2, Insightful)
In India will continue to operate business as usual.
So they acknowledge the caste system (Score:2)
You are a lowly peasant, but we have nothing against you being a lowly peasant. Welcome.
Japan (Score:2)
Japan has a caste type system too - Burakumin get the shitty end of the stick there.
I'm sure a good argument could be made that caste systems (or functional equivalents) are pretty widespread.
Outcaste (Score:2)
India banned the caste system in 1948 yet the CEOs and other luminaries are always from the Brahmin.
Yet, if there is news about some terrible rape or assault the victim is usually an untouchable/Dalit.
What a joke.
Hollywood should, too (Score:2)
I tried to get into a sound stage, but they said I couldn't because the sign said "cast only."
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:4, Insightful)
No argument is stupid if it benefits me. All arguments are stupid or made up when they don't.
There are plenty of people who think like that. Caste is just religion, but with built-in holiness clause at birth. No more stupid than other religions.
It's going to be interesting when people claim they need to discriminate based on caste, for religious reasons. This seems to be a valid course in the USA.
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's going to be interesting when people claim they need to discriminate based on caste, for religious reasons. This seems to be a valid course in the USA.
Not interesting at all. If they are an Apple or IBM employee, they will get fired because of violating explicit terms of their employment. Google and others claim that they will be fired because these companies have some catch-all conditions that cover this scenario. The same catch-all probable covers discrimination for hair colour, and discrimination for supporting a football team.
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:4, Informative)
Google and others claim that they will be fired because these companies have some catch-all conditions that cover this scenario.
And yet Google *isn't* actually doing anything about it... Sundar Pichai, a Tamil Brahmin, has been accused of harbouring ‘Brahminical’ ideologies while also engaging in caste bias, particularly against Dalits. [tfipost.com].
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple have been making efforts to make every product unveiling and WWDC keynote look like the United Colors of Benetton. That might be the right combination of positions filled, but I
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every diversity and inclusion initiative I've participated in as an engineer was just an effort to get better representation in the candidate pool. I've never been told to hire a particular person based on their race, ethnic, or gender identity. It's not discrimination to got out of your way to not just talk to white guys when you are looking to hire someone.
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:4, Insightful)
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But you're a liar, and admitted as much in your own post. You said California's laws mandate hiring PoC over more meritorious candidates, but then say the law was struck down. And the link you post is not about jobs, it is about board members. Those are almost always unpaid positions. The law does not say you have to repalce white men with women and people of color. You can simply add a new seat on the board for those positions.
Note that this law only applies to boards of publicly traded companies based in
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google and others claim that they will be fired because these companies have some catch-all conditions that cover this scenario.
And yet Google *isn't* actually doing anything about it... Sundar Pichai, a Tamil Brahmin, has been accused of harbouring ‘Brahminical’ ideologies while also engaging in caste bias, particularly against Dalits. [tfipost.com].
Ironically the article you cited is actually dedicated to discrediting the people accusing Sundar Pichai of those charges. Though I'll say the tone of article gives me great cause to believe the author discriminates against Dalits (no idea about Pichai though).
Rancid Dalit activists not being allowed to speak to Google employees are now waging a campaign against big tech firms themselves, accusing them of toeing the line of Brahmins in particular, and Hindus in general.
Tip to future authors trying to downplay claims of discrimination against a group, don't refer to people as "rancid {group} activists".
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:4, Insightful)
How can you look at one of these Indians, and tell what caste they are in?
Do they brand them or mark them somehow, etc?
I mean, aside from having some sort of secret handshake, how the fsck can you tell what caste one of them is by looking at them?
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:5, Informative)
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Not sure if it was on the same podcast, but also e.g. invite coworkers for after work pool activities, when some specific attire characteristic for casts is reveled.
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All questions that HR would say you can't ask. And yet people do it anyway. Ie, you're not supposed to know marital status and yet so often someone says "so,do you have any kids?" and other ways to try to sneak that question in.
One snag is when you get a team that's all the same culture, they'll have a strong bias against someone not in their culture, and I've seen often that HR and upper management either doesn't see this or looks the other way. Eventually that group figures out which of their members do
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since 85% of black children in America are raised by single mothers.
[citation needed]
nothing to do with race (Score:3)
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:5, Funny)
I once worked with an Indian engineer who spent a hour an a half telling me how evil the caste system is. "Of course" he said " I am of a high caste".
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It's mostly the higher castes that make it over here. They're the ones with the means to send their kids to good private schools or American universities and can afford to go through the visa process plus the travel expenses.
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When I was working towards my MBA, we had 6 Indian nationals in our class, located in Europe. They all said that caste is stupid and they didn't care - and even less so outside India where they were free of social pressure. One of them was relatively low caste and one was quite high - I never found out about the others. Despite what they claimed, not only did those two know of other's caste but even as a European I could see the difference on how they behaved towards each other. If it's really stupid and a
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I had a similar reaction, visiting Belfast in Northern Ireland, talking to two young women in a bar who nominally shouldn't be allowed to be friends (one being Catholic, the other Protestant). Personally I couldn't tell any marked difference between them in appearance, accent, etc. (and I'm Irish-American myself), but they said the difference was obvious to people in-culture if they knew the last name, or what street they lived on, etc.
Note the problem there is so bad they have giant concrete "peace walls" [wikipedia.org]
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As a side note, the Ainu were widely discriminated in hiring as an underclass in Japan, even after it was made illegal to do so. Much of the discrimination came down to finding out what addresses a persons recent ancestors lived at. Completely illegal but widely practiced. Which also illustrates the problem of just declaring something illegal and assuming the problem will passively resolve itself.
I have seen in a few cases in the US where discrimination of minority groups by other minorities gets overlooke
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Nobody cares, Nazi. You can repost this on every Slashdot story for the next 20 years, and nobody is going to read it or care.
Re: how can indochimps be this stupid? (Score:4, Informative)
He needs to realize that whtie nationaism is negative no matter how positive they spin in. So much energy being spent preserving an outdated idea when it's so easy and relaxing instead to just admit that it's ok if a brown person moves next door or marries your daughter.
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It can also be argued that not abiding by caste (for example a Brahman allowing an "untouchable" to get a position) can bring about bad karma, and punishment in the next life. It is similar to the Persian proverb, "Kick a blind man. Why be kinder than God?"
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure that proverb is either lost in translation or entirely false.
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India suffered aggregious oppression & social division ("divide & conquer") under British occupation & colonisation. They famously managed to achieve independe
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:4, Informative)
Outlawed and not practiced are entirely different things.
Fact is, it's been well known and understood that caste practices came right along with Indian immigration to the US
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Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Really? Do tell!
I'd love to that it's not driven by the "divine" but some idiot cleric in Italy put that stamp on it too I *think* it was the 1600s, but without wasting time to look up exact dates... That said, it's still not a 4000 year old practice as is caste.
I once had some idiot pull "the aryans brought it to India so it's their fault"... But THOSE Aryans came from steppes of Asia. Forebearers of the mongols
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And yet, discrimination based on caste is quite alive and well in India, despite being illegal. The issue is that in the US these sorts of discriminations aren't noticed normally because all the anti discrimination policies that companies have are focused around the sorts of discriminations that traditionally happen in the US. Caste discrimination is very difficult to notice for many HR departments and certainly I've never seen it covered in any annual training. Although most corporate policies would inh
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:3)
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:2)
There's both racism and classism in the US.
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:2)
That doesn't make them legal or desirable. What exactly does your comment add to the conversation?
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e3m4n was claiming that there is no racism in the US and that it's just classism, and I was pushing back on that. Did something give you the impression I thought they were legal or desirable?
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Land ownership is just religion. We need to end land ownership because the earth is for all of us. See how that works??? Religion is a belief system no different than laws are a belief system. You can say religion is stupid but I can say the same thing about laws since most of them were put in place by bribed and bough representatives
That's a poor analogy. Land ownership isn't a religion, it can be an important part of religion (Jerusalem, Mecca) but generally it isn't. The cast system is a hierarchy hardwired into Hinduism that has become an instrument of brutal oppression. As for laws are not always put in place by bribed and bough representatives, it may seem that way to you because your country works that way, but in most other countries laws are a simply a commonly accepted set of rules of behaviour. Religion on the other hand is b
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If we are discussing about levels of stupidity for discrimination, I would propose that discriminating someone for the colour of their skin, their age, their gender or any other attribute they did not chose themselves is a level dumber than based on what job they chose. Obviously if someone works as a butcher they are not vegan, for example.
On the other hand, most people in caste systems do not choose their jobs, but are restricted to the ones of their caste, which is kind of the point of castes I guess?
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thought people would shed such beliefs when moving to America
No. America was founded by people who wanted "religious freedom", which meant to them the right to exclude people of other religions from their society. Because America was so big, they could all have a patch (once they'd murdered the original owners of the big of land they wanted - which was fine because they where heathens and therefore not really human) and so America as a collective looks like it's a big old melting pot, but it's more of a stew of lumps.
You see it still today in people who call themselv
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or even African-Americans as if anyone in American is somehow not descended from Africans.
Not to step on your point too badly, but everyone, including Africans, are descended from some proto-human that lived in what is today called Africa.
Everyone is not descended from modern Africans, any more than we're (meaning all humans) descended from Chimpanzees.
So while I agree with you that tribalism is stupid, saying that "African America" is somehow a sillier label than "Irish American" due to the fact that African Americans and Celtic Americans have a common ancestor 70,000 years ago in Africa...
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or even African-Americans as if anyone in American is somehow not descended from Africans.
Not to step on your point too badly, but everyone, including Africans, are descended from some proto-human that lived in what is today called Africa.
Everyone is not descended from modern Africans, any more than we're (meaning all humans) descended from Chimpanzees.
So while I agree with you that tribalism is stupid, saying that "African America" is somehow a sillier label than "Irish American" due to the fact that African Americans and Celtic Americans have a common ancestor 70,000 years ago in Africa... doesn't really make any sense.
Well that's a bit pedantic. A similar point can be made about "Ancient Greeks" who really only happened to occupy land which would later become a country called Greece but we understand where in the world we mean (more or less).
Our ancestors were African in that they lived in the place we call Africa and I never mentioned "modern" Africa which is not even a country but a very large location. What they called it is of course unknown but they probably had no name for it at all. Would you say that we are desce
Re:how can people be this stupid? (Score:5, Informative)
and I never mentioned "modern" Africa which is not even a country but a very large location.
No, you skirted it though.
You used the phrase, "African Americans", and scoffed "as if any American isn't African".
African Americans are not labeled as such because they have ancestors in Africa 70,000 years ago (or perhaps much older depending on your standpoint on the Out of Africa hypothesis).
They do so because they come from ethnic and cultural roots that are significantly newer than that.
Your reasoning could be used to scoff at a Japanese person trying to distinguish their ethnicity and culture from a Chinese person.
Would you say that we are descended from beings "from a nameless land" instead?
Of course not. We definitely came from Africa.
But not the Africa for which African Americans are named.
Let's recap:
Tribalism: Dumb, for sure.
Deliberately confusing context to make the point: Not helpful.
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African Americans are not labeled as such because they have ancestors in Africa 70,000 years ago (or perhaps much older depending on your standpoint on the Out of Africa hypothesis).
They do so because they come from ethnic and cultural roots that are significantly newer than that.
I disagree completely. They are labelled "African Americans" because their skin is black. It's a euphemism, nothing more.
Let's recap:
Tribalism: Dumb, for sure.
Deliberately confusing context to make the point: Not helpful.
It wasn't deliberately confusing. It wasn't confusing at all. You understood it and I think so would everyone else.
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I disagree completely. They are labelled "African Americans" because their skin is black. It's a euphemism, nothing more.
I hope to fuck you simply misused the word euphemism, here.
And further, no. It's not because their skin is black.
There are all kinds of "black" people. African Americans are a subset of them.
It wasn't deliberately confusing. It wasn't confusing at all. You understood it and I think so would everyone else.
Drawing a line in the sand 6 feet over the edge of a cliff. Fascinating.
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No, religious freedom was never about excluding others. My god, is that what schools teach today?
The earlier Europeans who cane over for religious reasons were persecuted in their origin countries and fled for their safety.
Jfc....
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:3)
From what recall, Christianity pretty much focuses on excluding non-believers from Heaven.
That's pretty exclusionary.
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:2)
I didn't say it was BAD!
I'm all for exclusionary policies. Why the fuck should you have to be around people you don't want to be around?
I was just pointing out that it IS exclusionary.
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It was only later I learned the pilgrims fled to North America because even the ever-tolerant Dutch were tired of their shit.
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The earlier Europeans who cane over for religious reasons were persecuted in their origin countries and fled for their safety.
Of course, then they murdered people for "witchcraft" and persecuted Quakers, etc.
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No, religious freedom was never about excluding others. My god, is that what schools teach today?
The earlier Europeans who cane over for religious reasons were persecuted in their origin countries and fled for their safety.
Jfc....
They were persecuted because they were even more bigoted than was normal for the period and couldn't find anywhere that could put up with them for any length of time. Once they arrived they set about creating their own little Utopian lands where their view was the only view.
Delusional people usually have a low threshold for people who don't go along with their delusions.
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Well, a good chunk of them were "persecuted" because they thought England (and the church of) was too permissive.
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American Caste System (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:American Caste System (Score:5, Interesting)
Primary difference appears to be that caste here is somewhat malleable still. Certain traits are harder to look past, generally the more readily apparent ones (race, gender, obvious disability such as downs syndrome), but our definition of each caste is far more fluid. A couple generations ago people who's families were from Britain and those who's families were from Italy were clearly different castes (Italians not being considered "white" back then), but now they are to most people the same caste (white people from Europe). Being black puts you into a lower caste in most circumstances, but other traits can counter that in many/most settings (Clarence Thomas' Yale Law Degree). As such our caste system is more multi-factorial. I think of the difference like search terms.
Some caste systems allow for a single value in the "Caste" field (or at least that is my impression from the outside), where as others (like ours) can fit half a dozen, with the person running the lookup getting to decide which they focus on. Black celebrities are simultaneously Ultra High Caste (members of the celebrity caste) and the very high caste (The obviously wealthy caste) but are also low caste (obviously Black caste) and a police officer gets to decide when they walk up to the car which of those 3 castes they are going to use to guide their interactions today. Focuing on celebrity, maybe they give them a warning and take a selfie together (Not all Cops!!). Focusing on wealth, maybe they give them a pass on bad behavior because they don't want to deal with the inevitable challenge and having to show up in court. Or maybe they focus on the black part and focus on asserting their authority (insert Eric Cartman impression here).
The Indian caste system is based less on physical differences and more on cultural signals and (at least from the outside) seems less multi-factorial and more rigidly hierarchical (you are a Dalit or a Brahmin, but you cannot be both). As such it is simultaneously easier to identify who belongs in which caste by those within the culture (based on traits that are obvious only to people from that culture) AND harder for those outside to see the discrimination when it is occurring right in front of them (requiring a cultural awareness unlikely to be possessed by anyone not steeped in that culture, and therefore unlike to spot caste based discrimination when it is occurring right in front of them).
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This is true especially for the political caste. Some people will never be allowed to subvert the political caste system to the point where the caste will do anything to ensure its survival.
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It's even worse than that. Where we once used redlining to keep minorities out of white neighborhoods and perpetuate the cycle of poverty, we now use government-sanctioned zoning laws to achieve virtually the same result [washingtonpost.com]. Institutionalized housing segregation not only blocks poor families from the same economic opportunities as other families, it also makes poor neighborhoods subsidize affluent ones [strongtowns.org].
The "progressive" state of California took this to the next level with Prop 13 [ca.gov] which provides tax relief for
Re: American Caste System (Score:2, Informative)
You are delusional if you think most rich Americans are "self-made"
The best indicator of economic success in the US is what zip code you were born and raised in. In other words, being born rich is the best way to be rich as an adult.
Re:American Caste System (Score:5, Informative)
Literally all research disagrees with you. The US has the least class mobility in history, to the point of no longer realistically existing.
The problem with the American Self-Made myth is that it focuses on some very very rare examples, to the exclusion of the millions of counter examples.
So that makes it exactly that, a myth. Something not attainable for 99.992% of people (If I remember my numbers right).
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Upward mobility becomes a generational thing if it only works if you can build on the success of your ancestors over generations. That may not be so bad, if you don't get rich yourself at least you can say you made things better for your kids.
That, to me, is the ongoing sin of racism and seems likely to spread. Educational systems and inheritance laws need to be tilted toward narrowing the gap between richest and poorest.
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Literally all research disagrees with you. The US has the least class mobility in history, to the point of no longer realistically existing.
The problem with the American Self-Made myth is that it focuses on some very very rare examples, to the exclusion of the millions of counter examples.
So that makes it exactly that, a myth. Something not attainable for 99.992% of people (If I remember my numbers right).
The important thing to realize is that parents will always devote a lot of resources towards trying to help their children succeed.
Parents who are rich and powerful will tend to skew the system towards helping their kids.
For most of human history this worked through the monarchy, the richest and most powerful parents convincing everyone of the wisdom of letting their kids inherit their advantages.
The fall of the feudalism upended this for a while, but the rich and powerful have now had a few hundred years t
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Sorry, the US is 27th on the global social mobility index. It's not bad, certainly not in the context of all of history, but it's nowhere near the best "that has ever existed in the history of the planet" and is near the bottom among modern western countries.
Casteism is just a word for obscure racism. (Score:2)
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thought people would shed such beliefs when moving to America
Why on earth would you think that? The very basis of immigration means that while people are leaving their old world behind, a new identity is formed that is a mix of the old and the new. It's glaringly obvious in every series or movie you see with some cultural context, from gangster movies like the Godfather or Black Mass (based on a true story of the Irish-American mob) to simple things like the recent rom-com on Netflix called Wedding Season. Just watch a video of comedian Ronnie Cheng; a good half o
Re: how can people be this stupid? (Score:3)
What you're discovering is that people actually enjoy being around like-minded people and really the only ones upset with this are those who are jealous of something and choose not to build it themselves.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with people localizing to their own traditions. I'll say it again there's nothing wrong with this.
It's a lot like the thermostat in a multi-zone climate control building. Some people like rooms to be really cold, some people like rooms to be really hot. Some people like room
Re: (Score:2)
Nsss... They packed it up and brought it along from the trip
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't believe in it, every religion looks weird, even ridiculous in its belief system. But that's the thing, people take that stuff serious. No, I don't get it either, but you can't expect them to accept that it's ridiculous. Attacking someone's religion usually entails attacking them, because religion tends to be a very, very large part of someone's identity.
If you really want to solve that problem, start by giving people a reason to abandon their religion. For example by giving them hope in some ot
Re:Not far enough (Score:4, Informative)
This is telling these employees that if they try to discriminate it is against company policy (and could lead to them getting fired, for example).
Re: Not far enough (Score:3)
It's a crime, but it is still widespread.
News broke just yesterday of a child beaten to death by teachers for drinking from a pot reserved for teachers of a higher caste.