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UCDavis added caste to its anti-discrimination policy. Will others do the same?
- ryzvonusef 5y agoFor J. Kaur, a UC Davis senior of Indian descent, it started with insulting memes casually dropped into her group chats. For one of her schoolmates, it was overhearing South Asian students ask each other what caste they belonged to before picking roommates. The experiences inspired Kaur and her schoolmate to spend months working behind the scenes with other students to get their university to officially recognize caste — a millennia-old concept that assigns people their social statuses at birth — as a source of discrimination on the Northern California campus. That effort culminated in September, when UC Davis became potentially the first public institution in the U.S. to add caste to its anti-discrimination policy. The move places the university on the ground floor of a rising movement to confront caste discrimination, a lesser-known form of oppression present in American society, and one that is largely imported from South Asia.
- ryzvonusef 5y agoIn May, federal law enforcement agents raided a Hindu temple in New Jersey after lawyers for hundreds of oppressed caste workers filed a lawsuit against the Hindu sect known as BAPS. The temple was accused of confining the men who were working on a construction project to its grounds and paying them as little as $1 per hour for arduous labor. The lawsuit was amended this month to include other BAPS locations near Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Robbinsville, N.J. How did so many labourers enter the country without ringing alarm bells?