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> After Gupta posted a link in the email group to a petition to reinstate the talk, respondents argued that caste discrimination does not exist, that caste is n

> After Gupta posted a link in the email group to a petition to reinstate the talk, respondents argued that caste discrimination does not exist, that caste is not a thing in the United States, and that efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division. > Some called caste equity a form of reverse discrimination against the highest-ranked castes because of India’s affirmative action system for access to education and government jobs. > Others said people from marginalized castes lack the education to properly interpret Hindu scriptures around castes. Wow. I did not expect saints; every person and organization will be fallible and all that. Yet this is still so... absolutely stunning.

1270018080 4y ago
To me, all of these statements 100% confirm caste discrimination exists in America. Whenever I hear confronting history and privilege as "sowing further division" I cringe hard. The parallels in American history are, well... very parallel.
- skyde 4y ago
  The problem is "affirmative action" is just reverse discrimination and this is why it bring further division. Because people from both sides now, no longer feel reward is based on merit alone anymore. If there is another solution than "affirmative action" this might not be divisive.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    There is no such thing as reverse discrimination it's a purely content free term. Discrimination is merely discrimination with the insertion of the word reverse having no additional meaning. It's normal for any system which creates an incentive to hire minorities to still be so biased in favor of white dudes that you are still much better off being a white dude. Basically for every minority that wouldn't have made it on merit it's likely you could find two white dudes with the same level of actual merit. This degrades substantially the virtue of complaints about such discrimination.
    - skyde 4y ago
      You are basically saying its ok for a white dude from a family of homeless to be doubly discriminated (1- because he does have money to go to college 2- because college reserve seat for non-white people) And you justify it because statistically if you take a random white people and a random black people the black person would deserve it more. While this is true this logic is morally wrong because you punish or reward an individual not because of this individual merit but because he happens to have the same skin color as other individual. It's as absurd as saying there are not enough professional basketball player that are redhead so we should have quota of redhead regardless of skill level.
      - devnonymous 4y ago
        > It's as absurd as saying there are not enough professional basketball player that are redhead so we should have quota of redhead regardless of skill level. If the end goal is that after a number of generations we finally have the proportionate number of redhead basketball players that would have existed if we didn't discriminate against recruiting redhead players in the past, then no, the idea isn't absurd at all. Note the keyword here is the end goal - of creating a equal and just basketball team... or society, if you reel in the ad absurdum.
        skyde 4y ago
        there is no way to know what the right number should be for the percentage of the team that should be redhead. So the best you can do is create a new sport “ redhead basketball” the same way we now have “ women basketball” to not discriminate women !
      - michaelmrose 4y ago
        Attend more carefully to what I'm saying please. I said that discrimination is just discrimination. The term "reverse discrimination" is semantically nonsense. Selecting people based on skin color is always discrimination. That said the situation as it stands is so tilted against minorities in favor of white dudes that this injustice rarely leaves a white guy in the red on net and fixing what pitifully little preference there is before making any dent in rampant discrimination will on average net out to a decrease in justice. Consider even in microcosm a white man applies to 10 positions who loses one due to preference given to a minority while 7 identically skilled black man fills out 10 apps each and 5 take lesser jobs. It's hard to imagine that the victim here is the white dude. Speaking as a white man white victimhood doesn't really pass the sniff test. You mention education so lets talk about Harvard. This blew my mind. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-percent-white-students-are-legacy-athletes-n1060361 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-... > Study on Harvard finds 43 percent of white students are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staff. The number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories, the study said. Almost all the minorities are people who belong their by merit. About half the white people do. Before reading this I was against racial preference in education.
  - wumpus 4y ago
    > The problem is "affirmative action" is just reverse discrimination Have you ever noticed that this opinion isn't the only one out there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Origins
    - skyde 4y ago
      is there other form of affirmative action that are not : - just a type of quota to give preferential treatment to a group of people not because of merit but simply as a way to increase diversity for some arbitrary measurement (gender, race ...)
      - wumpus 4y ago
        Yes, it's right there in the link I posted.
        skyde 4y ago
        already spent more than 10 minutes reading that page and didn’t find any which is why I was asking.
        wumpus 4y ago
        It's right there at the start of that section: > The term "affirmative action" was first used in the United States in "Executive Order No. 10925",[17] signed by President John F. Kennedy on 6 March 1961, which included a provision that government contractors "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin".[18] It was used to promote actions that achieve non-discrimination. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 which required government employers to "hire without regard to race, religion and national origin" and "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin."[19] You asked for: > is there other form of affirmative action that are not : - just a type of quota to give preferential treatment to a group of people not because of merit but simply as a way to increase diversity for some arbitrary measurement (gender, race ...) Are you asserting that treating people fairly (what JFK said) is somehow not "because of merit"? If so, there's the difference of opinion I was recommending you learn about.
akavi 4y ago
I think the argument that "efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division" isn't totally without merit. As an America-born Indian-American, I honestly don't know what my caste is beyond knowing I'm not Brahmin (I didn't do the string ceremony some of my childhood family friends did), and have basically zero idea of how I'd identify someone else's caste. I imagine that that's not terribly uncommon among ABCDs. Educating people like me about that would suddenly create the ability for them to identify a difference that they wouldn't have noticed before. This makes it unlike gender, racial, or age discrimination, where the categories are usually surface level obvious. That in turn could have a star-bellied sneetches effect, where people identify with the new categories that they wouldn't have considered before.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- empressplay 4y ago
  Um, no. The only division it would sow would be when you notice your Indian-born manager is discriminating against your Indian-born co-worker. The only people who really want to stop awareness of this are people like that manager.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Funny that you are literally discounting an Indian American, telling them how they will think and feel about the topic.
  - uhuruity 4y ago
    I am also a foreign born person of Indian descent and agree with the person you’re replying to. I have never been aware of my cast, the cast of other Indians / Indian origin people I interact with, and think that’s a good thing. Could you elaborate on why you think the negative effect - that making previously oblivious people aware of castes could increase discrimination - doesn’t exist?
  - chasil 4y ago
jjcon 4y ago
> efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division. I think is a real point and is true of many issues - the problem is how do you fix a problem silently in the background? Can it be done with better results than hyperfocusing on it? I would guess and hope there might be a way but don't know how.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  Talking about social problems only "sows further division" in the sense that people who currently benefit from those problems get angry that you want to change things.
skyde 4y ago
Well to be fair If in United States, I met/interview someone from India. I would have no idea which caste they are, so I don't see how I can discriminate one caste over another :)
- rhacker 4y ago
  Ever get an offhanded comment from another co-worker (indian) that says something like, yeah I don't know about this guy. What if THAT was him thinking about the entire CASTES thing!?!?!?! I mean that's often enough to pass up entire people
  - skyde 4y ago
    So would that co-worker be able to guess the caste of the candidate during a 30minute phone interview ?
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      Casted are guessable simply by seeing someone’s name.
      - qorrect 4y ago
        What are some obvious examples? Thx
Johnny555 4y ago
Anyone that really thinks the USA has no caste is in an upper level caste. It's less formalized here than in other countries, but it absolutely exists.
- pydry 4y ago
  American caste is just money though.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    That's not what caste is. Caste is a value assigned to you at birth that you cannot change no matter what you do. It's similar to race but stupider
    - qorrect 4y ago
      People are having a really hard time grasping this and Im not sure why.
    - justinclift 4y ago
      Kind of sounds like "from old money" vs "not from old money" in the UK/US/etc?
    - pydry 4y ago
      This sounds an awful lot like what money in America has become. An american rags to riches mythos and a small and decreasing class mobility asymptotically trending to zero looks more like caste than not.
  - Johnny555 4y ago
    It's money and everything that comes along with it - social status, health (both because of access to healthcare, but being able to afford a healthy lifestyle), education, safer interactions with law enforcement, job prospects and advancement, etc. If you're born poor, it's very hard to break out of that. It's not literally impossible like changing caste is, but it's very difficult.
devwastaken 4y ago
Companies only talk about equality because 1. Requires by title IX and 2. Advertising. It is immediately clear to anyone whom has done even the slightest research that no org with millions/billions sitting around can ever claim to support equality in any respect.
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> Others said people from marginalized castes lack the education to properly interpret Hindu scriptures around castes. "If you're one of them, you're too ignorant to understand why we're right". Absolutely repulsive.
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  Do you think this isn't a prevalent idea in US society as well? It's just a reframing of the current DNC platform using exotic words like "caste".
- harry8 4y ago
  Ok my reaction too but we should temper it in that we're hearing someone reporting what someone reported that they heard. It could be utterly baseless, it could be missing a load of context, it could be distorted beyond reason. "Others said..." Also a them kinda deal right there.
AussieWog93 4y ago
>Some called caste equity a form of reverse discrimination against the highest-ranked castes because of India’s affirmative action system for access to education and government jobs. I've heard some pretty horrible stories about this in particular; like Brahmin kids being legally adopted into Sudra families in order to get into a reserved position at a State University, and rich kids with private tutors getting given further advantage over poor kids doing all the work themselves because they happen to be of a lower caste. Just like in every other country, affirmative action does nothing but help members of a specific group who are already advantaged.
- india_usa 4y ago
  There is 70% affirmitive action. If you are a Dalit with 50% mark you will get admission to a medical seat and you will be a cardiac surgeon, but if a brahmin girl gets 99% she will not get admission and will be a clerk. Go figure the Indian system. This is why you see thousands of Brahmins in Silicon valley as they are kicked out or disgusted with Indian political system of favoring lower castes. USA benefited immensely from it.
  - nix9000 4y ago
    >If you are a Dalit with 50% mark you will get admission to a medical seat and you will be a cardiac surgeon, but if a brahmin girl gets 99% she will not get admission and will be a clerk. Is it possible for someone with a 50% GPA to finish a cardiac surgery training program in India? Or is that a gross exaggeration?
    - ceeplusplus 4y ago
      I'm sure OP is exaggerating a bit but it's no different than the American affirmative action system where if you are black/native then you can get a 1300 SAT and get into an T20 school but if you are Asian then you need a 1600 and a laundry list of achievements.
      - nix9000 4y ago
manifestdissent 4y ago
mr_toad 4y ago
>> > Others said people from marginalized castes lack the education to properly interpret Hindu scriptures around castes. The term gaslighting gets thrown around a lot these days, but…
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

1270018080 4y ago

To me, all of these statements 100% confirm caste discrimination exists in America. Whenever I hear confronting history and privilege as "sowing further division" I cringe hard. The parallels in American history are, well... very parallel.

skyde 4y ago
The problem is "affirmative action" is just reverse discrimination and this is why it bring further division. Because people from both sides now, no longer feel reward is based on merit alone anymore. If there is another solution than "affirmative action" this might not be divisive.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  There is no such thing as reverse discrimination it's a purely content free term. Discrimination is merely discrimination with the insertion of the word reverse having no additional meaning. It's normal for any system which creates an incentive to hire minorities to still be so biased in favor of white dudes that you are still much better off being a white dude. Basically for every minority that wouldn't have made it on merit it's likely you could find two white dudes with the same level of actual merit. This degrades substantially the virtue of complaints about such discrimination.
  - skyde 4y ago
    You are basically saying its ok for a white dude from a family of homeless to be doubly discriminated (1- because he does have money to go to college 2- because college reserve seat for non-white people) And you justify it because statistically if you take a random white people and a random black people the black person would deserve it more. While this is true this logic is morally wrong because you punish or reward an individual not because of this individual merit but because he happens to have the same skin color as other individual. It's as absurd as saying there are not enough professional basketball player that are redhead so we should have quota of redhead regardless of skill level.
    - devnonymous 4y ago
      > It's as absurd as saying there are not enough professional basketball player that are redhead so we should have quota of redhead regardless of skill level. If the end goal is that after a number of generations we finally have the proportionate number of redhead basketball players that would have existed if we didn't discriminate against recruiting redhead players in the past, then no, the idea isn't absurd at all. Note the keyword here is the end goal - of creating a equal and just basketball team... or society, if you reel in the ad absurdum.
      - skyde 4y ago
        there is no way to know what the right number should be for the percentage of the team that should be redhead. So the best you can do is create a new sport “ redhead basketball” the same way we now have “ women basketball” to not discriminate women !
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      Attend more carefully to what I'm saying please. I said that discrimination is just discrimination. The term "reverse discrimination" is semantically nonsense. Selecting people based on skin color is always discrimination. That said the situation as it stands is so tilted against minorities in favor of white dudes that this injustice rarely leaves a white guy in the red on net and fixing what pitifully little preference there is before making any dent in rampant discrimination will on average net out to a decrease in justice. Consider even in microcosm a white man applies to 10 positions who loses one due to preference given to a minority while 7 identically skilled black man fills out 10 apps each and 5 take lesser jobs. It's hard to imagine that the victim here is the white dude. Speaking as a white man white victimhood doesn't really pass the sniff test. You mention education so lets talk about Harvard. This blew my mind. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-percent-white-students-are-legacy-athletes-n1060361 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-... > Study on Harvard finds 43 percent of white students are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staff. The number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories, the study said. Almost all the minorities are people who belong their by merit. About half the white people do. Before reading this I was against racial preference in education.
- wumpus 4y ago
  > The problem is "affirmative action" is just reverse discrimination Have you ever noticed that this opinion isn't the only one out there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Origins
  - skyde 4y ago
    is there other form of affirmative action that are not : - just a type of quota to give preferential treatment to a group of people not because of merit but simply as a way to increase diversity for some arbitrary measurement (gender, race ...)
    - wumpus 4y ago
      Yes, it's right there in the link I posted.
      - skyde 4y ago
        already spent more than 10 minutes reading that page and didn’t find any which is why I was asking.
        wumpus 4y ago
        It's right there at the start of that section: > The term "affirmative action" was first used in the United States in "Executive Order No. 10925",[17] signed by President John F. Kennedy on 6 March 1961, which included a provision that government contractors "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin".[18] It was used to promote actions that achieve non-discrimination. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 which required government employers to "hire without regard to race, religion and national origin" and "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin."[19] You asked for: > is there other form of affirmative action that are not : - just a type of quota to give preferential treatment to a group of people not because of merit but simply as a way to increase diversity for some arbitrary measurement (gender, race ...) Are you asserting that treating people fairly (what JFK said) is somehow not "because of merit"? If so, there's the difference of opinion I was recommending you learn about.

akavi 4y ago

I think the argument that "efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division" isn't totally without merit. As an America-born Indian-American, I honestly don't know what my caste is beyond knowing I'm not Brahmin (I didn't do the string ceremony some of my childhood family friends did), and have basically zero idea of how I'd identify someone else's caste. I imagine that that's not terribly uncommon among ABCDs. Educating people like me about that would suddenly create the ability for them to identify a difference that they wouldn't have noticed before. This makes it unlike gender, racial, or age discrimination, where the categories are usually surface level obvious. That in turn could have a star-bellied sneetches effect, where people identify with the new categories that they wouldn't have considered before.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
empressplay 4y ago
Um, no. The only division it would sow would be when you notice your Indian-born manager is discriminating against your Indian-born co-worker. The only people who really want to stop awareness of this are people like that manager.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Funny that you are literally discounting an Indian American, telling them how they will think and feel about the topic.
- uhuruity 4y ago
  I am also a foreign born person of Indian descent and agree with the person you’re replying to. I have never been aware of my cast, the cast of other Indians / Indian origin people I interact with, and think that’s a good thing. Could you elaborate on why you think the negative effect - that making previously oblivious people aware of castes could increase discrimination - doesn’t exist?
- chasil 4y ago

jjcon 4y ago

> efforts to raise awareness of these issues in the United States would sow further division. I think is a real point and is true of many issues - the problem is how do you fix a problem silently in the background? Can it be done with better results than hyperfocusing on it? I would guess and hope there might be a way but don't know how.

crooked-v 4y ago
Talking about social problems only "sows further division" in the sense that people who currently benefit from those problems get angry that you want to change things.

skyde 4y ago

Well to be fair If in United States, I met/interview someone from India. I would have no idea which caste they are, so I don't see how I can discriminate one caste over another :)

rhacker 4y ago
Ever get an offhanded comment from another co-worker (indian) that says something like, yeah I don't know about this guy. What if THAT was him thinking about the entire CASTES thing!?!?!?! I mean that's often enough to pass up entire people
- skyde 4y ago
  So would that co-worker be able to guess the caste of the candidate during a 30minute phone interview ?
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    Casted are guessable simply by seeing someone’s name.
    - qorrect 4y ago
      What are some obvious examples? Thx

Johnny555 4y ago

Anyone that really thinks the USA has no caste is in an upper level caste. It's less formalized here than in other countries, but it absolutely exists.

pydry 4y ago
American caste is just money though.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  That's not what caste is. Caste is a value assigned to you at birth that you cannot change no matter what you do. It's similar to race but stupider
  - qorrect 4y ago
    People are having a really hard time grasping this and Im not sure why.
  - justinclift 4y ago
    Kind of sounds like "from old money" vs "not from old money" in the UK/US/etc?
  - pydry 4y ago
    This sounds an awful lot like what money in America has become. An american rags to riches mythos and a small and decreasing class mobility asymptotically trending to zero looks more like caste than not.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  It's money and everything that comes along with it - social status, health (both because of access to healthcare, but being able to afford a healthy lifestyle), education, safer interactions with law enforcement, job prospects and advancement, etc. If you're born poor, it's very hard to break out of that. It's not literally impossible like changing caste is, but it's very difficult.

devwastaken 4y ago

Companies only talk about equality because 1. Requires by title IX and 2. Advertising. It is immediately clear to anyone whom has done even the slightest research that no org with millions/billions sitting around can ever claim to support equality in any respect.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

> Others said people from marginalized castes lack the education to properly interpret Hindu scriptures around castes. "If you're one of them, you're too ignorant to understand why we're right". Absolutely repulsive.

puffoflogic 4y ago
Do you think this isn't a prevalent idea in US society as well? It's just a reframing of the current DNC platform using exotic words like "caste".
harry8 4y ago
Ok my reaction too but we should temper it in that we're hearing someone reporting what someone reported that they heard. It could be utterly baseless, it could be missing a load of context, it could be distorted beyond reason. "Others said..." Also a them kinda deal right there.

AussieWog93 4y ago

>Some called caste equity a form of reverse discrimination against the highest-ranked castes because of India’s affirmative action system for access to education and government jobs. I've heard some pretty horrible stories about this in particular; like Brahmin kids being legally adopted into Sudra families in order to get into a reserved position at a State University, and rich kids with private tutors getting given further advantage over poor kids doing all the work themselves because they happen to be of a lower caste. Just like in every other country, affirmative action does nothing but help members of a specific group who are already advantaged.

india_usa 4y ago
There is 70% affirmitive action. If you are a Dalit with 50% mark you will get admission to a medical seat and you will be a cardiac surgeon, but if a brahmin girl gets 99% she will not get admission and will be a clerk. Go figure the Indian system. This is why you see thousands of Brahmins in Silicon valley as they are kicked out or disgusted with Indian political system of favoring lower castes. USA benefited immensely from it.
- nix9000 4y ago
  >If you are a Dalit with 50% mark you will get admission to a medical seat and you will be a cardiac surgeon, but if a brahmin girl gets 99% she will not get admission and will be a clerk. Is it possible for someone with a 50% GPA to finish a cardiac surgery training program in India? Or is that a gross exaggeration?
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    I'm sure OP is exaggerating a bit but it's no different than the American affirmative action system where if you are black/native then you can get a 1300 SAT and get into an T20 school but if you are Asian then you need a 1600 and a laundry list of achievements.
    - nix9000 4y ago

manifestdissent 4y ago

mr_toad 4y ago

>> > Others said people from marginalized castes lack the education to properly interpret Hindu scriptures around castes. The term gaslighting gets thrown around a lot these days, but…

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago
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