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I am one and I have never seen anything casteist in the US, for what it's worth. I have been friends with and worked closely with dozens of people with Indian b

I am one and I have never seen anything casteist in the US, for what it's worth. I have been friends with and worked closely with dozens of people with Indian bosses all the way up to CEOs, who would have mentioned or confided such discrimination, and have come across exactly zero instances of caste being an issue. In fact, no one even discusses someone's else caste and most of the time no one knows others' caste, except some guesses from last names or whether someone is vegetarian or not. Many lower caste people in India converted to Christianity and they've been treated really well(as friends, coworkers, being hired by other Indians) as far I as can tell. Same with Muslim Indians who are also quite a sizeable number both back home and here. The only time it ever came up for discussion is in the context of someone's parents in India preferring their own caste folks as brides/grooms for arranged marriages back home(similar to the very high rates of race discrimination in dating in the US) and even that has trended down a lot recently with everyone becoming more progressive. My sense is that there are isolated cases here and there, and that it's not systemic, and that it's also rapidly getting better with time both back home and with 2nd generation immigrants in the US.

fartcannon 4y ago
Anecdotally, I hear about it all the time from my Indian friends.
kajecounterhack 4y ago
Just curious, for your personal experience do you know the caste distribution of your indian friends? I too haven't seen much of anything casteist at work or among my friends, but I'm not discounting that it exists and potentially at larger scale than I've personally experienced especially since almost all my friends are brahmins or the caste right below that. You'd have to have a large enough sample of low-caste friends to really understand the experience of low-caste individuals.
- javajosh 4y ago
  - kelnos 4y ago
    How is that ironic? A part of anti-racism is understanding what's going on, how people identify themselves, and how people view others. I feel like being unable (or unwilling) to ask these sorts of questions is the realm of the head-in-the-sand people who claim they're "colorblind", and somehow believe that if we just ignore race and racism it'll somehow magically just go away.
    - belltaco 4y ago
      So lets say the tech companies start requiring every Indian looking person to self identify their caste(with penalties if found lying later) on their employee profiles so that everyone in the company can look for signs of casteism to fight it. Same with all Indian looking interviewee to monitoring hiring bias. Do you think that will tend to increase or decrease discrimination in the companies against various caste groups? Note that caste is much harder to find than race, and many Indians in the US don't care enough about caste to try and find out, but some may now subconsciously or consciously discriminate in both illegal and legal(friendships, dating, invites to social events etc. like racism in America) ways.
      - javajosh 4y ago
        kajecounterhack 4y ago
        I can't tell whether this is sarcasm laughing at how bad the parent's straw man is.
      - kajecounterhack 4y ago
        > So lets say the tech companies start requiring every Indian looking person to self identify their caste This is a straw man to represent fighting caste bias. Clearly, asking folks to self-identify their caste and somehow creating a list of low-caste folks is not going to be very productive. This is like that scene in "The Office" where Michael Scott makes a "do not mock" list which turns into a "do mock" list. Ideally what we're looking for is a setup wherein, given the situation that someone who is low-caste is working with a lot of high-caste individuals and files a report about caste discrimination, that this is taken seriously and that a procedure exists to prevent retaliation / yields outcomes that protect the victim. It's not that different from general discrimination right? How do you prove someone is racist or sexist? There are just different markers, and different lines that can be crossed. If a male coworker gives unwanted contact e.g. touches a female coworker's thigh, that's crossing a line; even if it's not easy to prove that it happened, you would hope that your workplace would know how to react to this & help your female coworkers to achieve psychological safety. Folks suffering from caste-discrimination deserve the same. Solving all of these problems is clearly not easy. We don't have to come up with the solutions in internet comments, but there are very big, very obvious problems with discrimination in the workplace and to date it generally sucks to be on the victim side of it. You can't just say "nobody suffers from this because caste is hard for _me_ to personally understand or find, and I haven't _personally_ seen it." You don't work at every company, and you don't have to in order to understand that Indian representation is higher at various companies, and some people do care about this and do wrongly mistreat those they view as inferior to them. Why can't you just say you agree that this is wrong, understand that some folks are saying it happened to them, and leave it at that?
ripper1138 4y ago
Is it fair to call dating preferences “race discrimination”? And without looking at any real stats, I’d guess that the US has more interracial dating/marriage than most countries.
- quantified 4y ago
  Or, for that matter, "sex discrimination"? What discrimination is illegal and what is legal? Some will be illegal even if immoral.
- belltaco 4y ago
  Note that I didn't call it racism. But it definitely fits the definition of discrimination by race. What else would you call this and the stark change from the South and rural places, to the coasts and cities? And higher rates of interracial marriages isn't saying much when the baseline for comparison is low. >When I relocated from my predominantly Black suburb in Dallas, Texas to an immensely diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, I didn’t expect to receive so many matches on Tinder and Hinge from non-Black men. I had always found myself in mostly white spaces — college, jobs, vacations — yet white men never took a deep interest in me before I moved to the East Coast. And while I had spent two years dating a German guy who was studying abroad at my university, it was only by transplant that a non-Black person really showed interest in courting me beyond a “you’re pretty for a Black girl” comment. >Eventually, I stopped swiping on non-Black men altogether. There had been several cases before when a white man would match with me and then DM me something obscure like my skin tone reminding him of chocolate or feeling the need to tell me he’s always wanted to fuck a Black girl. I found it ludicrous that these men actually thought that was the way to a Black woman’s heart — or panties — and would unmatch them instantly. But in New York City, the progressive melting pot of America, white men (and Asian and Latino men for that matter) wanted to take me out for dinner and drinks, probed my interests, and complimented my photos in a respectable manner. https://mashable.com/article/racism-online-dating https://mashable.com/article/racism-online-dating
- kelnos 4y ago
  If you refuse to consider someone for something (anything!) based on their race, then, by definition, that is race-based discrimination. I think many people are a lot more tolerant of discrimination in dating, though, even if it's (IMO) unfortunate. People who don't date outside their race are really closing their minds and their worlds to a lot of potentially great possibilities. I get that many people do it because of parental approval/disapproval, and I can absolutely understand the desire not to piss off parents in that way, but it's still a shame.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
Are you from a higher caste or a lower one? In the '90s, if a usenet discussion turned to how racism basically doesn't exist anymore, one might question whether this was shaped by the group with access to usenet being almost entirely white. Here on HN I have to question whether the voice of lower caste Indians is proportionally represented, and if not, why that might be.
ramraj07 4y ago
Most Indian (or Indian origin) people wouldn’t openly discuss caste and honestly wouldn’t even implicitly judge anyone for it. But a minority do, and often if you’re not yourself from a caste they think is “untouchable” you might never realize or notice anything. I was in the states for a decade and have encountered numerous cases of bigoted Indian and Indian origin people in power (both academia and industry) who discriminate against caste. Dalit discrimination is one, but there’s actually a more common Brahmin superiority thing as well, which I tend to find easily because I look Brahmin (don’t ask me, that’s what these guys tell me) but I’m not one, so I’ve had 4-5 instances when these Bigots found me because I was eating chicken and they had to lecture about my sin. The irony I point to them is that If they truly are trying to follow scriptures or whatever then they should remember that their caste is not allowed to cross oceans lol.
- rajup 4y ago
  > I’ve had 4-5 instances when these Bigots found me because I was eating chicken and they had to lecture about my sin. Oh haha that has happened to me as well, I’m an “upper” caste fellow and eat meat on occasion and have been lectured by one of these guys on how I am doomed to be reborn as a worm or something! Shitty people exist everywhere I guess..

fartcannon 4y ago

Anecdotally, I hear about it all the time from my Indian friends.

kajecounterhack 4y ago

Just curious, for your personal experience do you know the caste distribution of your indian friends? I too haven't seen much of anything casteist at work or among my friends, but I'm not discounting that it exists and potentially at larger scale than I've personally experienced especially since almost all my friends are brahmins or the caste right below that. You'd have to have a large enough sample of low-caste friends to really understand the experience of low-caste individuals.

javajosh 4y ago
- kelnos 4y ago
  How is that ironic? A part of anti-racism is understanding what's going on, how people identify themselves, and how people view others. I feel like being unable (or unwilling) to ask these sorts of questions is the realm of the head-in-the-sand people who claim they're "colorblind", and somehow believe that if we just ignore race and racism it'll somehow magically just go away.
  - belltaco 4y ago
    So lets say the tech companies start requiring every Indian looking person to self identify their caste(with penalties if found lying later) on their employee profiles so that everyone in the company can look for signs of casteism to fight it. Same with all Indian looking interviewee to monitoring hiring bias. Do you think that will tend to increase or decrease discrimination in the companies against various caste groups? Note that caste is much harder to find than race, and many Indians in the US don't care enough about caste to try and find out, but some may now subconsciously or consciously discriminate in both illegal and legal(friendships, dating, invites to social events etc. like racism in America) ways.
    - javajosh 4y ago
      - kajecounterhack 4y ago
        I can't tell whether this is sarcasm laughing at how bad the parent's straw man is.
    - kajecounterhack 4y ago
      > So lets say the tech companies start requiring every Indian looking person to self identify their caste This is a straw man to represent fighting caste bias. Clearly, asking folks to self-identify their caste and somehow creating a list of low-caste folks is not going to be very productive. This is like that scene in "The Office" where Michael Scott makes a "do not mock" list which turns into a "do mock" list. Ideally what we're looking for is a setup wherein, given the situation that someone who is low-caste is working with a lot of high-caste individuals and files a report about caste discrimination, that this is taken seriously and that a procedure exists to prevent retaliation / yields outcomes that protect the victim. It's not that different from general discrimination right? How do you prove someone is racist or sexist? There are just different markers, and different lines that can be crossed. If a male coworker gives unwanted contact e.g. touches a female coworker's thigh, that's crossing a line; even if it's not easy to prove that it happened, you would hope that your workplace would know how to react to this & help your female coworkers to achieve psychological safety. Folks suffering from caste-discrimination deserve the same. Solving all of these problems is clearly not easy. We don't have to come up with the solutions in internet comments, but there are very big, very obvious problems with discrimination in the workplace and to date it generally sucks to be on the victim side of it. You can't just say "nobody suffers from this because caste is hard for _me_ to personally understand or find, and I haven't _personally_ seen it." You don't work at every company, and you don't have to in order to understand that Indian representation is higher at various companies, and some people do care about this and do wrongly mistreat those they view as inferior to them. Why can't you just say you agree that this is wrong, understand that some folks are saying it happened to them, and leave it at that?

ripper1138 4y ago

Is it fair to call dating preferences “race discrimination”? And without looking at any real stats, I’d guess that the US has more interracial dating/marriage than most countries.

quantified 4y ago
Or, for that matter, "sex discrimination"? What discrimination is illegal and what is legal? Some will be illegal even if immoral.
belltaco 4y ago
Note that I didn't call it racism. But it definitely fits the definition of discrimination by race. What else would you call this and the stark change from the South and rural places, to the coasts and cities? And higher rates of interracial marriages isn't saying much when the baseline for comparison is low. >When I relocated from my predominantly Black suburb in Dallas, Texas to an immensely diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, I didn’t expect to receive so many matches on Tinder and Hinge from non-Black men. I had always found myself in mostly white spaces — college, jobs, vacations — yet white men never took a deep interest in me before I moved to the East Coast. And while I had spent two years dating a German guy who was studying abroad at my university, it was only by transplant that a non-Black person really showed interest in courting me beyond a “you’re pretty for a Black girl” comment. >Eventually, I stopped swiping on non-Black men altogether. There had been several cases before when a white man would match with me and then DM me something obscure like my skin tone reminding him of chocolate or feeling the need to tell me he’s always wanted to fuck a Black girl. I found it ludicrous that these men actually thought that was the way to a Black woman’s heart — or panties — and would unmatch them instantly. But in New York City, the progressive melting pot of America, white men (and Asian and Latino men for that matter) wanted to take me out for dinner and drinks, probed my interests, and complimented my photos in a respectable manner. https://mashable.com/article/racism-online-dating https://mashable.com/article/racism-online-dating
kelnos 4y ago
If you refuse to consider someone for something (anything!) based on their race, then, by definition, that is race-based discrimination. I think many people are a lot more tolerant of discrimination in dating, though, even if it's (IMO) unfortunate. People who don't date outside their race are really closing their minds and their worlds to a lot of potentially great possibilities. I get that many people do it because of parental approval/disapproval, and I can absolutely understand the desire not to piss off parents in that way, but it's still a shame.

pcthrowaway 4y ago

Are you from a higher caste or a lower one? In the '90s, if a usenet discussion turned to how racism basically doesn't exist anymore, one might question whether this was shaped by the group with access to usenet being almost entirely white. Here on HN I have to question whether the voice of lower caste Indians is proportionally represented, and if not, why that might be.

ramraj07 4y ago

Most Indian (or Indian origin) people wouldn’t openly discuss caste and honestly wouldn’t even implicitly judge anyone for it. But a minority do, and often if you’re not yourself from a caste they think is “untouchable” you might never realize or notice anything. I was in the states for a decade and have encountered numerous cases of bigoted Indian and Indian origin people in power (both academia and industry) who discriminate against caste. Dalit discrimination is one, but there’s actually a more common Brahmin superiority thing as well, which I tend to find easily because I look Brahmin (don’t ask me, that’s what these guys tell me) but I’m not one, so I’ve had 4-5 instances when these Bigots found me because I was eating chicken and they had to lecture about my sin. The irony I point to them is that If they truly are trying to follow scriptures or whatever then they should remember that their caste is not allowed to cross oceans lol.

rajup 4y ago
> I’ve had 4-5 instances when these Bigots found me because I was eating chicken and they had to lecture about my sin. Oh haha that has happened to me as well, I’m an “upper” caste fellow and eat meat on occasion and have been lectured by one of these guys on how I am doomed to be reborn as a worm or something! Shitty people exist everywhere I guess..