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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 p

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?
kelnos 4y ago
That's... quite the straw man you've come up with there. I don't think it's really even necessary to respond to it, because that's something that just wouldn't happen, and isn't even particularly related to what is happening, or what I was talking about.

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?

kelnos 4y ago

That's... quite the straw man you've come up with there. I don't think it's really even necessary to respond to it, because that's something that just wouldn't happen, and isn't even particularly related to what is happening, or what I was talking about.