7 ms·

The large and vocal constituency activated against the bill is good evidence that in fact it is not already accounted for under existing civil rights law.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
locofocos 3y ago
Precisely. I'm trying to understand the resistance in good faith, but the article didn't explain their position very clearly. "It's already prohibited" - so why the fierce opposition? "Passing a law against discrimination of X will stigmatize X" - Imagine someone was making this argument for an existing federally protected class.
- dataflow 3y ago
  No idea what the actual reason is, but I could potentially understand the argument that passing such laws would suggest to courts that other categories that they might've thought were already intended to be protected perhaps actually weren't so. Moreover, every new law carries a risk of having unintended consequences. So the argument may well be as simple as, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. (That said, I don't get the impression everyone who opposed it did so for the same reasons.)
- tekla 3y ago
  People do not want to import this shit into the US. They left these systems behind, and making a law codifies the system into law, which is kinda fucked up. I myself have seen discrimination in non obvious ways (not Indian but exact same idea where your birth dictates certain societal ideas about you) , and would be absolutely pissed if anyone made a law that protects against that because discrimination is already protected against. I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about, and now everyone wants to codify a system that I would rather just fade away into time.
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    > because discrimination is already protected against Some discrimination is protected against, but this statement is far too broad to be accurate. I can discriminate against you because of who you vote for or what car you drive or which NFL team you root for.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      I think companies have very well established term for this: "culture fit".
  - olliej 3y ago
    What are you talking about? The whole point of caste based discrimination is that people are putting you, as you say, in a bucket and then discriminating on that basis. By having such discrimination be legal you ensure that such discrimination is (a) legal, and (b) gets to be entrenched in the US.
    - huytersd 3y ago
      It’s impossible for it to get entrenched because people from India can’t even tell a persons caste unless they are from the same cluster of towns and villages. This is Indian “county specific” knowledge that cannot survive a cosmopolitan society.
      - olliej 3y ago
        Uh, no it’s not? You can [and people do] use family names as an effective proxy for caste, and if you’re planning on discriminating on caste that’s more than enough. The Dalit's (in the case of Cisco) are not all the same "village" as the people they're claiming are discriminating against, and it's bizarre you would think that clusters of immigrants from a country of a billion people would magically already know each other. I know of people who through marriage had their family name change from a lower caste to a higher one, and experience an immediate drop in questions of the “how could you get here?” Form. More to the point: if it were already impossible to discriminate based on caste then this law would not impact anyone.
- belltaco 3y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-laws-trump-muslims https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-...
- catlover76 3y ago
  The one good faith argument is that Hindus feel targeted by it because, de facto, this is about higher-caste Hindus discriminating against low-caste Hindus. Whether or not that's particularly convincing or a reason not to pass it is debatable, but I think it's a valid reason that merits consideration. Any reasoning beyond this ends up being gobbledygook.
  - bradleyjg 3y ago
    This is not a reasonable complaint unless there is no discrimination. If there is discrimination then it’s entirely reasonable to target it.
  - olliej 3y ago
    I mean there are plenty of caste based systems in many religions, perhaps of relevance to the US are Mormonism and Scientology which both have ranking systems that determine options for people in the religion (and who have tried to leave it). It's also worth noting that if you are born in a specific caste, and convert from your religion, you will still be subjected to caste discrimination from the folk in the original religion. Obviously under the rules of the current Supreme Court anyone can claim their bigotry is because "religion" and carry on doing it. Don't want to serve someone? claim doing so violates your religious beliefs. Renting a property? ditto. Employment? again.
    - catlover76 3y ago
      I don't think Mormonism/LDS has anything like the Hindu caste system (I neither know nor care about Scientology) I'd be interested to know whether any other major religion has anything quite like the caste system.
      - olliej 3y ago
        Mormonism and scientology both have castes, albeit in varying forms of "ranking". A person of a lower rank is always subservient to the higher ranked version, which is castes. There may be a degree of mobility between ranks, but mormonism at least makes it explicit that a black person for instance starts at a subservient rank, and can never reach the top rank, as that is reserved for white people. Your position in a job, or the availability of that job, or housing, or in fact anything, should never be restricted simply due to some religious doctrine.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  >>so why the fierce opposition? Because anytime you pass unnecessary laws you open the future up to some judge somewhere, or some prosecutor some where twisting the words to mean something completely different Happens all the time in society and the fact that people believe it is acceptable to simply duplicate laws is very dangerous We need a massive curbing of the number of laws in society as it is, personally in think for every law that is passed they should be forced to repel one.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Would make sense if this wasn't being proposed specifically in response to specific real things happening in actual reality today which the law is failing to address.
    - phpisthebest 3y ago
      Well clearly many people disagree that is an actual reality to today, and if it is the problem would be a symptom of a much deeper issue not addressed by the bill at all, and in fact would probably make the root cause worse That is today we seem to be moving away from the "melting pot" of multiculturalism were we are all one nation made of many, to a salad bowl of multiculturalism where we lose the "one nation" part, and communities are splintering / siloing themselves off from one another inside one geographic bloc We need the melting pot to return... that is the only way multiculturalism actually works.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Codifying into law a dying system only prolongs it. Unless you have people from hyper local regions working together, no one can even tell caste. People from different parts of the same state in India can’t even tell apart castes.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  > "It's already prohibited" - so why the fierce opposition? Because making something double illegal is a waste of time at best, and at worst would be actually harmful if there are unforeseen negative consequences.
tpmoney 3y ago
Whether or not it is already accounted for under existing law, this sort of reasoning is about as valid as "the large and vocal constituency against a bill requiring everyone to pledge allegiance to the US is evidence that people aren't loyal to the country" Better evidence would be someone who would have been eligible to bring a case under the new law having been denied justice under the existing laws.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- olliej 3y ago
  You mean the many documented examples of caste discrimination who have been unable to do anything because caste discrimination is legal?
  - belltaco 3y ago
    > many documented examples Source(s)? Should be easy to link if there are many, and they're documented as you say.
  - singlow 3y ago
    I think he means it would be better proof if you simply gave an example case which was dismissed because a Judge ruled that it didn't qualify as a civil rights violation.
    - btilly 3y ago
      That isn't how it works. The issue is that cases are not brought because it is hard to prove it illegal. https://www.equalitylabs.org/castesurvey https://www.equalitylabs.org/castesurvey documents that 2/3 of Dalits in the USA report being mistreated at work. I'm only aware of one lawsuit about it. That was the CISCO case. No federal agencies got involved because it does not fall into race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetic information. Therefore discriminating by caste is legal under federal law. California may be a different story. The case against CISCO is the only one ever brought. You can read about it at https://hulr.org/spring-2021/caste-in-cisco-understanding-caste-in-america https://hulr.org/spring-2021/caste-in-cisco-understanding-ca.... Remember. Only case ever brought, when surveys indicate that 2/3 of Dalits are discriminated against on the job in the USA. And it is definitely legal under federal law. In the absence of any case, ever, saying that it is illegal to discriminate on caste in the USA, it is almost certainly generally legal.
dclowd9901 3y ago
The large and vocal constituency isn’t evidence of anything except for a bunch of people being mad. But we do not have caste protections as far as the law is concerned. If someone said “I don’t want to hire them because they’re poor trash from Alabama,” there’s actually nothing legally discriminatory about it as far as our protections go. Weird to think about.
dataflow 3y ago
It might be good evidence that those people don't believe it's covered, but it doesn't really imply anything about the actual law. Or even about what other people think about it.
emmelaich 3y ago
There's a vast array of prejudices and grievances in most cultures. Are you going to enumerate them all? I reminded of that scene in "Mad Men" where Pete Campbell is denied a sale by a McDonald. You know, because of the 1692 Massacre at Glencoe and related. https://www.ccsna.org/the-campbells-and-macdonalds https://www.ccsna.org/the-campbells-and-macdonalds. Then there is the Balkans ....
- catlover76 3y ago
  I'm not sure if you noticed, but there are already legal protections for discrimination on basis of race and religion. > There's a vast array of prejudices and grievances in most cultures. Are you going to enumerate them all? Are you going to enumerate them all in defense of caste discrimination on the faulty logic that we have to eliminate every other possible injustice before we tackle caste discrimination?
  - addicted 3y ago
    What would cover discrimination based on religion if religion was not in that list? The argument here is that ancestry already covers caste so it’s unnecessary. Adding caste, assuming Newsom’s argument is correct, would then be the equivalent of adding religious denomination because an Evangelical Christian is concerned a Catholic is discriminating against them. And most likely that would never even see the light of day because people would reasonably argue that’s already covered under discrimination based on religion.
    - catlover76 3y ago
      > The argument here is that ancestry already covers caste so it’s unnecessary. It seems that there is caselaw in California indicating that courts do not believe ancestry covers caste (?) It's unclear really; nobody in this thread has posted any caselaw either way. It could be that the issue is so unsettled that maybe it would make sense for advocates of the law to first try to establish that ancestry covers it--or build up some clear precedent that ancestry is inadequate in the process.
- 3y ago
whatsup7123 3y ago
It is accounted for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act "...the unlawful discrimination is in part based on a person's sex, race, color, religion, *ancestry*..."
- gnicholas 3y ago
  That appears to cover consumers, but doesn’t cover employees. Is there another law that also refers to ancestry that applies in the employment context?
  - whatsup7123 3y ago
    FEHA covers this. Between the two, consumers and employees are already protected.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      I’ve been convinced by your points here (and a few others). I strongly strongly suspect caste discrimination is a real thing that happens and that is hard to detect/address, but agreed that it’s adequately accounted for legislatively, at least in California. And yeah, I’ve been convinced of the potential negative effects of such additional legislation, redundant or not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts + info!
serial_dev 3y ago
No, it is not. If I propose adding "don't be sneaky little hobbitses" to the MIT license and people don't want to add it, is it evidence that we have sneaky Hobbits infiltrating the software developer community? Or something more serious, people who are against the PATRIOT Act are evidence that we need the laws and they are not patriots, anyway? Is it the level of discourse we want? You take what's in the bill at face value and believe it has only positive effects, and don't even consider why others might be against it. NYT mentions that the bill "would make South Asians (...) more vulnerable to unfair accusations of discrimination." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/us/south-asians-are-divided-over-a-pending-ban-on-caste-discrimination.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/us/south-asians-are-divid... My attempt to understand their argument: imagine you are from India, living your life, conducting interviews, working to the best of your abilities, then someone sues you, alleging that you only didn't hire him, because of his cast. Now, you'll spend months if not years trying to prove that you didn't, while people around you will believe the accusations and start treating you like a casteist bigot. Then, as this gets more and more common, companies stop hiring people from South Asia because they don't want to deal with this. Now, is this true or is it their only argument against it? I don't know, but you can see how people could be against it for other reasons than "oh I want to discriminate so hard and this bill won't let me".
- TMWNN 3y ago
  >Then, as this gets more and more common, companies stop hiring people from South Asia because they don't want to deal with this. And what is wrong with this solution, compared to the alternative of American companies and the American people being forced to deal with foreign prejudices and beliefs imported into their country? When children get into a fight, adults intervene by separating the combatants and sending them home regardless of who is "right". As a non-Indian American, I don't know who is "right" regarding the existence and extent of caste-based discrimination. I don't care. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't have to know or care in the first place!
  - innagadadavida 3y ago
    > I don't care. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't have to know or care in the first place! Newsom vetoing the bill is on similar grounds - no one should care or talk about cast and certainly it should not be mentioned in any CA bill.
Bukhmanizer 3y ago
I don't think this is very good logic. I'm not South Asian, but I can understand not wanting to be subjected to the judgements of a majority who neither knows or cares about the nuances of my culture, yet has to judge me through the lens of that culture. The amount of times in these and other threads where people just try to explain the culture by simply analogizing to American history (X are the [Black|Mexican|Jewish] people of India) is ridiculous. America is not a macrocosm for the rest of the world.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Well the thing about American laws is that they apply to America and American culture. A pluralistic society like ours has no reason nor obligation to import (or even respect) ass-backwards concepts like caste.
  - Bukhmanizer 3y ago
    Either you misunderstood my comment or you're deliberately interpreting it in a way that is easier to argue against. In no place do I argue that we should be importing the "concept of caste".
belltaco 3y ago
Just like all the anti-Sharia laws that were proposed in the US? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-laws-trump-muslims https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-...
- ethanbond 3y ago
  This is a good counter argument, thanks for making it :)
mulberrybush 3y ago
- Age, gender, sexual orientation etc apply to all human beings. But caste is applicable only to people from the Indian Subcontinent, and even though Indian Muslims, Christians and Sikhs all practice caste it was presented as though it was only applicable to Hindus. So this was seen as a bill that was specifically targeted at Hindus. - The senator who presented the bill is a first generation Afghan muslim. This adds to the suspicion among Hindus that this is a Hindu-phobic action. It is kind of like a Palestinian senator pushing a bill to protect Sephardi and Misrahi jews from discrimination by Ashkenazi jews in Californian workplaces. - The bill was based on a questionable survey by Equality labs - this survey has been challenged as unscientific and biased. For e.g. see [1] Anatomy of a Dishonest survey. [1] https://medium.com/@rachelgotham5/equality-labs-caste-report-a-rebuttal-to-a-british-colonial-narrative-replayed-1676068ee2cf https://medium.com/@rachelgotham5/equality-labs-caste-report...
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
Would you support a law against Sunnia-Shia violence?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

locofocos 3y ago

Precisely. I'm trying to understand the resistance in good faith, but the article didn't explain their position very clearly. "It's already prohibited" - so why the fierce opposition? "Passing a law against discrimination of X will stigmatize X" - Imagine someone was making this argument for an existing federally protected class.

dataflow 3y ago
No idea what the actual reason is, but I could potentially understand the argument that passing such laws would suggest to courts that other categories that they might've thought were already intended to be protected perhaps actually weren't so. Moreover, every new law carries a risk of having unintended consequences. So the argument may well be as simple as, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. (That said, I don't get the impression everyone who opposed it did so for the same reasons.)
tekla 3y ago
People do not want to import this shit into the US. They left these systems behind, and making a law codifies the system into law, which is kinda fucked up. I myself have seen discrimination in non obvious ways (not Indian but exact same idea where your birth dictates certain societal ideas about you) , and would be absolutely pissed if anyone made a law that protects against that because discrimination is already protected against. I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about, and now everyone wants to codify a system that I would rather just fade away into time.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  > because discrimination is already protected against Some discrimination is protected against, but this statement is far too broad to be accurate. I can discriminate against you because of who you vote for or what car you drive or which NFL team you root for.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    I think companies have very well established term for this: "culture fit".
- olliej 3y ago
  What are you talking about? The whole point of caste based discrimination is that people are putting you, as you say, in a bucket and then discriminating on that basis. By having such discrimination be legal you ensure that such discrimination is (a) legal, and (b) gets to be entrenched in the US.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    It’s impossible for it to get entrenched because people from India can’t even tell a persons caste unless they are from the same cluster of towns and villages. This is Indian “county specific” knowledge that cannot survive a cosmopolitan society.
    - olliej 3y ago
      Uh, no it’s not? You can [and people do] use family names as an effective proxy for caste, and if you’re planning on discriminating on caste that’s more than enough. The Dalit's (in the case of Cisco) are not all the same "village" as the people they're claiming are discriminating against, and it's bizarre you would think that clusters of immigrants from a country of a billion people would magically already know each other. I know of people who through marriage had their family name change from a lower caste to a higher one, and experience an immediate drop in questions of the “how could you get here?” Form. More to the point: if it were already impossible to discriminate based on caste then this law would not impact anyone.
belltaco 3y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-laws-trump-muslims https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-...
catlover76 3y ago
The one good faith argument is that Hindus feel targeted by it because, de facto, this is about higher-caste Hindus discriminating against low-caste Hindus. Whether or not that's particularly convincing or a reason not to pass it is debatable, but I think it's a valid reason that merits consideration. Any reasoning beyond this ends up being gobbledygook.
- bradleyjg 3y ago
  This is not a reasonable complaint unless there is no discrimination. If there is discrimination then it’s entirely reasonable to target it.
- olliej 3y ago
  I mean there are plenty of caste based systems in many religions, perhaps of relevance to the US are Mormonism and Scientology which both have ranking systems that determine options for people in the religion (and who have tried to leave it). It's also worth noting that if you are born in a specific caste, and convert from your religion, you will still be subjected to caste discrimination from the folk in the original religion. Obviously under the rules of the current Supreme Court anyone can claim their bigotry is because "religion" and carry on doing it. Don't want to serve someone? claim doing so violates your religious beliefs. Renting a property? ditto. Employment? again.
  - catlover76 3y ago
    I don't think Mormonism/LDS has anything like the Hindu caste system (I neither know nor care about Scientology) I'd be interested to know whether any other major religion has anything quite like the caste system.
    - olliej 3y ago
      Mormonism and scientology both have castes, albeit in varying forms of "ranking". A person of a lower rank is always subservient to the higher ranked version, which is castes. There may be a degree of mobility between ranks, but mormonism at least makes it explicit that a black person for instance starts at a subservient rank, and can never reach the top rank, as that is reserved for white people. Your position in a job, or the availability of that job, or housing, or in fact anything, should never be restricted simply due to some religious doctrine.
phpisthebest 3y ago
>>so why the fierce opposition? Because anytime you pass unnecessary laws you open the future up to some judge somewhere, or some prosecutor some where twisting the words to mean something completely different Happens all the time in society and the fact that people believe it is acceptable to simply duplicate laws is very dangerous We need a massive curbing of the number of laws in society as it is, personally in think for every law that is passed they should be forced to repel one.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Would make sense if this wasn't being proposed specifically in response to specific real things happening in actual reality today which the law is failing to address.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    Well clearly many people disagree that is an actual reality to today, and if it is the problem would be a symptom of a much deeper issue not addressed by the bill at all, and in fact would probably make the root cause worse That is today we seem to be moving away from the "melting pot" of multiculturalism were we are all one nation made of many, to a salad bowl of multiculturalism where we lose the "one nation" part, and communities are splintering / siloing themselves off from one another inside one geographic bloc We need the melting pot to return... that is the only way multiculturalism actually works.
huytersd 3y ago
Codifying into law a dying system only prolongs it. Unless you have people from hyper local regions working together, no one can even tell caste. People from different parts of the same state in India can’t even tell apart castes.
bigstrat2003 3y ago
> "It's already prohibited" - so why the fierce opposition? Because making something double illegal is a waste of time at best, and at worst would be actually harmful if there are unforeseen negative consequences.

tpmoney 3y ago

Whether or not it is already accounted for under existing law, this sort of reasoning is about as valid as "the large and vocal constituency against a bill requiring everyone to pledge allegiance to the US is evidence that people aren't loyal to the country" Better evidence would be someone who would have been eligible to bring a case under the new law having been denied justice under the existing laws.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
olliej 3y ago
You mean the many documented examples of caste discrimination who have been unable to do anything because caste discrimination is legal?
- belltaco 3y ago
  > many documented examples Source(s)? Should be easy to link if there are many, and they're documented as you say.
- singlow 3y ago
  I think he means it would be better proof if you simply gave an example case which was dismissed because a Judge ruled that it didn't qualify as a civil rights violation.
  - btilly 3y ago
    That isn't how it works. The issue is that cases are not brought because it is hard to prove it illegal. https://www.equalitylabs.org/castesurvey https://www.equalitylabs.org/castesurvey documents that 2/3 of Dalits in the USA report being mistreated at work. I'm only aware of one lawsuit about it. That was the CISCO case. No federal agencies got involved because it does not fall into race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetic information. Therefore discriminating by caste is legal under federal law. California may be a different story. The case against CISCO is the only one ever brought. You can read about it at https://hulr.org/spring-2021/caste-in-cisco-understanding-caste-in-america https://hulr.org/spring-2021/caste-in-cisco-understanding-ca.... Remember. Only case ever brought, when surveys indicate that 2/3 of Dalits are discriminated against on the job in the USA. And it is definitely legal under federal law. In the absence of any case, ever, saying that it is illegal to discriminate on caste in the USA, it is almost certainly generally legal.

dclowd9901 3y ago

The large and vocal constituency isn’t evidence of anything except for a bunch of people being mad. But we do not have caste protections as far as the law is concerned. If someone said “I don’t want to hire them because they’re poor trash from Alabama,” there’s actually nothing legally discriminatory about it as far as our protections go. Weird to think about.

dataflow 3y ago

It might be good evidence that those people don't believe it's covered, but it doesn't really imply anything about the actual law. Or even about what other people think about it.

emmelaich 3y ago

There's a vast array of prejudices and grievances in most cultures. Are you going to enumerate them all? I reminded of that scene in "Mad Men" where Pete Campbell is denied a sale by a McDonald. You know, because of the 1692 Massacre at Glencoe and related. https://www.ccsna.org/the-campbells-and-macdonalds https://www.ccsna.org/the-campbells-and-macdonalds. Then there is the Balkans ....

catlover76 3y ago
I'm not sure if you noticed, but there are already legal protections for discrimination on basis of race and religion. > There's a vast array of prejudices and grievances in most cultures. Are you going to enumerate them all? Are you going to enumerate them all in defense of caste discrimination on the faulty logic that we have to eliminate every other possible injustice before we tackle caste discrimination?
- addicted 3y ago
  What would cover discrimination based on religion if religion was not in that list? The argument here is that ancestry already covers caste so it’s unnecessary. Adding caste, assuming Newsom’s argument is correct, would then be the equivalent of adding religious denomination because an Evangelical Christian is concerned a Catholic is discriminating against them. And most likely that would never even see the light of day because people would reasonably argue that’s already covered under discrimination based on religion.
  - catlover76 3y ago
    > The argument here is that ancestry already covers caste so it’s unnecessary. It seems that there is caselaw in California indicating that courts do not believe ancestry covers caste (?) It's unclear really; nobody in this thread has posted any caselaw either way. It could be that the issue is so unsettled that maybe it would make sense for advocates of the law to first try to establish that ancestry covers it--or build up some clear precedent that ancestry is inadequate in the process.
3y ago

whatsup7123 3y ago

It is accounted for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_Civil_Rights_Act "...the unlawful discrimination is in part based on a person's sex, race, color, religion, *ancestry*..."

gnicholas 3y ago
That appears to cover consumers, but doesn’t cover employees. Is there another law that also refers to ancestry that applies in the employment context?
- whatsup7123 3y ago
  FEHA covers this. Between the two, consumers and employees are already protected.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    I’ve been convinced by your points here (and a few others). I strongly strongly suspect caste discrimination is a real thing that happens and that is hard to detect/address, but agreed that it’s adequately accounted for legislatively, at least in California. And yeah, I’ve been convinced of the potential negative effects of such additional legislation, redundant or not. Thanks for sharing your thoughts + info!

serial_dev 3y ago

No, it is not. If I propose adding "don't be sneaky little hobbitses" to the MIT license and people don't want to add it, is it evidence that we have sneaky Hobbits infiltrating the software developer community? Or something more serious, people who are against the PATRIOT Act are evidence that we need the laws and they are not patriots, anyway? Is it the level of discourse we want? You take what's in the bill at face value and believe it has only positive effects, and don't even consider why others might be against it. NYT mentions that the bill "would make South Asians (...) more vulnerable to unfair accusations of discrimination." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/us/south-asians-are-divided-over-a-pending-ban-on-caste-discrimination.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/02/us/south-asians-are-divid... My attempt to understand their argument: imagine you are from India, living your life, conducting interviews, working to the best of your abilities, then someone sues you, alleging that you only didn't hire him, because of his cast. Now, you'll spend months if not years trying to prove that you didn't, while people around you will believe the accusations and start treating you like a casteist bigot. Then, as this gets more and more common, companies stop hiring people from South Asia because they don't want to deal with this. Now, is this true or is it their only argument against it? I don't know, but you can see how people could be against it for other reasons than "oh I want to discriminate so hard and this bill won't let me".

TMWNN 3y ago
>Then, as this gets more and more common, companies stop hiring people from South Asia because they don't want to deal with this. And what is wrong with this solution, compared to the alternative of American companies and the American people being forced to deal with foreign prejudices and beliefs imported into their country? When children get into a fight, adults intervene by separating the combatants and sending them home regardless of who is "right". As a non-Indian American, I don't know who is "right" regarding the existence and extent of caste-based discrimination. I don't care. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't have to know or care in the first place!
- innagadadavida 3y ago
  > I don't care. I shouldn't care. I shouldn't have to know or care in the first place! Newsom vetoing the bill is on similar grounds - no one should care or talk about cast and certainly it should not be mentioned in any CA bill.

Bukhmanizer 3y ago

I don't think this is very good logic. I'm not South Asian, but I can understand not wanting to be subjected to the judgements of a majority who neither knows or cares about the nuances of my culture, yet has to judge me through the lens of that culture. The amount of times in these and other threads where people just try to explain the culture by simply analogizing to American history (X are the [Black|Mexican|Jewish] people of India) is ridiculous. America is not a macrocosm for the rest of the world.

ethanbond 3y ago
Well the thing about American laws is that they apply to America and American culture. A pluralistic society like ours has no reason nor obligation to import (or even respect) ass-backwards concepts like caste.
- Bukhmanizer 3y ago
  Either you misunderstood my comment or you're deliberately interpreting it in a way that is easier to argue against. In no place do I argue that we should be importing the "concept of caste".

belltaco 3y ago

Just like all the anti-Sharia laws that were proposed in the US? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-laws-trump-muslims https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/30/anti-sharia-...

ethanbond 3y ago
This is a good counter argument, thanks for making it :)

mulberrybush 3y ago

- Age, gender, sexual orientation etc apply to all human beings. But caste is applicable only to people from the Indian Subcontinent, and even though Indian Muslims, Christians and Sikhs all practice caste it was presented as though it was only applicable to Hindus. So this was seen as a bill that was specifically targeted at Hindus. - The senator who presented the bill is a first generation Afghan muslim. This adds to the suspicion among Hindus that this is a Hindu-phobic action. It is kind of like a Palestinian senator pushing a bill to protect Sephardi and Misrahi jews from discrimination by Ashkenazi jews in Californian workplaces. - The bill was based on a questionable survey by Equality labs - this survey has been challenged as unscientific and biased. For e.g. see [1] Anatomy of a Dishonest survey. [1] https://medium.com/@rachelgotham5/equality-labs-caste-report-a-rebuttal-to-a-british-colonial-narrative-replayed-1676068ee2cf https://medium.com/@rachelgotham5/equality-labs-caste-report...

cscurmudgeon 3y ago

Would you support a law against Sunnia-Shia violence?