The Hindus fighting against ‘caste consciousness’

2023/07/19 Leave a comment

Of note (California a trendsetter…):

The first-ever Caste Con, an event dedicated to “dissolving caste consciousness,” held in Fremont, California, on Sunday (July 16), may sound to the uninitiated as if its point was to oppose discrimination based on India’s social hierarchy that places Brahmins at the top of the social order and Dalits at the bottom.

In fact, the gathering brought together a group of activists who warn that recent efforts to outlaw caste discrimination in the United States only serve to reaffirm caste differences in a way that could negatively affect the U.S. Hindu community and stigmatize Indian Americans in politics, at school and in the courts. Many of the attendees are outspoken opponents of SB 403, a bill headed for a vote in the California State Assembly that would single out caste bias as a violation of the state’s anti-discrimination statute.

Richa Gautam, a data analyst who organized the event, portrays caste awareness as a version of American identity politics that left-leaning politicians use to force presumptions about caste on Indian immigrants such as her, she told Religion News Service in the days before Caste Con.

“Any seepage of identity politics is against multiculturalism,” said Gautam. “It is against progress, it is against even spiritualism, you know, the whole concept of Hinduism.”

Caste differences, a fact of life in India and other South Asian communities around the globe, has caused increasing controversy in the U.S. South Asian immigrant community since colleges and universities began adding caste to their list of differences, along with race and sexuality and gender identity, that were protected against bias. Brandeis University banned caste discrimination over complaintsfrom some Hindus in 2019; the California State University system added caste to their nondiscrimination policy in early 2022.

Gautam was inspired to join the fight against these measures in 2020, as California was prosecuting the most prominent legal case of alleged caste discrimination involving the computer giant CISCO Systems. An anonymous CISCO employee, a Dalit, accused two of his managers, Ramana Kompella and Sundar Iyer, of passing him over for a promotion. California’s civil rights department sued the two defendants in a years-long case that ended just this month, when it was dismissed due to lack of evidence.

Iyer made a surprise appearance at Sunday’s Caste Con, claiming that the state prosecutors decided he was a high-caste Hindu based on his last name, even though he identifies as non-religious.

“Ramana and I are the state of California’s best and only example of caste litigation,” said Iyer. “The CRD is supposed to protect civil rights, yet deliberately violated my religious liberty.”

More recently, 12 of the complainants in a 2021 lawsuit that alleged forced labor among “lower-caste” workers on the BAPS Swaminarayan Temple of Robbinsville, New Jersey, retracted their claims, saying they were coerced into making false allegations of caste discrimination.

Yet an often cited report on caste bias released in 2018 by Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organization and a co-sponsor of the California bill, found that two-thirds of respondents said they suffered discrimination at work; one-third reported that they had faced discrimination in education.

In an article on Caste Files, Gautam’s website tracking the issue, she characterizes the report as “fake and unscientific.” Other Hindu organizations, including the Ambedkar Phule Network of American Dalits and Bahujans, representing traditionally lower-caste groups, have also criticized Equality Labs’ findings.

“Any survey or any bill that is made without us is looking to butcher our cultural existence,” Sandeep Dedge, a volunteer at APNADB, told the Caste Con audience. “The people with little experience are trying to oppress the contributions of the Dalits and Bahujans.”

Those who reject the need for provisions against caste discrimination say not only that such laws have no place in the United States, but they also deny that caste is primarily a feature of Hinduism. Instead they claim that caste was imposed by British colonizers of India, who fastened on varna — a spiritual term dictating one’s inner nature — and jati — a description of a distinctive social group — and conflated both with caste as a way of ordering Indian society under their rule. It should be removed from American consciousness altogether, they say.

Sudha Jagannathan, a board member of the Coalition of Hindus of North America and longtime California resident, says she never experienced discussions of caste before coming to the United States. She began referring to herself as Bahujan only after caste became a talking point in recent years. To her, caste is a “slur against Hindus” that is already covered under the existing anti-discrimination laws.

“The caste discrimination ban is broadcasting caste consciousness into America in big ways,” said Jagannathan. “The Americans who did not know this, whenever they see a Hindu now, the first question they ask is, ‘What is your caste?’”

California, where a vast number of Indian immigrants live, has long been the center of the discourse about caste in America. In 2006, the Hindu Education Foundation, along with the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu American Foundation, fought in California courts to erase mentions of the caste system, among other stereotypes about the Hindu religion, from the state’s school textbooks. The litigation ended in settlements, with repeated text changes.

Source: The Hindus fighting against ‘caste consciousness’

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , , , ,

When Caste Discrimination Comes To The United States : NPR

2018/04/30 Leave a comment

The challenges of culture and tradition changes. Not aware of any similar studies in Canada (this one has the main methodological flaw that responses are voluntary rather than systematically collected and analyzed):

At over three thousand years old, caste hierarchy is one of the oldest forms of social stratification in the world: the community you’re born into in places like India, Pakistan and Nepal has designated where you can work, who you can marry, and what your reputation is in life. Even today in South Asia, caste conflict and discrimination remain a potent force in everyday life. In the United States, though, caste tends to be a relatively muted topic.

But a new survey, “Caste in the United States,” finds that caste discrimination is playing out in the United States as well — a finding that raises questions around how South Asian Americans understand themselves and their history.

The survey, which is the first of its kind, was commissioned by Equality Labs, a South Asian American human rights startup, and includes the experiences of about 1200 people who volunteered their answers.

The report on the survey’s results said that two-thirds of members of the lowest caste, called Dalits, said they have faced workplace discrimination due to their caste. Forty-one percent have experienced discrimination in education because of it. And a quarter of Dalits say they’ve faced physical assault — all in the United States.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan is the executive director of Equality Labs and co-authored the report. She said increased immigration from South Asia — including more and more people from lower castes — fuel this discrimination.

The South Asian American population was the fastest-growing major ethnic group in the US between 2000 and 2010. Today, India alone routinely attractsthe majority of skilled worker visas the US allots to foreign nationals, accounts for the highest number of undocumented Asians, and is one of the top countrieswhere new immigrants hail from.

This survey provides data for what many in the community already know: any time there’s a dominant population of South Asians — whether they’re living in Silicon Valley or New Jersey, or working at an office or a restaurant — caste biases emerge. It could be anything from refusing to date or marry someone from a lower caste, to being on the receiving end of a casteist slur, to being made to sit separately because of your perceived “untouchability.”

“We have people who responded who were in the assembly lines for a Campbell soup factory in Central Valley, as well as people who work for Google, Facebook and the other big tech companies,” Soundararajan said, naming workplaces that employ large numbers of South Asians.

But because most Americans don’t understand caste dynamics, it’s hard for people to speak up about it, or bring discrimination cases to court. That includes many people living of South Asian ancestry as well.

Anupama Rao is a historian and anthropologist at Barnard College who studies caste. She said for years, many of the so-called “model minority” of South Asians, who have earned the status of being “good immigrants” in the U.S., came from upper-caste families.

“Many of them, once they are upwardly mobile in the United States, tend to be extremely cagey sometimes, but most often I think embarrassed, to think of themselves as the beneficiaries of caste privilege,” she said.

And when being from a privileged caste obscures what this discrimination looks like — because it isn’t a part of you or your family’s experience — caste itself can become invisible. This is especially true in a new country like the U.S., where immigrant groups of all kinds must navigate their place in an American racial and class hierarchy.

What makes caste discrimination even harder to combat in this new context is that some lower caste people hide their identity as well — 52 percent of Dalits surveyed worry about being “outted” as lower caste.

And the issue is polarizing.

Suhag Shukla is the executive director of the advocacy group the Hindu American Foundation. She said it’s important to get rid of caste prejudice, but that this new survey unfairly essentializes and villainizes Hinduism. It’s one of the most complex arguments surrounding caste; as the survey notes, caste first appeared in Hindu scriptures. It now pervades all religions of South Asia.

“The single most problematic issue with this survey is that it traffics in the most dangerous and false tropes about Hinduism,” she said.

“So instead of demanding an honest conversation about caste and privilege, or its contested relevance among South Asian kids of the third and fourth generation who are now coming of age that are all brown regardless of caste, this report kind of alienates Hindus by scapegoating them,” Shukla said. Caste discrimination isn’t on the radar for many South Asian kids of later generations, she added. What they’re worried about is the discrimination they face for being brown in America. Hate crimes against Muslims and South Asians are at their highest levels since the year after 9/11.

Yet others — both Hindu and non-Hindu — see this defense as helping to preserve the caste system itself. It may not be exactly the same as it functions in South Asia, but a denial of accountability, they say, maintains a hierarchy of privilege.

Last month, over a hundred people packed into the auditorium of the First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to talk about what the survey found. It was a special kind of Black Lives Matter event: an evening with Dalits.

Dr. Cornel West was part of the panel introducing the topic to the crowd, which included both South Asians and non-South Asians. He emphasized the parallels between the struggles of Black Americans and those of South Asians on the lowest rungs of the caste system.

“We will not be crushed! And we will struggle for love and justice, not hatred and revenge! Love and justice,” West roared to the crowd.

There has been a long history of Dalit and Black leaders finding common ground in their struggles. The Black Panthers in Oakland, for example, inspired the formation of another resistance group, the Dalit Panthers, in Mumbai. And Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, often recognized as the most renowned Dalit leader of the 20th century, and an architect of India’s constitution, exchanged letters with W.E.B. Du Bois in the 1940s, after seeing the similarities between the plight of India’s Dalits and African Americans in the US. This history was front and center at the event that evening in Cambridge.

“Let us never forget Ambedkar!” West insisted, as applause rung through the room. “And the spirit of W.E.B. Du Bois is here as well!”

Thenmozhi Soundararajan pointed out the shared experiences of those in the room.

“Places like this, where oppressed people are starting to build their connections, this is freedom,” she said.

via When Caste Discrimination Comes To The United States : Code Switch : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,