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Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

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Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#311

Post by ghufran_syed »

triceratops wrote: post #146
anu7df wrote: post #114

Ok.. I am going to be brave and not going to use a throwaway. I find it perplexing that HN crowd who is usually arguing for a balanced analysis and seeing both viewpoints is suddenly behaving as if this data proves some injustice is currently happening in India as well as US (in the context of Indian caste system). To be clear, India has/had a caste system that was extremely oppressive. Currently though, the social a…

> It is common for affirmative action students to not do very well there. Do you have any data at all for this? > Then it is not a stretch to imagine that some of them may not be very good at their job either. It's not right to assume that someone may not be good at their current job because they may (in your mind) have benefited from some "affirmative action" program far in the past (John Doe is 20+ years into his c…

This example from Thomas Sowell refers to affirmative action in the US rather than in India, but seems relevant https://www.pe.com/2015/12/17/thomas-sowell-mismatching-stud...

>I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago, when I was teaching at Cornell University and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.

>These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.

>The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell, in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile.

>That was a “favor” reserved for black students. This favor turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.

>None of this was peculiar to Cornell. Black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math had serious academic problems trying to keep up at M.I.T., where other students scored somewhere within the top 99th percentile.

>There were other fine engineering schools around the country where those same students could have learned more, when taught at a normal pace, rather than at a breakneck speed geared to students with extremely rare abilities in math.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#312

Post by sulam »

mywittyname wrote: post #252
bluGill wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. The slave class in the US was in theory gone by 1870 (I don't care to look up the end of the civil war. 150 years latter a lot of people still know who is a descendant of that class. Somehow, something, fueled that through several generations.

Yeah, but it was pretty obvious who were the former slaves. There was no "nuance" about it. When the tell-tale signs aren't physical, but small, subtle difference, they are easier to erase. You can change your name, religion, what you eat, and how you talk. So if those are the signs of your ancestors' caste, they probably won't last for generations in the west unless there's a conscious effort to preserve those disti…

One thing people clearly step around discussing is that the darkness of your skin is literally one of the main UC signifiers. Lighter skinned individuals are assumed to be UC.

So yes, this is a lot like racism in America.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#313

Post by geofft »

zarkov99 wrote: post #299
Loughla wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication is that, inherently, higher caste individuals were more gifted than lower castes, and that breeding over the years selected for those traits. You're confusing inherent trait with sociologically applied traits. In other words, there is no reason to assume there would be selective reproduction for ANY single trait in any of the castes, because your birth into those castes is random and meaningless. Unle…

I am not an evolutionary biologist so please excuse and correct any mistakes if you can. Lets assume there are some physical differences between the castes. These differences would have been brought into existence because at some point the respective populations were isolated and living under different sets of evolutionary pressures. If, over time, you remove physical isolation but replace it with cultural taboos aga…

The assumption you're making that you haven't substantiated is that higher (as in socially-more-powerful) castes have higher IQs.

(There are a number of other unsubstantiated assumptions beyond that, including that the difference in IQ is enough to explain the observed effect, that the variance in the distribution of IQs in each population is pretty close to zero, that castes started out as physically-isolated populations with distinct IQs, etc., but let's start with that one.)

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#314

Post by dqpb »

lowend wrote: post #214

ITT: (Possibly) "Upper caste" Indians claiming: 1. This is due to a few bad apples 2. Reservation is the real problem (no it's not) 3. I don't do it therefore it doesn't exist I can tell you by experience the amount of concious and unconcious bias regarding caste amongst Indians both in India and abroad is ridiculous! I'm light skinned so people assume I'm "upper caste" and speak with me as such. My last name doesn't…

How do they know what each persons caste is?

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#315

Post by screye »

rvn1045 wrote: post #92

The lack of self awareness amongst upper caste Indians in India and abroad is interesting to witness. They often think of themselves as having come from humble backgrounds and 'made it' in society all on their own. Not realizing that the vast majority of Indians in India live in abject poverty without any meaningful access to basic education and other amenities. Upper caste Indians are more likely to have access to b…

It has another side that validates their opinion. ( I am neither upper caste, nor come from a historically wealthy family)

In many cases parents will live incredibly frugally their whole lives to save up enough money for their child's education. Growing up on $3-8k annually is a humble background for a family when look at from the American lens. Qualifying for Indian universities is a nightmare exam that takes 2+ years of 10+ hrs a day of study. The kids compromise on any hobbies and a life just to MAKE IT.

Everything in India IS far harder than the developed world. A family that can't afford a personal vehicle, air conditioning or a single vacation over their lifetime is a humble family. Being successful enough to make it to the >95th percentile in the western world from such beginning is commendable and something a person should be able to take pride in.

Now, is it still an order of magnitude less hard to do this than it is for a dalit ? Ofc it is. But, should a person born in the western world feel ashamed to get a phd because kids in Africa are dying of hunger ? NO.

> Come from humble backgrounds and 'made it' in society all on their own

> Upper caste Indians are more likely to have access to better education

Both these statements can be true. One should not need to throw away pride in their accomplishments to empathize with someone less fortunate.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#316

Post by bluGill »

Gravityloss wrote: post #91
nullsense wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know about the issues in India, but perhaps lower caste members just don't have access to education. The caste system is about natural born status not tied to economics, but ancestral in nature. You're born into your caste and there isn't mobility within the system. So, try as you might, if you're in the lower caste you're in the lower caste and people higher up are going to treat you that way regardless. I'…

It's just been stable for longer. The current inequality increasing systems in the west will lead to all kinds of equivalent effects. Multi-generational debt etc.

No, because in the west debt is not inherited. Wealth is, which is an advantage to the right, but even then the majority of people - even rich don't get that advantage right away.

The big help the not-poor get is parents help their education. Not monetary help (that exists, but the poor get scholarships which in theory makes up the difference), but help as in a background that values education. If your peers and family expect you to get pregnant and drop out at 14 - it isn't really possible to get ahead in modern society the way most of us take for granted.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#317

Post by jrd259 »

Isabel Wilkerson's new book Caste compares the systematic racism of the USA, the caste system of India, and the Nazi genocide of the Jews. She attempts to describe a fundamental framework of caste (including divine mandate) that encompasses all three. She reports on how Martin Luther King came to see himself as a Dalit (undercaste). She also provides a brief introduction to the (Indian) caste system. Quite relevant to this discussion.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#318

Post by danans »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #222

How are non-Indians classified in the cast system? Are they completely out, invisible to the hierarchy? But in such case how a non-Indian marrying an Indian is perceived? Does this depend on the nationality/skin color?

> How are non-Indians classified in the cast system?

It's very complicated. TLDR: if you are a high-caste foreigner (meaning white, well educated, successful), you will probably be accepted. If you aren't that, your mileage may vary.

After all, caste in large part a codification of the hierarchical social structures found throughout the world.

Historically, just like all other old world societies, foreigners were considered barbarians. But if those foreigners brought more powerful technologies (weapons, tools, or social structures) they were quite often accommodated and absorbed.

So in reality, the Indian subcontinent has absorbed wave after wave of foreign immigration over millennia, each adding a facet to the complex and fractal social structure and hierarchy.

That dynamic - the foreigners with more power subjugating and marrying into a local population - plays a large part into how the caste system (both the theoretical model from scripture and the on-the-ground instances) formed in the first place. Again this is very similar to how the societal estates (clergy, aristocrats, merchants, and serfs) formed in other parts of the world.

An innovation of the Indian system is a category of people completely outside the system, the Dalits, who by consequence of both their ancestry and traditional professions, are completely ostracized by people in all layers of the caste system.

At some point however in India, the castes became very rigid - meaning endogamous - and also provincial, with caste being interpreted and enforced primarily on a local level.

Overall, it's not very different from what you see in the social structure of Latin America, which is not surprising because the Spanish/Portuguese colonists were directly inspired by the social structure they observed in India when they established the post colonial social structure of Latin America. The English word caste is itself a borrowing from Portuguese that subsumes two subtly different Indian terms: varna (the theoretical 4-level social structure) and jati (the actual "tribe" or "community" that identifies with one level of the structure).

Today, many Indians are actually more willing to accept an upper class educated foreigner than a lower caste Indian in matters such as marriage, but only usually if the foreigner is white, which is to say they have just adopted the racial hierarchy used in the western world. This tells you a little bit about how much similarity there actually is between the caste system and western racial hierarchies, despite the often heard claim that they have nothing in common.

Re: Over 90% of Indian techies in the US are upper-caste Indians

#320

Post by kelnos »

ImamBayildi wrote: post #280
macintux wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please reference the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Accusing someone of lying violates several of them.

But original comment is a lie. There are thousands of castes all over the country - different in every state. So education boards create categories (named 1,2A,2R etc.) Each such category is an umbrella for x number of castes. And perhaps this category is indicated next to students' name and not the caste itself.

You can only assert that the comment is a lie if you've visited every university in India and have verified that what the OP says isn't true, and can provide evidence that you've done so.

"This doesn't feel true to me based on my experience" does not mean OP was lying. It just means they had an experience that you weren't aware was possible.

Expressing polite, respectful skepticism is fine; accusing someone of lying without presenting evidence of that lie is not.

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