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Based on the language in this comment, I can't help but imagine you somehow let your internal biases affect your behavior and language during these interviews.
What would be a property of the language in the comment that would lead you to this conclusion?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In an interview, it seems to me as highly unethical and likely discrimination. Although, not sure if there are legal ramifications to this sort of thing though.
caste isn't a protected class so they might be fine legally.
Caste itself isn't explicitly protected (axes of discrimination that weren't widely recognized as actual things people cared about in the US when the law was written don't tend to be) but there are arguments that caste discrimination runs afoul of existing US protection regarding color, ethnicity, national origin, and religion, among others, and some of these are currently being actively litigated in federal court, IIRC by both private plaintiffs and state fair-employment authorities.
So “might be fine”, but very much might not. And HR is usually about avoiding risk of exposure, not steering the company into “might be fine” waters.
There has been a lot of outrage over the past week in India over the rape of a lower caste woman by upper castes. The police sided with the culprits and forced the family to cremate the victim to destroy evidence. This is a common tactic by upper castes to spread terror and keep the lower castes in line. Goes to show how entrenched the system is especially outside the big cities.
Do you have an English source on this reported incident? It sounds beyond modern day concept of cruelty.
This interview seems one sided though. I know that for last two decades Brahmins and other so called upper caste Indians have been protesting India’s quota system which is basically affirmative action whereby certain percentages of college seats and job vacancies are reserved only for people who do not belong to the upper castes. So there have been numerous occasions where meritorious but poor upper caste youths did…
One anecdote that struck me was that a cousin, someone a couple of decades older than I am and spent time in US since 1990s, openly admit to me that he was more open minded in India and became more caste conscious once he moved to the US. I am not sure if he sounded regretful or just was sharing a fact of his life, but that really was weird.
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I have Indian heritage, and I’m clueless about this. Are there dog whistles I’m missing?
I'm Indian and I've heard things like "koncha jaticha" said casually in a professional setting... Meaning which caste are you? I was born in India and moved here when I was in school. It was shocking to me as well when I heard stuff like this.
See, you can have discourses on caste, you can deliberate as you will, but endogamy - marrying within your caste - is still the norm across India, even in the states where people are not that finicky about caste. Until this chain is broken, the shadow boxing on the sidelines will continue. Interestingly the Caribbean communities have somehow managed to shed caste, while retaining the Hindu identity.
> One peculiarity of Andhra society is that many of the leading warrior families made no pretensions to ksatriya status but instead proudly proclaimed their descent from the creator Bramha’s feet. This is an allusion to the famous origin myth first found in the Rig Veda wherein the four varnas are said to have originated from different portions of the body of Purusha, the primordial man. It was from the creator’s feet that the fourth, or sudra, class sprang, and another way of expressing sudra status was to say that one belonged to the fourth order of society. The pride in sudra origin is especially prominent in two records from the fourteenth century, in which sudras are said to be the best of the four varnas because they are the bravest or the purest. Families in what was theoretically the lowest social category, and not the ksatriya lineages of the costal subregion, possessed the greatest degree of actual political power in medieval Andhra, despite their relatively humble ancestry.
India’s history of caste in society is far more complicated than what’s portrayed in popular depictions of India. Add to this, India’s insane cultural diversity. When Ibn Batuta was traveling through (presumably north) India recording how women were uneducated, forced into marriage and how Brahmins held the highest social status, the Bhakti movement (sort of similar to Europe’s protestant movement) was brewing in the south[1], the Virasaivas were trying to form a caste free society in what is now Karnataka[2] and you have sudra rulers over modern day Andhra Pradesh.
This complicated history has largely been forgotten, Indian textbooks do not come anywhere close to exploring the complexity of the origins of Caste.
I appreciate NPR taking an interest in talking about Caste in India, but this treatment is extremely disappointing. Indian society can not discuss caste freely - there is too much political baggage that gets in the way (notice how all the references below aren’t from Indian scholars). NPR has an incredible opportunity to be the swiss neutral ground when talking about caste and how it impacts every day life in India.
I really hope they don’t bring that baggage over to America and end all possibility for level headed discourse.
[0] Cynthia Talbot, “Precolonial India in Practice - Society, Region and Identity in Medieval Andhra”. Chapter 2, page 51. [1] John Stratton Hawley, “A storm of songs” [2] Gil Ben-Herut, “Silva’s saints - the origins of devotion in Kannada according to Harihara’s Ragalegalu”
People are people and always have ways to flag people outside the tribe.
But it's really weird to see that there's not overt cultural movements to shed this stuff. Trying to hide the fact that you're a lower caste, in a way, seems to embody the fact that you're a lower caste, shifting it from an outward identity to a hidden identity. Seems like the obvious thing to do is to get ahead of the issue and state that you don't have a caste. Or make up a post modern American one. I get this is hard to do when you're in a position of weakness relative to the other party (like manager's as described). But like, this is clearly a social movement waiting to happen. If someone of equal social standing starts probing you for your caste, you should confront them on it and say you don't subscribe to it, because otherwise you do, on some level, subscribe to it.
I won't pretend it's not much, much easier said than done, but geez. Is there really such a collective power by upper indian castes that you can't bring the issue to the table if you're reasonably well established? Say, a second generation citizen, with a multi racial network?
Racial discrimination between people of color and whites is a frustratingly stupid problem to deal with. Caste discrimination seems, somehow, even dumber, because based on non-obvious, made up facts.
What am I missing?