241–250 of 1001 posts
It doesn’t necessarily follow that this would encourage racism. But it sure isn’t surprising.
There's a lot of bias in the tech industry, not just caste. if your company is sufficiently large it will have various HR policies on this and in my experience they will enumerate the kinds of discrimination they don't tolerate. Here's an exercise for you: go through the list of US protected classes [1] and see which ones are explicitly stated and which ones aren't. It's actually enlightening. For example, I don't th…
First off, activism is uncomfortable - it’s about changing the status quo and anyone who benefits will take issue with it even if they don’t actively perpetuate the system. MLK wasn’t met with open arms; he was harassed, arrested and ultimately assassinated.
Personally I’ve worked with many Indians too and I have never heard anyone one of them bring up caste; but I’m not Indian, so why would they?
A better benchmark is how many people of lower caste have you talked to and how do they feel about it? It may be the case that the structures of American Indians have already expunged all the lower caste Indians from your workplace.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you dismiss Martin Luther King as an “activist”? But your point is in some ways valid, as it’s important to be able to see Israel through the lens of colonialism and to show that the state’s brutality applied to brown people of all faiths, including Jews. I also find it really strange that any criticism of Israel is labelled as anti-Semitic. I actually think equating the brutal behaviour of the Israeli governme…
The central issue with discussions about Israel is a failure to differentiate Israel (the state and government) with Judaism (the religion) with Jew/Hebrew (the ethnicity). (And yes, I realize Israel is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, but to a first order approximation and given current political dynamics... it's not) Given that there are relatively few states with as intertwined religions and historical atroc…
That has not been my experience. AFAICT even people who are extremely careful and specific about criticizing the state of Israel - even more specifically the IDF or a political party within Israel responsible for a particular act - still get tarred with the "anti-Semitic" brush. Jewish people have been severely oppressed for centuries, and the state of Israel has been attacked repeatedly. The response has been a strong emphasis on solidarity and mutual support, which is generally laudable, but in some this manifests as militant intolerance of even the tiniest deviation from the (insiders') conventional position. Unfortunately, those few - and I know most Israeli and Jewish people are much more open minded because that has been their tradition for millennia - often end up controlling the debate.
Question from a layman. How does one know that someone is from another caste? If I was someone from India, how would I know what caste my fellow Indian is from? Is there some kind of code? Or where you are from?
Google’s culture is dominated by arrogance. Management repeatedly tells employees they work on the world’s hardest problems using the world’s biggest computers and the world’s smartest people. Doing anything less is “ungoogley”. It doesn’t necessarily follow that this would encourage racism. But it sure isn’t surprising.
Also - which companies are saying they hire the worst people?
I've worked at several companies - every single one of them claimed to hire the best. It's just corporate psychobabble at this point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just caste discrimination, but also sexism. I have worked at least three companies where if there were Indian women, the vast majority were in QA.
I am a Director-Level in Engineering/QA/Quality Engineering. I currently lead a team where our ratio of Female Indian women is higher than any other engineering group at the company. Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of has had a higher ratio of females, but not necessarily of any specific background. My N=1 experience is that this can be related, but not always directly about discrimination or sexism.…
Positive discrimination is also discrimination, why not look for the same ratio as the job market has? Over hiring from an underepresented group necessarily means lowering the competence, unless you purposely interview a disproportionate number of individuals from the underepresented group, is this what you have done?
Edit: needing to interview a disproportionate number of individuals to be able to overhire from an underepresented group without affecting performance is just a straightforward statistical fact assuming the same competence across all groups.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just caste discrimination, but also sexism. I have worked at least three companies where if there were Indian women, the vast majority were in QA.
There seem to be more women in QA in general. Genuinely asking: Is this also sexism?
One way to look at it is that the disparity may be a symptom of complicated cultural biases, and we may not know the specific reasons. Since there’s nothing gender or sex related to doing the job of QA, then if the disparity actually is measurable and widespread, it does reveal cultural bias. This is currently true for nurses and for elementary school teachers in the US, for example.
It’s important to note that this can happen without individuals who have any overtly “sexist” behavior at all. It can be the result of cultural attitudes and not prejudiced hiring practices. This is why using the word “sexism” on it’s own might not be the best word for it, even if it’s technically true. Perhaps better terms are “cultural sexism”, or “cultural bias”. I’m sure there are better terms. The problem with using the bare word “sexism” is it tends to be accusatory and out people on the defensive, where the issue may literally be with all of us.
Left unstated is the assumption that Brahmins limit their discrimination to Dalits.
In some regions, there were also some devout worshippers of one God that take adverserial position about worshippers of another God (Shiva versus Vishnu)
Luckily most of these (I think) are on their way out and don't manifest in professional workplaces of today.
These tendencies must have definitely shaped careers and unfairly disadvantaged people as recently as a couple of decades ago.
Do we need every mega-corporation to weigh in on every social issue globally? The thing I like most about work is that its a relatively diverse group of people working together on shared goal. People have known for a long time that work should be professional and you should avoid politics and religion. But I guess people have to relearn these lessons every few decades.
It’s called “leadership.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't racism fundamentally a type of caste/class discrimination? Not as well defined castes like seen in India, but "black people" are discriminated as a result of slavery, "asians" as a result of mass immigration. To the point where in many countries you were not allowed or able to marry outside your "caste", had different rights than locals/whites etc. People today don't feel racism as caste discrimination, but to…
The word you are looking for is bigotry. That's the generalized equivalent of racism. Thing is, bigotry in general isn't illegal. Specific kinds of bigotry are in regards to hiring though. Racism is one of them. But caste isn't. A lawyer might be able to make the claim that it would fall under "national origin or ancestry" since, to my knowledge, caste is hereditary and hard to change. But if so then that makes these…