Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

As someone who grew up in the Deep South but studied and worked on the east coast for many years, I can confirm this to be 100% true.

At a past job, I worked for a company headquartered on the upper east coast, but which had opened a "tech hub" in the mid-sized Southern city where I lived at the time. Some of my co-workers had fairly pronounced Southern accents and people in the home office would regularly laugh and make fun of them during meetings. And after I put in my notice, the tech lead on the project I was on declared, completely unprompted, during a completely unrelated call that "we haven't had any issues with code quality or anything, but Southerners are just slow. That's just how they are. It's the culture." I think that I will regret for the rest of my life not telling him to go eff himself right then and there.

And I wish I could say that that was an exception to my experience elsewhere, but while living on the east coast I heard more offhand comments about "stupid Southerners" than I can count, often followed by an awkward "I mean, not you of course, you're different". Interestingly, many (but not all) of the same people who think it's funny to beat up on the South are also the most likely to make impassioned performative declarations of support for every DEI initiative they come across. The level of cognitive dissonance required to maintain that kind of mindset must be intense.

I know nothing about the parent or their experience [edit: and thanks to the parent for posting this]. I do know that commonly, people in positions of power (managers or people in the majority) believe the following but it's often not true; that is, the signal is always same, but not the reality. That is, the signal is meaningless as an indicator of the underlying situation, but when I find myself thinking it, it is potentially a signal that I'm missing something.

> "I ... have a positive influence." [note: not what the parent actually said; it's abridged for my example]

> "The Dev team took less than five minutes to round-table agree that she was fit for the position."

> "I asked for feedback from ..."

A cause is that the people in a vulnerable position, the people who actually have the experience and know if you are having a positive influence or if they are accepted, don't have a voice, a safe way to speak about their experiences. Just saying 'you are safe', 'I support you', etc., doesn't make it so. Just having a conversation doesn't mean you know.

A useful rule for me is that if everything I hear feels relatively comfortable, then I am not hearing nearly everything.

We've all been in situations where someone invites us to be open and frank (especially your boss!): How do you respond? You know that many say it without meaning it - because it's polite, or it's in the HR training, or because they don't seriously considering what they are asking for. You know that some even say it to trap you, and some say it because they want to openly and frankly tell you something - and they do, ignoring what you said and then going on a rant. Some mean it but then can't handle it; they hear something disruptive to their worldview or needs (such as a stable, stress-free team or family), and react poorly, ignore it, or they bury their alarm and carry it around, associating it with you, degrading the relationship. Really, how often do you hear that invitation and then actually speak openly and frankly?

Now imagine that it's about a highly inflammatory topic which has yielded bad results throughout your life, about which you carry a lot of trauma. It might be a relatively new experience to the person in power, but to the vulnerable person it's something they've dealt with daily, they have ways to cope without dealing with it afresh all the time, and they've tried that conversation many times with little success. Just imagine your boss invites you to speak openly and frankly about politics or Donald Trump, and you might have an idea.

It's not hopeless, but there is an art and there are techniques for making it work, and plenty of expertise is available now that can guide people who are truly serious about hearing uncomfortable things.

There are 200+ million Dalits in India. These are the people which were previously called “untouchables”.

I work in medicine, many Indians work with me and most are Brahmins with a few Christian Malayali from Kerala.

I think the Malayali have shown it is possible to escape the caste system and to have success.

However I am worried Dalits have been at the bottom and treated as such for thousands of years that it has effected more than just their psychology. In a high population density area with food insecurity there will be high baseline stress, malnutrition, and starvation. Those will cause epigenetic modifications to DNA which are (surprisingly) heritable. Over thousands I imagine these effects will produce behaviors which are going to be hard to overcome.

I'm afraid there is none. Also its better if people from the west do not try to draw parallels with their experiences and culture. It simply doesn't match. This would help you understand the caste system and once you do, you would literally see it in any place where Indians live/work. The revelations would be mind boggling for sure.

For ex, if there are a bunch of Indians in a work place and a few of them are from lower caste, they will not be invited for lunches, dinners or any socialising event by their upper caste counter parts. Implicit untouchability.

I have read that in the US tech companies this is far too common and since their white (only white specifically. Because they don't care about what their black/asian/latino colleagues think.) colleagues don't understand caste, there are no repercussions for any discrimination.