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Is there a Wikipedia list of obscure 'race'-isms? I find reading about other cultures or other time period's biases to be informative and wonder what the common elements might be. Off the top of my head, issues I can think of where an outsider may be oblivious between the "sides" are: Indian caste Japanese Barukumin caste Protestant/Catholic in Europe Jewish people in Europe/US/USSR English Class System, or Southern/…
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Hey there! Thanks for writing this. One question I've always had is, how do you know you're Dalit if you were born outside of India? How do others? Especially, say, when meeting other Indians in some tech company in the US?
If you were born outside of India, it would be pretty much like any other national /racial identity -- inferred from family (based on family names for instance). Like mentioned in the GPs write-up: > Unlike race, it’s easier to hide your caste, especially in a new country. Many dalits change their official last name to something common enough that it’s hard to identify them.
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> list of obscure 'race'-isms The word you need is “xenophobia” (hate of the others, of those who are different). Race is a limited, artificial concept and by focusing on it we miss the forest for the trees. Xenophobia is as old as humanity and can be based on anything: physical features; ideas, religions, languages, family ties, etc.
Since when does '-phobia' mean 'hatred'? If I suffer from arachnophobia, do I hate spiders?
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a specific point of view to talk about it while delegitimizing all other perspectives as inherently beneath consideration it's not gonna go well Why do we owe this degree of sensitivity to some types of bigot but not others? Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? The realpolitik answer is that Go…
> Why don't we need to be careful about "delegitimizing" the beliefs of people who think black people are inherently inferior or gay people are inherently immoral? This is imposing the cultural dynamics of American racial politics onto an issue with a completely different historical and cultural context. I wasn't talking about people who are expressing a belief of castes being inferior, I was talking about activists…
Ah, I see how it could cause problems with that type of "equality lab". The equality, discrimination, etc training I've had was very different, and boiled down to "here is a list of behaviors; if you do any of them or anything like any of them your ass is fired."
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Regional elitism in the USA is definitely a form of soft caste system. If you are from the upper East coast or the West coast you are a member of a higher caste than if you are from the interior, and inside the US there are definitely smaller caste differences. The South gets it the worst. When I was in college (University of Cincinnati) engineering students from the South were sometimes encouraged to lose their Sout…
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…
> On October 26, 1909, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease was organized as a result of a gift of US$1 million from John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The five-year program was a remarkable success and a great contribution to the United States' public health, instilling public education, medication, field work and modern government health departments in eleven southern states.[45] The hookworm exhibit was a prominent part of the 1910 Mississippi state fair.
> The commission found that an average of 40% of school-aged children were infected with hookworm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookworm_infestation#Eradicati...
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That NPR story was great, thanks. The transcript is definitely worth reading for anyone curious about this. In a nutshell, people can sometimes tell by your last name, and if they can’t, they will ask you questions about your background, such as what town and/or neighborhood your family is from, until they figure it out. In one example in the story, a guy is outed as a Dalit by a coworker who knew him from college.
Outing a co-worker is pretty mean. And asking all kinda of private background questions in order to judge someone's social standing and treat them accordingly is intrusive and bigotted. As usual, racists are more often than not mean bigots. It is somewhat different if you grew up in the caste system, and the discriminatory behaviour was just ingrained. If you start falling back to that based on, e.g., surname it's ha…
This also happens in the west and it's not caste-related. Go to a suburban barbecue or something, and observe: people will ask what you do for a living, which neighborhood you live in, how long have you been living here, where did you originally come from, and so on. Often they are doing this kind of small talk just so they can figure out where you are on the social totem pole.
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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.
Interesting fact: Talk to Indian upper caste women who claim to be feminists about caste; you'll be shut down quickly. I have had countless arguments only to be named "mansplainer". The activism from powerful groups will flow in the same social structure which does not affect their power.
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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.…
> Every Quality Engineering team I have been apart of had had a higher ratio of females 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: needin…
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This is likely the only reasonable counter to my opinion so far. That said, is caste of a racial nature? To my understanding it really more of a social construct more tied to ethnicity.
To be clear, race is also socially constructed; they're different cultures' ways of stratifying social categories. That said, all that matters for the law in this case is what the courts say.
Now, if were to look for a biological definition from Webster(1), race would be defined as:
a group within a species that is distinguishable (as morphologically, genetically, or behaviorally) from others of the same species
How is skin color not a distinguishable trait?
Now.. it might not be politically polite thing to say, but it does not change the outcome here.
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>Last time I saw a big thread related to the topic there were super deeper threads of people just straight up calling each other slurs. I hope you didn't take my comment is advocating for that. I can't really comment on a thread I didn't see. >They probably would have been flagged, but the threads were just so deep you wouldn’t see that unless you’re intently following the thread. Sounds like pointless name calling.…
I disagree. It is permitted, but it’s important to tread carefully and have a nuanced discussion that is respectful of other points of view.
How so? You can't say what you mean here, you're forced by moderation to be dishonest and sterilize everything. Nuance is only rewarded if you're nuanced about the right side.
>is respectful of other points of view.
Again, this is not in any way consistently applied. If you disagree with the majority here no amount of nuance will save you from ban/rate limit.