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Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

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Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#831

Post by bgdam »

alex_smart wrote: post #204
Vaslo wrote: post #65

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?

Usually you know someone's caste from their last name. I am someone who was not given a caste-based last name because my parents were influenced by a regional movement against caste. (I didn't even have a last name to begin with but eventually added a non caste-based one to avoid visa issues.) Whenever I traveled by train and chatted up with a co-passenger, almost surely they would ask my name and would never be sati…

> Edit: Curiously, based on the last name of the person (Soundarajan) whose talk got cancelled, I would actually have guessed that they were upper caste (Brahmin - the highest).

This is most likely because her parents/grandparents changed to using patronymical last names, precisely to avoid this problem. There was a very popular movement in South India (particularly the state of TamilNadu), called the self-respect movement, which a large part of society (except for the upper castes - who had a lot to lose), adopted.

This is why my own name does not give away my caste. Because my grandfather switched to patronymics from the existing caste based last names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Respect_Movement

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#832

Post by bgdam »

shultays wrote: post #827
sumedh wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your parents tell you your caste. You can also get a caste certificate from you local municipal office which helps you take advantage of some perks if you belong to a "lower" class. Generally you wont be able to figure the caste of someone but there are clues like skin color, fairer skin generally is "upper" caste, sometimes your surname also gives away your caste. Unfortunately some Indians specially from the "upper…

caste certificate What, caste is an official thing in India?

Unfortunately, it has to be. If you want to decrease the effects of centuries of oppression, the oppressed have to be given a giant helping hand. Which is done by both the union and state governments in India in the form of reservations for people belonging to oppressed castes. Now this is a controversial subject, because there are people who have abused the reservations system, but overall I am of the opinion that it is a much needed system. The only way to enforce that only the oppressed castes get these benefits is to officially recognize castes and issue certificates attesting this.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#833

Post by bgdam »

dataexporter wrote: post #664
sashu123 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fair skin thing is nonsense. I'm a Tamil Brahmin (Brahmin being the highest caste) and I'm one of the darkest skinned people in India. Most of my friends are far darker than most Indians from North India. It's much easier to identify through surname (Pichai I'm pretty sure is a brahmin surname), but certain states like Tamil Nadu banned surnames for this reason. If people ask me my surname, it is T. Every government…

Well if Surnames are banned, why is the name Pichai still used? Genuinely asking. I also see tons of engineers from Tamil Nadu in the US with last names Iyer and Iyengars.

It wasn't banned. It was one of the side effects of the popular Self Respect movement which saw most people switch to patronymical last names from caste-based last names.

Ofcourse the Iyers and Iyengars wouldn't switch because they had more to lose than they gained from hiding their caste identity (they are the so called upper castes who have traditionally held a much priviledged position).

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#834

Post by pydry »

Johnny555 wrote: post #535
pydry wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American caste is just money though.

It's money and everything that comes along with it - social status, health (both because of access to healthcare, but being able to afford a healthy lifestyle), education, safer interactions with law enforcement, job prospects and advancement, etc. If you're born poor, it's very hard to break out of that. It's not literally impossible like changing caste is, but it's very difficult.

Moving abroad and changing your name may even be a little easier than breaking out of American capital chains. Youll still be dalit but it doesnt have to define you.

India also has a dalit president.

America hasnt had a president of modest income since Truman.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#835

Post by bgdam »

hirako2000 wrote: post #787
bgdam wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a law and public debates for castes and how to address the (no doubt existing even outside India) problem. That's kinda part of the problem. In India there are laws dealing with caste based oppression and discrimination (how well they are enforced is another story). But in most other countries such laws do not exist. And caste-based discrimination is exceptionally easily and silently accomplished because f…

That's right, in the West at wide they roll up to anti discrimination laws, agreed they probably don't tackle the very specific problem castes pose, I would much rather have anti discrimination encompass them in a more generic form to tackle all forms of discrimination based on "classes" than making it an indian caste problem. I fail to see how the unambiguous distinction in names makes the problem solving any easier…

While I am in favor of generic anti-discrimination laws, I don't think they can be generic and target caste based discrimination. Let me give you an example:

A hiring manager, gets two resumes. Both are equally qualified. He glances at one, see's the last name and decides on the spot to not hire him. Because of caste.

If he's slightly clever, he'll atleast schedule an initial call with the candidate before inventing a reason to reject him. How does a generic anti-discrimination law identify this as an instance of caste-based discrimination?

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#836

Post by wellerpan »

sizzle wrote: post #673

Genuine question, what is stopping you from identifying as another caste in 2022 with the mass adoption of the concept of identifying with different genders? Just like being assigned a sex of Male or Female at birth, those who don’t want to associate can identify with another gender identity or even transition their bodies to whatever sex they please. I don’t buy the notion that once a Dalit by birth you are destined…

No post body was provided.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#837

Post by 1sembiyan »

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #748
rajup wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many Brahmins I know don’t wear it. So how is it a caste marker? Heck I wear it only during certain ceremonies. So the point the gp was making about people wearing the sacred thread condoning the caste system and discrimination is patently false and bigoted.

>Many Brahmins I know don’t wear it. But only Brahmins have the right to wear it. Wearing a "sacred thread" in a society that wants to eliminate caste based discrimination is promoting and condoning discrimination. As an extreme example, how is this different from a klan member choosing to wear a "hood" in public.

That’s not true. Many other castes used to have their own thread ceremonies and wear it. In TN at least, I can think of the Chettiars and Nadars who did a 100 years ago, and who rid themselves of it after concerted efforts by the Justice Party. Example: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_elderly_Chettia...

Soundarapandian Nadar of Justice Party (and after whom Pondy Bazaar is named) campaigned in the Nadar community to get rid of the thread: https://alchetron.com/W-P-A-Soundarapandian-Nadar

Some Nairs wear it as well. Wearing the thread is not a “privilege” afforded to only Brahmins, although now in popular imagination it has become their identifier.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#838

Post by bellypot »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #740
sizzle wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would it take to plant the seeds of change in the youth to abandon casteism conceptually as technology allows us to be on a more equal platform with all the world’s information at our fingertips?

I truly don’t know and fully defer to people who are directly familiar for that portion of the discussion. My only point in responding was to say that increased (public) diversity of gender identity hasn’t been a panacea of acceptance. If anything I’ve seen the opposite, much more transphobia and even just ignorant objections to parts of speech, in recent years. I can speak a little bit to that , but technology has m…

I think where the activists went wrong was in trying to increase acceptance of gender identity, rather than acceptance of diverse gender expression.

We can see that distinction very clearly in the increasingly influential 'TERF' movement: being radical feminists who are deeply critical of gender stereotypes, they of course have no problem with men wearing dresses or other gender non-conforming accoutrements. But men saying they are women, that is where the line is drawn, as these men are identifying into an already existing, and marginalized, group.

"Stop bullying cross-dressers" would have been a far more effective model of acceptance than "men can be women if they say they are".

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#839

Post by zeckalpha »

colechristensen wrote: post #662
retrac wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's touches of that elsewhere too (hiding race or ethnicity with a name change.) I have an extremely unusual surname in Canada, and most North Americans don't recognize it as European in origin, which has led to assumptions in the past. My grandfather said he considered changing it to something English in the 50s, but ultimately he kept it. I know that, at least historically, some Christian Arabs, Jewish people,…

Quite a few essentially had Americanized (or for Canada... idk, Canadized? Anglicized? somebody tell me the best word for that :) ) names forced on them upon immigration. My mother's ancestral Norwegian last name wouldn't have worked particularly well in English, my own last name of Danish origin survived unscathed for obvious reasons.

Canada is in the Americas, so Americanized seems fine to me.

Re: Google cancelled a talk on caste bias

#840

Post by throwaway0a5e »

jcranmer wrote: post #277
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1, so most students miss out on reconstruction, and pretty much no curricula will talk about the explicit race discrimination in the GI bill/redlining.

> high school history tends to skip from the civil war to WW1 I very, very highly doubt that. In terms of US history, this period covers several important topics: * Reconstruction * Settling of the American West * Rise of the Granger and later Progressive movements * Burgeoning immigration to the US, and all the tensions that result from that * Second Industrial Revolution, which also fuels the Gilded Age and labor m…

I was really interested in history (so presumably I paid attention) and my education mirrors his. I went to a good public school in a state that people who are looking to lie with statistics in order to make a politically charged point like to hold up as a pinnacle of educational achievement. Pretty much any topic that someone who is a big proponent of government solutions to problems might find troublesome got glossed over as quickly as possible.

Thankfully I lucked into the English section taught by the female equivalent of Ron Swanson who made us read books that covered the Jim Crow south and the Indian wars. Looking back she was obviously a bull #### and rightfully had a bone to pick when it came to mistreatment of demographic groups under color of law.

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