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Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

indiatoday.in

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Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#161
post #3

My dad once told me of how at his work (in the 1980s or early 1990s, I think), they had a team of two Indians assigned to a project. One turned out to be of a much "higher" caste than the other, and refused to work with the other, making him utterly useless to the project. It's good that Apple, IBM and other tech companies are taking steps to prevent this sort of discrimination. It's a shame that Google seems be goin…

I know who I would have fired without hesitation.

Along with anyone who found this a difficult decision once the facts were clear.

People with these beliefs don't belong anywhere in society where they can oppress others. Just as white people who think blacks are beneath them do not belong in any setting where they can affect a black person.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#162
In my opinion, companies should produce "challenges" for leading personal, from a sort of internal investigations team, and among them should be corruption challenges, security challenges, nepotism challenges and discrimination challenges.

If you fail them, you get demoted or otherwise restructured.

Of course, this creates a atmosphere of distrust, but some things, like Meritocratic atmosphere, are worth it.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#163
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not just talking about skin color.

> not just talking about skin color Steve Jobs is ethnically Syrian. Most people would call him white. The fact that some e.g. North Africans may fit the classic conception of whiteness better than many Europeans doesn’t dissolve every racial boundary therebetween.

[deleted]

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#164
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work predominately with Indian coworkers. You are exactly correct in my view. Racism has technically been banned in the United States wholesale since the Civil Rights act, yet we struggle with the effects still today. This is a step in a right direction, but it should be seen as only as the beginning.

Casteism, while bad, is not racism. Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism.

> Casteism, while bad, is not racism. Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism.

Doesn't caste have some deep origins with race? I'm under the impression that thousands of years ago Indo-Europeans invaded an India populated by darker-skinned natives, and formed an elite that now finds some expression in caste. I could be wrong, though.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#165
post #3

My dad once told me of how at his work (in the 1980s or early 1990s, I think), they had a team of two Indians assigned to a project. One turned out to be of a much "higher" caste than the other, and refused to work with the other, making him utterly useless to the project. It's good that Apple, IBM and other tech companies are taking steps to prevent this sort of discrimination. It's a shame that Google seems be goin…

I know who I would have fired without hesitation.

Yeah. "Caste", "Color", doesn't matter, all the same shit. If someone sees a problem there, they're unfit for a lot of other stuff.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone hires a person based on their color, that's wrong regardless of who's doing it. This includes let's say for example an Indian that hires a white person just because they're white.

> If someone hires a person based on their color, that's wrong regardless of who's doing it. Let's say a company is set to hire 1,000 employees. For the first 900 hires, they intentionally exclude white people. Should they, then, make up for this intentional exclusion by then prioritizing white people in their hiring? Or should they correct the problem by giving those who were intentionally excluded priority? In othe…

You can't correct racism against Bob be being racist in favor of Carl. Which is one reason why Affirmative Action is bullshit.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#167

looks the other way when Indian director has all Indian SDMs reporting to him It’s all lip service. Nepotism is rampant at FAANG

>looks the other way when Indian director has all Indian SDMs reporting to him I've seen it happen so many times now that I can call it ahead of time. Critical mass is when you get a VP. From there, you go from representational levels to >50% Indian in a matter of months.

Happened at my last company. They hired an Indian CTO and before long, all the management under him was Indian. He basically made life unbearable for the existing leaders until they quit and then brought in someone he knew. Seemed like blatant racism to me.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#168
post #114
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casteism, while bad, is not racism. Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism.

This doesn't sound right. Weren't castes based on race and conquering populations initially? How would you describe casteism's status among expatriated Indian populations at a population level? Or is the fact one refers to a population at all to be help in contempt as "racism"?

> Weren't castes based on race and conquering populations initially?

We don't know the exact process, but there were several culturally, ancestrally and often phenotypically distinctive populations that encountered and mixed with each over millennia in the subcontinent and engaged in both conflict and cooperation, mostly for arable and pasturable land resources and access to water.

The societal power and identity structures and population genetic patterns that emerged from that process manifest in, but are not limited to, the caste system.

A latter such migration brought the Indo European language and customs, and it has had an outsized impact on elite cultural artifacts like religious literature. Colonial philologists discovered the Indo European linguistic connection between Sanskrit and European sacred languages and some became fetishized on it due to their own ancestral connection to it, while discounting the relevance of other South Asian ethnolinguistic groups.

In response, current Indian nativists have promoted the wholly unfounded idea that South Asia was closed to human in-migration until the Islamic era, and that Indian culture and peoples are strictly indigenous in ancestry.

Both the colonial theories of a single conquering Indo European invasion and the nationalist out-of-india theory are highly oversimplified and marketed towards their respective societies' ethno-nationalist impulses.

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#169
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldnt it be nice. Or are you suggesting that some races / genders / etc are better at some things than others?

I'm not sure that this isn't bait, but, given enough somewhat arbitrary slicing of the data (gender, age, loose race groups etc.), surely it'd be unlikely that there wouldn't be some biased slices? It's basically p-hacking: if you come up with enough ways of analysing data, you'll find something "significant".

To be fair, you would need a bigger more representative company. If your slice is CEOs' then that is pre-filtering for a lot of things. Tech role at apple skewed a fair bit, general role less so, a retail apple role thena different population all together.

Amazon possibly has enough employees in the fuller distribution of income / qualifications that would be an interesting dataset for slicing, but of course you will always find rouge slices and while they may have a reasonable explanation othertimes they do not - why are 90% of CEO of a listed companies are >50 years old, 22% of the population is under 18 its unfair they are not represented (lets not get into the number of old people in politics)

Re: Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

#170
post #69

Out of curiosity, for Indians working in America, how hard is it to hide your caste or pretend to be of another caste altogether? Is this something that comes up in conversation among Indians? Do names tend to correlate to you caste? And if so, do people change them as a way of hiding their family caste?

I'm not Indian American my origins are Caribbean but I have some Indian origins and can offer a few answers from my experience. > Is this something that comes up in conversation among Indians? It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive. > Do names tend to correlate to you caste? In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste. I had some friends adopt English names to ge…

NB: "where are you from?" is a question your HR training should already explicitly tell people not to ask candidates. I'm not in HR or management and I still make sure to mention it to new hires before doing my first interview alongside them. National origin is a protected class. Even within the US , "where are you from?" can proxy for a protected class. Race, mostly, or possibly religion.

It's also a question that's very easy to ask in good faith while making small talk, which makes it noticeably dangerous.

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