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Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination

indiatoday.in

471–480 of 667 posts

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

#471
post #189

I worked at a company where this was an issue at one point (granted this was one situation among a lot of employees). A manager was pretty much dismissive of everything anyone of a lower caste did / wouldn't communicate with them effectively. HR absolutely struggled with the issue. The HR folks tasked with dealing with discrimination issues largely had spent their time constructing company wide emails and classes tha…

I don't understand how you can be so dismissive of HR talking about discrimination while at the same time praising legal for firing someone for discrimination, and compensating people for being discriminated against. What would you like HR to do about caste-based discrimination? Apparently not send emails, or mention it in classes? You just want them to go straight to firing?

A lot of people are frustrated because if you ask anyone who works in HR at a company with DEI policies, they would say that they are "committed to diversity and inclusion and helping the oppressed" and whatever else they were trained to say. But given what seems like a textbook example of oppressive discrimination, they throw their hands up and say "well, we don't know what to do because the law says we don't have to do anything." Are we really still supposed to believe they're "committed" to anything other than getting paid?

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

#472
post #24

Casteism is an elaborated form of Classism, which the West will not ban because the whole society depends on that discrimination to decide who’s “smart”

Casteism is much more worse. You or your children or your grandchildren atleast have a chance on moving up in class in a capitalistic society like West. In Casteist society you neither your descendants can ever leave your caste and will always face discrimination does not matter how much money you have.

Don’t worry, the west is working it’s way there slowly but surely

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

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Imagine you have two kids, and you only give one of them a cookie. Should you make up for it, by giving the next cookie to the kid who didn't get one? Of course! Should you do this even if the other kids kick and scream and say it's "bullshit"? Of course!

This isn't what AA/DEI policies do though. Working with your analogy AA is this:

You have two kids a boy and a girl. You give the boy a cookie, and the girl gets nothing. Eighty years later your adult grand kids buy cookies and give them to all the little girls in they neighborhood and explicitly exclude the boys because their great aunt didn't get a cookie.

This fixes nothing. The original girl got nothing, the later generation girls get a preference though there's no evidence that they were discriminated against in their own lives or even if they lack cookies. And later generation boys are harmed regardless of how deserving they are of receiving a cookie.

Your non-analogous analogies are strawmen and we really don't need to make analogies or strawmen if we want to discuss AA, DEI, or discrimination. We're all adults and are able to communicate without using analogies or metaphors.

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

#474
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone working on ML to determine possible avenues of response and debate given a prompt?

I would love to see some social networks silently implementing something that rewrites comments in a more diplomatic manner when displayed to everyone else.

That would be an interesting alternative to shadowbanning, especially if it came with a label ("The comment has been autotuned.") I'd like to see them offer the submitter some alternatives or provide some analysis before they post ("Please avoid sealioning").

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

#476
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.

There is literally no difference. They are both arbitrary categories of people based on ancestry that are used for discrimination.

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

#477

”Recently, talking about the incident to the New Yorker, Tanuja said, "A number of e-mails got sent to my VP, to the head of HR, to our chief diversity officer, to our CEO directly, claiming that the talk was creating a hostile workplace, that people felt unsafe, that the speaker was not qualified to speak on the topic and several other allegations." She also claimed that in tech companies, including Google, discrimi…

Quoted post unavailable.

How about instead of being dismissive, which is against the guidelines, you try being instructive?

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

#478
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t necessarily the food itself, it’s just that the food marks somebody as lower class. For example, not knowing how to order sushi or use chopsticks. Maybe a better example is not knowing anything about wine. People will think you’re stupid or have bad taste. What would you think of a coworker bringing bologna and ketchup sandwiches to the office?

I would assume they were frugal and trying to pay off a massive student loan debt. But I’m also from the Midwest and don’t know how to order sushi.

> I’m also from the Midwest and don’t know how to order sushi.

So was I, and everyone thought I was a barbarian.

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

#479
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is caste not a subset of national origin or race? Do Indians who discriminate on the basis of caste also discriminate against non-Indians of a lower caste, or is it solely confined to other Indians? If not directly a protected class, why would this not clearly be a disparate impact type of case?

Morally, it may be obvious to us that that's how it should be, but the law doesn't work like that. The law runs on precedents. Taken another way, the law is like code. The "architects" of the code are the legislature who write the laws, and the "programmers" are the judges, who decide exactly what goes in the if-else conditions, based on their interpretation of the law, and those become precedents the next time someo…

Applicable precedent is basically already set for this, especially in the liberal Ninth Circuit. This is the language of Bostock regarding LGBTQ discrimination, decided in 2020 6-3 and written by a conservative constitutional originalist (Gorsuch):

"An employer who fired an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit."

Replace "homosexual or transgender" with "different caste" and "different sex" with "different race/national origin/ancestry (in California, ancestry is a protected class)" and the passage quite obviously still applies:

An employer who fired an individual for being [from a different caste] fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a [different race]. [Race/National origin] plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

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

#480
post #427
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there. There is an interesting history behind this. When Christian missionaries first arrived in India to spread their religion (in the late 1700s/1800s) they were initially unable to make much progress, but then found success among lower caste Indians by promising them a life of equality…

Christian missionaries arrived in India much, much earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Thomas_Christians

In fact Saint Thomas (as in literally Doubting Thomas the apostle in the New Testament) was supposedly martyred in India, according to tradition at least.
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