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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

#501

Post by conductr »

kazinator wrote: post #465
duxup wrote: 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…

> If he was white this would have been dealt with sooner. I think that if we more or less accurately map the situation into an analogous one involving the class system among whites in North America, then the "lower caste" white person would not even be working there.

I thought this too. “White” has a lot of gradients in the US

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

#502

Post by rendall »

elsonrodriguez wrote: post #492
outworlder wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

This has been the case for a while. I've posted videos on here of white supremacists literally saying white people are a "superior bloodline", only to be met with "both sides" pedantry and apologetics. Part of this is because engineers tend to take devil's advocate positions as a matter of due diligence, but the other part is because of the metaphorical smoke that is this article and countless others showing systemic…

> I've posted videos on here of white supremacists literally saying white people are a "superior bloodline", only to be met with "both sides" pedantry and apologetics.

Interesting. I'd like to read those threads. Can you post a link, please?

As an aside, you know that all of our entire comment histories are browsable and searchable, right? I couldn't find them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=elsonrodriguez&next=...

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

#503

Post by yrgulation »

bergenty wrote: post #491
yrgulation wrote: post #452

Here in europe, we have a large minority called Romany (derogatorily known as Gypsy). An indian people that apparently was a caste in india, migrated to europe some 400 years ago, later on ending up as slaves and then finally getting freed (to a certain extent). Sadly this group of indians is heavily misunderstood and massively discriminated against, and there is little to no effort in understanding their culture or…

Pretty sure the Romani were never slaves. Didn’t they always just live on the fringes of society?

Unfortunately they were:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Romania

https://www.europeana.eu/en/blog/roma-slavery-in-romania-a-h...

Also suffered greatly at the policies of Romanian fascist and German nazi governments:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-o...

As a result of that they lived on the fringes of society once “freed”. Basically they were not allowed to own land or property and when “employed” they were “paid” in food and accommodation - another form of slavery. Modern day the situation is improving but literally anywhere in europe they travel they are either marginalised or forced to hide their identity. The issue is deeply rooted. It really is an ongoing tragedy that europeans flat-out fail to acknowledge and repair.

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

#504

Post by conductr »

pm90 wrote: post #313
duxup wrote: 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 think this is some sort of malicious conspiracy or evidence of anti whiteness or whatever. Processes are created for the common case and when there is an uncommon scenario, it is new territory for everyone involved and someone has to be responsible. In most corporate environments, nobody wants to be that person so inaction is generally the norm unless the course of action is straightforward or has precedent.

True. This explains maybe the first 5 minutes of the issue. In practice, HR usually leans on Legal for these types of questions. It likely boiled down to “do we want to be sued by a whole team/department because of a bad manager doing unethical thing? Or do we want to get sued by that one manager?” They had to weigh the risk of each since it probably wasn’t clear either way which was the legal thing to do (much like the debates here). They chose wisely in terms of risk and that’s why it came off as “legal’s” choice.

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

#505

Post by googlryas »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #328

”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…

I wonder if we should coin the term "Brahmin fragility" - I assume this same behavior, if demonstrated by white people, would be labeled as "white fragility".

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

#506

Post by statguy »

hef19898 wrote: post #178
paxys wrote: 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…

If I remember correctly, Sikhs are standing outside the caste system as well.

In principle yes, but in practice no: https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/who-are-dalit-sikhs-n...

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

#507

Post by statguy »

nharmonia wrote: post #230
FactolSarin wrote: post #41

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?

Interestingly, I grew up in India but have no clue what my caste is. I could probably ask my parents and they'd know but it has never come up. Religion and sub ethnicity came up a lot more often while growing up. Funnily enough the only ones who have ever asked me about my caste were white people. I had always assumed the caste system was a thing of the past but looking at how it's still present even at companies in…

I am guessing that you are upper caste, which is why it didn't really come up. If you were lower caste it would have been a different story.

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

#508

Post by trs8080 »

morelisp wrote: post #417
pnathan wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s a blind spot in DEI and intersectionality; the idea that an oppressed class can also be an oppressor class, and that it’s not an attribute of the perpetrator’s class at all, but in fact, situational and individual. what's really bleakly funny is that you're right - that's how it's taken, but that's actually a major _point_ of intersectionality.

Well, "DEI" in the end is the neoliberalization of (the capitalist-corporate-compatible parts of) intersectionality, so it's not really surprising that something of significant value was lost in the appropriation.

How does one "neoliberalize" intersectionality? What parts of intersectionality are "capitalist-corporate-compatible"?

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

#509

Post by googlryas »

anoonmoose wrote: post #419
cortesoft wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should only things you can't change be protected?

A tautology I suppose, but, because you can't change them. You didn't choose it and it's immutable. Not fair to discriminate against someone for something they can't control. This is, of course, personal opinion of mine.

We do discriminate against things people can't control, like intelligence. If you have an IQ of 80, I can almost guarantee you will not be accepted to a college to become an architect, lawyer, or doctor.

But also, discriminating against things people can control is really just one party trying to apply soft power over another, and I am generally against it. You might be able to legally say you can't work at this company if you like to go bowling in your free time, but I don't think it would be a right thing to do.

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

#510

Post by jl6 »

registeredcorn wrote: post #450
jl6 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, class and ethnicity and accent intersect to create some similarly “invisible to HR” discrimination situations between people who would otherwise be lumped together as white.

Could you explain what you mean, a bit more?

Class discrimination is a big thing, and it’s related to accent discrimination and somewhat to ethnicity too. There is no shortage of stereotypes associated with regional accents (apologies, but to illustrate: cockney = untrustworthy; West Country = unsophisticated; Yorkshire = blunt, miserly; RP = haughty). Accent is judged alongside class (which I won’t attempt to define here). Ethnicity comes into the picture with groups such as travellers (who have only recently been recognized as an ethnic group) and showmen (who disclaim being one), and Jewish ethnicity is also often ignored as “just another kind of white” (see David Baddiel’s book Jews Don’t Count). Then there are Scottish and Welsh people and maybe even sub-national groupings like Cornish, where ethnicity and accent and class interact in complex ways.

These groupings have fuzzy edges and can be hard to disentangle as identity markers (and thus hard to make anti-discrimination rules against), which is fertile ground for under-the-radar discrimination.

The UK has multi-dimensional racism!

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