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My Caste

cs.toronto.edu

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Re: My Caste

#41

Post by isanjay »

xmonkee wrote: post #30
isanjay wrote: post #7

> I was, however, not ready to publicly declare it until I received tenure as it seemed too risky Risk of what ? Seems a bit exaggerating. > There are at most five tenure-track faculty who belong to OBC category among all the faculty members in North America's "top" 50 CS departments > What evidence do I have to support my claim? And then continues to show castes of faculty at IIT. Am I missing something here ?

>Risk of what ? Seems a bit exaggerating. There is a whole paragraph answering this question: ``` An uninitiated might be forgiven for not realizing that caste-based discrimination is rampant in India (yes, even among faculty members at IITs), and perhaps worse among Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). Therefore, there was always fear of what would a potential letter writer or someone on tenure evaluation committee think of…

> So, this is a claim they believe is true and would be happy to be corrected

You don't claim something on based on beliefs. He already has evidence on IIT. Why talk about North America if he doesn't have data to back up it up ?

Re: My Caste

#43

Post by karaterobot »

isanjay wrote: post #7

> I was, however, not ready to publicly declare it until I received tenure as it seemed too risky Risk of what ? Seems a bit exaggerating. > There are at most five tenure-track faculty who belong to OBC category among all the faculty members in North America's "top" 50 CS departments > What evidence do I have to support my claim? And then continues to show castes of faculty at IIT. Am I missing something here ?

> Am I missing something here ?

Yes, I think so. The evidence he's showing demonstrates the claim he made (within a reasonable level of accuracy given the data). The point is that the number of OBC professors is much smaller than you'd expect, ceteris paribus, and one likely explanation is caste discrimination in top-rated North American CS departments.

Re: My Caste

#44

Post by dotnet00 »

cleandreams wrote: post #8

I had a student in my class who wrote about being from a "low caste" background. So when a friend hosted a woman from India on her podcast who said there was so caste discrimination in India I spoke up about this. The podcast guest said that the fact that anyone in the west mentioned caste discrimination, even within western tech companies, was an act of racism against Indian culture and reflected colonial judgements…

I would've been in the same camp of denying it and treating it as just a thing westerners exaggerate and to an extent that is the case. But at the same time caste discrimination is still very much a thing.

The way I've seen people in the west envision it is that everyone is keenly aware of their caste, where they are in society and what they're "allowed" to do. But it isn't that blatant to me, so I felt impressions of caste discrimination were overblown. I was raised to be caste-blind (literally wasn't taught the differences to be able to even subconsciously be biased) so I projected that upon everyone.

However as I've interacted with other Indians, I have noticed that our conversations tend to be very different. I don't really care about where they're from, barely care about their name beyond how to refer to them etc, mostly interested in what they do professionally and what they're interested in while their questions tend to focus on where I'm from and what my family history is.

My understanding is that my caste is fairly mundane so I haven't really noticed any discrimination towards myself, but I think I've atleast noticed that many people have a lot of interest in identifying the caste at least, which can obviously lead to discrimination pretty easily.

Re: My Caste

#45

Post by wtmt »

The caste system in India is layered like onions. The author says he was born as OBC (Other Backward Classes), but that's not the lowest in the overall scheme. SC (Scheduled Castes) are considered lower in the hierarchy. ST (Scheduled Tribes) are considered even lower (there are variations across states and regions, so please take this with a pinch of salt). While the atrocities and punishments by "upper" caste people on "lower" caste people continue, even OBCs oppress SCs and STs quite badly, sometimes along with other "upper" caste people and sometimes by themselves. [1] It's a sad fact that the oppressed themselves don't understand it well enough to avoid oppressing others. If they could get together and lift each other up, things could be very different (or at least not as bad as they have been and are).

[1]: Searching for news on atrocities and punishments on "dalits" would yield many results from as recent as a few days to long ago in the past.

Re: My Caste

#46

Post by biogene »

This whole idea is completely wrong, in my opinion. You first need to demonstrate why your sampling model/methodology (collection of top50 NA CS departments) will lead to an error-free way to establish a discrimination type mechanism of selection. There is a near absence of people of South east asian origin in the NFL, but I don't think the NFL is doing so on discriminatory grounds. The end result is under-representation, but the underlying mechanism is not one of malicious discrimination by the talent scouts.

The point is, lets discuss evidence of discrimination rather than a weird "this can only be possible with discrimination" argument.

Re: My Caste

#47

Post by xmonkee »

isanjay wrote: post #41
xmonkee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Risk of what ? Seems a bit exaggerating. There is a whole paragraph answering this question: ``` An uninitiated might be forgiven for not realizing that caste-based discrimination is rampant in India (yes, even among faculty members at IITs), and perhaps worse among Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). Therefore, there was always fear of what would a potential letter writer or someone on tenure evaluation committee think of…

> So, this is a claim they believe is true and would be happy to be corrected You don't claim something on based on beliefs. He already has evidence on IIT. Why talk about North America if he doesn't have data to back up it up ?

>You don't claim something on based on beliefs.

What's your evidence for this claim?

Re: My Caste

#48

Post by dotnet00 »

isanjay wrote: post #41
xmonkee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Risk of what ? Seems a bit exaggerating. There is a whole paragraph answering this question: ``` An uninitiated might be forgiven for not realizing that caste-based discrimination is rampant in India (yes, even among faculty members at IITs), and perhaps worse among Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). Therefore, there was always fear of what would a potential letter writer or someone on tenure evaluation committee think of…

> So, this is a claim they believe is true and would be happy to be corrected You don't claim something on based on beliefs. He already has evidence on IIT. Why talk about North America if he doesn't have data to back up it up ?

Are the Indians in NA somehow fundamentally different? It isn't like we've left the rest of our social/cultural practices and ills behind upon moving to the West. Thus it makes sense that if there's evidence of caste based discrimination at the highest levels of education in India, there is likely such discrimination in Indian communities in the West too.

Re: My Caste

#49

Post by [deleted] »

biogene wrote: post #46

This whole idea is completely wrong, in my opinion. You first need to demonstrate why your sampling model/methodology (collection of top50 NA CS departments) will lead to an error-free way to establish a discrimination type mechanism of selection. There is a near absence of people of South east asian origin in the NFL, but I don't think the NFL is doing so on discriminatory grounds. The end result is under-representa…

[deleted]

Re: My Caste

#50

Post by sulam »

biogene wrote: post #46

This whole idea is completely wrong, in my opinion. You first need to demonstrate why your sampling model/methodology (collection of top50 NA CS departments) will lead to an error-free way to establish a discrimination type mechanism of selection. There is a near absence of people of South east asian origin in the NFL, but I don't think the NFL is doing so on discriminatory grounds. The end result is under-representa…

So you're saying the Indian caste system is well partitioned with respect to capability for tenure-producing work across a wide range of disciplines taught in IIT schools?
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