My Caste

The author wrote his post from an inspiring standpoint, so my comment does not come from a place of criticism. His achievement is worth celebrating on its own grounds.

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It's been 6 years for me in the US, and no one has asked me my caste. Even in India, the only time someone could have inferred my caste, was when someone indirectly asked my university JEE (SAT) scores in my first few weeks of freshman year. My scores were as high as 'general' (upper class) candidates, so they'd quickly assess me as 'one who deserves his spot here'. Still, I was pretty transparent about my caste status. Afterall, I was one of the lucky few who'd never been discriminated on caste. Hell, I didn't know I belonged to the umbrella term 'OBC' until I started filling out application forms for universities.

Their inquiry, it was less so malice, and more so a sense of unfairness about a system that was supposed to be strictly meritocratic. But a few weeks side-by-side in a dorm made everyone intimately aware of the poverty of the lowest class. Soon, no one would dare think that the barely-English-conversant SC/ST, who came from a town without running water, was on the same level playing field as them. There were admittedly a few grifters and abusers of this system. All castes were equally bewildered by that group.

The Indian-American diaspora in the US remains untarnished by caste (Can't comment on Canada). I make this as both of statement of faith, anecdotal personal experience and a statically aligned truth seeker. OBC is an artificially created term from less than 100 years ago. The communities have nothing in common, except a tag of underdevelopment forced onto us.

The vast vast majority of Indians in the US are upper caste and the vast majority of tall NBA players had access to protein growing up. SC/ST communities and many poor OBC communities are backwards because their problems begin at nutrition, K-12 schooling and cultural emphasis on lower-income professions. By the time you make it to freshman year of college, you have mostly risen past the burden of your caste. This also means, that trying to increase visibility of the community at the highest levels, does diddly-squat for those grappling with crippling poverty and the worst of caste discrimination.

Leaving outrage-driving topics like IQ, discrimination and generational trauma aside for a minute, vast statistical gaps within communities can still manifest due to emergent properties of systems converging to their nearest stable state.

Caste discrimination is terrible in lower-class India. People actively try to move beyond Caste in middle class India. Caste is unheard of in upper class India. And the upper-most caste of operates at the family level, deeming everyone from their own caste and otherwise to be similarly 'pedestrian'. American immigration policy ensures that only middle and upper class Indian can move to the US. This means that every Indian who arrives in the US, is preconditioned to want to move past caste.

If it's a blank to fill in, then I write "Irish/Scottish".

It's never a blank.

Your above point itself proves what I said: "dueling literature"! Heh.

that's the nonsense question. This isn't 100%, but there were Google managers who prided themselves on having very disproportionately large numbers of black or female employees. SRE groups, especially.

In addition, there are plenty of teams that are almost all Chinese. Or Indian. Or, of course, white male.