Newsom vetoes a proposed ban on caste discrimination in California

Caste discrimination is an issue in the home country, but it is pretty cut and dry here in the US.

I have the rare distinction of not being upper caste, but 'passing' as one. I get to hear the conversations of upper castes as a fly on the wall. But in some groups I am open about my caste, letting me see the other side.

Honestly, caste is total non-factor in the US. There are cliques within the Indian community, but caste is not the main favor. The main type of discrimination is between FOB immigrants vs American-Indians.Other than that, American-Indians are fully integrated, to the point of barely knowing caste, let alone discriminating based on it.

Among immigrants, IIT vs non-IITian ivy-league style snobbishness can happen. Second, those who did their undergrad in the US usually come from the rich class of india, and innocently as it may be, end up maintaining those rich-people cliques. Grad students are often less-well off and can feel left out. both groups harbor resentment towards Infosys/TCS style L1/H1bs who are seen to abuse immigration loopholes. Lastly, cliques are linguistic. It is less discriminatory, more based on feeling comfortable communicating with those who speak the same native language.

But none of these are based on caste. Yes, caste may be correlated with class given their economic differences. But people get the casual directions wrong and the correlation is much smaller then these accusations claim. Indians in the US are obsessed with merit. If you can signal merit, nothing else matters.

Note: Urban and Northern American whites are largely of English and German descent. Southern, Appalachia and flyover state whites are overwhelmingly scots-irish. Due to clear regional cultural and accent differences, it's considered acceptable to ridicule and discriminate against scots-irish Americans from 'bumfuck nowhere'. These groups don't inter-marry and the economic differences between both groups are vast. Yet, the average American doesn't understand this. They consider themselves 'woke' and happily continue discriminating on visible class signals. What they don't realize, is that even among whites, the class signals are strongly correlated with sub-racial identity & genetically distinct people.

You may not call it caste, but that's caste. At least with Indian class differences, both aspire to be better urban-white Americans. On the other hand, with whites, one group starts off an urban-white American while the other group is denied their identity despite being a so-called native of independent USA.

I don't think that was quite the argument. Per Sen. Wahab: >It’s largely believed that California’s civil rights law does cover caste to some degree, because some people will put it under the concept of ancestry or race. But caste is very specific; it encompasses more than just those two factors. We are just trying to clarify the law to explicitly include protection against discrimination based on a person’s caste, which we define as a system of social stratification, in which people are characterized by hereditary status, social barriers and other forms of segregation.

The intent seems to be to ensure no future confusion based upon something we all presently read in the law. Given how Gavin Newsom has recently been publicly at odds with judges over the interpretation of laws and that we've seen interpretations change radically over time (2nd amendment!), it's hardly without precedent.

>predictable second-order effect of this explicit enumeration... and those doing the accounting will find the easiest path through it.

Rather than comparing to consumer labeling laws, what about comparing to other presently enumerated forms of discrimination (and information collection requirements). Do you think we are presently harming minorities with these same second order effects from explicitly listing race and requirements to measure race in hiring? Or that non-heterosexual folk were harmed by explicitly adding sexual orientation (courts had previously inferred it based on prohibiting sex based discrimination)?

Indian politicians will try to maximize votes overall. Only in a district with supermajority caste-culture population would they be able to prefer their caste over others someone in campaigning, and why wouldn't they do that anyway?

As it stands now, an elected Indian official is free to appoint only same-caste officials when said officials are also Indian. Do they pr do they not do that now?

Because making something double illegal is a waste of time at best, and at worst would be actually harmful if there are unforeseen negative consequences.

If, as you have indicated, those provisions are already redundant under California law - of course I would. You seen to be asking this question as if you expect to catch someone in a contradiction, but I don't think you're going to find people support one situation but not the other.