Seattle may become the first U.S. city to outlaw caste:

One of Kshama Sawant’s earliest memories of the caste system was hearing her grandfather — a man she “otherwise loved very much” — utter a slur to summon their lower-caste maid.

The Seattle City Council member, raised in an upper-caste Hindu Brahmin household in India, was 6 when she asked her grandfather why he used that derogatory word when he knew the girl’s name. He responded that his granddaughter “talked too much.”

Now 50, and an elected official in a city far from India, Sawant has proposed an ordinance to add caste to Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws. If her fellow council members approve it Tuesday, Seattle will become the first city in the United States to specifically outlaw caste discrimination.

In India, the origins of the caste system can be traced back 3,000 years as a social hierarchy based on one’s birth. While the definition of caste has evolved over the centuries, under both Muslim and British rule, the suffering of those at the bottom of the caste pyramid – known as Dalits, which in Sanskrit means “broken” — has continued.

Sawant is a socialist, and she believes in social justice. Her family’s background is Tamil Brahmin, like Kamala Harris’ mother. Though currently married to Calvin Priest, Sawant’s surname is from her first Indian husband (who was not Brahmin).

Caste is a big deal in India, both socially and genetically. My two posts on my Substack are popular with Indians in part because I look at the issue with some detachment. Caste isn’t a thing in the US. But you wouldn’t know it by what the media is telling you.

Caste in California: Tech giants confront ancient Indian hierarchy:

The update came after the tech sector – which counts India as its top source of skilled foreign workers – received a wake-up call in June 2020 when California’s employment regulator sued Cisco Systems (CSCO.O) on behalf of a low-caste engineer who accused two higher-caste bosses of blocking his career.

Most media write-ups and social justice activism around caste focus on this single alleged case. Was this person discriminated against based on caste? We don’t know. Could he have been? Sure.

But the idea that caste discrimination is pervasive in the US is a manufactured narrative by a few activists, woke Indians, and useful non-Indian idiots who have never seen a social justice cause they could say no to (also some frog-nazis who just hate Indians on racial/ethnic competition grounds). Many of the “data” on caste discrimination comes from Equality Labs, an activist organization that used “snowball sampling.” That means the survey went out to people in the Equality Labs network. 

The Carnegie Foundation’s more methodologically sound survey paints a much more mixed picture. Basically, around half of Indian Americans are Hindu, and about half of Hindus have identification with a caste group. That identification is much stronger among the foreign-born.

Most Indian Americans were raised in India because of the massive wave of post-2000 immigration. When you say “Indian American,” you mean immigrants, not people like Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramaswamy. It’s entirely plausible that these immigrants have some sensibility of caste and might engage in discrimination…but there are severe problems with how this would play out in America more than theoretically.

– About 1% of Americans are of Indian origin, and only half are Hindu. The vast majority of Indians exist in an overwhelmingly non-subcontinental professional world and, to a great extent, a very cosmopolitan social world. Systemic caste discrimination’s social and cultural instruments are not operational in the US. There just aren’t levers that people can pull to engage in discrimination.

– About 60% of Hindus in India are “backward” or “scheduled castes.” The rest are basically “high caste” in some way. In the US, 80% of Indians are “high caste.” In India, 20% of Hindus are Dalit, formerly called outcastes. In the US, the figure is 1%. Not only is the social context for caste discrimination not operative in the US, but there are also very few “low castes” or “outcastes” to discriminate against.

– Caste discrimination still exists in a stark manner in rural India, but it is much more subtle in urban areas. There is self-segregation and self-dealing within communal networks. 90-95% of Indians marry within their jati, one of the thousands of subcastes in the subcontinent. The situation in the US among the immigrant community is very different. There is a strong skew toward “progressive” and “modern” outlooks, and many Indian techies are married to people from different jatis or regions. I haven’t seen a survey, but if you are familiar with the H1-B class, you know this is true. By definition people from different ethnolingusitic groups are from different castes, and this is very common.

The problem of course, is that most Americans are not familiar with the subtle gradations among Indians. Brown is brown. From an American perspective, a Bengali Brahmin married to a Gujarati Brahmin is an endogamous marriage. In India, it would be exogamous and against caste principles just a few generations ago (it is much more common in urban professional circles in India today, though).

More generally, Americans have certain perceptions of caste that are often contradicted by reality.

On the left is Rho Khanna, a Punjabi Hindu. On the right is Nikki Haley, a Punjabi Christian from a Sikh background. Khanna is a Khatri, which is definitely a “higher” caste than the Jats, from which Haley’s family comes. But, because Haley is much closer to “passing” for white than Khanna, I am 100% sure most non-brown Americans who are “woke to caste,” which is probably less than 5%, would guess that she is “higher caste.”

But wait, it gets more complicated. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Jats:

Jats are classified as Other Backward Class (OBC) in seven of India’s thirty-six States and UTs, namely Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. However, only the Jats of Rajasthan – excluding those of Bharatpur district and Dholpur district – are entitled to reservation of central government jobs under the OBC reservation. In 2016, the Jats of Haryana organized massive protests demanding to be classified as OBC in order to obtain such affirmative action benefits.

In the state of Punjab, where Haley’s parents are from, Jats are the dominant caste politically and in terms of land ownership. But in other states, they are not so powerful, so their status within the caste hierarchy is conditional on where they are. Regarding religious status, there are arguments about the Jats, but most would argue that they are Sudras, the lowest of the official castes (Dalits are outside of the caste system). But in many parts of India, ritually Sudra castes are the dominant ones politically and regarding rural land ownership (Patels, who are quite prospery in the US, are ritual Sudras).

Americans are taught a simple model of Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (commoners and merchants) and Sudras (servants and peasants). But the reality is in India, caste is operationalized as 3,000 local and regional jatis. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu there are two significant groups of Brahmins, Iyers and Iyengars, and within both there are subgroups that traditionally do not intermarry.

This stuff is extremely complicated, and most Indians don’t know how caste functions in other parts of India. But we expect this woman can make decisions about caste discrimination:

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Several things are going on here.

First, caste is one of the few things many Americans know about Hindus. But many Indian American Hindus consciously do not tell their children about their caste because they are aware it doesn’t matter in the US, and the type of Indians who come to this country are often somewhat embarrassed by the institution (though most do know caste identities/origins by surname if they are born in India). I have a friend who did not know his caste, and I guessed based on his genotype (he had to call his mother to ask what I was talking about).

Second, some groups, like subcontinental Muslims, seem to think Hindu Americans are very casteist. I don’t want to explore the issue deeply, but subcontinental Muslims and Hindus hate each other, and in the US many of them have very negative perceptions of the other group. So, when someone who looks Hindu, like me, talks about caste, white people listen, because I look Hindu, but my name makes it clear to any South Asian I’m from a Muslim background. Brown Muslims have strong, often uninformed, opinions on caste, and the “brown face” makes their views more credible to non-browns.

Third, this points out what happens once the interrogation of caste becomes the norm: non-Hindu brown people will start to be asked about it. After all, we look Hindu, unless we ostentatiously dress in ways that signal we are not (hijab). Caste is just a highly racialized institution, so you will have the farce of DEI professionals who are not brown interrogating confused Indian Americans who grew up in the US about their caste status.

The whole situation frustrates me because many lies buttress this new truth that people are starting to get woke to. It’s really harder when you see the consent of the dull masses manufactured out of whole cloth right before your eyes.

This particular issue won’t affect non-browns very much because no non-brown will ever be asked about caste discrimination. But, it will serve as a template to bringing every social justice concern in the whole world to the US. This means more jobs for DEI bureaucrats but a total swamp in terms of America’s genuinely diverse society. We’ll be drowning in identity categories soon. We need to stop dividing Americans. 

Note: When Paragh Agrawal became CEO of Twitter frog-Nazis, brown anti-caste SJWs started decrying Brahin supremacy. The problem is Agrawal is a clear non-Brahmin Bania name. It would be like people assuming Ron DeSantis is of Mayflower stock. Yes, they’re that stupid.