Regulating caste discrimination on the West Coast

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: caste discrimination in California.

NICK EICHER, HOST: In recent years, the Supreme Court has heard arguments about sex as a protected class extending to homosexuality and transgenderism—meaning that employers can’t discriminate on the basis of sex in their hiring decisions. Well, now the West Coast is experimenting with a new form of a protected class, and this one has to do with race and religion.

REICHARD: The caste system is a hereditary social hierarchy most common in Indian and Hindu societies. It determines what jobs someone can get, who they can marry, and even what they can eat. Now, as more South Asians immigrate to the United States, some say discrimination on the basis of caste is coming with them.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy has the story.

MARY MUNCY, REPORTER: Sujatha Ramni lives in Seattle. She’s a volunteer for the Coalition of Seattle Indian Americans.

SUJATHA RAMNI: I'm from the dominant caste community, I'm an ally, and I can definitely corroborate a lot of the casteist practices within my community.

Ramni has never been the victim of caste discrimination herself. As a Brahmin, she’s part of the highest caste, but she sees it all around her.

RAMNI: You will see on the Indian Facebook, social groups people asking, saying, hey, I want the I want a Brahmin nanny for my kids. Oh, I'm looking for you know, someone who a Brahmin who will come and cook two to three times a week.

She worked at Microsoft in the 2000s when affirmative action was first starting to cover oppressed caste communities in India. She says Microsoft workers who belonged to dominant castes derided the decision in a social chat.

RAMNI: The conversation was at such—such an egregious level, that many oppressed cast members who were in the social discussion group actually complained to HR.

But Microsoft didn’t have any policies to deal with caste discrimination. HR didn’t know what to do.

RAMNI: All they did was shut down that social discussion group.

But that’s starting to change.

Over the past few years, a handful of universities from across the country started implementing anti-caste discrimination policies. Then earlier this year, Seattle became the first city to specifically add caste to its non-discrimination ordinance. It went into effect last week, and now California could become the first state to outlaw caste discrimination.

RAMNI: Caste happens across religion, and within religion as well. So it this isn't, you know, the case of a religious discrimination. This is a case of caste discrimination.

The Pew Research Center says the caste system started within Hinduism about 3,000 years ago. But now, a majority of Indians identify within a caste, regardless of their religion.

ANIL WAGDE: My name is Anil Wagde I am a spokesperson for Ambedkar International Center USA.

There are four main castes in the system, and those can be divided into more than 5,000 sub-castes. People considered to be the lowest of the low are outside the caste system altogether. Think of it like a pyramid.

WAGDE: As you move up, the upper caste is increasing order of reverence. And as you go down, it's an increasing order of contempt.

The Brahmin are the priests at the top of the pyramid, followed by the warriors, the traders, and the workers. Those four general castes make up about 30 percent of India’s population.

Anyone outside of that system belongs to the Dalit caste. Dalits are sometimes called “untouchables.” They make up the rest of the population.

WAGDE: Women actually do not have a place in the caste system. They have to procreate and so on, so they have to have the women with them, and women are treated as property. They have no choice.

Individually, women are in the lowest class—just one above the untouchables. But as members of a family-centric culture, they are associated with their father’s caste until they marry, then they become associated with their husband’s caste.

So, though Ramni is associated with the highest caste, historically, she wouldn’t have been able to get an education or work outside the home. She also couldn’t have participated in many of the religious ceremonies that Brahmin men perform.

It’s a watertight system where people must marry within their caste.

Ramni says to imagine a multi-story building where every floor is a caste.

RAMNI: You are born into that particular floor of a multi-story building and you live there all your life and you die in it.

In 2018, the Pew Research Center found that almost three million people from India lived in the United States, making them the third-largest immigrant group in the country.

But despite the growing presence of Indians in the U.S., experts don’t agree on whether caste discrimination is a problem that needs to be legislated.

SUDHA JAGANNATHAN: My name is Sudha Jagannathan. I am a board member at COHNA.

COHNA is the Coalition of Hindus of North America. The group says caste discrimination is not as big of a problem as some people say.

JAGANNATHAN: My personal experience is that I have not faced caste discrimination ever.

Meanwhile, a civil rights group advocating for lower castes called Equality Labs found that two out of three Indians known as untouchables experienced discrimination in the workplace, and a quarter of them said they’d experienced verbal or physical assault.

But a Carnegie Endowment survey found that just 5 percent of Indian Americans have experienced discrimination, and it criticized the Equality Labs Survey for its small sample size.

There is even debate over whether caste discrimination is a problem in India itself. A Pew Research Center survey found that only about 20 percent of people in India have experienced caste discrimination in the last year.

Pushpita Prasad is also with COHNA.

PUSHPITA PRASAD: When you pass laws, they need to be based in data, systemic data, there is no data that shows that it’s caste discrimination in the U.S.

Prasad goes on to say that the laws harm Hindus by characterizing the group as discriminatory. She says while caste discrimination may happen on an individual basis, it’s not systemic.

In any case, there are people who report casteist attitudes in their communities and workplaces, and they want American law to start prohibiting it.

Here’s Wagde again.

WAGDE: And as the as the immigration from the—from the oppressed community increases, this problem is going to increase. And it's better to have solutions for the problems before the proper problems kind of blow up.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.