>>Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism.
This is always fascinating to me. I would call it "culturalism", though I'll agree it does depend hugely on how the author meant it, and thus is open to interpretations. (I live in Canada now, and though I consider myself 99% "a Canadian" culturally, and very intentionally so, I'm still amused seeing people get Up in the arms when somebody makes a generalist comment about culture or societal norms of my country of birth, while I chuckle and say Yup. That is indeed the general culture and societal norm of that region.:)
I cannot change my race, or ethnicity, or country of birth (and "Indian" may refer to these immutable qualities) . But I can change my values and moral framework, my culture (and I have; consciously and determinedly so), and sometimes "Indian" or "Bosnian" or whatever is meant to refer to culture and dominant societal framework of that country. I don't believe I don't have right to judge other people's value framework, i.e. their culture. It is within each of our purview and ability and mandate to consider and evaluate and choose and as needed change our own value frameworks. If somebody's cultural values and habits say "it's ok to throw acid in girls eyes", or "people in this randomly selected immutable group are bad" I will judge that value framework or moral axiom or culture/society negatively and strive to change it and convince them otherwise.
Open to this argument. But every definition of race I’ve seen constructed to exclude caste seems contrived. The system has imprinted itself as far down as hair shaft diameter [1].
> Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism
Sympathetic to this. It’s like saying all white people are racist. It’s ingrained in the Indian culture, and I think anyone coming from India should be sensitive to the issue, but e.g. their kids born and raised here are obviously less susceptible. (This is true of all immigrants and their biases, though.)
There are some correlations between phenotypes and caste (and there is a lot of genetic stratification when you look at ancestry), but caste really cuts across race - there are lower caste groups in North India that look more "white" than upper caste groups in South India.
Many people from the Mediterranean and the surrounding areas are white-passing people of color. They've been flattened by the official US race forms into "white", but that's not the same thing as actually being white in terms of day-to-day lived experience.
Genes which are responsible for white skin were introduced to Europe by “immigrants” from the middle east. It’s a very diverse region due to groups of people moving in/out for thousands of years.
So whatever label you try to attach to them you’ll find plenty of people for whom it makes no sense (e.g. there are groups of people whose ancestors lived in the Levant for at least thousands of years and amongst whom red hair and blue eyes are more common than in most “European” populations)
Someone who is truly white-passing should be considered a person of paleness, not a person of color, no? Like sure they're an ethnic minority but racial minority?
I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to draw that distinction, but what I can say is that several people close to me fit that description and look at themselves as white-passing PoC, due to the ways they've been treated as a separate group from European-origin white people.
Steve Jobs is ethnically Syrian. Most people would call him white. The fact that some e.g. North Africans may fit the classic conception of whiteness better than many Europeans doesn’t dissolve every racial boundary therebetween.
Middle eastern and north african people are generally considered white here in Europe. Using 'white' just as synonymum for 'european-ancestry' is some recent US quirk.
If Jobs had grown up in (say) New England rather than California, there is no way he would be have been treated the same as white people there. He would have clearly stood out.
This relies on a fairly narrow view of what constitutes "race" or "racism".
The caste of a person is fundamentally based on their ancestry. Thus, discriminating based on caste is discriminating based on a person's ancestry. I think a lot of reasonable people would consider that to fall under the definition of "racism".
Yes, it's true that there is a lot of diversity of ethnic groups and e.g. skin color within castes in different regions of India. But just because people discriminate on certain aspects of race (ancestry) and not others (skin color) doesn't make it not racism.
> Casteism, while bad, is not racism. Saying casteism is ingrained in Indians on the other hand is racism.
Doesn't caste have some deep origins with race? I'm under the impression that thousands of years ago Indo-Europeans invaded an India populated by darker-skinned natives, and formed an elite that now finds some expression in caste. I could be wrong, though.
No that's mostly wrong. A group of Indo-Europeans did enter India, but North Indians were likely relatively lighter-skinned at that point already. It's true that Brahmins (the priestly caste which had the most privileged status in the ritual hierarchy, though they lacked the economic wealth of business-oriented castes) have the most Indo-European steppe ancestry (controlling for region, as North Indian lower castes have more steppe ancestry than South Indian Brahmins), but beyond that the correlation is much more complex. Many tribals and untouchables in North India have more Indo-European ancestry than the wealthy business castes for example.
The Caste system is as old as India itself, from ancient India: the varna, and the joti. The Indian Government itself recognizes how deep it goes, and based their Affirmative Action program upon it. To say it's not ingrained is simply choosing to ignore the problem is there. It's not saying "all Indians are casteist" but recognizing, much like the American South pre-Jim Crow, it was ingrained in society.
I’m from what would be considered a backwards caste in my ancestral state in India, and thus qualify for affirmative action quotas. So I’m actually very qualified to say so when I say that casteism isn’t ingrained in the diaspora.
Weren't castes based on race and conquering populations initially?
How would you describe casteism's status among expatriated Indian populations at a population level? Or is the fact one refers to a population at all to be help in contempt as "racism"?
> Weren't castes based on race and conquering populations initially?
We don't know the exact process, but there were several culturally, ancestrally and often phenotypically distinctive populations that encountered and mixed with each over millennia in the subcontinent and engaged in both conflict and cooperation, mostly for arable and pasturable land resources and access to water.
The societal power and identity structures and population genetic patterns that emerged from that process manifest in, but are not limited to, the caste system.
A latter such migration brought the Indo European language and customs, and it has had an outsized impact on elite cultural artifacts like religious literature. Colonial philologists discovered the Indo European linguistic connection between Sanskrit and European sacred languages and some became fetishized on it due to their own ancestral connection to it, while discounting the relevance of other South Asian ethnolinguistic groups.
In response, current Indian nativists have promoted the wholly unfounded idea that South Asia was closed to human in-migration until the Islamic era, and that Indian culture and peoples are strictly indigenous in ancestry.
Both the colonial theories of a single conquering Indo European invasion and the nationalist out-of-india theory are highly oversimplified and marketed towards their respective societies' ethno-nationalist impulses.
Oh, the Indus valley was always Indian and never had external population migrations or conquests that left an impact on culture and dynasties analogous to England's Norman conquest of 1066 and earlier Saxon migrations that impacted the culture to the present day, reflected in socioeconomic class distinctions?
How is all this diatribe related to the fact that AIT (not AMT) is a discarded theory, and jati vyavastha has nothing to do with imagined external conquests?
The statement was not a diatribe as it was neither forceful nor an attack, but I see that you perceive it as such and hence recommend re-reading it under a steelman approach.
1. My statement points out to another population that still has class-based bigotry from prior conquests and migration
2. If you note, you brought invasion into the conversation after my initial comment which neither supported nor refuted AIT, AMT, or other migration theories. I really don't care which theory people believe, because, ultimately, however history unfolded, it's today's Markovian state of the world that holds highest weight.
No. They're saying that an invasion that came and imposed a caste system is imagined. It was a reasonable hypothesis a hundred years ago but has long since been discredited.
Migration on the other hand is the current consensus theory.
> Weren't castes based on race and conquering populations initially?
No, that's a discredited theory from a century ago. The caste system as we know it began to come into being about two millennia ago, and the relative ancestries of some of the castes did to some extent reflect the impacts of invasions that had happened long before that. But the ancestry correlation is much stronger geographically and isn't even monotonic with respect to the traditional caste hierarchy.
> How would you describe casteism's status among expatriated Indian populations at a population level? Or is the fact one refers to a population at all to be help in contempt as "racism"?
If you're assuming that it's widespread amongst educated Indian-Americans in top tech companies, then yeah you're probably just engaging in racist stereotyping.
> If you're assuming that it's widespread amongst educated Indian-Americans in top tech companies
Apologies as I'm not in FAANG, so I am fairly uninformed as to their corporate plights and struggles. What population is using the Indian caste system as a basis for discrimination?
The ones I have direct anecdotes of myself involve strong subcultures with strong ethnic and caste ties (e.g. Punjabi Jatts in the Central Valley or to a lesser extent, Patels) sometimes retaining casteism (even inter-generationally). It also wouldn't surprise me if the Cisco allegations are accurate (less selective / meritocratic places are more likely to retain old prejudices), though the constant media claims of casteism in FAANG make me hesitant to take any allegations at face value.
Edit: to be clear, I don't want to imply those subcultures are always casteist - plenty of Jats and Patels are really chill and accepting, and to stereotype them as casteist would ironically be casteist in itself.
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Racism has technically been banned in the United States wholesale since the Civil Rights act, yet we struggle with the effects still today.
This is a step in a right direction, but it should be seen as only as the beginning.