This is why America was intended to be a melting pot: so that cultural baggage could be left behind.
Complete waste of resources just to demonstrate how progressive the city is.
I don't understand your comment. We agree that caste discrimination is bad and should be "left behind," but you don't want laws passed about that?
It feels like you're saying "things should be this way, so I assume that they already are" rather than "things should be this way, so let's construct laws that encourage that."
If you start with the presumption that anti-discrimination laws already exist, then you may see this law as merely performative -- it didn't outlaw anything that was actually permitted prior.
But it could also be that such a redundant law is part of an broader acculturation process, and so has more cultural, rather than legal value.
But... caste based employment discrimination is (arguably in court) permitted in the US. Discrimination protections are only for categories specified and caste isn't specified.
It's been drifting from melting pot to multiculturalism for (at least) the past few decades - distinct independent cultures that interact with each other, without leaving the baggage behind.
From what I understand, it is a problem in the tech sphere. But caste is not a protected class because it should not exist here. So, depending on how this law is written, it could extend anti-discrimination protections to groups that otherwise don't have it at the moment.
I disagree that America was intended to be a melting pot. That idea came later. It was intended to be a federation of Christian, culturally English states.
I don't think anything was intended, it just happened due to historical facts. US in the meantime invented its own class systems - income/wealth you have, university you went to etc.
And of course skin color in the past that it still struggles to shed off (every US person of asian origin I've met while backpacking complained to me how its great the progress black minority receives, but they feel left behind and much more exposed to racism).
People really don't need much to look down on different others, I'd say its still part of human nature.
every US person of asian origin I've met while backpacking complained to me how its great the progress black minority receives, but they feel left behind and much more exposed to racism
Is there any group in the US who doesn't feel, on average, that they are the most discriminated-against?
Most of the people of Asian origin I've met have been happy that the civil rights fought for mainly by black Americans before them helped them as well. This is an economic class issue. Lower class people of any race are more likely to hate other races and blame them (and other people generally) for their problems.
A melting pot means that everything (everyone) assimilates to the majority. That's not really what America was intended to be, but it is what a large part of the population wants it to be.
> This is why America was intended to be a melting pot:
That's really a concept that manifested much later in American history. By no means was it intended to be a "melting pot" from the very start, or even the first 1/3 of its existence.
How is it simultaneously a good thing for caste systems to be annihilated in immigrant communities, and a bad thing to annihilate caste systems in immigrant communities?
Seattle is doing tons of stuff. They recently upzoned a huge amount of the city, approved ranked choice voting, approved social housing, expanded rail, fixed a major bridge failure before it failed, and plenty more.
Crime rates are down, the city has grown astronomically, etc.
Look at these graphs. Crime has consistently fallen.
The article you linked is discussing a recent uptick after a stable period of low crime. They've cherry picked the statistics to not show the huge drop in crime over the past 40 years.
I have. I've lived here for nearly 40 years. I've been active in politics here and I've experience with both the data and the anecdotes.
Seattle has less crime then it did 40, 30, and 20 years ago. The past three years were exceptional and the report does indicate increased rates of violent crime.
But we had a global pandemic, a contentious election, a spotlight on police brutality, etc.
I guess you can make the call, whether you think that's a trend or an anomaly, but when I look at the data I see us having a crime rate half of what it used to be, with an uptick in the most unusual years in a generation.
Read this report by a group strongly incentivized to and rewarded by a creation of the perception that crime is high, about how high you should perceive crime to be.
When you learned how to use primary sources did they teach you to take them at face value without any consideration of the purpose, goals, constraints, and motivations of the people who created them?
I'm curious what other source you would even reference in this situation? Also do you really think the police intentionally misreport numbers that make themselves look bad?
I doubt there's a single trustworthy authoritative source that presents a complete picture. I'm not saying completely ignore or dismiss what the police say, but consider it in its context as one piece of information, published by an organization with its own needs and biases, rather than the single defining instance.
Police definitely lie a lot, and invest significant resources in outreach and PR, which we would straightforwardly call propaganda if someone else was doing it. The motivations are probably more complex than just what makes them look bad. And the mechanisms are probably more sophisticated than simply publishing completely false data in a report.
> Also do you really think the police intentionally misreport numbers that make themselves look bad?
Social housing is a horrible idea and it only passed because voter turnout is so low. Seattle is doing a lot of nothing and anyone living here can tell you that.
Metro resident since 2015 here, aside from rising home prices just about everything has gotten better for me. Expanded transit, light rail will be within walking distance of my house in 2 years, better food and restaurants, incredible schools for the future with kids, etc. That doesn't happen because people sit around with their thumbs up their butts.
