> not OK for a lower-caste person to discriminate against a Brahmin

Unfortunately, U.S. discrimination laws have a long history of replacing perceived, hard to demonstrate/prove discrimination with actual explicit discrimination in the other direction... so although you may be morally correct, you're likely to be legally incorrect.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

I won't speak to the situation in India, but in America it is certainly possible for somebody from a 'lower caste' to be in a position of authority over somebody from a 'higher caste'. If for no other reason than because Americans with no understanding of the caste system might find the 'lower caste' person to be more competent and capable than the 'higher caste' person and promote accordingly.

This is exactly how discrimination persists. They’re not “using the very language that furthers caste segregation”, they’re describing reality.

Caste exists. It didn’t need to, but people invented it. Pretending it isn’t real and doesn’t affect people’s lives is not how to fix this.

It isn't real. That's the point. It's made up arbitrary classification. Continuing to use it by calling people "lower-caste" is how it persists.

You're not describing reality since there is no such thing as a "lower-caste person". Stop thinking, talking, and acting as if there is.

You can't legislate your way out of it, you just stop doing it, including the language.

It actually has a genetic basis. According to David Reich in his outstanding book Who we are and how we got here, the varna/jati castes and sub-castes have been able to maintain a level of endogamy stricter than Ashkenazi Jews for millennia and there is 2-3x more genetic distance between two different jati groups coexisting in the same village than between North and South Europeans.

So basically you had a group of invaders who came to India, proclaimed themselves both racially and morally superior, and enforced a rigid system of miscegeneation laws to prevent themselves from being diluted. Makes the wildest dreams of white supremacists tame in comparison.

Of course, none of that justifies the discrimination. I don't know how to fix it either, India tried but hasn't succeeded. B. R. Ambedkar, the author of India's Constitution came to the conclusion that Hinduism is unreformable and that former untouchables like himself should convert to Buddhism, but that hasn't happened on a large scale. Subhas Chandra Bose proposed to abolish the caste system through socialism and inter-caste marriages, but he was an authoritarian bordering on Fascist.

Your idea of abolishing the concept of caste system is noble, but it has been tried and failed in India. Just as you could say making people color-blind would solve racism (setting aside the problem of reparations for past injustice), but how do you make it happen? It's a social problem, and there are seldom simple solutions. Banning the language won't make it disappear, just as (effectively) banning the N-word hasn't made racism go away.

Genetic differences don’t mean it’s not made up. It’s not like we studied people’s genes and went “hm yes you can divide this ethnic group into four subgroups, Science!” People made a system where they divided themselves, and over time that division resulted in some small but noticeable amount of genetic divergence.

But there are, like, trillions of different genetic differences between all of us, and you could draw totally different lines around people and find a genetic basis if you really wanted. The genetic basis is used to justify the arbitrary groups; the groups are not an emergent phenomenon of the genetics.

You're confusing cause and effect. The genetics did not emerge from the castes, the castes were an effort to entrench through religion the superior social status of invaders who were a different group with distinct genetics. They were not imposed from within by a faction of a unified group that subsequently diverged.

Race is made up, yet racial discrimination happens all the time. Money is made up, yet we all use it every day. Just because something is “made up” doesn’t mean it isn’t real. We made it real.

You're missing the point.

Instead of a law to stop "lower" and "upper" caste from discriminating against each other (like that comment was saying), the entire concept of caste needs to be purged.

That won't happen if you continue to use those very terms and then say it's (describing) reality. The sooner people stop dealing with it, the sooner it stops being a (real) thing.

I’m not missing the point, I disagree with it.

Like, who is “we”? In any situation where one group has structural advantages over another, there are going to be people who are very much not on board with merging the groups. If your plan to equalize everyone is just “pretend the groups don’t exist”, it will fail, because you’re simply ignoring a status quo that others are actively working to preserve.

There are people who want caste discrimination to exist. Given that reality, should the people who don't want caste discrimination to exist simply pretend caste doesn't exist (and therefore caste discrimination doesn't exist) or acknowledge that the former group exists and try to do something about it?

Exactly true. Race, money, and caste all vanish from existence if nobody continues to use the concepts.

So Castes exist but should people start using the phrase different-caste instead of higher-caste, lower-caste, etc.

The hierarchy of castes (and the untouchables) is intrinsic to the caste system, I am not the one making a value judgment. It's like saying "upper class" vs. "middle class" vs. "working class", which are within the reference frame of the class system.

One could of course combat it by totally transforming the original language and rituals of the culture, so that they can’t be used anymore. That is what communists tried to do with the Bible for instance.

But if you want to refer to things in a really widespread system by their name, then you show respect to the people practicing the system and may have more success in saying — keep believing what you are believing, but in this context you cannot enforce it. You may have an easier time getting it adopted then.

In the case of the caste system, my initial reaction was like the sibling comment but then I realized that I personally (and many Indians today) no longer believe it has anything to do with reality and is in fact just a self perpetuating mass delusion. So the question is, do we therefore have a right to gaslight and disrespect the beliefs of those who do believe it if they come to live in our country. My guess is yes.