Senate Bill 403, which has divided the South Asian community, awaits Gov. Gavin Newsom's signature.
When Prem Pariyar first came to the U.S. from Nepal in 2015, he got a job at an Indian restaurant in California and was assigned a room to live in by the restaurant’s owner. But other workers didn’t want to room with him, he said, because he is Dalit — the lowest-ranked caste, formerly known as “untouchable.”
The California legislation follows a similar ordinance passed in Seattle earlier this year, as well as anti-discrimination rules including caste that are in place in the California State University system and some University of California campuses, due in part to Pariyar’s advocacy. Other universities, such as Harvard University, have caste-bias protections in place for graduate-student workers.State Sen.
A 2016 survey of more than 1,500 South Asians living in the U.S. by Equality Labs, a civil-rights organization that advocates for ending caste-based oppression, found that 67% of Dalits reported experiencing unfair treatment in the workplace because of their caste. Four in 10 Dalit students reported experiencing caste discrimination in educational institutions.
“I think she was so brave to take on this issue,” Gupta said in an interview with MarketWatch. “Not very many people would. Why rock the boat? Why risk [political] donors?” Both Prasad and Jagannathan questioned the research and claims about caste discrimination by Equality Labs. They also said they don’t want Indian-American employees to be asked about caste at work, or for children to be asked about caste in school.
— Tarina Mand, a lawyer with the South Asian Bar Association of North America Caste has determined access to educational networks and connections for generations, said Anupama Rao, a history professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, who has written a book about caste and is currently working on another. Caste has functioned to “organize occupations, rituals, the religious, the legal, the political,” Rao said. “It organizes sexual relationships.
The professor added that she finds the arguments of reverse discrimination “deeply ironic,” saying opponents of the bill think that to “give people rights is actually a form of denying you yours.” Silicon Valley’s increased focus on caste Wahab said caste systems “exist in every corner of the world” and that there are Hindus who support the bill, including the group Hindus for Caste Equity.
According to four Google employees who spoke with MarketWatch last year around that time and asked not to be named out of fear of reprisal, there was “defensiveness” from some employees at the company and claims that caste discrimination didn’t exist in the U.S. So the talk at the company never happened, though Gupta and Soundararajan eventually posted the discussion they had planned on Google-owned YouTube.
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