In another significant moment for the movement against caste discrimination in the United States, a Bill to make caste discrimination illegal was passed by the California State Assembly on Monday, August 28, with 50 votes in its favour and only three against it. It was earlier passed by the state’s Senate in May this year. With its passage in the state Assembly, California will become the first US state to ban caste discrimination. The legislation will add caste as a protected category under ‘ancestry’ in California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, Education, and Housing codes.
Caste in the USA is not direct or obvious though. It is a subtle taboo to even mention its existence. The real caste in the USA is the poverty line and exploitation inherent to capitalism. It is perfectly legal to discriminate for loans, and all of the goods and services available to the poor. Banks, utilities, housing, and the job market are all indirectly discriminatory in ways something like this can not address. This is one way places like India, where caste is a prominent social component, have something of an advantage. They have an addressable issue to fight against in the sociopolitical sphere. Every culture has a caste system to various degrees. I argue that it is harder to fight caste in places where it is not clearly defined and prosecutable. This may seem odd to someone accustomed to a caste dominated system, but here in the USA, this will likely only really apply to a situation where the plaintiff and defendant are both from a culture where caste is an established legal issue.
Your class can change in the United States but caste is something you are born into and cannot change. Doesn’t make it any less made up, but it’s still not the same thing at all.
that’s a class issue .
India’s oppressed castes will disagree. Oppressor uppercastes not only have no problems inflicting barbaric violence on the oppressed castes , they also face minimal to no negative consequences for their crimes.
Here’s a recent days old example where a 20-year old Dalit youth and the three young children with him were beaten up, urinated on, and hung upside down. The perps, all oppressor upper caste men, recorded the atrocities they were commiting and circulated its video which should tell you how sure the oppressor castes are of their crimes being taken lightly. The police only filed a report against them after the video they made went viral. They make and circulate such videos as caste pride and to humiliate and terrorie the oppresed castes even more.
Oppressor castes too have their sociapolitical spheres who act vocally &sometimes silently to ensure caste oppession foes unpunished. Oppressor castes are wealthier, have greater political representation, and almost all in positions of power are fromthe oppressor upper castes. which is why even after 77 years of Independence, caste atrocities are rampant in India.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/peed-on-told-to-lick-shoe-dalit-man-hung-upside-down-over-theft-claim-4334726
Caste discrimination is a problem in every place where oppressor upper castes come across those who they think should be oppressed, both inside India and outside. It is a global problem, but not discussed much because most of the diaspora Indians who are vocal and visible are also mostly from the oppressor upper castes.
@queermunist
Your passion is admirable.
In the USA these same issues manifest in our enormous prison system. The imprisoned minorities are facing the same bias and direct oppression.
The illusion of equality and justice in the USA is only amongst those that have not directly experienced it. The cost of any serious court case in the USA will cost upwards of $100,000, due to how the system works and the reliance on academically credentialed (opinion mercenaries or so called) expert witnesses. If you do not have the funds in reserve, there is no chance of you winning a court case.
Housing in the USA is completely unaffordable for the average person to have ownership. All of our consumer markets are monopolies where the price of goods are artificially 3-4 times what they would cost in true free market capitalism. All of the consumer and labor protections mechanisms in the USA have been defunded or made legally inaccessible for the average person. Wages have completely stagnated for the average skill worker over the last 40 years while housing has increased 6-10 fold in the same period, mostly due to foreign investors that are allowed to complete with buyers in the domestic housing market.
We are also constantly pushed to buy products and services by subscription with corporations working very hard to monopolize markets for these goods and services. This has eroded ownership and property rights to the extreme. The only difference between a citizen and a serf is the right of ownership. The lower class of the USA is under a new age of corporate dominated feudalism. This is direct and blatant theft from a group of people with no effective voice. The antiquated two party political system in the USA suppresses true democracy. The system is funded by super rich and corporate anonymous donors. Ordinary people have no effective voice in the USA. Corruption at the highest level of the legislature, the supreme court, is common knowledge and a meme at this point.
Social services for the elderly and disabled are totally inadequate and provide less than the minimum wage. The suicide rate amongst the poor is large. All the school shootings and violence in the USA are because of the hopeless pressure individuals and families are under. It is disenfranchisement of people in general. It isn’t just class. Class has mobility. In the USA, mobility is an illusion. This illusion is subtly hidden in a way that makes it impossible to target and fix. If you do not already have funds to exploit in the USA, you will never have the chance at social mobility. Every aspect of this is institutionalized. In this place, there is nothing more expensive than being poor. Everything you need will exploit you. Every product you can afford will break prematurely, every vital service will employ every means possible to exploit you with manipulation and hidden fees.
These issues are everywhere in the USA, but there is no group or caste to fight against. We despise the billionaires, but the issue is far more perverse than these 750 parasites, it is systemic. Caste sucks. I get it, but we are fighting mostly the same problems. I’m just facing a far less obvious opponent.
I appreciate you putting it all here. and yes, we’re all fighting similar problems.
India’s oppressed castes have borne the brunt of caste oppression in silence for thousands of years (I’m not even exaggerating), because Indian civilization denied them a voice and normalised caste oppression. Caste has now become an obvious opponent, because oppressed castes speak about the caste atrocities and humiliations they suffer, risking violence if they need to. And because Dr. Babaaheb Ambedkar took steps to shine light on its barbarity.
The good people at Castewatch UK have explained it better than me when they say :
While ‘race’ is a way of classifying people into groups based on physical traits, ‘caste’ is a system of social stratification, where groups are assigned a way of life defined primarily by occupation. Caste has no distinguishable physical feature and members of the same ‘race’ group may be of several different caste groups. In Britain for example, Dalits have progressed economically and do not follow their traditional occupations of cleaning toilets and skinning dead animals, but they encounter caste-based discrimination in social interactions. Unlike race discrimination, caste discrimination is intra-racial and is practised among those of the same nationality, ethnic origin and/or cultural background.
Caste and class are different things.