California may become the first state in the US to have caste as a protected group in the state’s anti-discrimination laws. It is significant that the bill to do so has been introduced in California, the fifth biggest economy in the world and home to over 6 million Asian Americans. It is also one of the places where caste discrimination in the US came to the forefront, with the Laki Bali Reddy case and the more recent Cisco lawsuit. TNM spoke with anti-caste activist and founder of the Dalit Civil Rights organisation Equality Labs, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, to understand the significance of the bill, how caste exists within the diaspora, and more.
“A lot of people think of Indians in tech, but South Asians are involved in all work – restaurant, building trades, education, law, medicine. And we have heard reports from caste oppressed workers across all of those institutions. It is troubling, the kind of things we are seeing, and it requires deep intervention,” Thenmozhi says. Excerpts from the interview:
Adjudication of caste discrimination looks different in the US than it would in India. A caste oppressed person may raise a complaint that they experienced caste discrimination. The complainant can raise the point that they are from a protected category, and that then informs the investigation. The remedy is not specific to caste, it is specific to the workplace violation. If someone used a slur, it’s very different from if they were sexually assaulted. It’s important for Indians to understand that this is not about grafting Indian legal processes in the US
California itself is a big push, it took six-eight months of campaigning. I think where we are right now is a snowball moment, there’s going to be many campaigns all over the place. It’s like a runaway train now, where people on their own are asking for caste to be a protected category. There is nothing unlawful about adding caste as a protected group. However, there is a great deal of unlawful discrimination and harm occurring because people are not addressing these issues.
Right now, we are saying 15 years of Dalit women’s leadership in laying the foundation for a national movement for caste equity. That work is going to grow as more institutions adopt caste as a protected category.
Ambedkar said, “If Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem.” Ambedkarites are globalising the resistance.
Americans don’t need to be historical experts on caste to see that grave discrimination is occurring. For them, they’re observing dynamics that are extremely bigoted in the South Asian community. They’re questioning why some people get treated badly. They don’t have to have a terminology to see bigotry is occurring. In the Lakireddy Bali Reddy case, there were young Dalit girls who were sex slaves. It was other children who noticed that these girls were not in school. They were thinking, ‘Why aren’t these girls in high school, why do they sweep the roofs and are scared to talk to people?.’
I don’t think people understand how much bigotry ‘upper’ caste groups have done here and thought that they could get away with. In the Laki Bali Reddy case, many people wrote saying that the community shouldn’t air its dirty laundry in front of Americans. This is not dirty laundry, this is human rights obligations that are being failed, resulting in these crimes. They are crimes. If you are trafficking girls for sex, that is a crime. If you are indulging in wage theft and taking advantage of undocumented workers, that’s a crime.
When we have systems like caste, the privileged and the oppressed are connected to one another. What I have seen is that privileged people have a great deal of fragility and their nervous systems view equity from a lens of threat to survival.
Wage theft, housing discrimination — it's not microaggressions, this is serious harm. We also see it in domestic violence survivors whose caste becomes a part of coercive control. Take the example of Nepalese national Prem Pariyar, who fled caste atrocities and worked in a restaurant. Many restaurants and grocery stores hire recently-immigrated workers, and they pay them very low wages. They house them all in one room — but the inmates would not share the space with Prem because he is Dalit. So he was forced to stay homeless and live in a van. It’s disgusting.
There is actually no legal foundation to their argument that the bill to protect Dalit people is actually discriminatory towards Hindus. Several major legal scholars, including the South Asian Bar Association of North America, have weighed in in favour of caste equity. The only people that this bill works against are those who discriminate. If you don’t discriminate, you won’t have a problem. It’s really hard to argue against caste equity. It’s a no-brainer.
I think about where we were 20 years ago, when no one had come out as Dalit, ‘dominant’ caste people disagreed that caste was here. Now, because of the work of anti-caste organisations, we are seeing a fundamental reorganisation of the South Asian identity where caste must be reckoned with. Where do we go beyond that, can we go to reconciliation? In the diaspora, we have more opportunities to create foundations for open dialogue and healing and transformation.
We have built possibilities for emotional intelligence, for authentic engagement, because we’re not in the context of the immediate violence. That distance makes a huge difference. There’s a difference between caste in South Asia and how it operates in the diaspora. It’s different, but it’s here. It’s operating in serious ways, and the more that South Asians gain power the more vicious it gets.