Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!

Everybody in India knows about caste discrimination, just as everyone in America knows about racial discrimination. But casteism has recently been travelling West

Everybody in India knows about caste discrimination, just as everyone in America knows about racial discrimination. But casteism has itself recently been travelling West. The California state legislature is considering a new bill banning discrimination based on caste — adding caste as a protected category along with more historically-established categories like race, gender, or religion. This comes right on the heels of the Seattle City Council passing an ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on caste in employment, housing, and public accommodation. Although there are similar moves brewing on the East coast as well, the West coast is the epicentre of this new anti-caste activism.

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When it came to racial discrimination during the civil rights movement, the American south was the epicentre. Nina Simone’s stunning and scathing 1963 protest-song, ‘Mississippi Goddam’, made this clear:

Alabama’s gotten me so upset/

Tennessee made me lose my rest/

And everybody knows about
Mississippi, Goddam!

It is the West coast that houses the US tech industry, and it is within this industry especially that casteism in America has unabashedly emerged. Why so? Because the majority of Indians in the US tech sector – Indians comprise over 20% of the American tech industry – are Brahmins. And as we all know, Brahmanism, or systemic anti-Dalit-Bahujan sentiment, plagues India’s IITs and NITs, where so many of these tech workers are trained. Quite simply, the deadly casteism of India’s IITs has been replicated in Silicon Valley.

A century ago, Babasaheb Ambedkar remarked about his time spent studying in America that he could be casteless there, suffering from no caste prejudice. Today, Dalits from IITs who thought that they would similarly elude the heinous burdens of caste discrimination by landing jobs in America are suffering a rude awakening.

Lord have mercy on this land
of mine/

We all gonna get it in due time/

I don’t belong here/

I don’t belong there/

I’ve even stopped believing
in prayer.

Thanks to Nina Simone, to the murdered civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who motivated her protest song, to Martin Luther King Jr., whose murder caused Simone to add lyrical updates and, of course, to the millions of others who fought and died for racial equality, we no longer recognise two valid sides on this issue. You are either against racial discrimination or you are racist. Similarly with gender equality. We don’t recognise two valid sides. You either oppose gender discrimination or you are sexist.

Hindus in the US have, however, managed to mount legal and ideological opposition to the bans on caste discrimination without the media and wider public dismissing them for what they are – casteist. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) has put together a battery of arguments against the new legislation. They claim that the bans are Hinduphobic and violate a Hindu’s freedom of religion. However, the new ordinances and bills merely prohibit discrimination based on caste, just as with race or gender, and have nothing to do with religion -- unless, of course, the HAF is suggesting that casteism is an essential component of Hinduism. They have argued that we should not evoke colonial concepts like ‘caste’ in contemporary law. This may be insightful at a highly ideal level, but it isn’t actionable. And don’t forget that ‘Hindu’, as we know it, is also a colonial concept.

The HAF has also argued that the introduction of the term ‘caste’ into US law is superfluous because caste-based discrimination would already be covered by existing prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and national origin. This, however, has been disproven by decades of case law. For example, throughout the 1970s-80s, black women sought to bring workplace discrimination suits against their employers because they were always the last to be hired and the first to be fired. But courts routinely and systematically rejected those cases. There were prohibitions against discriminating against blacks and prohibitions against discriminating against women; however, the law did not take cognizance of the specific category of ‘black women’. Just the same, any suit brought to an American court today claiming discrimination based on caste would be thrown out – the law does not take cognizance of this category.

Not yet at least. But it’s coming.

Don’t tell me/I tell you/

Me and my people just about due/

I’ve been there so I know/

They keep on saying “Go slow!”/

But that’s just the trouble/

“Do it slow”.