Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Aunche 1405 days ago
If your platform champions people's subjective experience, and Indians at Google feel that Soundararajan is discriminatory herself, then they have a right to oppose her talk without being labelled as caste bigots.
2 comments

Caste discrimination is not a "subjective experience", however much your subjective experience maybe telling you so.
Like I said, their only example of caste discrimination at Google is "denial of caste discrimination" and "coded conversation", which is very much subjective. A Hindu can make the same case that "denial that caste is used as a dog whistle for Hindu discrimination" or "accusing Hindus who are opposed to a caste talk as being bigoted" as forms of Hindu discrimination.
From the article:

> when you’ve got people who are caste privileged and caste oppressed, the people who are caste oppressed start to be given inferior assignments, get treated differently, left out of meetings, which are certainly things that I heard from Google employees within the company.

> Asking things like “What’s your last name? I’m not familiar with it.” Then, when the manager hears that last name, they’re, like, “Oh, so you’re from this caste—no wonder you have these leadership skills.” Things like that. And somebody else in the room is, like, “What the hell?” It’s those different types of experiences that I’ve seen or that have been shared with me that show that caste discrimination is happening in the workplace.

What about those that felt discriminated? Where is their forum to talk about what happened to them?

Might I add, if you weren't a party to an experience, an off handed observation that those are just subjective experiences, is frankly not yours to make.

Google's reaction was the Damore memo was that it didn't matter that Damore felt discriminated against. People felt attacked by the memo, so his opinion wasn't welcome. If they want to be consistent, they had to reject the caste talk. It's that simple.

>Might I add, if you weren't a party to an experience, an off handed observation that those are just subjective experiences, is frankly not yours to make.

Do you share the same opinion about the white activists who are supporting Gupta? Why are you calling me out for expressing a nonzero disagree of sympathy towards her opposition who also claim they are discriminated against? I'm not Indian, but I've seen fairly egregious examples of caste being used to attack Indians. Admittedly, it was on 4chan, but I'm sure weaker forms of this attitude exist in real life as well.