[tekla]

People do not want to import this shit into the US.

They left these systems behind, and making a law codifies the system into law, which is kinda fucked up.

I myself have seen discrimination in non obvious ways (not Indian but exact same idea where your birth dictates certain societal ideas about you) , and would be absolutely pissed if anyone made a law that protects against that because discrimination is already protected against.

I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about, and now everyone wants to codify a system that I would rather just fade away into time.

[catlover76]

This makes so little sense I can't really tell whether or not this is in good faith.

> People do not want to import this shit into the US.

You realize people discriminating on this basis are the ones "importing this shit into the US", right?

> I REALLY do not want the Govt to literally categorize me into a bucket I do not give a shit about

You realize that this law wouldn't involve the government compiling a list of the caste background of every Hindu in America from ahead of time right?

> now everyone wants to codify a system that I would rather just fade away into time.

How does it "codify" the caste system to allow people who are being discriminated on its basis to have a better shot at obtaining legal redress for the wrong being done to them?

[tpmoney]

>This makes so little sense I can't really tell whether or not this is in good faith.

It makes a degree of sense. Pick some other non standard "trait" for dividing people and imagine that we need laws for all of them for anti discrimination.

Anti-discrimination laws for your astrological sign, for the color of your chi, for the phrenological map of your skull, maybe ones for your INTJ profile, your New Thought energy types, the amount of toxins in your blood, your blood type, the balance of your humors, your aura, your chakras, your graphology.

I'm not sure I would really want a law codifying astrological signs and banning discrimination based on them. Not because I think you should be discriminating based on astrological signs, but because I don't think our government should be giving any serious legal weight or discussion to the concept of astrology at all. If it's a serious enough problem, I'd rather we work on crafting a law that more specifically codifies the few things we do allow discrimination on, than the innumerable things we won't.

[cataphract]

Regardless of the merits of this law, your take is very simplistic. All laws are trade-offs and they achieve their purposes imperfectly and with side effects. Not to mention the administration of the law (the justice system) is far from perfect.

Just to give a perhaps contrived example based on what the GP said. We can imagine that companies start worrying about the caste of their employees (or just if they're indians) when they otherwise wouldn't, and constrain their actions lest they be exposed to higher legal jeopardy down the line.

[catlover76]

How is my take simplistic? I wasn't even really arguing in favor of the law, nor was I opining on the concern you raise about the chilling effect on companies in terms of hiring Hindu employees (I think your point is reasonable).

I was merely pointing out several inane things about the post to which I was replying. That post raised no reasonable arguments for its position, and showed a lot of ignorance about what the law would actually do.

[ribosometronome]

>absolutely pissed if anyone made a law that protects against that because discrimination is already protected against

Why would this piss you off? It's a little redundant, I suppose, but that hardly seems particularly upsetting. Specifically, this bill looks like it updated CA's definition to clarify that ancestry based descrimination include caste, where caste was defined as:

>(aa) “Caste” means an individual’s perceived position in a system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status. “A system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status” may be characterized by factors that may include, but are not limited to, inability or restricted ability to alter inherited status; socially enforced restrictions on marriage, private and public segregation, and discrimination; and social exclusion on the basis of perceived status.

I'm not really seeing where the government is codifying you into a group you don't want to be in. The idea seems to be based on the discrimanator's perception of what groups you are in. Without this clarification, though, I'm not sure how Newsom (or anyone) can be confident of judicial interpretation of law, especially given that he notably was complaining recently about a judge's interpretation of the law.

>I would rather just fade away into time.

Would you say that most of the progress on dismantling caste-related issues has been by way of the government actively ignoring its existence?

I'm pretty American and thus largely ignorant about most things but especially India's history and how this issue has been addressed and changed over time, but American history doesn't have many examples of places where the things people discriminated on simply faded away. Most have required active efforts to get to where they are today and obviously where it's at is still not a great place.

[idopmstuff]

> because discrimination is already protected against

Some discrimination is protected against, but this statement is far too broad to be accurate. I can discriminate against you because of who you vote for or what car you drive or which NFL team you root for.

[riku_iki]

I think companies have very well established term for this: "culture fit".

[olliej]

What are you talking about?

The whole point of caste based discrimination is that people are putting you, as you say, in a bucket and then discriminating on that basis. By having such discrimination be legal you ensure that such discrimination is (a) legal, and (b) gets to be entrenched in the US.

[huytersd]

It’s impossible for it to get entrenched because people from India can’t even tell a persons caste unless they are from the same cluster of towns and villages. This is Indian “county specific” knowledge that cannot survive a cosmopolitan society.

[olliej]

Uh, no it’s not?

You can [and people do] use family names as an effective proxy for caste, and if you’re planning on discriminating on caste that’s more than enough. The Dalit's (in the case of Cisco) are not all the same "village" as the people they're claiming are discriminating against, and it's bizarre you would think that clusters of immigrants from a country of a billion people would magically already know each other.

I know of people who through marriage had their family name change from a lower caste to a higher one, and experience an immediate drop in questions of the “how could you get here?” Form.

More to the point: if it were already impossible to discriminate based on caste then this law would not impact anyone.

[dooraven]

Yeah maybe in North India.

South India it's pretty impossible, since it went through the self respect movements and basically got rid of surnames. Most south indians have surnames based on their fathers names.

But it is definitely common to use surnames as proxies in North Indian communities (unfortunately)

[huytersd]

You don’t have to “magically” know each other, you just have to know what the last name implies. What I’m saying is that knowledge is very locally specific.

[0thgen]

there is an interview with a person from India involved in a caste discrimination lawsuit that people should watch: https://youtu.be/XhGZUE1ABuo?si=r9DVUDAoexoS0-aB

they make similar arguments about why they feel the bill is a bad idea

[bsder]

> People do not want to import this shit into the US.

It already exists whether you wish to acknowledge it or not.

The question, at the end of the day, is whether or not existing law is sufficient. Presumably we are expecting that caste falls under "religion or creed" in terms of protected characteristics.

Has that actually been established?