Caste In America

The Tamil Nadu government recently announced that the Vaikom Award for Social Justice for the year 2025 will be presented to Ms. Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a civil rights activist campaigning for Dalit rights in the US.

The Vaikom award is in memory of social reformer ‘Periyar’ E.V. Ramasamy Naicker (1879-1973) for his role in the Vaikom Dalit temple entry Satyagraha in 1924.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a California-based Dalit technologist from Madurai in Tamil Nadu, has been leading campaigns for the rights of marginalised people including Dalits in the US. She is the founder of “Equality Labs”, a civil rights research and advocacy organization, with special emphasis on discrimination against Dalits in the US.

In an essay written for ww.yesmagazine.org entitled “Time to Dismantle Caste in the US” Soundararajan says that caste discrimination is deep-rooted among Indians in the US, both in the social and the work sphere.

“While we are not in the same conditions of caste as in our homelands where dominant castes control all institutions of power, we recognize the troubling existence of caste in every aspect of American life, affecting such diverse issues as immigration, labour, housing, domestic violence, education, personal relationships, and national politics,” Soundararajan says.

She and her doughty colleagues are fighting for “caste” to be added to the “protected category” across the US so that the Dalits benefit from protective legislation.

The filing of a historic lawsuit by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing against the global technology conglomerate Cisco sent shockwaves through the US South Asian community. The discrimination suit, filed in June 2020 was the first in US history against any institution on accountability in respect of caste discrimination.

In the Cisco case, it was stated that the Dalit complainant, “John Doe,” was expected to accept the caste hierarchy in the workplace where he held the lowest status in the team and, as a result, received less pay, fewer opportunities, and other inferior terms and conditions of employment because of his caste. Doe endured insults, demotions, and isolation, his complaint said.

The HR department in Cisco and the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing did not have knowledge of the caste system and so failed to see any justification in Doe’s complaint. The case had to be taken to court.

Earlier, in 2018, Soundarajan and Maari Zwick-Maitreyi helmed the first US survey on caste discrimination for “Equality Labs”. The survey covering 1500 Dalits across the US, found that 1 in 4 had faced physical and verbal assault in the US, including casteist slurs, fist fights, and even knife and gun violence.

“My family has survived caste atrocity back at home, and I will be damned if I have to deal with it again here. I need to protect myself because each time I hear their words about my people, I die a little,” said Priya, one of those who responded to the survey.

Two thirds experienced workplace discrimination in both white-collar and blue-collar categories. One of them said, “If the managers and other workers from the dominant castes found out that I was Dalit they would trip me up in my tasks and report me to my manager—who was also a dominant caste person. I considered reporting it to HR but what would they do? They can barely find India on the map. Do you think they would understand caste?”’

The survey found that dominant castes openly boasted about their supposed intellectual superiority, which made Dalits hide their caste identities. Dalits faced demotions, harassment, and even termination if they protested.

Ramesh Suman, a real estate agent in Antioch, California, remembered a client who refused to see a house after saying that it looked like it belonged to members of the Dalit community. Narayan Bishwakarma recalled how a landlord accepted his deposit but later reneged on a rental after learning his surname, which is common among Nepalese Dalit families.

And Dr. Promila Dhanuka said that once word got around more than 15 years ago in Redding, California, that she had Dalit roots, some Indian American doctors stopped referring patients to her oncology practice.

The issue is especially acute in the tech industry, where South Asians comprise a significant share of Silicon Valley workers, many of them first-generation immigrants.

Equality Labs received complaints from more than 250 Dalits about bullying, ostracizing, and even sexual harassment by colleagues who were from the dominant castes. The complaints came from top US companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Netflix.

These included 33 complaints from Dalit employees at Facebook, 20 from Google, 18 from Microsoft, 24 more at Cisco, and 14 from Amazon. Complaints were also recorded from employees at Twitter, Dell, Apple, Uber, and Lyft. There were dozens more from a range of smaller tech companies.

The survey found that 1 of 3 Dalits faced discrimination on American campuses. Caste was used to shame, disregard, and exclude students from campus life and prevent their professional advancement. Many students hid their caste identity because they did not want their competence to be questioned—especially within alumni networks dominated by the privileged castes, the study found.

Discrimination also prevailed in community circles. Dalit families were shunned by those of the dominant caste, forcing them to build relationships outside the South Asian community. Caste pervades our religious institutions, with more than 40% of Dalits reporting that they felt unwelcome in a place of worship. Dominant castes link Dalits to spiritual defilement.

Caste is found in all South Asian faiths in the US, including Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs, and Muslims. A Sikh Dalit shared this painful incident - “We are a group of Chamar (Dalit) friends, and when some of us Chamars tried to get leadership in our gurdwaras, we were jumped in the parking lot by a Jatt (dominant caste) gang with knives.”

Daryl E. Lucas, writing in the website of the New Jersey State Bar Foundation in 2024, says that in February 2023, the Seattle City Council voted 6-1 to approve an ordinance that added caste discrimination to its anti-discrimination laws. Seattle was the first American city to recognize caste discrimination and impose a ban on the practice.

A place where there is growing support for banning caste discrimination is on college campuses. In November 2019, Brandeis University updated its code of conduct and non-discrimination policy to include caste, becoming the first university to do so. Colby College in Maine followed suit in 2021. In 2022, California State University and Brown University updated their policies to include caste. Rutgers University faculty approved a contract that included caste discrimination protection.

California state Senator Aisha Wahab introduced legislation in March 2023 that added caste as a protected category under California’s anti-discrimination law. The bill was passed by a wide margin in the State Assembly and Senate.

But in October 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, claiming the state’s discrimination laws were sufficient to protect citizens from caste bias.

In a letter to the law makers, Newsom said -“In California, we believe everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, no matter who they are, where they come from, who they love, or where they live. That is why California already prohibits discrimination based on sex, race, colour, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics, and state law specifies that these civil rights protections shall be liberally construed. Because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited under these existing categories, this bill is unnecessary.”

The Indian American Muslim Council, the National Academic Coalition for Caste Equity and South Asians for Black Lives, now work together. More than 30 anti-caste Ambedkarite organisations exist. Among them are the Ambedkar King Study Circle, Ambedkar International Center, Ambedkarite Buddhist Association of Texas and Boston Study Group. Many caste equity civil rights groups often name themselves Ambedkarites after the Dalit civil rights leader Dr B R Ambedkar.

The North American network of Shri Guru Ravidassia centres (Guru Ravidas was a social reformer who campaigned against caste) and Sikh gurdwaras around the country have also joined Equality Labs.

Legal and caste scholars like Kevin Brown, Ann Ravel and Shailaja Paik, as well as groups like the Feminist Critical Hindu Studies Collective and Amnesty International, have written in support of Equality Labs.

Even the South Asian Bar Association of North America, the voice of the South Asian legal community, has shown support. Longtime civil and human rights leaders like Cornel West, Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy also have written impassioned letters. Cornel West’s letter urges members to “learn the lesson from our shameful history of anti-Blackness” in the US.

The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) of Washington DC and other similar groups contend that since the caste system and Hinduism are closely aligned, any caste-linked legislation will stigmatize Hindus as such.

HAF Executive Director Suhag Shukla told Religious News Service in 2020, “In my work with thousands of Hindus and hundreds of Hindu communities throughout the US, caste identity is largely irrelevant in their day-to-day lives and interactions with one another.”

Shukla contended that most US-born, second-generation Hindus wouldn’t even know how to identify someone’s caste.

“I personally see this as something that does not exist in society,” said Praveen Sinha, a professor of accounting at California State University, Long Beach, who filed a lawsuit last year challenging the university system’s addition of caste to its discrimination policy.