California moved closer to becoming the first U.S. state to ban caste discrimination after a bill to outlaw the practise passed the California Assembly late on Monday.
U.S. discrimination laws ban ancestry discrimination but do not explicitly ban casteism. California’s legislation targets the caste system in South Asian immigrant communities by adding caste to the list of categories protected under the state’s anti-discrimination laws.
The bill was introduced and authored by state Senator Aisha Wahab, an Afghan American Democrat, in March. An earlier version of it passed the state Senate before undergoing revisions.
It is classical bigotry.
And we do it in the U.S. through classism too though it’s much less apparent (mostly because Americans like to believe in ‘upward mobility’).
How you talk, what you eat, what kind of music you like. All of this can betray caste (or class) and keep you out of job positions or even schools if the person interviewing you has conscious or subconscious biases.
The rich have a term, new money, which is a way of saying, you don’t belong in our caste. Or class. Pick your term for bigotry.
the level of bigotry in the US is nothing compared to caste discrimination in south asia
If being a bigot was socially acceptable here we’d see more abuses in broad day light like Asia
But people still get murdered and tortured for being different in the U.S. And there’s still tons of covert and overt bigotry in every level of society from housing, to work, to school, to medicine.
So, I get you. In Asia it’s acceptable to treat people this way which means there’s fewer legal protections. It still happens in the U.S. And I’m sure the victims and their families couldn’t care less if we argue about where it’s worse.
Yeah, it has many names and often less obvious terms to describe the same thing.
I have only ever seen “new money” used when referring to someone coming into money and blowing it all on something dumb like a giant, inefficient luxury car or some other depreciating asset.
Honestly I learned it from books that take place in New Orleans. Families that have had plantation houses and estates in their family since before the civil war.
I don’t hang out with old money people to first hand know how they talk behind closed doors. Just have read some authors that do.