Among Kshama Sawant’s earliest memories of the caste system was hearing her grandfather — a man she “otherwise loved very much” — utter a slur to summon their lower-caste maid.
The Seattle City Council member, raised in an upper-caste Hindu Brahmin household in India, was 6 when she questioned her grandfather about it. He responded that his granddaughter “talked too much.”
The U.S. caste debate has divided the South Asian community. Dalit activists say caste discrimination is prevalent in diaspora communities, surfacing in social relations, housing, education and the tech sector. Prem Pariyar, a Dalit Hindu from Nepal, gets emotional as he recalls escaping caste violence in his native village. His family was attacked for taking water from a community tap, said Pariyar, now a social worker in California who serves on Alameda County’s Human Relations Commission. He moved to the U.S. but says he couldn’t escape discrimination.Pariyar helped caste becoming a protected category in the California State University system in January 2022.
In her book “The Trauma of Caste,” Soundararajan writes of being devastated upon learning that her family members were considered “untouchables” in India. Suhag Shukla, the Hindu American Foundation executive director, called Seattle’s proposed ordinance unconstitutional because it targets an ethnic minority and “sends that message that we are an inherently bigoted community that must be monitored.” Shukla says caste is already covered under existing anti-discrimination laws.
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