The “caste in America” issue just isn’t going away, and I keep having to resurface on social media. This post will be placeholder until I can set aside time to publish something more thorough and polished (between my startup and substack I can’t spare the marginal cycles on a piece about caste).
First, why do I care about caste? Though I have an intellectual interest in the topic, mostly it’s just that I get asked about it, a lot. Mostly this is driven by Indian American journalists writing about the pervasiveness of caste in tech, which I think is pretty much manufactured mostly out of a few incidents. If you are a subcontinental-looking person in the US in professional class situations you will be asked. This is why I have started to refer to myself as a Dalit online. Why not? Who is going to know? Some online Indian Leftists do accuse me of being an “upper caste Muslim,” but despite my origin from eastern Bengal’s rural landholder class my “lived experience” is that of a brown American.
Second,
Looks like a lot of your old posts just got reposted all on the same day, starting with this.