Caste benefits from invisibility, unlike its siblings of race and gender-based discrimination. In the States, you usually can’t see it. This is a stark contrast from its virulent counterpart in India, which involves brazen, gratuitous violence and constant reinforcement. To non-South Asians, Dalits are indistinguishable from other South Asians. Within the coethnic community, though, roaring divisions create complex power dynamics and negotiations. To reveal this otherwise hidden tragedy, the need for empirical data on caste discrimination has become increasingly important. Researching caste in the U.S., however, proves complicated.
The Survey Wars
To date, there have only been two major studies on caste discrimination in the U.S.—a survey by Dalit civil rights group Equality Labs (2016), and a survey by think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2020). Both are continuously invoked in high-stakes settings, like antidiscrimination policies and legislative proposals, and usually pitted against each other for their contradictory findings.
Equality Labs’ survey paints a damning portrait of caste in the U.S., reporting findings like: 25% of Dalits in the U.S. faced verbal of physical assault based on caste, one out of two Dalits feared their caste being “outed,” and two out of three Dalits reported unfair workplace treatment. This groundbreaking survey has been referenced across antidiscrimination reforms, from universities to the state of California. It boasts a robust sample size and revealing testimonies, but its ‘snowball sampling’ technique—when survey respondents recruit other respondents—and failure to include those who did not disclose a caste identity, creates potential for a sampling error. Opponents like the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) have seized upon this footnote to discredit the entire survey. Snowball sampling is widely accepted as a legitimate research practice, particularly with populations that difficult to find. While it might create some concern around probability, HAF’s concerns are hardly genuine. Equality Labs’ findings are in no way irrelevant nor moot; they remain a valuable window into the Dalit American experience. The aggregation of these otherwise disparate, invisible realities is to be applauded and taken seriously—warts and all.
Carnegie’s survey is much less pointed, but found that only 5% of Hindu Indian Americans reported experiencing caste discrimination—a nearly opposite statistic to Equality Labs’ findings. Regrettably, all its data on caste identity was restricted to Hindu respondents, so caste-oppressed members of other faiths were not considered. With 75% of Muslim converts and Christian converts being caste-oppressed, Carnegie’s data is also colored by their methodological constraints.
Within its Hindu sample, though, the survey found that half of all Hindu Indian Americans identify with a caste group, with 80% identifying as upper-caste. This is congruent with a 2003 study by the University of Pennsylvania’s South Asia Center, which found 90% of the U.S. population belonged to upper castes, whereas just 1.5% were caste-oppressed. Like the other two surveys, both sides of the caste controversy wield this data to make opposite claims. Opponents of anti-caste reforms claim this 90-to-1 disparity diminishes the importance of anti-caste reforms, which only affect a sliver of the American population. Anti-caste advocates cite them to reveal the severe marginalization Dalits face across migration, and as evidence for spotlighting their cause.
Survey findings are easily coopted by competing narratives, so there remains a vital need for ongoing, sharper research. Surveys suffer from preference falsification, social acceptability bias, and reluctance from impacted participants. Worse—those to whom caste is visible are least likely to study it, for a myriad of reasons.
Experiments are the superior means of assessing discrimination. I’d suggest an experiment like those used to assess racism: a researcher targets South Asian American managers and recruiters who are identified by caste, and has them evaluate applicants covertly identified by similar and different castes, and observes disparities in treatment. One could also measure how these managers reward caste-identified employees, or how they respond to caste-related questions, like: catering non-vegetarian or vegetarian food for workplace celebrations, celebrating Hindu and non-Hindu religious occasions, and responding to casteist slurs or statements. The project would avoid common survey trappings and clarify the nuanced way that caste operates. Of course, these exact interactions have already been widely cited by Dalit employees as locations of grave discrimination. But do we listen?
Locating Caste in the Weeds
I tend to think that scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality is being exaggerated and misapplied these days, but it can be extremely helpful for understanding issues like caste. Traditional research logic would have us isolate variables of caste, religion, language, region, and more, but these very factors defy isolation. We must consider the interplay or intersection of such closely tied factors in evaluating discrimination. For example, the managers I suggested researching earlier may favor applicants with their family surname—which is simultaneously a caste surname. Is this caste discrimination, a kinship partiality, or both? The same paradox could occur with religion. They might promote vegetarian-only luncheons for events for their South Asian employees, but this could simultaneously mean unwelcome to non-Hindu South Asians whose diets are oriented primarily around meat. Are they being inclusive, exclusive, or both? Stepping deeper into caste or religious groupings, these variables atomize into highly specific and subtle differences. It’s in these weeds that suffering happens.
The best judge of discrimination, tends to be the one suffering it. In an interview conducted by The Washington Post, Dalit employee Benjamin Kaila recounted facing personal questions that sussed out his caste during panel interview. “They don’t bring up caste, but they can easily identify us,” he said. These caste locator questions can involve one’s last name, hometown, diet, religion, and more (see this list of caste locator questions and answers).
The Post also published a statement from 30 Dalit women engineers in Silicon Valley, who describe casteist insults, caste locator questions, and even caste-based sexual harassment. They write, “We have seen casteist bias dominate the hiring, referrals, and peer review processes in our respective workplaces,” and “We did not have a lot of options to report these incidents to our respective HR departments because caste was not a protected category.” The volume and nature of these allegations indicates that grave discrimination can run rampant while remaining completely invisible to authorities. From Slack threads to construction sites, caste preys in the dark.
With anti-caste reforms spilling over from American universities to cities and states, empirical research can help support civil rights enforcement and data gathering. At the same time, there is really no further case to make. To refuse the historic, bloody, ubiquitous, well-documented tyranny of caste is to bury one’s head in the ground—and yet, many Indians are busily doing just this. Ultimately, data is not all that useful in persuading the anti-Dalit critic, because he behaves in bad faith. He does not speak with reason, but with anxiety, dogma, and a deeply engrained belief of caste superiority. Dalit scholar Suraj Yengde describes this poignantly:
“Dalit perspectives lie beneath the dignity of even recognition, [or] acknowledging the presence of a dignified human being. Their cries and pains do not summon anyone’s mind to think, let alone engage with the victim… The oppressor caste cannot empathize with the Dalit condition, because they do not think of Dalit as a victim. They assume [a] pretense of a vile, disgusting, lazy Dalit body that is loudly clamoring against nonexistent injustice. In this condition, to put across the rational Dalit viewpoint is an impossibility.”
“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” - Ephesians 6:12 NIV