Seattle considers historic law barring caste discrimination

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One of 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 asked her grandfather why he used that derogatory word when he knew the girl’s name. He responded that his granddaughter “talked too much.”

Now 50, and an elected official in a city far from India, Sawant has proposed an ordinance to add caste to Seattle’s anti-discrimination laws. If her fellow council members approve it Tuesday, Seattle will become the first city in the United States to specifically outlaw caste discrimination.

In India, the origins of the caste system can be traced back 3,000 years as a social hierarchy based on one’s birth. While the definition of caste has evolved over the centuries, under both Muslim and British rule, the suffering of those at the bottom of the caste pyramid – known as Dalits, which in Sanskrit means “broken” — has continued.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/seattle-considers-historic-law-barring-caste-discrimination/ar-AA17IpeG

I often find Sawant to be a bit on the nutty side but she's right on this one.

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1. Seattle considering outlawing caste discrimination

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217664406

Seattle considering outlawing caste discrimination

https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/02/18/opinion-confessions-of-an-american-caste-traitor/

OPINION | Confessions of an American Caste Traitor
FEBRUARY 18, 2023 EDITOR

by Prashant Nema

On Jan. 24, Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant introduced first-in-the-nation legislation for the City to ban caste-based discrimination. South Asian American groups, like AANA (Ambedkar Association of North America), AIC (Ambedkar International Center), Ambedkar King Study Circle, and Equality Labs, who represent the small, but growing, caste-oppressed community, have been working hard to build public support for the successful passing of this legislation. However, they faced a challenge when attempting to describe the problem to Americans.

The topic of caste may seem intimidating, so what I present here is a brief profile of the beneficiaries and guardians of this evil system. It is not easy to see us as separate from our casteism, because it is so deeply embedded in our culture and moral constructs. Caste supremacy is, after all, thousands of years older than white supremacy.

South Asians may all seem alike to American eyes, but we are hardly a monolith: We are divided by caste in more ways than any other people on the face of this earth. We are divided and placed in a hierarchy of caste. As someone who spent about half a century among the people at the top of this social pyramid, I can confirm widespread casteism in our community even here in the USA. After all, I have access to the collective minds of my community and experience of a casteist upbringing in India to see those invisible markers of caste that often puzzle non-South Asians. But first you should understand what I mean by caste.

To paraphrase what the foremost scholar on this topic and architect of the Indian constitution, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar explained in his various writings, “Caste in India means artificial chopping off of the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into another through the custom of endogamy (forcing to marry within caste).” It is not a multicultural collection of different communities or tribes. It is a system of graded inequality. These units are explicitly placed in anti-social and hierarchical relationships with each other with an “ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt” — contempt for the working-class castes and undue reverence for the ruling-class caste (also called dominant castes or oppressor castes).

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