A case for being critical about race

What a civil rights lawsuit in California shows us about race, caste, and American discrimination.

In June of 2020, as the pandemic raged, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Cisco Systems Inc. on behalf of an engineer working at the company. The engineer at the heart of the case went to school in India with another man working at Cisco. One of these men, Mr. Iyer, is Brahmin (upper caste Hindu) and the other is Dalit (considered the lowest caste in India). Both these men studied at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), and made it to work at Cisco’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. The lawsuit describes how Mr. Iyer “outed” his colleague as being Dalit, and implied that he was only able to gain admission into IIT because of India’s reservations programme (affirmative action policy). The Dalit engineer confronted Mr. Iyer, his former classmate and now his supervisor, about the damage done by exposing his caste and disparaging him among colleagues.

According to the lawsuit, for two years thereafter, Mr. Iyer denied the Dalit engineer raises and bonuses, stonewalled promotions, and isolated him from his colleagues. Mr. Kompella, the other Brahmin manager named in the lawsuit, replaced Mr. Iyer as the Dalit engineer’s manager and “continued to discriminate, harass, and retaliate against” him.

Cisco’s human resources department conducted an investigation and responded to his complaints by telling him that “caste discrimination was not unlawful.” The company has not taken any corrective action, finding that no discrimination occurred in this case.

After this lawsuit was filed, 30 Dalit women engineers who work in Silicon Valley wrote an anonymous statement in which they detail the discrimination and abuse they too have faced. They write:

This letter is an anonymous effort, because many of us are still employed by our workplaces and not all of us are citizens. To speak out in this tenuous environment would not just mean losing our jobs, but also our immigration status. Despite these barriers, we will not be silent.

We thank John Doe from Cisco for speaking out, because his experience echoes our own. As Dalit women, we have already seen both casteism and sexism during our tech education in India. Many of us have the burden of proving ourselves to our male peers, while also facing multiple casteist assumptions that we are not competent developers. We are always having to dodge difficult caste locator questions about where we are from, what religion we practice, and whom we have married—questions designed to place us into the caste hierarchy against our will… We have seen casteist bias dominate the hiring, referrals, and peer review processes in our respective workplaces. None of us were hired through those dominant caste “boys clubs” networks (we were employed through a general hiring process). As a result, working with Indian managers is a living hell. 

This year, Fortune magazine ranked Cisco Systems as number one on the list of best Fortune 500 companies to work for. 

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As the conversation about the merits of critical race theory has exploded into the mainstream, this is a good moment to reflect on social hierarchies, race, and the limitations of our anti-discrimination protections. This decades-old field of study has somehow caught the eye of conservatives determined to uncover liberal plots when they would do well to focus on the litany of social, political, and economic crises that we are all staring down. 

But never to be deterred from drumming up nonsense debates when there are real problems to solve, the FOX news acolytes have found a new bogeyman. Senator Ted Cruz recently blustered, “critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” a comment that can be dispelled as false with the most cursory of Google searches. Never to be outdone, Republican Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley recently told  America Reports, “Think about a 5-year-old that starts kindergarten and they don't know anything about color. If she's white, you're telling her she's bad. If she's brown or black, you’re telling her she will never be enough and she's always a victim. That's harmful for the well-being of our children.” Critical race theory is a field of advanced legal and political study, hardly something taught to kindergartners, despite how brilliant Nikki Haley might consider the 5-year old in question.  

The conservative, and even a fair amount of mainstream, media has buried the actual definition of critical race theory, which is “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as Columbia law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Despite the willful ignorance of those who refuse to even look up the thing they are demonizing, this field of legal theory can perhaps offer us some importance nuance in making sense of the caste discrimination case at Cisco.

In her recent book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, journalist Isabel Wilkerson brings questions of caste into the American context. She makes the case that the social constructs of race and caste are not synonyms, but that they "can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin."

In a reflection on Wilkerson’s book, writer and journalist Yashica Dutt locates herself with the powerful observation, “As a Dalit woman and immigrant from a formerly untouchable manual scavenging caste in India, my place in the Indian social order lies at the very bottom. But as a brown resident in the United States, I fall somewhere in the middle of the racial caste pyramid.”

It is only a critical lens on race that allows us to locate such nuances, and see the ways in which they are visible and invisible to our systems of legal protection. If 90% of Indians in the U.S. are upper caste, then this should inform the kinds of protections are afforded the Dalit minority. As Thenmozi Soundarajan and Sinthujan Varatharajah write, “Caste isn’t limited to our particular South Asian homeland, it migrates, too. Caste is embodied by all of us diasporic South Asians, regardless of ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, sexual, or political affiliation.” It is only a critical lens on the intersection of race, religion, gender, immigration status, and caste that can help us understand why caste should be a protected category for South Asians in the US.

Approximately 2.2 million immigrants from India live in the United States, according to the Migration Policy Institute and nearly half of these have settled in California. So, we must head back to California for a moment. 

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A few years ago the state was embroiled in a hot debate about how to talk about the relationship to Hinduism and caste. In 2016, California’s Instructional Quality Commission began considering a new framework for the kindergarten to 12th grade social science curriculum. Their goal was t to include new research and reflect the state’s increasing diversity. On the matter of how South Asia and the history of the region was described in the textbooks, two camps emerged. On one side were Hindu nationalist organizations like the Hindu Education (HEF), Hindu America Foundation (HAF) and the Uberoi Foundation, a religious studies organization that promotes awareness of Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism. On the other side was the South Asia Faculty Group, an interdisciplinary group of scholars, supported by Dalit rights and anti-caste activists. Among other things, one of the major points of contention was how caste would be taught, particularly in its relationship to Hinduism.

The Hindu nationalist organizations argued for tempering or erasing the curriculum’s mentions of the caste system, arguing that it reflects unfairly on Hinduism. HAF, HEF, and the Uberoi Foundation all fought for the removal sentence that described caste as a social-science term for a “particularly unbending social structure, for example, slave-holding society in the American south before the Civil War.”  Their argument for delinking caste from Hinduism is to falsely claim that caste is not a religious practice. They wanted to use the term “social classes” instead of “caste.” The Uberoi Foundation went so far as to call for the exclusion of the word Dalit (meaning “oppressed”) a term that people chose in order to identify with their struggle and not rely on their oppressors terms for them (words like “untouchables”).  

Though they lost the debate on the use of the term Dalit, which did make it into the textbooks, many scholars find that the final description that made it in was uncomfortably close to the language suggested by the conservative Hindu groups like Hindu America Foundation. Unsurprising given all that we know about the power and reach of these groups, and given all that we know about who gets to write the history books, and who doesn’t.

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So as it turns out, the field of critical race theory has much to offer us here, in this very real and ongoing debate about caste and discrimination. Through it we can pay close attention to questions about who creates knowledge, and whose stories are erased. Through it we can ask about the utility of identity politics. 

For example, what is gained and what is lost if I, an immigrant to the U.S. from an upper caste Hindu family identify as South Asian, and so does a Dalit immigrant to the U.S. Can the category of “South Asian” hold both our experiences? 

For another, can our legal system intended to protect people on the basis of racial discrimination account for the caste-based discrimination faced by the Dalit engineer, when perpetrated by another Indian immigrant? In 2016, Equality Labs released the results of a survey on caste in the US, and found that 2 out of 3 Dalits in the U.S. reported workplace discrimination.

And for yet another, where do we locate the discrimination that the Dalit women engineers detailed in their letter? How do we account for the multiple cracks in legal protection that multiply marginalized people experience?

These are the REAL questions that critical race theory reckons with. It names and surfaces the limits of our legal protections against discrimination. It exposes the need for nuance beyond a perfunctory call for color-blindness in the law. It asks us to pay attention to the way that legal discrimination cannot be understood without an intersectional context. Your race matters, yes. As does your class. As does your gender. As does your ability. As does your sexual orientation. As does your age. 

And I would argue, as does your caste.