Caste discrimination in the United States

Caste is a birth based hierarchical system wherein people are divided. Varna is not the origin of caste. Varna classified workers into four varnas or categories: Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra, in order of descending value of work. Varna cannot be inherited. The work determines varna. Changing career will change varna.[4] The caste system does the opposite, A person's caste is determined at birth and that forces them into that caste's occupation. Based on DNA analysis, Caste originated during gupta period.[5][6]

Historically, dominant-caste Hindus have used their caste privilege to gain citizenship in America. In 1923, A.K. Mozumdar and Bhagat Singh Thind argued that they passed the whiteness test because they were caste Hindus and had pure "Aryan" blood.[7]

The caste system has historically been central to the American perception of Hinduism and India. Transcendentalists wrote about Brahmanism, a system they defined through ancient Sanskrit texts.[8] In the second half of the 19th century, Brahmanism was taken by American writers like Lydia Maria Child and James Freeman Clarke to be the religion of India and one that created "a degraded society organized by caste."[9] During the 18th and 19th centuries, Hinduism was derided as "heathenism", "paganism, and "superstition."[9]

Michael J. Altman argues that American writers and editors consolidated the idea of Protestant morality and American nationalism by defining them in opposition to the "Hindoo Other," imagined through representations including that of caste.[9] The ideology of American Protestant nationalism was disseminated through school textbooks, popular magazines, and missionary reports.[9] American textbooks emphasized the connection between religion and caste in order to teach a narrative of India as a "half-civilized society" that was a product of Hindu religion. The United States was considered "enlightened," and therefore, valued Protestantism as well as equality democracy and freedom. Harper's Magazine warned against the treat posed by the immigration of others to the United States. It portrayed Indian society and Hinduism, a religion which "undergirded the hierarchy of caste," as a tale about the absence of Protestantism with the aim of demonstrating the superiority of American Protestants over Hindus.[9]

In 1910, the Asiatic Exclusion League, argued that Asian Indians should be denied citizenship through naturalization. The league described Hindu ancestry as "enslaved, effeminate, caste ridden, and degraded" and Hindus as the "slaves of Creation."[10] Such Hinduphobic rhetoric formed the idea of the "Hindoo invasion," an iteration of the "Yellow Peril."[10] In 1953, W. Norman Brown, founder of the Department of South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that "a large number of Americans...have a picture of India as a land of meditating omphalopsychites, hypnotic swamis, naked ascetics, bejeweled princes of fabulous wealth and incomparable harems, gross superstitions, bare-skinned, poverty-stricken, famine-ridden masses, where everyone is a beggar and caste is more important than life, the countryside terrifying with Bengal tigers, the houses and fields infested with hooded serpents, a land where disease and depravity are rampant."[11]

Caste is not officially recognized by law in the United States.[12][2] It has come into limelight due to recent incidents of personal personal prejudice[13] and forced labor.[14] The caste discrimination has followed the immigrants in US coming from India, Nepal and other south Asian countries. It has been mostly underreported despite its influence on job opportunities and marriage prospects among south Asian immigrants.[15][16] There have been earlier attempts to get institutions recognize the discrimination related to caste.[17][18][19]

In August 2002, the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination approved a resolution condemning caste or descent-based discrimination.[20]

Lower caste activists in India have found common ground with the struggles of African Americans in the US.[21] The lower caste activist body Dalit Panthers was formed taking inspiration from Black Panther Party.[3][22] Martin Luther King, Jr. too had an empathetic association with the untouchables in India, and when he visited India in 1959 he said, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.”[23]

British colonialists used "caste" in order to "systematize" India's diversity and to justify colonial rule of India.[24] Indian society, through the colonial era and into the present, has been altered by racial classification conducted using the British census.[25] Caste as "the institution of ranked, hereditary, endogamous occupational groups" is not indigenous to South Asia.[26] The English term "caste comes from the Portuguese word "castas."[27] Although, caste is equated with varna or jāti, the two terms have a much broader meaning than caste. The categories of caste were created by the British, who transformed local jãti identities into national social categories for records and legislation.[28]

Much like caste, the caste system was developed through a selective reading of the works and perspectives of some Brahmin scholars by colonialists.[29] This is exemplified throughout the nineteenth century, beginning from 1871-72 when the first all-India census was attempted.[30] The idea of the four varnas can be traced to the Manu Smriti, although the text is not prescriptive, sacred, nor does it possess any pan-Indian significance. Rather, the Manu Smriti, compiled by Brahmin scholars, gained importance as a legal document under British rule when British census officials were unable to separate between various factors.