[ATTW-L] tech comm & caste . . .

[Joseph Jeyaraj]

If caste is something of which we technical communicators should be aware, then  its invisibility could impact American tech workers.  

Most in the US would likely not know that Gandhi belonged to the bania caste or that caste was left out when the NYT ran a story on the current VP pick from the city with which the pick (whose mother was from the Brahmin caste and whose grandfather worked for the British bureaucracy) are associated.  Such invisibility produces a positive resonance as when the VP pick used a generic Tamil term in the acceptance speech.  

(This city, though, was a major site of the anti-caste Justice Party, the "Non Brahmin Manifesto," the non Brahmin movement, and currently a major site for the anti caste Dravidian movement.)

In the USA US workers have been suing South Asian big tech companies for discrimination based on national origin.  In a suit recently against one of those corporations (employing 30,000 or so in the US of whom more than half are of South Asian background)  for letting go non South Asians, the big tech company won.   

It raises, though, the question of whether caste should have been factored into the discussions.  If there are reports of discrimination against Dalits (those from the Untouchable caste) in the US, then could those outside the caste system have been left out unfairly because they did not belong to the right caste formation?  

If instead of national origin caste was made the category of discrimination or in addition to national origin caste was as well included as a discriminatory category in these legal suits, would the legal system have ruled differently?

Caste has been documented in the USA and UK, and in the USA raises pertinent legal questions.