The Casteism I See in America

Updated at 7:00 a.m. ET on Nov. 10, 2021.

Indians and Indian Americans are often held up as a “model minority” in the United States. Members of this community are more likely to be highly educated and to have health insurance, make more money, work in more senior positions, and have lower rates of poverty than both the average immigrant and the average American. They are well represented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects—and more and more of them occupy roles of political and social influence, including Vice President Kamala Harris. This group, so the narrative goes, exhibits the promise of the American dream.

But two lawsuits in the past year, as well as two surveys, have offered a clearer picture of this particular minority group, warts and all, finding evidence that many members of the community have imported the specifically Hindu Indian notion of casteism to America. The vocabulary may be unfamiliar to most Americans—Dalits, Brahmans, Adivasis, for example—but underlying it is a familiar, and corrosive, subject: discrimination.

In July 2020, the tech company Cisco Systems over alleged discrimination toward an Indian engineer by his that it will “vigorously defend itself.”