In her new book, Caste , Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson looks towards the Indian caste system to understand the stubborn pe...
In her new book, Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson looks towards the Indian caste system to understand the stubborn persistence of racism in the US. In a similar vein Indians, particularly in the diaspora, can look towards the recent soul searching over white racial privilege in the US in the wake the Black Lives Matter protests, to reflect on how caste-based segregation endures.
The recent caste discrimination lawsuit launched against Cisco by the State of California has generated defensiveness among some in the Indian immigrant community with declarations of caste being a thing of the past and no longer a relevant influence on diasporic life. In our book Seeing White: An Introduction to White Privilege, we explored the seeming invisibility of whiteness; white Americans are not conscious of being white, they perceive themselves and their experiences as the good, normal way of being.
At the same time, they are hyper aware of other races and the ways in which people are not “white”. In much the same way, upper caste experiences in the Indian diaspora are often thought of as the normal or good Indian immigrant success story.
The power of selective nostalgia
In a 2019 New York Times profile, Indira Nooyi the former chief executive of PepsiCo, a first- generation Indian...
