WA Councilmember Sawant Proposes Legislation Against Caste Discrimination

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https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/01/25/news-gleams-sawant-proposes-legislation-against-caste-discrimination-spokane-street-low-bridge-reopens-but-delays-remain/#Sawant-Proposes-Legislation-Against-Caste-Discrimination

Councilmember Sawant Proposes Legislation Against Caste Discrimination

Councilmember Kshama Sawant (District 3, Central Seattle), chair of the Seattle City Council’s Sustainability and Renters’ Rights Committee, has proposed City legislation aimed at fighting caste discrimination. The bill — which is the first of its kind in the nation — is primarily focused on the 167,000 people from South Asia who live in Washington State, especially those located in the Seattle area and focused around the tech sector. According to a press release by the Seattle City Council, “Caste is a system of rigid social stratification characterized by hereditary status, endogamy (completely closed categories), and social barriers based on birth and descent. Caste discrimination occurs in the form of social segregation, economic deprivation, physical and psychological abuse, and violence. Caste discrimination is also manifested in employment, education, and housing.”

One organizer shared with Real Change News that “ideas of purity and pollution which originate from caste are commonplace” and that “slowness in adopting anti-casteism provisions reveals the biases of many U.S. South Asian communities, which tend to be overrepresented by caste-privileged people.”This bill follows a 2020 case where the state of California sued Cisco Systems Inc. for discrimination against a Indian American employee who was of a lower Indian caste than his managers. Since then, other incidents of caste discrimination have surfaced around Silicon Valley as well, and it has been identified as a prevalent problem.

Data from Equality Labs shows that “1 in 4 caste-oppressed people faced physical and verbal assault, 1 in 3 faced education discrimination, and 2 in 3 (67% percent) faced workplace discrimination,” according to the Seattle City Council’s press release.

Authors like Isabel Wilkerson of the book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents holds an expanded view of caste, which she extends to other races, including Black Americans. She notes to NPR, “Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that’s used to determine one’s place in that … [it] is the term that is more precise [than race]; it is more comprehensive, and it gets at the underlying infrastructure that often we cannot see, but that is there undergirding much of the inequality and injustices and disparities that we live with in this country.”