Kudos to Swati Sawant, the fierce Dalit immigrant lawyer, who organized legal teams & highlighted this case.
Caste discrimination and exploitation of labor are inherently linked
And a poor understanding of caste in the US leaves more Dalit workers vulnerbale to exploitation.
“They were forbidden to talk to visitors...their pay was docked for minor violations, such as being seen without a helmet”
“They were asked to sign several documents,often in English, & instructed to tell US embassy staffers that they were skilled carvers or decorative painters”
They were paid $1/hour as mentioned in article, which is prohibitively low compared to the $15/hour min wage in NY and $12/hour min wage in New Jersey.
"Lawyers for the men, however, said they did manual labor on the site, working nearly 13 hours a day lifting large stones,operating cranes & other heavy machinery, building roads and storm sewers, digging ditches and shoveling snow, all for the equivalent of about $450 per month"
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
As someone who spent decades tormented by this word, a Savarna actress casually describing being ‘ugly’/‘unclean’/‘unpresentable’ by calling it Bhangi is not surprising.
Neither is the reaction of those who don’t seem to find any issue with using the name of a caste as a slur.
It’s a reflection of the deep tentacles of the caste system that so endemically normalizes a caste being seen as lower that it is turned into a synonym for dirty.
It shows the complete acceptance of the idea that Bhangis, one of the lowest paid people are inherently unclean.
It is this fully established understanding that allows the actress @moonstar4u to mean exactly what she did when she said Bhangi
to be understood in the exact way she intended
and then turn around to say that it was ‘misinterpreted’.
But it’s crucial to remember, even in a pandemic casteism never takes a break.
The IIT Kharagpur prof who berated an entire class of SC/ST/OBC + PwD students as ‘bloody bastards’ was apparently Covid+.
But that didn’t stop her.
She continued to use her hyper nationalism (not ‘standing up for the national anthem’) to lash out on ‘quota’ students in her English class, where she gets to determine whether they even make it to any of the IITs next year.
This is how casteism opeates in university spaces
It’s not just the usage of casteist slurs or telling students they don’t belong
It’s also constant harassment of those who avail reservation by UC profs to remind them of their ‘place’ in the system.
It’s calling them + their parents ‘bloody bastards’ in an English class.
Since calling out HAF for their motion in the Cisco case, a lot of seemingly Hindu Americans are ‘enraged’ about Dalits pointing out the obvious caste discrimination that happens to us.
Aside from the abuse, bullying & trolling, the worst are those trying to obfuscate the issue.
The ones who know how to skillfully shut down any call outs for casteism by waving their flag of religious freedom
Something that understandably scares most non-Indian Americans into silence
In the name of preserving religious sanctity they want to gag even the mention of caste
Like they did in 2016 in the California textbook case, where HAF argued that mentions of caste should be removed. And succeeded.
This idea of obfuscating caste by citing religious freedom is that is highly strategic, well thought & not an accident.
Despite obvious signs,many Indians still don’t believe that caste discrimination in the US is a lived reality for Dalits.
Wonder what they’d say to the Dalit couple who had ‘achoot’ - a slur for untouchable, scratched on their car while living in an Indian community in New York?
Reading @Isabelwilkerson’s Caste was an education in the racial heiarchy of the US. Her lucid writing & brilliance shines so powerfully that I often had to stop just to catch my breath.
But the book largely overlooks the current impact of a system that inspires its argument.
Wilkerson’s Caste not only makes visible the plainly manifest yet stubbornly obscured reality of racial suppression of African Americans but also supplies other people of color with a vocabulary to understand their place in the lattice of racial and social order in the US.