Thread by @SuhagAShukla

We #HinduAmericans have the unique (mis)fortune to have Indian visitors drop by for a bit and arrogate the immense privilege of platforms such as @TheAtlantic to import their casteist obsessions & counterfactually transfer those anxieties on us. (Thread)
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

You come from a casteist family that dunked on your servants? You want to slam our model minority myth as “flattening”?

Fine.

But your “caste travels” tropes “flatten” varna/jati/etc & expose an entrenched #Hinduphobia & shocking ignorance of Hinduism. Yet you’re platformed.

I mean @TheAtlantic article leads with that Equality Labs survey debunked by the same @CarnegieEndow survey the article also cites! The EL survey excluded the majority of South Asians that identify with no caste & only counted folks like the author identifying as “upper caste” 3/

Author doesn’t mention that Carnegie found that 95% of Indian Americans have no experience w/ caste disc. in the US! If they face discrimination, it is 5-7x more likely due to their religion or skin color. So little empathy/understanding of our lived experience. 4/

Colonized consciousness is so ingrained in India, that brown people like this author are clueless about the racist & Hinduphobic stereotypes they perpetuate about themselves!

Come on!

Purusha of Purusha Sukta is not Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva.

Caste is not race or color.

5/

So @JeffreyGoldberg, perhaps unwittingly, you just promoted racist tropes conflating caste with Hinduism, false depictions of deities & a call to police a brown micro-minority at colleges for something rarely reported.

You’re on more solid ground with a story on snake charmers.