My friend Mahesh actually informs me that the @dalitdiva handle below is an actual co-founder of that anti-Hindu hate group that goes by the name of @EqualityLabs .
So the co-founder of this well-known American Dalit Activist grifter group can't even get basics of caste affiliation right for what is a fairly well known mercantile caste in India and just goes around saying "Brahmin this Brahmin that" like a learned Pavlovian reflex.
It is however not surprising that she knows nothing about Indian castes (even well known ones) because she is a second generation Indian American who attended UC-Berkeley for undergrad. Caste played no role in her life here and not surprisingly she lacks basic knowledge ....
... other than tagging random Indian Americans as "Brahmin" or the preferred catch-all for Equality Labs "Upper Caste"
I read her article in the Indian Edition of Elle titled "What it means to be an Untouchable in 2017" and it set off several alarm bells. She is almost certainly an outright fraud and grifter elle.in/article/still-…
She claims that when she "came out" as Dalit at UC Berkeley when she made a documentary as part of her undergrad thesis that "friends stopped talking to us", "I had plates and utensils switched on me", "Indian professors ... blacklisted my work", that she
"stopped getting invited to South Asian events". Anyone with even the most passing familiarity with Indian American scene especially the "South Asian" scene in academia would recognize each of the above claims as that of a bullshit artist.
Notice the lack of specificity of these claims. Details are lacking as are names. There is no way to fact check them at all. That is good because they are almost certainly figments of her grifter imagination.
If anything an admission of being a Dalit is likely to lead to sympathy from other Indian Americans, not shunning. The plate and utensils trope is so strong because of its roots in old India, but to suggest it operates in the US is just so bogus ... how would she even know ....
... that the plates and utensils she got at a friend or acquaintance had been "switched out"? The smart thing for a budding casteist trying to enforce untouchability in America would be simply not to interact with her at all.
And if they did interact with her but could not bear to have her eating with plates and utensils they might use, then the smart thing to do would be to have one matching set of plates and utensils stored somewhere and whipped out just when Dalit Diva visits.
All of this stuff is just getting into surreal fever dream territory here but obviously the grift is too good to factcheck. I mean the part where she claims she was blackballed by Indian Profs and South Asian events is hilarious.
She would be hailed as a Dalit Queen laying down truth bombs because most Indian American academics in Liberal Arts actually share her simplistic stereotypes about Caste in India perhaps to carry on their own grift in their academic niche.
And as I said in my original thread the goal is to show adjacency to BiPOCs, and sure enough she waxes poetic about how the only people who really understood her were African American women (not even the men)
To illustrate how this grift can be a career go on LinkedIn and you can find lots of White women (mostly women, some White men) lauding her for various Diversity, Equity & Inclusion events under the umbrella of "Caste Equity in Tech". Google Cloud execs appear to the ones ...
... plugging her seminars the most, but it also includes the American Bar Association and the MIT Open Documentary Lab.
I would encourage all Indian Americans to push back hard when their employers announce such events. You and I know that these people are wearing an empty suit but the hapless and clueless DEI mafia doesn't. Provide examples such as their tweets about the Twitter CEO ...
... to show that the Dalit Activist Grifters in America are not wearing any clothes. If you steer clear of confronting these charlatans then just remember that your position and that of your children in American society is being undermined without any Casus Belli whatsoever.
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So the Indian American CTO of Twitter got promoted to the CEO slot and there has been a metric ton of garbage related to what his caste affiliation might be on Twitter by both Indian American wokes and other American wokes.
Even the Indian American woke could not identify Parag Agrawal's caste correctly and called him a "Cis Brahmin". Another woke handle misidentified him twice "Tamil Brahmin" and "Tamil Bania"
This is not surprising to me as a first generation Indian American immigrant at all. Caste identity plays very little role in the day to day life of even a first generation immigrant and in any case India being a massive, diverse country ...
Hey @sfchronicle you say you deliver "the Bay Area’s best journalism every day". Well your article on the UC-Davis anti-caste discrimination policy by @Shwanika fell short of that standard.
It is like the Rolling Stone UVa Rape or Duke Lacrosse Rape case of reporting except much more shoddily written and less professional than those articles were believe it or not.
In this thread I outline numerous reasons why you have spread sensationalistic blood libel type anti-Hindu accusations.
Just managed to read this incredibly hard to believe article in the SF Chronicle (it was behind a paywall but I used the Wayback Machine archive) by @Shwanika
Dear Shwanika Narayan all I can say is that you really need to learn how to be a seasoned reporter and not just be so gullible that you repeat incredible claims without doing any legwork to verify them.
Your article quotes "J. Kaur" a UC Davis senior of Indian descent as making the absolutely 100% take it to the bank fabricated quote that students are seeking same-caste room-mates.
LOL all this reflects is comical California woke-max hothouse farce. Any Indian American knows that discrimination on the basis of caste is basically like reason # one billion gazillion on their list of worries.
For a supposed scholar of medieval India to cheer on policies that encourage stereotyping and bias against Indian American immigrants is well kind of stunning but par for the course for people who know this mediocre scholar of a third rate campus at Rutgers.
Truschke seems to have been smarting since served with a defamation lawsuit by HAF and since Rutgers backed away from its name being affiliated with the poisonous DGH conference. She has been kind of unhinged and incendiary since then.
Open letter by HAF to Melinda Byerley @MJB_SF. While I have mixed feelings about the outreach to Melinda as I view her apologies as incomplete, she did actually address her second apology to Indian Americans. If she goes on the HAF Podcast and invites Indian Americans ...
... from the Tech Industry on her Podcast and has a genuine conversation about why we are concerned about attacks from the woke liberal wing of the Democratic Party and why her incendiary rhetoric was so dangerous and othering then it might be the best possible outcome.
Like HAF I too have an intense dislike for cancel culture and in fact even after her clearly frivolous first apology had invited Melinda to introspect and offered redemption. I am not in a position to offer her redemption personally because while her second apology is a positive
Rep Scalise falsely claims in the beginning of his tweet that there are unlimited GCs for "migrants". First these GCs are not for migrants in these sense of those who jumped our Southern Border ...
These are GCs for skilled legal immigrants sponsored by their employer and their spouses and kids. These GCs will be awarded mostly to Indian American workers *already working here* in most cases for over a decade and whose GC petitions were approved long ago ...
... their GCs are just held up due to country of origin quotas. I thought Conservatives were supposed to be against quotas? The Rep might want to get a primer on the subject he is tweeting about from Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) since the Congressman from LA doesn't seem to understand ..