Thread by @saaf_oxforduni

Starting shortly, @EllisMonk @DhandaMeena and Kamala Visweswaran on 'Race and Caste: How do Oppressive Systems Count?' Panel moderator: @surajyengde

Tune in here: facebook.com/southasianalte…

This panel has now begun. @surajyengde introduces the speakers @EllisMonk, Kamala Visweswaran and @DhandaMeena

sant.ox.ac.uk/events/two-day…

#CasteCensus @EllisMonk will talk about enumeration, stratification and amelioration of racial domination.

#CasteCensus "US Census in 1850 evolved to understand differences within black people. Then in 1890, Indian (Native American), Chinese and Japanese categories were added."- @EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "Chinese & Japanese were separately listed because Chinese people were discriminated against whereas Japanese were seen as 'frenchmen of the east'. So, Census created and maintained racial hierarchy."- @EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "Sikhs were termed 'Hindu' as a racial term. An UC Sikh Indian man fought a case in the US to be listed as 'white' claiming to be from Caucasian race but the courts denied it."-@EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "US thinkers used to look at Brazil as a 'Racial Paradise' because their laws around defining blackness were not strict and a lack of explicit ghettoization like Jim Crow"-@EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "Series of ethnographic studies did highlight that it was not a paradise at all even if it was not as bad as in the US. Brazil has White, Brown, Black categories."-@EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "US ethnographers merged brown and black into a 'negro' category in Brazil. "- @EllisMonk

There were affirmative actions like Homestead Act, the GI Act for white people, that gave them free land taken from Native American people. The civil rights legislation clubs minorities and women, leading to White women being highest benefactors of affirmative actions.@EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "Essentialism is a political strategy - they lump together a heterogeneous population. Intra-racial or intra-categorical aspects are subsumed."-
@EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "The darker you are as an African American the more likely you are to face incarceration, face labour market inequalities. There is a conflation of census race categorisation with socially perceived skin tone is the norm" - @EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "We should address these complexities, is it about contemporary or historical legacy of discrimination, or both? How sticky is this categorisation? Can people shift in and out of categorisation in their lifetime?" - @EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "Savarna UC elites play minoritarianism to enjoy the Affirmative Action policies in the west. They stop oppressed castes in their country but adopt the language of social justice while in the US."- Kamala Visweswaran

#CasteCensus "In India there was a discussion around 'creamy layers'. This move to say 'class, not caste' or 'class, not race' is a way to try to disappear the phenomenon of caste/race discrimination. "- Kamala Visweswaran

fb.watch/a-H0JV6gyX/

#CasteCensus "This is not the post-caste society or post-race society as envisioned by Dr Ambedkar or Martin Luther King Jr."- Kamala Visweswaran

#CasteCensus "There is an opposition to addition of caste as protected category. It was opposed by saying 'it will cause more discrimination by unfairly targeting Hindu faculty.'"- Kamala Visweswaran

#CasteCensus "Incidentally, they claim caste is not unique to Hindu community but that adding caste as protected category affects Hindus only."- Kamala Visweswaran

#CasteCensus "If people don't identify with any caste it doesn't mean they are not capable of caste discrimination. Who has the luxury of not having strong views on caste? "- Kamala Visweswaran

#CasteCensus "Firstly, let me say I am fully in support of Caste Census to understand patterns and to correlate it with indices of development." @DhandaMeena
fb.watch/a-H0JV6gyX/

#CasteCensus "The political use of census data is not just for remedial measures, but for all kinds of long term goals, goals may not always be benign." @DhandaMeena

#CasteCensus "How would we package the many groups we have, how would we go about these categories? How do we identify patterns of disadvantage? On the biases of enumerators, I would recommend the book Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion by Joel Lee."

#CasteCensus "Social classes are formed everywhere but castes as 'jatis' always in plural and always in relationship to each other, is unique to Caste. Individual economic advancement does not have traction against the entire system."-@DhandaMeena

#CasteCensus "Like the real life example quoted in @surajyengde's book, I can say that Inferiorization is at the heart of Casteism. Building global solidarity requires understanding imposed collective silences."-@DhandaMeena

#CasteCensus "A trope like Hinduphobia is solely used to undermine anti-caste activism and it even led its way to the parliament here."-@DhandaMeena

#CasteCensus "Sudha Bharadwaj recently said in an interview - 'I think all judges should spend a week in Under Trials jail. Then, they will rethink before refusing bail.' So, experiential understanding is very important."-
@DhandaMeena

How can things get messier with further categorisation? asks @surajyengde, Once you have data, things can unfold in complex ways, says @EllisMonk, you may come across consequential forms of inequality, discrepancy between self identification and perceived identity etc

"What does data mean if it doesn't match up to lived experience" - @EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "Over generations, people can move into different categories. Eg. Many black students at Harvard are not from American descendants of slaves, but are immigrants."-@EllisMonk

#CasteCensus "UCs need to acknowledge the legacy of caste privilege that enabled them to migrate to the US. What we can do is, track the appropriation and call it out. "- Kamala Visweswaran

#CasteCensus "Lies have been spread about anti-discrimination law. They say racism is more prevalent than casteism. That's true because UCs face discrimination for the 1st time here. Imagine what the oppressed caste people face, back home and here?"-
@DhandaMeena

#CasteCensus "A lot of depth in understanding comes from qualitative understanding, which foregrounds lived in experience. But, quantitative data is a first step towards that understanding."-@DhandaMeena

#CasteCensus "Colourism and discrimination in South Asian communities is an issue that students have taken up. Colour is also coded through our understanding of caste in our languages and assumptions."- Kamala Visweswaran

#CasteCensus "There is a long history of Indians from various communities who petition to citizenship by claiming to be from Aryan Race."- Kamala Visweswaran

That brings us to the end of this panel, thank you so much for watching this session! The replay will be on our Facebook page: fb.watch/a-H0JV6gyX/