When Maya, a computer scientist, left India in 2002 at age 21, she thought she was finally leaving her home country's oppressive caste system behind.
Maya is a Dalit, a group previously called “untouchables” in India’s caste system, which has structured Hindu society for centuries. Under the caste system, people are ranked at birth, and that impacts every aspect of their lives, including where they work, who they marry, and access to education.
But she soon learned that caste discrimination didn't respect borders, and for 18 years she has faced discrimination at the hands of higher-caste Brahmin Indians who have established powerful cliques within many of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. She has hidden her identity and even used fake names to get work.
...
“I think that every single tech company is vulnerable,” Thenmozhi Soundarajan, director of Equality Labs, told VICE News. “I think that the whole Valley is watching what happens with the Cisco case.”
The claim of widespread caste discrimination across the Valley is backed up by the accounts of six Dalits living in the U.S. who told VICE News about their own experiences of discrimination that stretches all the way from America’s education system to some of the more valuable companies in the world.
...
Indians in America
Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly dominated by white men, especially at senior and executive level positions. But within the tech industry, Indians have carved out an important niche for themselves as skilled engineers and coders.
Indians migrants in the U.S. are typically highly educated with a median income twice as high as the general population. They also fill a significant skills gap in some of America’s biggest companies.
This is especially true in Silicon Valley, where India’s tech-focused education systems provide a consistent supply line of highly educated workers. For example,
more than 70% of H1-B visas — which are widely used by Valley companies to recruit overseas talent — were issued to Indians in 2019.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, and Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, are both Indian immigrants who come from the higher Brahmin caste and now lead two of the world’s most powerful organizations.
But despite the Indian immigration story looking like a huge success, the largely ignored issue of caste discrimination against lower-caste Indians shows that deeply ingrained prejudices persist, and have left tens of thousands of people living in fear for decades.
...
Because the U.S. government does not track caste when handing out visas, there are no reliable figures available for how many of the roughly 3 million Indians currently living in the U.S. are Dalits.
www.vice.com
