Why California Adding "Caste" as a Protected Class Will Increase Discrimination
FAIR Substack | Suhag Shukla & Samir Kalra
In this piece, Shukla and Kalra argue that “CSU and other California state institutions are deeply misguided in creating a new protected class category that is facially discriminatory and so ill-defined as to make it impossible to adjudicate claims—all while existing laws already effectively cover caste-based discrimination.”
Recently, “California State University (CSU) joined the University of California, Davis and the California Democratic Party in adding “caste” to the list of protected classes in their non-discrimination policies. The addition came after activists insisted that South Asians, most of them Indian and Hindu, are discriminating against other South Asians based on their perceived place in a ‘caste hierarchy.’”
“This policy is facially discriminatory because caste is almost universally equated with people of Indian origin and with followers of Hinduism,” the authors argue. In addition, there’s no way to define caste in a legal manner. “There are no caste certificates in the United States,” they explain, “and there is no name or surname that reliably indicates which caste one might belong to…that most Indians in the United States don’t even know their supposed caste.”
“The addition of ‘caste’ as a protected class is an appalling throwback to an era when California created and enforced policies that explicitly discriminated against entire groups of people based on their immutable characteristics.”