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Beyond Caste Bans and Black History Erasures: Looking Ahead Toward Indian American and African American Solidarities

Beyond Caste Bans and Black History Erasures: Looking Ahead Toward Indian American and African American Solidarities

  • Upper-caste opposition to Seattle’s ban on caste-based discrimination can find an eerie resonance in the discomfort conservative and fashionably liberal Whites have shared in the inclusion and teaching of the racial context underpinning American history.

“We can disagree and still love each other… unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” — Robert Jones Jr (Son of Baldwin)

Seattle banned caste-based discrimination through its City Council legislation this week. Recently, higher academic spaces in the U.S. have gradually started to recognize caste as an operational and exclusionary category; Brandeis University was the first to add caste to expand its non-discriminatory policies. As a progressive, inclusive attempt towards realizing South Asian (Indian) America’s highest potential in participating in U.S. democracy, this has a broader resonance not only related to caste and casteism. 

The Seattle City Council’s ban sends a strong message of solidarity to caste-oppressed people everywhere and strengthens the holds of American democracy for them in the domestic space. It also lays bare the essential coalitional and solidarity efforts that should expand its critique against the politics of censoring and exclusion of people and their histories under oppressive regimes and cultures. For, intersecting with this local attempt at broadening inclusion is the reverberation of being critical about another potent history of exclusion, the foundational framework of U.S. history and culture, the history of Black enslavement, exclusion, and a continual struggle to belong. In the context of the Seattle legislative reforms, a conservative movement led by the Hindu American Federation (HAF) has insisted that such a matter of discrimination can ‘target’ South Asians due to their caste-based identities and that it infringes upon tenets of the Civil Rights Act (1964).

While reservations about caste-based discrimination may seem irrelevant for people not touched by casteism, the reservation is at best meant to uphold upper caste Brahmin/Savarna Hindu fragility over any caste-oppressed individual’s rights and inclusion into American polity as an individual. Such a locus of discomfort finds an eerie resonance in the discomfort conservative and fashionably liberal Euro-Caucasoid people have shared in the inclusion and teaching of the racial context underpinning American history. 

Critical Race Theory (CRT) informs an academic and legal-social conceptual framework whose teaching, recognition, and public discussion creates discomfiture within state councils and policymakers. Several states have shared regulatory policies that prohibit, erase, and otherwise censure any discussion on systemic inequity that has gained momentum with political patronage. 

On the first day of Black History Month this year (February 1, 2023), the College Board truncated and censured much of its Advanced Placement (AP) levels course (that can count towards college-level credits) in African American history, also focusing on queer studies and the abolition movement. In fact, in tracking the nationwide records of restricting education and awareness about critical race and structural inequity, 18 newly introduced anti-CRT measures across eight U.S. states have been identified by researchers as of December 2022. 

The call of the hour should be to strongly criticize the College Board for readily bowing to conservative political pressures resulting in the banning of Critical Race Theory while showing anti-caste approaches in navigating and practicing intentional inclusion within our democracy.

With further political and legislative traction, U.S. high school students may soon be studying a filtered history of America. This history is patterned to ensure the comfort level and the fragility of the last white person standing, with historical and institutionalized amnesia about America’s foundationally racist beginnings. Predictably and in the rationale governing exclusion, the Board of Education and the College Board in Florida approved that knowing African American history was optional; instead of recognizing it as the bedrock informing American history and democratic principles.

It is now not obligatory for high school students to know American history that includes Black struggles and movements that inextricably also inform the principle that allows South Asian (Indian) American presence in U.S. immigration history. This systemic assurance protecting the comfort guaranteed through perpetuating an incomplete history and in support of structural racism is similar to the discomfiture that HAF and those in alignment with it have shared on Seattle’s anti-caste legislation and anti-caste education in the recent past. 

The reservations about whitewashing race collude with the ideology aligned with sanitizing caste and casteism. And the histories of oppression that conspire to make caste irrelevant in the existence of South Asian (Indian) American shares a renewal and intersectional alignment with the oppressive attempts to erase the relevance of race in America’s history.

In the context of South Asian (Indian) American presence in the United States, it is a requisite to reexamine the legislative and historical context that allowed for this diaspora’s existence (See Immigration Act 1965Civil Rights Act 1964, and Civil Rights Movement) here. Thus, conversations linking the legislative ban on discrimination based on caste (in Seattle) and the parallel moment that seeks the discursive and systemic erasure of Black history and belonging in the tapestry of U.S. history (in the College Board’s AP revision) are not only relevant but crucial to renew coalitional and intersectional spaces of advocacy and community building. 

These conversations and reexaminations become powerful moments to remind us, South Asian (Indian) Americans, of our social responsibility for creating a conduit that promotes for historical reckoning of both stories and their intersections as part of our American Kahani. Just as historical amnesia and institutional censuring of race-based education about U.S. history and politics seem to discomfort those who continue to benefit from inequity, the chorus denying the rampant existence of caste-based discrimination also helps exclude and protect caste and casteism as an operational valence of experiencing life as a South Asian origin (Indian) American. 

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The call of the hour should be to strongly criticize the College Board for readily bowing to conservative political pressures resulting in the banning of Critical Race Theory while showing anti-caste approaches in navigating and practicing intentional inclusion within our democracy.

Retrospectively located in the interstices of both kinds of oppressive systems of exclusion and as a person grounded in the historical context of her presence and privilege to live and work from the U.S., it is perhaps a part of our rigorous self and community assessments to see where we can align ourselves with inclusionary movements that help combat (and maybe redeem our complicities with oppressive systems) of systemic exclusion. 

The African American Policy Forum (AAPF), co-founded in 1996 by legal scholar and noted academic, Kimberle W. Crenshaw could be a place to start. Honest dialogue and inclusion can become more meaningful if they are intersectional and coalitional. Perhaps, it can be a start for South Asian origin (Indian) Americans trying to be meaningful allies and showing solidarity, political consciousness, and ethical grounding in recognizing the struggles of Black people for inclusion. 

Just as racist practices exclude and caste ensures structural exclusion, perhaps, joining forces in solidarity can ensure we broaden the arch of our belonging into realizing a slice of that freedom that Martin Luther King Jr. dared to challenge us to dream about long years ago. King dared us all to keep going ahead in search of freedom with echoes that resonate, “We cannot walk alone…” 

We won’t.


Aparajita De is an Associate Professor at the University of the District of Columbia and specializes in postcolonial literature and Cultural Studies. Her recent collection, South Asian Racialization and Belonging after 9/11: Masks of Threat, was published by Lexington Books Inc., 2016. Her essays can also be found in the Journal of South Asian Popular Culture, South Asian Review, and Postcolonial Text. Aparajita’s most recent essay is a chapter in Bollywood’s New Woman: Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies (Rutgers University Press 2021). Currently, she is transitioning from academic writing to writing for the self, life writing, and creative writing. 

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  • We higher cast Hindus have made the hate towards lower caste ( includes Dalits and all oppressed class ) Hindus as their main psyche mentally and DNA physically over the last 1500 years ( whites’s racim is only less than 150 years old ). All fair colored Hindus are the descendants of Ayryans who not original Indians for probably 28000 to 30000 years ago original indians came either from Australian aboriginals or African aboriginals as they were perfectly able to distant lands on foot or by sea. We so called “migrated Aryans” ARE DEFINITELY NOT ORIGINAL INDIANS. IT HAS BEEN PROVEN BY MODERN DAY GENETICS . But gee a higher caste can lick whites feet for two hours but to lick a dalit’s feet is another matter

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