In response to Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s proposed inclusion of ‘caste’ in Seattle’s non-discrimination policy, the Hindu American Foundation wrote to Seattle City Attorney Ann Davidson last week, apprising her of HAF’s concerns. 

Signed by HAF Executive Director Suhag Shukla, Esq., HAF Managing Director Samir Kalra, Esq., and HAF co-founder Nikhil Joshi, Esq. (a Board Certified specialist in in Labor and Employment Law), the letter opens:

“We share the admirable goals of standing up for civil rights and eliminating all forms of prejudice and discrimination, including based on caste. Indeed, if and when incidents of caste discrimination occur, they should be brought to light, thoroughly investigated and rectified.

That said, we believe that both the legislative intent and impact of Councilmember Samant’s proposal unfairly singles out and targets an entire community on the basis of their national origin and ancestry for disparate treatment, thereby violating the very policy the resolution seeks to amend, not to mention Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Additional resources:

 

Full text of the letter is below:

February 7, 2023

Dear City Attorney Ann Davison, Hope this finds you well.

We are writing to you on behalf of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) with regard to legislation recently proposed by Councilmember Kshama Sawant to add the novel category of “caste” to the city’s policy on nondiscrimination in the workplace. HAF is a national nonpartisan, nonprofit education, advocacy and civil rights organization with a significant number of members living and working in the City of Seattle.

We share the admirable goals of standing up for civil rights and eliminating all forms of prejudice and discrimination, including based on caste. Indeed, if and when incidents of caste discrimination occur, they should be brought to light, thoroughly investigated and rectified.

That said, we believe that both the legislative intent and impact of Councilmember Samant’s proposal unfairly singles out and targets an entire community on the basis of their national origin and ancestry for disparate treatment, thereby violating the very policy the resolution seeks to amend, not to mention Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In her statements to the press, Councilmember Samant has stated that, “Caste discrimination doesn’t only take place in other countries. It is faced by South Asian American and other immigrant working people in their workplaces, including in the tech sector, in Seattle and in cities around the country” and that “the policy protects those of South Asian descent from discrimination by those who do [recognize the caste system].”

Not only does the council member make clear the target of her policy proposal, but she negatively implicates an entire ethnic minority community — people of Indian descent make up less than 2% of the US and Washington state population — in the absence of any verifiable evidence of her claim of widespread discrimination amongst South Asians in the workplace. No other ethnic minority is being similarly targeted or subjected to separate proposed policies that would only apply to their community.

The addition of “caste” is a striking departure from the well-established practice of facially neutral policies that apply broadly and generally to all people regardless of background or identity. That this category calls for treating disparately members of a group on the basis of their national origin or ancestry is the very definition of discriminatory, and a denial of both equal protection and due process. It also further exacerbates misconceptions about Indians, and in effect seeks to institutionalize implicit bias about all people of Indian/South Asian descent as members of a suspect class as a matter of policy.

Caste is one of the most complicated and misunderstood concepts encountered when attempting to understand India and Hinduism. Yet it remains one of the single most entrenched, inaccurate and reductive stereotypes about both. Though often presented as a growing problem in the United States, the only authoritative survey on the issue of caste identities and caste discrimination has found that while discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, color and national origin is reported as quite common, discrimination on the basis of caste is exceedingly rare (See Carnegie Endowment’s 2020 Social Realities of Indian Americans: Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey conducted in partnership with Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pennsylvania). Even if rare, however, existing laws prohibiting ancestry-based discrimination can and should be used as the remedy. It is also important to note that both statistically and anecdotally, caste becomes less and less salient to the identities of subsequent generations of Indian and Hindu Americans.

We strongly urge you to quash this ill-intended resolution calling for a policy change that seeks to unfairly single out and discriminate against people of South Asian and Indian descent or origin. We’ve also provided some additional resources below for your convenience.

Please let us know if you have some time this week or early next to discuss this issue and its legal ramifications further. We would also be happy to similarly address members of the city council.

Additional Resources