In another significant moment for the movement against caste discrimination in the United States, a Bill to make caste discrimination illegal was passed by the California State Assembly on Monday, August 28, with 50 votes in its favour and only three against it. It was earlier passed by the state’s Senate in May this year. With its passage in the state Assembly, California will become the first US state to ban caste discrimination. The legislation will add caste as a protected category under ‘ancestry’ in California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, Education, and Housing codes.
I appreciate you putting it all here. and yes, we’re all fighting similar problems.
India’s oppressed castes have borne the brunt of caste oppression in silence for thousands of years (I’m not even exaggerating), because Indian civilization denied them a voice and normalised caste oppression. Caste has now become an obvious opponent, because oppressed castes speak about the caste atrocities and humiliations they suffer, risking violence if they need to. And because Dr. Babaaheb Ambedkar took steps to shine light on its barbarity.
The good people at Castewatch UK have explained it better than me when they say :
While ‘race’ is a way of classifying people into groups based on physical traits, ‘caste’ is a system of social stratification, where groups are assigned a way of life defined primarily by occupation. Caste has no distinguishable physical feature and members of the same ‘race’ group may be of several different caste groups. In Britain for example, Dalits have progressed economically and do not follow their traditional occupations of cleaning toilets and skinning dead animals, but they encounter caste-based discrimination in social interactions. Unlike race discrimination, caste discrimination is intra-racial and is practised among those of the same nationality, ethnic origin and/or cultural background.