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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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The only reason this isn't particularly obvious is that there are very few other "races" in India, it's mostly Indians of different ethnicities with the odd African student going to college.

I thought it was due to the scheduled caste/affirmative action in India being so very strong that the majority of Indians who end up in the West have a bone to pick with the concept of it.

I wish.

A disproportionate number of immigrants to the West (especially the US) are upper caste, so that's certainly one of the reasons they're unhappy with things, let alone when they find out that being (South) Asian means they're going to be discriminated against again in the States, when it comes to education at least (and woe upon anyone who comes between an Indian and his kid's education).

But Indians, in India, are quite prone to casual racism, especially against Blacks, East Asians, or the North-Eastern citizens of India who look more Nepali/Bhutanese/Thai than they do what you typically think of as "Indian". I will note that by "racist" I mean muttered comments, crude comparisons or questionable/insensitive wording. Africans or African-Americans get the worst of it, though the Indians in the US are usually savvy enough to keep their opinions shared solely within their cliques.

Honestly from having a close friend/old housemate who's very high caste Indian back in the motherland (Father a very high ranking Air Force figure, grandfather owned a ton of stuff), it was always hilarious listening to complaints about bias or stratified society in context of what their family had gotten up to.

As I've said before, I'm not upper class. In fact my descent from my father's side makes me just above the cutoff for explicit AA as extended to the lower castes.

If that has ever advantaged me, I haven't noticed, and it has glaringly disadvantaged me when it came to the AA quotas for higher education, it's at something ridiculous like 66% now, maybe 80%.

Hell, I didn't even know my caste till a biology teacher asked me in high school, because she wanted to pray at a temple for her students and that was somehow relevant. Some on /r/India would claim that's a sign of privilege, but fuck them.

It might be different in the military, which still is a bit of an Old Boy's club, but in general India is quite meritocratic. I am modestly confident that the success of the upper castes stems more from HBD reasons than the system being stacked in their favor, whereas it explicitly is for the lower ones and they're still not closing the gap.