Caste Exports Incorporated : The Equality Labs fiasco Part 1
Link to the copy of Request of Dismissal of case filed against Cisco Systems Inc., California regarding the caste discrimination allegations that resulted in lawsuit being filed in 2020 : https://twitter.com/CoHNAOfficial/status/1645473759011143699?s=20
With that, let's dive deep into it.
Meet Thenmozhi Sounderarajan. She's a 'Dalit' American artist ( the quotations are there for a reason, as no official document in USA will consider her 'Dalit' ethnic identity, other than her Indian place of origin, probably ) , theorist and futurist who comments on religion, race, caste, gender, tech and justice. She is the founder / executive director of Equality Labs ( 2015 ) https://www.equalitylabs.org/about/who-we-are/ and the author of The Trauma of Caste.
In her website https://dalitdiva.com , she has quoted : “I am a daughter of a people who have been oppressed for thousands of years, I am also the artifact of centuries of their love and resilience". This 'daughter', apparently, is neither a social scientist nor is an 'oppressed Dalit woman'. She already hails from a well affluent Indian-American family and has completed her college education from UC Berkley. There are no records of caste discrimination against her. But even if we consider slight instances of discrimination against her, the broader question remains to how and why, an ethnic identity such as 'Dalit', which has no existential meaning in the USA, came out in the public in the first place. Until and unless she deems it worth while to use it in public, of course.
Now Equality Labs had made quite the headline with their survey report on caste discrimination that happens in US. The global media gave it unqualified publicity, but little to no attention was given to actually check the report and it's pioneers. No one cared to find that the fronts 'acknowledged' by the report were associated with Islamist organizations, and the consequent deletion of references from its acknowledgements after these organizations got exposed for their terror and ISI links. Other shady details on the members of Equality Labs are described in the links below.
EL's ( Equality Lab ) base of its claim to fame has been a one-only survey report on caste, which was published in 2018, with the assistance of several organizations such as IAMC ( Indian American Muslim Council ), OFMI ( Organization for Minorities of India ), HfHR ( Hindis for Human Rights) and AJA ( Alliance for Justice and Accountability). Details are mentioned under Acknowledgements section of EL website. Between 2020 - 2022, EL through its 2018 report on caste survey went loggerheads with CISCO and Google ( readers might have atleast seen a thumbnail of Sounderarajan's statement that her speech on caste in US was disapproved by Google ) and further inflicting fear among other leading tech giants to take action on caste discrimination. In 2023, the exact same report was used to bring about a resolution in Seattle and subsequently the bill against caste discrimination by the Seattle Council Member. In March 2023, California state senator, Aisha Wahab introduced a bill to ban caste discrimination in the state because of this report. It was passed in August 2023, by classifying caste discrimination as a subset of ancestral discrimination ( which was already covered by a bill, but apparently Wahab deemed it necessary to explicitly spell out caste, which again, had no basis of existence in US ).
I'll be breaking this post here, as the methodology of the survey, the funding of EL, and subsequent clean-up deserves a separate post. Part 2 of this series will be published later.
References :
Cheers!
Posted May 3, 2024, 12:30 PM UTC