The league described Hindu ancestry as "enslaved, effeminate, caste ridden, and degraded" and Hindus as the "slaves of Creation".
"[page needed] In 1953, W. Norman Brown, founder of the Department of South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that "a large number of Americans...have a picture of India ... where everyone is a beggar and caste is more important than life".
Indian migrants account for a large number of high-skilled workers in STEM fields, which could lead to an issue of caste discrimination in the workplace in areas such as Silicon Valley.
[24] The bill defines caste as “an individual’s perceived position in a system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status”, which can be determined by several factors including the “inability or restricted ability to alter inherited status; socially enforced restrictions on marriage, private and public segregation, and discrimination; and social exclusion on the basis of perceived status.”[25] SB403 proposes amendments to California's housing, labor, and education codes to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on one's ancestry, which notably includes caste.
“This was a very important bill for us.”[26] The oppressed castes of South Asia, known as Dalits, form 1.5% of all Indian immigrants to the United States, according to a University of Pennsylvania study carried out in 2003.
[27] The Carnegie Endowment researchers pointed out that the study used a non-representative snowball sampling method to identify participants, which might have skewed the results in favour of those with strong views about caste.
[30][31] The Carnegie Endowment study, using a sample from YouGov, found 5% of the Indian Americans reporting they faced caste discrimination.
[30] The Ambedkar King Study Circle collected testimonies of how caste consciousness and discrimination are practiced by the Indian Diaspora.
"[37] This fear of being outed can manifest in several ways; for example, some families opt to change their surnames to one considered more "caste neutral" (i.e. "Kumar", "Singh", "Khan") in order to avoid ridicule and isolation.
[40][41] Ambedkar King Study Circle (AKSC), a US based activists group, along with 15 other organizations sent an appeal to top American companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft demanding that the CEOs intervene immediately to address the issue of caste discrimination.
[47] In April 2022, Google cancelled a planned talk by Thenmozhi Soundararajan as part of its Diversity Equity and Inclusivity programme.
[52][53] After an initial filing in a United States District Court, the department refiled it in Santa Clara County Superior Court in October 2021[54] Cisco filed a demurrer asking for dismissal on the grounds that caste and ethnicity were not protected categories under the Fair Employment and Housing Act of California.
The Ambedkar International Center and other Dalit organizations filed an amicus curiae brief, arguing that the California law does in fact prohibit caste discrimination.
[56] According to court filings, the accused CEO of the division had actively recruited "John Doe", offering him a generous starting package and stock grants, knowing all along his caste background.
[58] In 2015, California State Board of Education initiated a regular ten-year public review of the school curriculum framework.
[63] The campaign was spearheaded by Prem Pariyar, a Nepali origin Dalit student, who came to the US in 2015 escaping persecution in his home country, and claimed that he faced discrimination in the US as well.
[64] The resolution cited the survey by Equality Labs where 25 percent of Dalits reported having faced verbal or physical assaults.
[64] A group of faculty in the university had written to the Board of Trustees citing lack of "due diligence" in instituting the measure.
They said that the existing policy of the university, which covers national origin, ethnicity and ancestry, already provided adequate protection, and claimed that the new measure would result in singling out and targeting the Hindu faculty.