From The Religions New Service:
LOS ANGELES (RNS) — Two California State University professors are suing their employer — the largest public university system in the United States — as they try to prevent officials from enforcing a new caste discrimination policy that they say singles out students and staff who are Indian and Hindu.
Professors Sunil Kumar and Praveen Sinha claim the new policy “seeks to define the Hindu religion as including ‘caste’ and an alleged oppressive and discriminatory caste system as foundational religious tenets,” according to the complaint filed Monday (Oct. 17) in California federal court…
“Today, caste operates within South Asian communities of all religious backgrounds, and it continues to constrain social and cultural practices, including marriage, meal sharing and friendship,” wrote Dheepa Sundaram, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Denver, and Simran Jeet Singh, executive director of the Religion & Society Program at the Aspen Institute, in a column for Religion News Service.
Meanwhile, the Hindu American Foundation, which is representing the professors, has said that treating caste as a specific class of discrimination is a “misguided overreach.” They’ve argued it is unconstitutional to identify a form of prejudice held only by people of one faith or national background as “so entirely different and abhorrent that it renders this group a suspect class meriting special monitoring and policing.”
I find this interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Doctrine of Diversity inevitably leads to such “paradoxes.” In an ethnically diverse society, we cannot please everybody; the more groups we allow to take root in our countries, the more issues we’ll have. We find diversicrats discriminating in order to prevent discrimination. They can’t win, and this is their own doing. Did they really think they could import large numbers of rival groups and not have issues and strife?
Secondly, the argument the Hindu American Foundation uses works quite well for whites. If they can argue that it’s unconstitutional to address a form of prejudice that only people of a certain national background can be guilty of, then this would include whites.
In a sane world, if the Hindus get their way, then the California Establishment Left will be forced to backtrack on its claim that only whites can be racist. After all, according to them, racism is a form of prejudice that’s only held by whites.
In reality, they’ll wiggle out of this contradiction by claiming that whites do not represent any specific national background or faith. Do Hindus? Actually not; they can hail from any number of countries.