Rutgers' tentative accord with faculty includes protections against caste bias

In addition to tentative agreements on pay and job security, Rutgers University faculty union leaders secured an unusual safeguard in new contract negotiations: protections against caste discrimination, faculty negotiators told Gothamist.

The announcement from faculty leaders led to some initial bewilderment – “What’s caste discrimination?” one economist asked on Twitter – but the move, if ratified by the unions' rank and file members in the coming weeks, would add Rutgers to a growing list of colleges and universities nationwide that have made caste an explicit protected category. The list includes Harvard, Brown, the University of Minnesota, Brandeis and the entire California State University system, as well as the city of Seattle.

“I think it’s going to be really important and transformative internally at Rutgers,” said Audrey Truschke, a historian at Rutgers who teaches courses on South Asia and Hinduism. Truschke said students regularly complain of caste-related comments and behavior from university administrators, faculty, other students and the parents of friends.

I hear about caste-based discrimination all the time from my students. I hear about it as a problem in their lives, in their communities, on campus, in dorms, in their friend groups.

Audrey Truschke, a historian at Rutgers who teaches courses on South Asia and Hinduism

“I hear about caste-based discrimination all the time from my students,” said Truschke. “I hear about it as a problem in their lives, in their communities, on campus, in dorms, in their friend groups. I hear about their fears if they were to ever talk about it publicly.”

The Rutgers American Association of University Professors - American Federation of Teachers, or AAUP-AFT, notes in a union document that the university intends to create a task force examining caste on campus.

In an email, Nusrath Yusuf, a member of the executive council of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, wrote, “Negotiations are being wrapped up on a few open articles for all three unions this week. This framework, along with the tentative agreement on all other articles (including the caste protection article) in our contract will be up for a ratification vote to our union members and then the final contract will be ratified.”

Rutgers university spokesperson Dory Devlin said she could not comment on the specifics of the contract negotiations, but pointed to an Apr. 15 statement by the university's president, Jonathan Holloway, in which he noted that the framework that was reached “between Rutgers and its faculty unions provides fair and equitable wages, benefits, and work conditions for our faculty as well as our graduate students and part-time lecturers.” The agreed-upon framework ended a five-day strike by thousands of union members.

'A hidden apartheid'

A 2001 report from Human Rights Watch concluded that caste and other systems of inherited status had hardly faded away. It likened the repression to “a hidden apartheid of segregation, modern-day slavery, and other extreme forms of discrimination” for an estimated 250 million people worldwide, including “the Buraku people of Japan, the Osu of Nigeria's Igbo people, and certain groups in Senegal and Mauritania,” as well as Dalits, who occupy the lowest rungs of the social order in South Asia.

“Caste has migrated with the South Asian diaspora to firmly take root in East and South Africa, Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname, the Middle East, Malaysia, the Caribbean, the U.K., North America, and other regions,” reads the report.

In Seattle, where a new anti-caste discrimination law was passed in February, protections extend to a variety of communities, including the Roma people and the Burakumin of Japan. The measures have been largely put forth by South Asian activists, academics and elected officials calling attention to what has been a pervasive, age-old problem.

“Caste is a system that divides people into a graded hierarchy of groups based on birth, with the 'lower' groups facing serious discrimination and even violence. It originated in South Asia about 2,000 years ago but remains pervasive under capitalism,” wrote former Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant and Black scholar Cornel West in Jacobin magazine.

The protections have also been fought by some national Hindu groups and led to at least one lawsuit in California from faculty members who argue that caste discrimination language “singles out” Indians and Hindus on campus and that actual discrimination on that basis is relatively rare.

The issue of caste and its relationship to systemic racism has received increased attention in the U.S., with author Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” becoming a bestseller that is now scheduled to be turned into a movie by filmmaker Ava DuVernay.

The campaign to include caste discrimination protections has received support from Black intellectuals, including West and Kevin Brown, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina who has studied caste for decades. He wrote a letter of support for the Seattle legislation.

“I write this letter as an African-American law professor who has researched and written about discrimination based on caste and race since being a Fulbright lecturer to India from December 1996 to May 1997,” wrote Brown. “There is no significant legal hurdle to anti-discrimination measures that add caste as a protected category or pursuing caste equity. Not only is such in compliance with current civil rights law, but anti-caste legislation is the unique historical foundation from which federal anti-discrimination law in the US developed.”

Brown noted that caste had been part of the U.S. racial discourse since the 19th century. In 1869, Sen. Charles Sumner, a so-called “Radical Republican” who opposed white supremacy, compared anti-Black racism to caste discrimination in India, where he inveighed against the hereditary status accorded to Brahmins and other more privileged castes.

Enduring caste violence

Caste violence remains a serious problem in modern-day India, with the chief justice of India’s Supreme Court noting in December that hundreds of people are killed each year for falling in love with or marrying someone outside their caste.

By one estimate, as many as 90% of Indians in the U.S. come from more dominant caste communities, with just 1.5% from more disadvantaged castes. However, in a 2018 survey conducted by the U.S. based group Equality Labs, 60% of Dalits (the most oppressed castes formerly known as “untouchables”) had experienced caste-based insults or comments, and that two out of three had been treated unfairly at their workplace.

In California, the tech company Cisco faces a lawsuit for alleged caste discrimination. Last week, however, the California Civil Rights Department dropped its case against two Cisco engineers, a move that was celebrated by some Hindu organizations who said the engineers had been wrongly vilified.

“We always knew that the case had no basis in actual fact and was foisted upon the defendants by overzealous lawyers,” said Nikunj Trivedi, the president of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, in a statement on the organization’s website.

This story has been updated with language that more accurately reflects caste hierarchies.