Seattle became the first city to ban discrimination based on caste after a Tuesday vote by the city council.
The move to add caste to the city’s anti-discrimination laws was sponsored by Kshama Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative Party and an Indian American. Dating back 3,000 years, the caste system rigidly divides Hindu society into a hierarchy based on birth or descent.
In recent years, calls to address caste have grown among some members of South Asian diaspora communities. The Seattle city council approved the measure in a 6-1 vote. However, a debate is now brewing over whether such measures wrongly target a single community.
It’s official: our movement has WON a historic, first-in-the-nation ban on caste discrimination in Seattle! Now we need to build a movement to spread this victory around the country ✊ pic.twitter.com/1mBJ1W3v6j
— Kshama Sawant (@cmkshama) February 22, 2023
“Caste discrimination is a widespread and increasingly grave contributor to workplace discrimination and bias faced by South Asian Americans and other immigrants—not just in other countries, but here in Seattle and across the United States,” explained Sawant in a petition circulated before the vote. “The fight against caste discrimination is deeply connected to the fight against all forms of oppression, and against the economic exploitation of the vast majority of people under capitalism.”
Sawant has previously talked about her experiences being raised in an upper-caste Hindu Brahmin household in India. Though caste discrimination has been banned there since 1948, discrimination against the lowest rung on the hierarchy — the Dalits, or untouchables — continues.
“We’ve heard hundreds of gut-wrenching stories over the last few weeks showing us that caste discrimination is very real in Seattle,” Sawant said, according to an Associated Press report.
The idea to add caste to anti-discrimination policies is not entirely new. Seattle’s vote has been preceded by the introduction of similar bans on U.S. college campuses.
Council member Sara Nelson, who cast the lone dissenting vote, called the ordinance “a reckless, harmful solution to a problem for which we have no data or research.”
“This could generate more anti-Hindu discrimination and could dissuade employers from hiring South Asians,” she said. “The community that is being impacted is deeply divided on this issue.”
Opponents have also emerged within the Hindu American community.
In a statement, the Washington D.C.-based Hindu American Foundation (HAF) said the intention was good, but agreed with Nelson that there was little evidence of widespread caste discrimination.
“Seattle has taken a dangerous misstep here, institutionalizing bias against all residents of Indian and South Asian origin, all in the name of preventing bias,” explained HAF managing director Samir Kalra. “When Seattle should be protecting the civil rights of all its residents, it is actually violating them by running roughshod over the most basic and fundamental rights in US law, all people being treated equally.”