Stop Pretending Caste Doesn’t Exist

Wake up. The caste system is alive and well, and here’s how to dismantle it.

AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) workers during a candle march against BJP Minister VK Singh over his remarks on the Faridabad Dalit burning incident, at Jantar Mantar, on October 25, 2015 in New Delhi, India. Photo: Ravi Choudhary/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

Growing up as a Brown girl in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, people were as likely to think I was Native American or Mexican as they were to guess that I was Indian. Once I clarified that I was Indian American, rather than American Indian, two of the most common questions I received were whether my family worshipped cows (we did not) and whether there was still a class of people regarded as “untouchables” in India. I laughed off the latter question as easily as I did the former and wondered how my classmates could have such regressive opinions about South Asians. Caste was a thing of centuries past, or so I had always been led to believe.

When I was working in India between undergrad and graduate school, I heard the word “Dalit” for the first time. It is a 100-year-old community moniker chosen and adopted by activists as a replacement for a variety of terms including untouchables or scheduled castes — names that had been used to describe people outside the traditional Hindu caste system. “Dalit” literally translates to “divided, broken, or scattered.” Over time, however, it became associated with self-determination and opposition to caste oppression as the community nomenclature chosen and used by Dalits themselves.