New York State lawmakers recently rejected a bill that would have added “caste” to the state’s anti-discrimination code. Had it passed, it would have made New York the first state—following a failed attempt in California—to enshrine the Indian system of social hierarchy in its law, adding yet another category to the ever-growing list of DEI concerns.
The battle, however, is far from over. Thanks to activists pushing this latest identity category, Seattle has already added caste to its anti-discrimination law, and universities including Brandeis, UC Davis, Brown, Columbia, and the California State University system have added caste to their nondiscrimination policies. While state-level policies have yet to succeed, activists will undoubtedly keep trying.
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Activists often kick off moral panics by asserting the existence of a pervasive but difficult-to-measure problem, then demanding a new institutional mechanism to detect and punish it. But just like prior moral panics, there’s little evidence that caste discrimination is widespread—and real evidence that adding it to our laws will make things worse.
Most New Yorkers have probably never heard of caste discrimination. But they are likely familiar with the worldview behind New York’s push to enshrine it—the institutional culture that has spent years teaching Americans to reinterpret ordinary interactions as evidence of hidden oppression. In New York, supporters pointed to alleged cases of workplace harassment, exclusion, and discrimination against Dalits and other caste groups. The claim is not merely that isolated incidents of discrimination are happening, but that an entire hidden, caste-based hierarchy is operating beneath ordinary American life that requires state-level anti-discrimination laws to address.
Before agreeing to a rewrite of anti-discrimination law around supposedly pervasive systems of hidden oppression, a reasonable person might ask a few basic questions. How many Hindu Americans in the United States even identify with caste? How common is caste prejudice in this country, exactly? And perhaps most awkwardly for those pushing these ideologies through universities, corporations, and government institutions: When Americans are taught to see oppression everywhere, does that framework actually reduce prejudice, or does it instead train people to join moral mobs and devour one another over imagined sins?
We wanted to contribute to the debate in a way that did not require pretending to possess mystical insight into invisible systems of oppression. Accordingly, through research at Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab, conducted in partnership with the Network Contagion Research Institute, we gathered and examined the evidence.
We surveyed more than 1,000 Hindu Americans and found that fewer than one-third of U.S.-born Hindus identified with a particular caste. Social distance—that is, reluctance to interact across caste lines in ordinary social, professional, or personal relationships—between caste groups was generally low. Explicit hostility, as measured by direct questions about attitude toward other caste groups, was also low. The sweeping portrait of a rigid caste hierarchy silently governing American Hindu life, as described by activist groups such as Equality Labs, simply did not appear in the data.
When participants were exposed to anti-caste ideological narratives, their responses were revealing. They became substantially more likely to perceive discrimination in ambiguous situations where no evidence of discrimination had been presented. Compared with participants who read a neutral academic essay about caste, those exposed to caste-sensitivity materials became 33 percent more likely to say an applicant had experienced microaggressions, 16 percent more likely to say the applicant had been harmed in an interview, and 11 percent more likely to assume an admissions officer’s decision was biased. They were also 19 percent more willing to punish the fictional administrator. In general, the intervention appeared stronger than the underlying prejudice it purported to solve.
And caste was hardly unique in this regard. We observed similar patterns across racial and religious anti-oppression narratives as well. Consistently, participants trained to see hidden systems of oppression were more likely to infer hostility, bias, and victimization from ordinary ambiguous interactions.
In one experiment, participants exposed to anti-caste ideological narratives also became more willing to endorse demonizing statements about Brahmins adapted from Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric about Jews. Thirty-five percent agreed with the claim that Brahmins are “parasites,” 34 percent with the claim that they are “viruses,” and 27 with the claim that they are “the devil personified.” Who knew the language of collective guilt could make such strange ideological alliances?
Even more striking, the people most attracted to these anti-oppression frameworks tended to score the highest on measures of left-wing authoritarianism: they showed support for ideological policing, coercive punishment, censorship, and aggressive enforcement against perceived moral offenders.
The anti-discrimination laws to which New York wants to add caste were meant to reduce prejudice. Increasingly, the evidence suggests that many of these systems are instead training citizens to monitor one another for invisible sins while empowering institutions to punish people for perceived transgressions.
New York, California, Seattle, and all other jurisdictions should protect residents from real discrimination. But if an ideology repeatedly produces paranoia, denunciations, censorship, coercive social policing, and mobs hunting for imagined offenses, it’s reasonable to question whether the problem is hidden oppression or the ideology itself.