IDERD 2023

Voices for action

The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is observed annually on March 21st to promote awareness of racial discrimination and encourage action to eliminate it. The day was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966 in response to the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, where police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators protesting against apartheid laws, killing 69 people.

The day provides an opportunity to reflect on the ongoing challenges of racism, prejudice, and discrimination worldwide. It aims to promote understanding, tolerance, and respect for diversity and to encourage individuals and communities to take action against racism and discrimination.

The theme for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination 2023, 75th anniversary of the UDHR - an impetus to combat racism.  The 2023 theme of the International Day focuses on the urgency of combatting racism and racial discrimination, 75 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the United Nations and the Government of Canada.


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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Caste-Based Discrimination Initiative

Caste is a 2,500-year-old system of dehumanization, division of labour, and discrimination that continues to shape the lives and life chances of over 1 billion people in any context and space where people from the South Asian subcontinent live. It is a system of inequality and violence that is written into Hindu scripture and by ancient Hindu lawmakers (Manu); pre-ordaining the spiritual and social status of human beings in life, labour, and death, based on the caste group into which they were born. Brahmins are at the apex of the caste hierarchy and the purity, worth, and dignity as humans that are attached to people born into the Brahmin caste is anchored in this fact. Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas are savarna, a term used to describe the three dominant caste groups who control most of the power and resources in social relationships in a society founded upon Brahminical supremacy.

There are four castes within the caste system and labour is divided accordingly. Brahmins have claimed monopoly control over religious and secular knowledge. Next in the caste hierarchy are Kshatriyas who are warriors, associated with political, state, and military power. Vaishyas are merchants, traders, and moneylenders who hoard considerable power in the economic sphere. And fourth in the caste hierarchy are Shudras, who constitute the working classes in agrarian, industrial, and service sectors. These four castes are within the caste system. Outside the fold of the caste system are Dalits who were derogatorily known as “untouchables” because their occupations were considered too polluting. In fact, the caste system dictated that their birth predestined and bonded them into the occupations of cleaning human waste, handling human and animal corpses, handling flesh and meat. The chosen title of Dalit literally means broken, but as a political and intellectual identity, it is a rallying cry and mark of resilience for those derogatorily labeled “untouchables”. Also outside the fold of the caste system are the region’s Indigenous peoples known as adivasis. Bahujan translates literally to mean much of the people. Dalit Bahujan is a term that is used to indicate political solidarity among those exploited, dispossessed, and oppressed by a Brahminical supremacist state and ideology, including shudras, adivasis, Dalits and those who converted out of Hinduism to escape caste such as Muslims and Sikhs.

While these four categories within the caste system have hundreds of sub-categories in practice, and there are considerable differences in the caste hierarchy in different regions of India, the primary characteristics of spiritual and social status attached to caste groups has been a resilient feature of the system across space and time. This resilience is explicable when we notice that caste endogamy is enforced through heteropatriarchal control over sexual reproduction, marriage, and sexual violence, alongside caste apartheid in work, residence, commensality, food practices and education—all routine ways in which the caste system is maintained across space and time. Here is an image that depicts the caste system created by the Dalit feminist civil rights organization Equality Labs, based in the United States.

It can be tempting for dominant caste communities to think, feel, teach, and learn that the caste system was an ancient practice, or, at worst, one that occasionally emerges in the Indian landscape in rural areas that have not caught up to modernity. But that would be a fiction belied by statistics and evidence in lived experience. Dominant castes who saturate academia have also peddled the prominent postcolonial theorization that caste was an invention of British colonialism, but that is not the case. Colonial laws simultaneously opened up land markets and education to Dalit Bahujan and embedded caste into capitalist systems of accumulation by dispossession. The caste system was thus consolidated by British colonial capitalism but also preceded and outlasted it, if not gaining an entrenched modern reality in contemporary Indian society and state.

Mohandas Gandhi led a mostly dominant caste Indian nationalist movement and gave Dalits the patronising name of Harijan, meaning “children of God.” Gandhi focused on abolishing untouchability but not the caste-based division of labour itself which he viewed as innocuous and functional. Starting in the mid-19th century, Bahujan leaders Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule, as well as Fatima Sheikh and others, constructed an anti-caste theory and political action, centred on reclaiming access to education understood as political consciousness. The visionary Dalit leader, theorist and architect of the Indian constitution, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar built on this legacy and scripted the slogan “Educate, Agitate, Organize” to mobilize the formation of the mass Dalit movement at the turn of the 20th century. Dalit Bahujan women were a crucial part of both of these historical moments of mobilizing against caste apartheid.

The postcolonial Indian state may have legally abolished untouchability, but in reality, caste apartheid is a part of everyday, institutional, rural, and urban reality in India. According to the Indian Human Rights Commission Report on Caste Atrocities, cited in Dalit feminist organizer and theorist Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s book The Trauma of Caste, in India, which remains the epicentre of caste apartheid, “every hour two Dalits are assaulted; every day three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered, and two Dalit homes are torched. A crime against a Dalit happens every eighteen minutes” (Soundararajan 2022, p. 16; see also, Saxena 2004, p. 33 here). Drawing on the 2004 report, Soundararajan notes that:

  • 37% of Dalits live below the poverty line
  • 54% of Dalit children suffer undernourishment
  • 83 out of 1000 Dalit children die before they turn one year old
  • 45% of Dalit population do not know how to read and write
  • 33% of Dalit households do not have basic facilities.
  • 33% of villages have Dalit homes where public health workers refuse to visit
  • 28% of villages have police stations where Dalits cannot enter
  • 38% of government schools have Dalit children sit separately
  • 48% of villages deny Dalit people access to water sources
  • 1 in 4 Dalit women between 15 and 49 is under-nourished
  • 67% of Dalit women have experienced sexual violence
  • 39 is average age of death for Dalit women

The numbers are staggering and express the magnitude of the effects of caste discrimination in India.

Caste violence, discrimination, and aspirations for liberation from caste travel with the diaspora, not least under colonial rule and the indentured labour system that spread across Oceania, the Caribbean, the Americas, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Caste has subsequently traveled with the diaspora—both as an escape from caste oppression and as a privilege of caste mobility and every intersectional complexity between migration and dispossession.

The postcolonial Indian government terminology for those formerly known as “untouchables” who self-designate as Dalits, is the term Scheduled Castes. As Rawat and Satyanarayana note, the formation of the National Federation of Dalit Women in 1995, Dalit participation in the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, and the growth in publication of Dalit literature animated Dalit resistance and voice in the public sphere. The Indian government’s reservation policies (affirmative action) for Scheduled Castes in the spheres of education and employment contributed to the growing numbers of Dalit peoples in higher education and those employed in professions outside those pre-ordained by the caste system. This has strengthened larger numbers of Dalit Bahujan peoples in the diaspora calling attention to caste discrimination wherever it exists. As per the 2016 report, Caste in the United States researched and produced by Equality Labs,

  • 25% Dalit people report verbal or physical assault
  • 1 in 3 Dalit students report discrimination during their education
  • 2 out of 3 report being treated unfairly in their workplace
  • 60% report experiencing derogatory jokes and comments
  • 40% report feeling unwelcome in places of worship
  • 20% report feeling discriminated at a place of business due to caste
  • 40% Dalits report being rejected in romantic relationships due to caste
  • 1 in 2 Dalit people fear being outed.

One cannot understand the resilience of the caste apartheid without attention to the heteropatriarchal structures and relationships that enforce caste endogamy through prohibiting inter-caste marriage, through sexual violence and even death. Dalit women’s bodies are simultaneously considered a source of pollution and an object through which Brahminical heteropatriarchal power is expressed. This explains why Dalit feminism has been the foremost feminist formation on the subcontinent even though its history and centrality continues to be erased in dominant caste feminist scholarship, practice, and leadership.

As Dr. B.R. Ambedkar noted, caste is a division of labourers, that is written into division of labour in society. As such, class cannot be understood distinct from caste and its specificities of gendered, sexual violence, labour exploitation, landlessness, social reproduction and resistance. Furthermore, caste power may be extreme at the top, but it takes the whole system of what Ambedkar referred to as “graded inequality” to uphold the hierarchy wherein each one is spiritually and materially sustained by being more ostensibly pure and powerful than those cast as more spiritually and materially polluted in the next rung down—everyone ultimately feeling superior to the Dalit outside caste’s fold.

While caste was scripted by Hinduism and originally institutionalized and protected by a Hindu state, over the centuries, caste has infiltrated every religious community in the subcontinent, including those religions and sects formed or drawing conversion out of Hinduism as an escape from caste—Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, and Christianity. This is why caste is found in communities of every religion on the subcontinent, and their diaspora.

As Dalit leaders, theorists, and communities have made clear, caste discrimination is a multi-layered social, cultural, historical phenomenon that is as deeply personal and physiological as it is imaginative, creative, material and institutional. To eliminate caste discrimination requires an equally complex and multi-layered approach that resists every instance and manifestation of caste apartheid. It stretches from interpersonal relationships that refuse caste boundaries to institutional protections that recognize the specific nature of caste hierarchies and violence within apparently-shared categories such as class or religion or race or national origin or ancestry. To eliminate caste discrimination will also require governments and educational institutions at all levels and intergovernmental organizations to ban the practice of caste apartheid in public life with the effect of blocking access to any and all resources when such practices are evident in effect. Dalit feminist Soundararajan defines caste abolition as the “interconnected political, social, cultural, somatic, spiritual and economic project of annihilating caste and caste apartheid. Drawing on a legacy of Black and Dalit solidarity, this phrasing intentionally evokes the abolition movement in the United States, linking Black and Dalit liberation to move us toward an overhauling of society to co-create liberatory futures beyond systems of exclusion and violence” (p. 217). Ultimately, Dalit Bahujan feminists have shown that caste constitutes the deep structure of modern capitalism and colonialities across the planet and  conceptions of decolonization, abolition, and liberation have a world to win in this recognition.

Ambedkar, B. R., & Rodrigues, V. (2002). The essential writings of B.R. Ambedkar. Oxford        University Press.

Ambedkar, B. R. (1936). Annihilation of Caste.  

Arya, S. (2020). Dalit or Brahmanical patriarchy? Rethinking Indian feminismCaste: A Global  Journal on Social Exclusion, 1(1), 217–228. 

Caste in the United States: A survey of Caste among South Asian Americans. (2018). Equality     Labs

Chakravarti, U. (1993). Conceptualising Brahmanical patriarchy in early India: Gender, caste, class and state. Economic and Political Weekly, 28 (14), 579–585. 

Gidla, S. (2017). Ants among Elephants: an untouchable family and the making of modern India (First Edition.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

Guru, G. (2003). How egalitarian are the social sciences in India? Economic and Political Weekly, 37(50), 5003–5009.

Jangam, C. (2017). Dalits and the Making of Modern India. Oxford University Press.

Kamble, B. (2008). The prisons we broke. Orient Black Swan.

Madan, A. (2020). Caste and class in higher education enrolments: Challenges in  conceptualising social inequalityEconomic and Political Weekly, 55(30), 40-47.

Omvedt, G. (1994). Dalits and the democratic revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit movement in colonial India. SAGE Publications India.

Paik, S. (2014). Dalit women’s education in modern India: Double discrimination. Routledge.

Paik, S. (2020). Dalit women’s agency and Phule-Ambedkarite Feminism. In S. Arya (First         Edition.), Dalit feminist theory: A reader (pp. 65-87). Routledge.

Patel, S., & Nath, N. (2022). What can ‘settler of colour’ teach us?: A conversation of the complexities of decolonization in white universities. In A. Gerbhard, S. McLean & V. St. Denis (Eds.), White benevolence: Racism and colonial violence in the helping professions (pp. 146-162). Fernwood.

Pawar, U., & Moon, M. (2008). We also made history: Women in the Ambedkarite movement.    Zubaan Books. 

P. M, Lata (2015, May 7). Silenced by Manu and ‘mainstream’ feminism: Dalit Bahujan women  and their history. Savari.

Rawat, R. S., & Satyanarayana, K. (Eds.). (2016). Dalit studies. Duke University Press.

Saxena, K. B (2004). Report on the Prevention of Atrocities against Scheduled Castes. National  Human Rights Commission. National Human Rights Commission, India.            

Soundararajan, T. (2022). The trauma of Caste: A Dalit feminist meditation on survivorship, healing, and abolition. North Atlantic Books.

 

Initiative to Mitigate Caste-Based Discrimination

The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) resource was developed by Dr. Dia Da Costa (Professor of Educational Policy Studies in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, Brahmin settler) to support the collaborative initiative between the Offices of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the UAlberta and the UCalgary to raise awareness toward the development of a nondiscrimination policy. For questions about or corrections and additions to this FAQ resource, please contact vpedi@ualberta.ca and vpedi@ucalgary.ca.

Toward Making Caste-Based Discrimination a Protected Ground A Virtual Panel Series

A collaboration between the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary

Efforts to officially make caste—a millennia-old system of stratification, division of labour, and discrimination— a protected category are well underway in postsecondary institutions throughout the United States. The conversation has yet to begin at educational institutions across Canada. The UAlberta and the UCalgary are collaborating with international activists and scholars on a series of conversations to raise awareness about caste-based discrimination.

Panels include an International Women’s Day discussion with Dalit-Bahujan feminist theorists, artists, historians, activists, and organizers, as well as a roundtable on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination with Dalit-Bahujan leaders instrumental in the struggle to make caste a protected category in North American universities. A conversation with Dalit-Bahujan and dominant-caste (savarna) student leaders will close out the series during Dalit History Month in April.

We acknowledge the intellectual labour and vision of Dr. Dia Da Costa (Professor of Educational Policy Studies, UAlberta, Edmonton) and Dr. Shaista Patel (Assistant Prof Critical Muslim Studies, UCalifornia, San Diego), as well as the UCalgary and UAlberta EDI teams in helping to come up with the event topics, speakers, resources and communications strategies necessary to host this series. 


Panel I: Dalit-Bahujan Feminist Knowledges and Praxis

Wednesday, March 8th, 2023
International Women’s Day

12 - 1.30 p.m. MST

There is no better place to start this engagement than with the profound theoretical and political knowledge called Dalit-Bahujan feminist knowledge. This International Women’s Day 2023, with the theme of “Every Woman Counts,” we have the opportunity to hear from four extraordinary Dalit-Bahujan feminist theorists, artists, historians, activists, and organizers. Come and learn about caste; how Dalit-Bahujan women and non-binary peoples are affected by it; and how they have been organizing across educational, cultural, labour, land and other institutions, one step and space at a time.


Panel II: The Problem of Caste in the North American University

Tuesday, March 21, 2023
International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

12 - 1.30 p.m. MST

On the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination 2023, we will be joined by four Dalit-Bahujan leaders who have been instrumental in the struggle to make caste legible and a protected category in North American universities and other institutional contexts. Come and learn from their research and experiences, how caste-based discrimination and violence manifest in the North American academy. The panelists will consider the challenges faced by Dalit-Bahujan students, staff, and faculty in universities and other spaces. They will offer insights into how caste operates in everyday environments, how they organize for social and institutional change, and what you can do to effect change.

Shikha Diwakar

Shikha Diwakar, McGill University, Canada's Department of Integrated Studies in Education doctoral candidate, studies the role and impact of Dalit women’s identities on their life experiences in higher education institutions in India. She also works on several projects focusing on women's empowerment, intersectionality, and caste at the Global level. Her research areas include Dalit studies, Dalit feminism, identity, anti-caste discourses, higher education policies, action research, and narrative enquiry.

Dr. Shaista Aziz Patel

Dr. Shaista Aziz Patel works as a scholar of Critical Muslim Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her scholarly and other political work address questions of multiple colonialisms, caste, race, and Muslimness. She identifies as a Pakistani Shi'a Muslim feminist.

Aashadh (alias)

Aashadh comes from a caste-oppressed community in South Asia. They have extensive professional experience spanning the corporate, government, and nonprofit sectors before coming for graduate studies at the University of Minnesota. Their research reviews development programs with an anti-caste lens.

For the last two years, they have been engaged in making caste a protected category at the University of Minnesota which so far has seen partial success. 

Prem Pariyar

Prem Pariyar is a Nepali grass root community organizer, a Caste Equity organizer in Equality Labs, and a Cal State East Bay alum. Prem has more than 15 years of experience working in the grass root community. Belonging to the caste-oppressed community, he is passionate about serving the voiceless and marginalized caste-oppressed communities and educating people about caste apartheid. He is one of the student leaders who added caste as a protected category in the CSU system. 

He received the SOLAR Award-2021 (Outstanding Student Leader) at Cal State East Bay. He is an elected delegate to the National Association of Social Workers, California Chapter. He has been serving as the Human relations commissioner in Alameda County. 


Panel III: Organizing to Make Caste a Protected Category

Information forthcoming

Who Is Afraid of Caste Equity in Canada?

Who Is Afraid of Caste Equity in Canada?

By Chinnaiah Jangam | The Wire

March 13, 2023
The Wire

Why I Am Grateful for the Toronto School Board's Resolution on Caste

Why I Am Grateful for the Toronto School Board's Resolution on Caste

By Trina Kumar | The Wire

March 10, 2023

The Wire

TDSB votes to recognize that caste oppression exists in Toronto schools

TDSB votes to recognize that caste oppression exists in Toronto schools

By Uday Rana | The Globe and Mail

March 8, 2023 
The Globe and Mail

 

Preventing Caste Discrimination on Campus

Preventing Caste Discrimination on Campus

By United Educators

January 2023
United Educators

Caste in Canada: The Unheard Stories of Dalit Canadians (2020-23)

Caste in Canada: The Unheard Stories of Dalit Canadians (2020-23)

Primary Investigators: Dr. Anne Murphy (UBC) and Dr. Suraj Yengde (Oxford)

2020 - 2023
University of British Columbia

US universities add policies to counter caste-based discrimination

US universities add policies to counter caste-based discrimination

By IANS, New York  | Business Standard 

December 9, 2022
Business Standard

Brown University adds caste to nondiscrimination policy

Brown University adds caste to nondiscrimination policy

By News from Brown | Brown University

December 1, 2022
News from Brown

Harvard Grad Student Union Contract Bolsters Advocacy Against Caste Discrimination

Harvard Grad Student Union Contract Bolsters Advocacy Against Caste Discrimination

By Elias J. Schisgall | The Harvard Crimson 

October 13, 2022
The Harvard Crimson

How prejudice rooted in an ancient social system has migrated from India to Canada

How prejudice rooted in an ancient social system has migrated from India to Canada

By RCI | Radio Canada International

May 16, 2022
Radio Canada International

Why Campuses Are Including Caste in Anti-Discrimination Policies

Why Campuses Are Including Caste in Anti-Discrimination Policies

By Rebecca Kelliher | Diverse: Issues In Higher Education

March 21, 2022
Diverse: Issues In Higher Education

Brandeis Becomes First US University to Ban Caste-Based Discrimination

Brandeis Becomes First US University to Ban Caste-Based Discrimination

By Mariah Bohanon | INSIGHT Into Diversity

February 12, 2022
INSIGHT Into Diversity

‘Watershed’: Dalits hail US university’s caste discrimination ban

‘Watershed’: Dalits hail US university’s caste discrimination ban

By Raqib Hameed Naik  | Al Jazeera

February 11, 2022
Al Jazeera

The push to end caste-based discrimination on campus

The push to end caste-based discrimination on campus

By Maria Carrasco | Inside Higher Education 

February 4, 2022
Inside Higher Education

The Fight Against Caste Oppression Comes to US Higher Education

The Fight Against Caste Oppression Comes to US Higher Education

By Aparna Gopalan | Non Profit Quarterly

January 31, 2022
NPQ

Colleges and universities across the US are moving to ban caste discrimination

Colleges and universities across the US are moving to ban caste discrimination

By Harmeet Kaur | CNN

January 30, 2022
CNN News

Caste and South Asian Canadian Youth – The Real Lived Experience

Caste and South Asian Canadian Youth – The Real Lived Experience

By Sharanjit Sandhrs | South Asian Studies Institute

October 21, 2021
University of the Fraser Valley

Caste on campus: Looking at social exclusions of Dalits in the U.S. colleges

Caste on campus: Looking at social exclusions of Dalits in the U.S. colleges

By Suman Guha Mozumder and Bhargavi Kulkarni | India Abroad

March 19, 2019 - Updated March 26, 2019
India Abroad

Thenmozhi Soundararajan calls the California bill the ‘culmination of a life’s work’. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

‘Caste is anti-Asian hate’: the activists fighting ‘less visible’ discrimination in the US

By Claire Wang | The Guardian

April 17, 2023  
The Guardian

 

 

Caste Matters · South Asian Canadian Heritage

Caste Matters · South Asian Canadian Heritage

South Asian Canadian Heritage 

2022
Caste Matters

Why the West is reckoning with caste bias now

Why the West is reckoning with caste bias now

By Meryl Sebastian | BBC News

April 28, 2022
BBC News

The Movement to Outlaw Caste Discrimination in the U.S.

The Movement to Outlaw Caste Discrimination in the U.S.

By Rohit Chopra and Ajantha Subramanian | Time

February 11, 2022
Time Magazine

How Indian-Canadian Culture Perpetuates Caste System

How Indian-Canadian Culture Perpetuates Caste System

By Meere Estrada | Refinery29

December 9, 2021
Refinery29

Indian caste system in Canada called 'a disease' worse than racism

Indian caste system in Canada called 'a disease' worse than racism

By Jason D'Souza | CBC News

May 28, 2015
CBC News

Gurpreet Singh: Canada needs to stand up for Dalits

Gurpreet Singh: Canada needs to stand up for Dalits

By Gurpreet Singh | Georgia Straight

October 26, 2013
Georgia Straight

‘We are zero’: Immigrant says she can't escape sting of India's caste system, even in Canada

‘We are zero’: Immigrant says she can't escape sting of India's caste system, even in Canada

By Postmedia News | National Post

October 10, 2013  •  Last updated January 25, 2015
National Post