The Summer of George Floyd's Murder and The Season of Anti-Caste Politics in the United States
An in-depth essay of where we stand five years since the 'moment of racial reckoning'
Something I have heard repeatedly from racial justice advocates, people who work in the immigration rights movements, folks who speak for justice for Indigenous Americans and in fact, from organizers of all stripes in the United States, is this country operates in seasons. There is a brief but shining moment, when it seems like out of nowhere (it isn’t, but it sure seems like it), the media machinery, the online cosmos, policy makers, corporate overlords, moms in the Midwest and even elected officials become simultaneously attuned to a specific issue, and the public opinion just falls in line — like Mercury in Retrograde, but the good kind.
This could last a few weeks, a couple of months, or in rare cases, some years. Then one day, too many stories have already been written, every video has been re-memed and reposted, politicians have machinated, openly or covertly, to fortify their interests and destroy any possibility that looks like retribution. And the public opinion, well that was the first thing that curdled.
This can be equally true of the ‘moment of racial reckoning’ that started in the summer of 2020, with the bone chilling murder of Minneapolis resident George Floyd, as it is with the short lived visibility of the anti-caste movement in the United States. Five years later, as we witness a complete reversal from a moment that at the time seemed like it would alter the history of the United States, the mainstream establishment has all but moved on from the reckoning that it seemed so keen on achieving just half a decade ago.
A new survey by Pew Research Center shows that Americans see it too. Compared to 2020, when 52% of adults in the US believed that increased focus on racial inequality would improve the lives of Black people in the US, now 72% say that focus did not improve the lives of Black people in America. Even George Floyd’s brother, who is a New York resident, said that “we should have been moving faster than this”. While this season of racial reckoning lasted longer than many had anticipated, there remains little doubt that in this era of DEI policy reversals and scaling back on the efforts for accountability from the police departments across the US, it has now firmly ended.
The season for caste (in the way it relates to its mainstream visibility in the US), on the other hand, seemed to have ended a lot earlier than 2025, and without as much flourish. Just as historically, the movements for civil liberties for Black Americans have benefitted all minorities in the United States, the mainstream championing of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 created the capacity in the American discourse to also pay attention to caste. Even though the anti-caste movement in the US goes back to at least the ‘90s — when a handful of Dalits began to migrate to the country, unlike the previous waves of immigration, which almost exclusively brought dominant caste Indians to America — it remained more or less invisible for past several decades. Dalits in the US began to organize in the early days of online list serves and email lists and formed communities that kept them safe and their caste ‘hidden’, if that was what they needed.
Although the anti-caste movements have flexed their influence across the world, and at the UN — most notably in 2001, when anti-caste activists challenged the Indian government over its objection to the inclusion of caste as a recognized category of discrimination — the organizing around caste in the US remained more or less limited to California, a state with the largest population of South Asians in the country. Over time, anti-caste ideas began creeping in into mainstream narratives, more specifically in 2016, with the fight between anti-caste activists and Hindu nationalist organizations over the inclusion of facts around caste and Indian history in California’s textbooks. Yet it wasn’t until 2020, in the immediate aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, that caste finally made news in all of United States.
In July 2020, a Dalit engineer (whose identity had to remain concealed throughout out the duration of the case) sued his employer, Cisco Systems, and his two Brahmin caste managers for discrimination at the workplace that had gone unchecked for years. In the charged milieu of that summer, a case, which perhaps otherwise would have received scant attention in media, took off like lightening. Media outlets, that only a few months ago did not consider it a subject with wide appeal, could not get enough stories out on caste. This attention was likely heavily underscored by the fact that Pulitzer Prize winning author and journalist, Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, which examined racial inequality through prism of the South Asian caste system and Nazi Germany, released in September 2020, and immediately shot to the top NYT’s best-seller list, where it remained for 58 weeks.
Companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple, which had also released statements and launched policies addressing racial injustice, began having conversations around caste (including one which I participated in). Institutions like Brandies College (the first to do it in 2019) and California State University added caste to their official policies against discrimination — a precedent which was later followed by several other universities including Columbia, Brown and Colby College, and companies like Apple. This prodigious attention prompted even more claims of caste discrimination at tech companies to become public, like the open letter signed by 30 Dalit women engineers in 2020, who detailed instances of exclusion and harm at their workplaces.
It was evident that caste was officially in season.
Yet, like every moment of retributive justice in this country is met with an even greater and more hostile rebuke, these small but not insignificant advances towards addressing racial and caste injustice were challenged bitterly by its opponents. Conservatives repeatedly attempted to frame the Black Lives Matter protestors as disproportionately violent (even as incidents like the NYPD intentionally barricading protestors to arrest them for staying past the city wide curfew were widely reported), scathingly attacked institutional efforts at diversity and anti racism, and claimed that the slogan which asserted the value of Black lives was racist to those who were not.
While simultaneously, the adversaries of the anti-caste movement (who aren’t always be conservative but also include self proclaimed liberals and Democrats) went after institutions who supported efforts of caste based inclusion. Like two dominant caste Indian professors who sued their employer, California State University over the inclusion of caste as a protected category (and lost). Along with Hindu fundamentalist groups who filed motions against California State Department of Fair Employment and Housing, that had sued Cisco along with the Dalit engineer in 2020, in order to ‘prevent the state’s overreach from the violation of rights of Hindu Americans’.
Not to mention the blanket framing of Dalit writers and activists who advocated for caste equality as ‘anti-Hindu’ (including yours truly; I was also born in a practicing Hindu family), which culminated in the shocking outcome of Google cancelling a talk by a Dalit activist at the behest of its dominant caste Indian American workforce that vocally opposed the event, just two years after the company’s much publicized commitment to racial equity. Other tech companies that had planned similar events called them off quietly and without much notice.
The discourse around both racial and caste inclusivity was surely turning sour, but if these tech companies were feeling the burn they chose to show it through genuflecting to pro-caste voices and disregarding Dalits, which even under the Biden administration in 2022, was relatively easy to get away with. Media outlets that earlier seemed eager to champion Dalit voices now began framing caste as an ‘internal conflict’, while consistently structuring it as a ‘both sides’ issue. This was most starkly evident during the media coverage of the passing of the historic Seattle anti-caste discrimination bill in 2023.
Sponsored by India born Socialist Assembly member Kshama Sawant, the law was the first of its kind in the US, where a city had officially recognized caste as a legal category of discrimination. It was aimed, among other things, to provide relief in cases of workplace discrimination like at Cisco, given that tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and several others that employ South Asian workers, have headquarters in Seattle. The passing of this law, though local in its impact, carried monumental legal significance for caste, yet its coverage remained relatively muted, especially when compared to the avalanche of stories that had followed the Cisco case.
Despite the tonal shift in the narrative of caste, many Dalit organizations and allies saw Seattle as a massive win, and decided to bring the fight, their biggest so far, back home to California. In the summer of 2023, California Senator Aisha Wahab launched the largest push for caste equity in America, and introduced a caste protection bill in the state, which likely had the largest population of Dalit Americans, as well as dominant caste Hindus in the United States. The home of Silicon Valley, California also houses some of the most influential and wealthy Indian Americans who built their fortunes in tech. Many of these Indian American techies and industrialists are not only opposed to any degree of caste protections but also refuse to acknowledge that caste is deeply embedded in Indian American and even larger South Asian societies. Like Indian American lobbyist Ramesh Kapur, who has been an influential donor in California Democratic circles for decades, and went on record to claim that he was in touch with then Vice President Kamala Harris’ office about the bill.
So, while Dalit Americans, who are relatively newer to the United States (several are still immigrants on visa), banded together with allies and went on hunger strikes to get the bill passed, dominant caste Indians that were able to migrate and establish influence since the 1960s when the country sought out tech graduates from India, lobbied with Democratic politicians to block it. And after months of extensive tinkering and a overwhelming majority vote on the bill in both the state’s legislative assembly and senate, when the bill reached at Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk to pass, it was hardly surprising that he decided to veto it. Reports suggested that Newsom had chosen to give in to the dominant caste Hindu lobbyists (Kapur allegedly being one of them) who directly warned him about the loss of the vote from the Indian Americans in the state, if and when he decided to run for President.
It’s worth noting that the news of Newsom’s veto of this caste bill that had sat on his desk for months, broke on October 7, 2023, the same day that Hamas fighters attacked thousands of people in Israel. Given the magnitude of the bill, it was extensively covered by media publications in the US, however the news of its veto failed to break through. The discourse on caste stood no chance against the tide of the cultural shift that would soon take over the United States, obliterating everything else in its wake. Despite crucial breakthroughs like, director
’s pivotal film, Origin (2023) — based on Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book, Caste, it showcased India’s caste system in exacting and realistic detail — the mainstream conversation around caste never gained the same traction. Majority of the prominent coverage around the film covered ‘racial caste’ and even Nazi Germany, but more or less glossed over the references to the caste system.Like that one unusually chilly day in September that sneaks up without warning that summer was now over, the season for caste in the US, too, seemed to have wrapped up without notice. In 2025, it is harder to get in stories around caste than it has been in years. The anti-caste movement is once again underground, and the enormous about face by Gavin Newsom has effectively stymied efforts for other caste bills across the country. Universities saddled with punitive consequences for even a whiff of DEI pursuits seem to have equally turned away from anti-caste policies.
But that is what we see now. If conversations with organizers, both in India and the United States, has taught me anything is that seasons, whether they be of caste or racial equity, might be short but they are always cyclical. As we look around and find ourselves in what seems like a drought, let us know that the seeds are still being planted. All we have to do is till the soil and wait for the first drops of rain, because the clouds are already gathering.
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Related reading on caste in India and the US: