“It’s a culmination of a life’s work, both living under the trauma of caste and turning that pain into power,” she said.

(In February, Seattle became the first US city to enshrine caste protections into its constitution.)įor Soundararajan, the legislation felt like a watershed moment for the caste equity movement that she helped build.

And last month, California lawmakers introduced a new bill that would make the state the first in the nation to add caste as a protected category to its anti-discrimination laws. Last year, California State University became the first university system to add caste as a protected category to its anti-discrimination policy. In 2020, state regulators sued the technology company Cisco, alleging that two high-caste Indian managers had discriminated against a Dalit engineer by subjecting him to lower pay and inferior terms of employment. In 2015, she founded the Oakland, California-based Equality Labs, the largest Dalit civil rights organization in the US, which conducted the first survey on caste discrimination in the US.Ĭalifornia, which has one of the largest south Asian populations in the country, has become ground zero for the caste equity movement. A multimedia storyteller and musician, Soudararajan has produced a documentary, a podcast and a new book, The Trauma of Caste, on caste oppression. In the diaspora, it often leads to intra-community violence that can be hard for outsiders to understand.

Soundararajan spent the following three decades advancing the civil rights of Dalits like herself and her parents, who fall at the bottom of the caste system, which is woven into many religions across south Asia. “Caste is one of the most severe versions of anti-Asian hate,” said Soundararajan, now one of the US’s pre-eminent Dalit feminists, “but it’s not as visible because it’s hate amongst us.”

Caste matters