Seattle was the first city in the US to ban race discrimination in September of last year. Now, Fresno, California, has done the same.
The Fresno City Council passed the Bill easily on Thursday, September 28. Its goal is to stop discrimination based on caste against people of South Asian descent and Oaxacan descent. The caste system in India is similar to the caste system used in Casta, which is a structured social order.
Tens of thousands of Sikhs and Oaxacans have led the protests against discrimination based on race. The Los Angeles Times said that people from these two groups have been farmers or farm workers in Fresno County and Central Valley for a long time.
In October 2022, an audio recording of three Los Angeles City Council members making racist comments about Oaxacans was leaked. This gave the cause a boost. The event made people in the US’s civil rights movement very angry. It has also brought new attention to how the casta system makes Oaxacans vulnerable to discrimination.
The TV network said that Annalisa Perea, vice president of the Fresno City Council, said, “I’m proud of our City for once again raising the bar on civil rights protections.” “We know that discrimination won’t go away overnight, but our city took a brave step by passing this anti-discrimination policy to make sure that caste discrimination is protected by civil rights laws even more.”
When Spain took over Mexico, they set up a system called Sistema de Castas. This said that people born in Spain were the most “pure Spaniards” and were at the top of the list. People born in Mexico were next on the list. Indigenous people from Oaxaca are at the bottom of the hierarchy, right next to Black people.
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Gaspar Rivera-Salgado told the LA Times, “During the colonial period, the Spaniards set up this system that was very similar to the system of India.” One of Rivera-Salgado’s jobs is to run the Center for Mexican Studies at UCLA. He is also on the board of the Binational Center for the Development of Oaxacan Indigenous Communities.
When Sikhs in Fresno saw how bad things were for Oaxacans, they thought of how bad things were for lower caste people from South Asia. Deep Singh, executive director of the Jakara Movement, told the LA Times, “When groups have shared a common experience of unfair treatment and being seen as less than, they can understand each other’s pain right away.”
The Fresno City Council’s approval of the Bill is a big step forward for the fight to end discrimination based on caste in the whole state of California. In May of this year, the California Senate passed a bill that outlawed caste with a huge majority. However, governor Gavin Newsom has yet to sign it into law.
A number of rights groups have been putting pressure on Newsom to sign the Bill into law. An Indian American campaigner for Dalit rights named Thenmozhi Soundararajan has been on a hunger strike for about a month to demand that Newsom sign the Bill.
However, Hindu nationalist groups in the United States have been against the most recent bill passed by the Fresno City Council. These groups are also against the movement and groups asking for federal laws to stop discrimination based on caste. They said that these kinds of rules would “single out” the Hindu community as discriminators.
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