14: Casteism among South Asian Christians in the US

"In Texas which is already a very red state, it is easy to fall into these kinds of patterns. I think in Malayali spaces which are these large Christian culture spaces that are very casteist and very exclusionary too, there is an invisible problem of caste there," says Vani, a Dalit Christian feminist from Texas who works on caste and gender issues. 

The most common notion around casteism in Christianity focuses on escaping the same post conversion. For the immigrant South Indian diaspora in the US, ties to your community then become the only way to establish links to your old life. 

However, in conversation with host Thenmozhi Soundarajan, Vani sheds light on how the oppressed are then left to choose between white supremacy and ostracism from Savarna Christians. Living in fear of their caste being detected, they often choose to operate in silos even in church. Dalit families often chose to not talk about caste to their children, thereby taking away from their identity in an attempt to protect them from oppression.


"A lot of people don’t hear second-generation people talking caste practices, and outside of these circles of faith, did you like see this operating in terms of your other networks, in terms of your other South Asian friends or in college because I think second-generation people particularly those who were born in the United States the language of caste may or may not have been conveyed to us by our parents," she adds.

An already invisibilized population, the addition of caste oppression to the community takes away from the fact that most of the conversion took place to escape casteism. A certain amount of liberation and access to opportunities and resources were awarded, recalls Vani, however, a lot of it also included moral and sexual policing, especially for women and queers. 

With curiosity pushing her through barriers of silence reinforced by elders, it was only research and education that gave Vani the vocabulary to articulate all the wrongdoings in terms of caste, religion, and more. 

"There was a long period of time when I didn’t want to call (myself) Christian (as) I was figuring out what faith and what connection with the divine looks like for me. Then I discovered liberation theology, I read a bit of James Cohn and I started doing a bit more research on what this faith looks like for people who have been deeply oppressed. [When] I started reading more liberation text it started becoming easier for me to understand that a lot of what I was taught when I was young was all very, very wrong," notes Vani.