My book review of Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s The Trauma of Caste appears in the June 2023 issue of the AWI Journal (pages 18-19), a quarterly publication distributed to Association of Workplace Investigators members.
I’m glad I received this assignment, through which I absorbed statistics, stories, and lessons about casteism within the South Asian diaspora in United States workplaces.
Among the new-to-me information: In 2020, a California-based Cisco employee sued the company for expecting him to follow a caste hierarchy at work, where he held the lowest status within a team of higher-caste colleagues; and a Cal State East Bay graduate student’s 2021 caste discrimination complaint resulted in California State University formally making caste a protected category across its twenty-three campuses.
I highly recommend this book, especially to my fellow workplace investigators. But if you don’t read the full work, my book review provides a summary of other stories like the two I shared above.