Haridhra Radhakrishnan, “In/visibility of Caste: An Analysis of Second-Generation Indian Americans’ Caste Discourses”
Mentor: Anjana Mudambi, Communication, Letters & Science (College of)
Oral Presentation: 9:00am Union E220
While caste serves as a fundamental organizational principle across much of South Asian society, its implications often appear less readily visible to members of the South Asian diaspora, especially in comparison to their more salient identity as a racially and ethnically nondominant group (see Chandrashekar, 2024). This study explores second-generation Indian Americans’ discourses to understand how they communicatively construct caste in relation to their identities. Using Deductive Qualitative Analysis (Fife & Gossner, 2024), we examined comments across 26 threads related to caste on the subreddit ABCDesis (American Born Confused Desis) that were posted between 2022 and 2024 and identified four major themes. We focused on two themes that demonstrated aspects of caste-blindness and helped ABDs sustain privilege as well as detach themselves from the issue. First, they echo three frames of colorblindness (Bonilla-Silva, 2022), including minimization, naturalization, and abstract liberalism, to construct a “casteblind” narrative that rationalizes caste/ism and, for many, maintains their caste privilege. Second, they rely on a disconnected power analysis (Jayakumar & Adamanian, 2017) to distance themselves from caste/ism, instead blaming it on first-generation immigrants, British colonization, and/or on a backwards Indian culture. We examine what this means for the predominantly upper caste diaspora and the role of second-generation immigrants in particular, highlighting the importance of caste as an analytic framework to better understand dis/privilege within the South Asian diaspora. Keywords: Caste, Casteism, South Asian diaspora, Privilege, Second-generation