California lawmakers send caste discrimination bill to Newsom
CalMatters | Sameea Kamal
After many twists and turns — intra-party drama, xenophobic comments against its author and division among some South Asian communities — the first-in-the-nation bill to ban caste discrimination in California’s housing and employment laws completed its journey through the Legislature Tuesday with a 31-5 vote in the Senate.
It heads next to the governor’s desk. Until Gov. Gavin Newsom signs it into law, a coalition of supporters says it is launching a statewide hunger strike “to remind the state that Californians have lost their jobs due to caste discrimination; have been unhoused due to caste discrimination; and have been harmed irrevocably by physical, sexual, and verbal violence.”
On the other side, the Hindu American Foundation, one of the groups that organized against the bill, is calling on Newsom to veto it.
What will the governor decide? His office told CalMatters he “will evaluate the bill on its merits.”
Senate Bill 403 by Sen. Aisha Wahab adds caste — a centuries-old social hierarchy system that has historically determined what jobs or education people can attain — to the list of protected classes, alongside race, gender and sexual orientation.
Wahab, on the Senate floor, ahead of the vote: “This bill is very simple. It is to protect all people against caste discrimination, regardless of caste: upper caste, lower caste, it does not matter.”
Because caste is associated often with the South Asian community, opponents that included Hindu-American groups said they feared the bill would lead to racial profiling.
Those concerns led Assemblymembers Evan Low and Alex Lee — who both represent parts of the Silicon Valley, which is home to large South Asian communities — to call for delaying the bill to study it further, though they later voted for it.
In a concession to critics, the bill was amended in the Assembly to include caste as a subset of ancestry.
Still on Tuesday, five Republican senators, including Shannon Grove and Brian Dahle, voted “no” Tuesday, saying that discrimination is already banned under current laws and that the bill could unfairly target Hindu Californians.