American Caste

May 10, 2026 ·

Rage bait title to share something casual and funny. By the way, I find many if not most Indians themselves do not understand what caste is. The topic is simultaneously taboo and overly intellectualized so the confusion adds up. My best working definition is that caste is the mapping between ethnicity and profession. Caste is not one's ethnicity, and nor is it one's profession; but rather it's the hardcoded mapping between one's ethnicity and profession. My own ethnicity is jatt, and the casteist mapping to it would be farming, land-lording, and peasantry labor. At the expense of annoying repetition, a popular misconception is that jatt is a caste, whereas caste is the systemic expectation and coercion into a profession at the point of one’s birth because of their ethnicity; not the notion of ethnicity itself.

Anyway, back to the funny thing. A common observation and joke Americans make while traveling is that boarding groups on flights vaguely represent the caste system in America. Do you even have the fancy credit card that lets you in the buffet lounge? Stop being low caste, just be rich. Quite funny. But talking to my parents yesterday I was reflecting on another such similar version of the thing. When I first moved to America I worked multiple blue collar jobs, out of both necessity and excitement. People in India where I grew up don't take up jobs to support themselves and the focus is on education and getting intellectual sounding college degrees for all, so many people's first jobs or at least the expectation of them is to be in some posh office among rich and intellectual people, while working at fast food joints and more labor intensive things is generally done by the less fortunate and all that usual socialist society jazz. Extremely ironic to me that societies obsessed with the notion of equality and diversity tend to have the deepest inequalities within them. Anyway, this was all changing while I was growing up in India in the 1990s and capitalism was creeping its way in. I read in a book one time that American children setup lemonade stands as their first business venture during summer vacation, so I imitated that one summer. Zero customers except my aunt who was visiting from Canada. People didn't understand what the point of it was. So when I moved to Texas in the 2000s I was eager to go to American high school, the kind I had seen on TV, work jobs that I had seen kids work, and do more western culture things.

The punch line to this whole thing is that as my career took shape over the years, the kinds of jokes, comments, and things people bring up and tell me has changed with time. I delivered pizza for years, an eternity in retrospect. During that era, I remember people joking with me about having moved to America and still delivering pizza 5 years in. You haven't even gotten yourself an 18-wheeler yet was the joke among peers. Indeed, the best return on investment for many is to get into trucking and the general expectation is that trucking is the default career path. Jokes from the outgroup were about 7-Eleven gas stations and taxi driving. I never thought or perceived any of it to be racist or anything like that; it's just the general nature of jokes is what it was. Then, I got a bit of a nicer job selling computers to small businesses and immediately noticed the difference in the kinds of things people would ask me and joke with me about. Peers and customers would ask me about Jim Corbett National Park, the Bengal tiger, Himalayan mountain ranges, diamonds and marbles from Rajasthan, best spots to go fly fishing in India and so on. Quite the change. And more recently for the last few years, it's been relatively even more intellectual in nature. Manmohan Singh, economic policy, Arundhati Roy, Jawaharlal Nehru, Zohran Mamdani, Sikh history and philosophy, just a few topics off the top of my head. I don't think of myself as belonging to any of these groups more than the other. It all still invokes laughter in me same as working at Dominos and being asked why am I not a trucker yet. It somehow feels like that same question just in its more intellectualized form. I'm jestermaxxing here but that's been my American caste climb.