Google the american American multinational technology giant is now facing serious allegations for owing a hostile and casteist workplace practices. As reported by the Washington Post, the allegations caught news after it cancelled a talk with Dalit rights activist to Google News employees.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan, A Dalit rights activist based in the US and the founder and executive director of Equality Labs, a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits, was invited to have a talk with the Google News employees for the Dalit History Month in April. The talk, however, got cancelled after some of its employees showed their resistance against the event.
As per reports, some of the employees started spreading misinformation about the activist, and labeled her with “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” title. The information was shared by some of the employees of the search engine family, anonymously, to the Washington Post.
The activist also reached out to Google CEO Sundar Pichai to organise the event, however, the CEO didn't responded to her. This situation led some employees assume that Google willfully has been ignoring caste bias, and is being castieist.
Tanuja Gupta, the one who invited Thenmozhi Soundararajan for the talk had to resign from her post, post the cancellation of event. As reported by ‘The Post' in her farewell letter, Tanuja wrote, 'Avengeance for handling internal criticism is normal at Google, and women bear the brunt.'
“I’ve seen four Black women, being harassed and silenced for promoting racial euqality. These are not individual incidents but a pattern.” Tanuja added further
Reacting over the row, Dr Meena Kandasamy, wrote “I wonder how Sundar Pichai has made peace with the fact that talking about caste got deplatformed by savarna lobbies, when he is a Tamil, has lived in Tamil Nadu, and most of all, gone to school inside the IIT Madras campus, a citadel of caste oppression & Brahmin supremacy”
What does the Google say
Google while reacting over the row, obviously denied the allegations and said,” “Caste discrimination has no place in our workplace. We also have a very clear, publicly shared policy against retaliation and discrimination in our workplace,” said the Google spokesperson Shannon Newberry to The Washington Post.
