Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan was scheduled to give a talk at Google News. The Company, however, cancelled the talk after employees claimed she was โHindu-phobicโ and โanti-Hinduโ in emails to the companyโs leaders. Senior manager at Google News, Tanuja Gupta, who had invited Soundararajan for the talk, resigned over the incident.
This move by Google led employees to wonder if the company was โwillfully ignoring caste biasโ, an article by The Washington Post said.
Soundararajan, who runs a nonprofit organisation called Equality Labs, works for causes of Dalits, or members of the lowest-ranked caste. Companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, Airbnb, Netflix, and Adobe have previously hosted Soundararajan for talks. The activist, reacting to the move by Google, said: โMost institutions wouldnโt do what they did. Itโs absurd. The bigoted donโt get to set the pace of conversations about civil rights.โ
Gupta, in her resignation email, said she questioned whether Google wanted its diversity efforts to succeed. โRetaliation is a normalized Google practice to handle internal criticism, and women take the hit,โ she wrote.
Shannon Newberry, a spokesperson for Google, wrote in a statement that caste discrimination has no place in the tech giantโs workplace. โWe also have a very clear, publicly shared policy against retaliation and discrimination in our workplace,โ she added.
โWe also made the decision to not move forward with the proposed talk which โ rather than bringing our community together and raising awareness โ was creating division and rancour,โ Newberry further wrote.
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