Caste-ing Stones: How DEI Fuels Anti-Hindu Hatred

• A recent NCRI study reveals that DEI initiatives often foster division, hostility, and biases rather than promoting inclusiveness, mainly targeting Hindus with caste-based discrimination narratives.
• The study highlights methodological flaws in Equality Labs’ caste sensitivity training, which increases assumptions of bias, fosters demonization, and amplifies prejudice against Hindus.
• Participants exposed to Equality Labs materials showed increased agreement with hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric against Hindus, with demonizing terms adapted from Hitler’s quotes gaining significant support.
• Legacy media outlets like NYT and Bloomberg have suppressed coverage of the NCRI study, raising concerns about ideological bias and lack of transparency in reporting.
• Public interest in DEI is waning, and MEI (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) is emerging as a preferred framework, signaling the potential downfall of DEI’s divisive practices.

When Friedrich Nietzsche unveiled one of his outlier maxims in “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering,” one wonders if he was underlining the primary dilemma of the Left-liberals that turns them into humanity-hating monsters. What Nietzsche meant by finding meaning in our suffering is that one should take responsibility for one’s life, find an honest solution to one’s problems, maintain a positive attitude, and navigate all the traumas with dignity and grace. All the great men and women of history have typically followed this maxim to the hilt by focusing on an ideal to suffer so that those who followed them suffered less.

Alas, but this ideal was too much for the parasitic minds of the Leftists to follow, who have always struggled to answer why pain is an indelible part of life. And with no faith, religion, belief, credence, or optimism to fall back upon, this has essentially reduced the Leftists into hating life itself. That explains all the mind-numbing woke mind viruses, that excruciating gender hatred, that spiel against your own race, and those cruel shutdowns against everyone who dares to disagree with their cult. Essentially, the Left went to war against life, and all their wokeism and DEI pogroms were primarily a toolkit against humanity – a war that went on unquestioned and unchallenged… until now.

Make no mistake, DEI has already become a huge business undertaking, with corporate America spending around $8 billion annually and involving around 52% of American workers in DEI meetings or training events. However, what remains to be gauged is the efficacy of these initiatives despite widespread acceptance, as several DEI programs appeared to backfire by fostering discomfort and perceptions of unfairness, eventually increasing racial resentment.

The need of the hour was rigorous research on diversity initiatives and the documented potential of DEI efforts backfiring, which was duly provided by a recent study conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University. The study assessed a crucial question: “Do ideas and rhetoric foundational to many DEI training foster pluralistic inclusiveness, or do they exacerbate intergroup and interpersonal conflicts? Do they increase empathy and understanding or increase hostility towards members of groups labeled as oppressors?”[1]

The NCRI research raised these questions across race, religion, and caste. And when you elaborate on their findings for caste, you will be practically staring at the reason why Hindudvesha (aka Hinduphobia) is surreptitiously peaking across all the Leftist hovels – right from the hallowed American campuses to those stormy Bangladeshi badlands.

Casting the net wide

In theory, caste-based discrimination among American Hindus has not really been an integral part of DEI discourse or training. Research by Pew actually indicates that few American Hindus born in the US identify strongly with caste, with less than half reporting any connection to a caste group. Yet with the Left’s rigorous woke agenda – particularly by Equality Labs, caste was forced in various American institutions as a category requiring protection from discrimination across various sectors.

Did Equality Labs have any authoritative study on caste discrimination? Actually, their most cited research article on caste discrimination “has been widely criticized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and others, for methodological flaws, including unrepresentative sampling and reliance on unverified self-reported experiences.” There exists a lacuna in the finer scientific understanding of the impact of the DEI initiatives on understanding caste discrimination in America, which the NCRI study sought to address deeply.

The research methodology was simple and scientific – the participants read excerpts from caste discrimination materials from Equality Labs, juxtaposed against a neutral control text about ‘jati and varna in Hinduism.’ Later, they were asked to evaluate a hypothetical scenario – “Raj Kumar applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2022. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer, Anand Prakash. Ultimately, Raj’s application was rejected.”

And the results were shocking, to say the least. “Analysis revealed that exposure to the Equality Labs intervention led to a significantly higher perception of microaggressions, perceived harm, and assumptions of bias during the interview process (increases of 32.5%, 15.6%, and 11%, respectively) compared to the control condition.”

However, that is not all. Additional questions sought to assess if reading the caste sensitivity essay from Equality Labs negatively influenced participants’ assumptions about Hindus’ racist attitudes while increasing participants’ willingness to punish the fictional college administrator. You will be shocked to learn how participants who read the Equality Labs essay showed a higher willingness (19%) to punish the administrator than those in the control group, along with assessing Hindus as more racist (47.5%).

Similarly, the caste study also revealed a significant increase in agreement with demonizing statements adapted from Adolf Hitler’s quotes, where the term ‘Jew’ was replaced with ‘Brahmin’ in quotes like ‘Brahmins are a parasite,’ ‘Brahmins are a virus’ and ‘Brahmins are the devil personified.’ Alarmingly, the participants exposed to the DEI content were markedly more likely to endorse Hitler’s demonization statements, agreeing that Brahmins are “parasites” (+35.4%), “viruses” (+33.8%), and “the devil personified” (+27.1%).[2]

What is painfully evident is that these findings suggest that Equality Labs’ dehumanizing rhetoric in the garb of a DEI program not only fails to address the systemic injustice but actively cultivates divisive and authoritarian mindsets, all the while fostering a false notion that Hindus are inherently racist.

A 185-word atomic missile?

Before going any further, it is crucial to understand the enormous significance of these research findings by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University. The participants were not bombarded by hours upon hours of vicious propaganda, nor were they subjected to intense coaching against Hinduism. “All it took was 185 words taken directly from Equality Lab’s website for participants to become more likely to dehumanize an entire category of Hindus. That’s the equivalent of a few tweets,” bemoans Indu Viswanathan, a research team member conducting this study. You read that right – a mere 185-word malicious fakery could create such measurable hatred; you can only sit back and rue “the damaging impact that this has had on the public imagination over decades and centuries.”

“It has created a permission structure that allows entire categories of Hindus to be described as viruses and parasites by actors like Equality Labs who profit from this demonization,” opined Indu Viswanathan, lamenting how Equality Labs’ DEI mishmash is “completely incompatible with the benevolent intention of creating healthy, compassionate social environments and intergroup relations.”[3]

Mind you, the results are consistently disastrous for the DEI brand in race and religion studies, too. In one experiment, participants read excerpts from Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi, compared to a neutral control text about corn production. Afterward, they were asked to evaluate a hypothetical scenario: an applicant being rejected from an elite university. Those exposed to the DEI materials were far more likely to perceive racism in the admissions process despite no evidence to support such a conclusion – mandating stiff punitive measures such as suspending the admissions officer or pushing for additional DEI training.

Likewise, for its religion studies, NCRI analyzed the anti-Islamophobia training materials of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) to determine their effectiveness in reducing anti-Muslim prejudice and to examine whether they unintentionally skew perceptions of fairness, potentially reinforcing biases against institutions viewed as oppressors.

Following exposure to the texts, participants were presented with a controlled scenario involving two individuals – Ahmed Akhtar and George Green – both convicted of identical terrorism charges for bombing a local government building.”

“In the control group (corn), Ahmed’s trial was perceived as just as fair as George’s, indicating no baseline perception of Islamophobia. In the anti-Islamophobia content group (treatment), George’s trial ratings were not significantly different from the corn content group (control). However, participants in the anti-Islamophobia treatment group rated Ahmed’s trial as significantly less fair (4.92 vs. 5.25) than those in the control group. The training led them to perceive injustice toward Ahmed despite the specifics of his situation being identical to George’s. These results suggest that anti-Islamophobia training inspired by ISPU materials may cause individuals to assume unfair treatment of Muslim people, even when no evidence of bias or unfairness is present.”[4]

And why are these findings a matter of huge concern? Because ISPU’s educational efforts include training American Federal Agents on Islamophobia sensitivity. Imagine the favoritism and partisanship that are already being baked in the scrutinization and evaluation processes of these premier investigative agencies worldwide.[5]

Shooting the messenger?

It is one thing to comprehensively establish that DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric, and it is entirely something else to take the research results to the masses. The pathbreaking study by NCRI is currently being nipped in the bud, with two leading American legacy media organizations – The New York Times (NYT) and Bloomberg- abruptly shelving its coverage.[6]

Naturally, this bigoted attitude of the legacy media is irking expert commentators and analysts, like Dr Colin Wright –  an evolutionary biologist and Manhattan Institute Fellow, who couldn’t resist quipping, “With billions of dollars invested annually in these initiatives, the public has a right to know if such programs – heralded as effective moral solutions to bigotry and hate – might instead be fueling the very problems they claim to solve. The decision to withhold coverage raises serious questions about transparency, editorial independence, and the growing influence of ideological biases in the media.”[7]

What makes the legacy media’s U-turn appalling is that the NYT, which has cited NCRI’s work in nearly 20 previous articles, has suddenly demanded that this particular research undergo a peer review. This requirement had never been imposed on NCRI’s earlier findings, even on similarly sensitive topics like extremism or online hate. “At Bloomberg, the story was quashed outright by an editor known for public support of DEI initiatives.”

The moot question remains: whose interest are these media outlets protecting – their deracinated DEI gangs or the general public’s? For Joel Finkelstein, the lead NCRI researcher, the editorial about-face is “as revealing as the data itself,” as he firmly believes that the findings are “sobering with likely impact for DEI policy, as well as congressional impacts and potentially civil litigation.” On media suppression of the study, Finkelstein further stated, “This seems like an effort to suppress research that challenges prevailing narratives around DEI and, worryingly, implicates standard practices for egregious harms.”

Endgame – When DEI stands for ‘Didn’t Earn It’…

It may not be unfair to say that DEI is no longer pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. With the impending change in regime at the Capitol, DEI already seems to be on borrowed time. MEI, or ‘Merit, Excellence and Intelligence’, is the new buzzword, fostering a culture where everyone is judged by their abilities and achievements.

Besides, DEI’s popularity is fast plummeting to rock bottom. Public interest in DEI is already down by 15 points since 2021. More importantly, Republican support for DEI has literally halved from 50% to 22%. Even your standard-issue DEI czars within the Democrat ranks are pulling away as Democrat support for DEI, too, dips from 86% to 79%.[8]

Has DEI run its course? Probably, yes… It was an aberration in the innovation ecosystem that made America the land of milk and honey. DEI sought inclusiveness, diversity, and equality but did the opposite. As this NCRI research indicates, it consistently amplified perceptions of bias where none existed, forcing the world to see prejudice in neutral scenarios and to support punitive actions against imagined offenders.

By bringing the caste wars into its ambit, DEI sought to tarnish the reputation of America’s most peace-loving and industrious demographic of Hindus and tar them with the black brush of racism – demonizing and dehumanizing them as parasites, viruses, and devils. It is this sustained propaganda against the hardworking Hindus that the Leftists around the world use to validate and even justify the cruel violence in Bangladesh against the Hindu minorities there. DEI and Equality Labs are partly responsible for this abomination, and one cannot but fail to conclude that with reports like NCRI’s, the debunking of their Hinduphobia is complete. Their entire facade of anti-Hindu rhetoric is collapsing like a pack of cards in the face of concrete data and crisp research by the NCRI. Indeed, the world is healing, as DEI is now set to DIE.

Citations

[1] NCRI. 2024. “INSTRUCTING ANIMOSITY: HOW DEI PEDAGOGY PRODUCES THE HOSTILE ATTRIBUTION BIAS.” Network Contagion. https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Instructing-Animosity_11.13.24.pdf.

[2] TOI Desk. 2024. “Replace Jew with Brahmin.” Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/hindu-brahmin-caste-dei-trump-hindu-america-foundation-equity-labs/articleshow/115695894.cms.

[3] Viswanathan, Indu. 2024. “Twitter.” As a member of the research team that conducted this study, I was astonished by how easy it was to achieve these alarming impacts. https://x.com/indumathi37/status/1861503540184916056.

[4] Colin Wright. 2024. “Following exposure to the texts, participants were presented with a controlled scenario involving two individuals—Ahmed Akhtar and George Green.” Twitter. https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1861086017727406125.

[5] ING. 2024. “FBI Training on Islamophobia.” ING. https://ing.org/fbi-training-on-islamophobia/

[6] India Today Desk. 2024. “India Today.” Study on anti-Hindu bias suppressed by US media giants: Indian-American group. https://www.indiatoday.in/world/us-news/story/hindu-american-foundation-accused-new-york-times-bloomberg-hindu-brahmin-caste-dei-training-equality-labs-2640549-2024-11-26.

[7] Wright, Colin. 2024. “Why Was This Groundbreaking Study on DEI Silenced?” Reality’s Last Stand. https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/why-was-this-groundbreaking-study.

[8] Vigilant Fox. 2024. “CNN’s Harry Enten Exposes DEI’s Sinking Popularity in Devastating Report.” Twitter. https://x.com/VigilantFox/status/1861642392987750411.