In a book talk on March 21, Soundararajan joined Data & Society Principal Researcher Sareeta Amrute to discuss her incisive and urgent work, including critical questions about caste in technology.

Purchase your copy of The Trauma of Caste: https://bookshop.org/a/14284/97816231...

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“‘Dalit’ is the name that we chose for ourselves when Brahminism declared us ‘untouchable.’ Dalit means broken. Broken by suffering. Broken by caste: the world's oldest, longest-running dominator system...yet although ‘Dalit’ means broken, it also means resilient.”

Despite the ban on untouchability 70 years ago, caste, one of the oldest systems of exclusion in the world, is thriving — impacting 1.9 billion people worldwide. And the wreckages of caste are replicated in the US and elsewhere, showing up at work, at school, in housing, and in technology, and forcing countless Dalits to live in fear of being outed.

In The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition, Dalit American activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan puts forth a call to awaken and act, not just for readers in South Asia, but around the world. She ties Dalit oppression to fights for liberation among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, femme, and queer communities, examining caste from a feminist, abolitionist, and Dalit Buddhist perspective — and laying bare the grief, rage, and stolen futures enacted by Brahminical social structures.