Thenmozhi Soundararajan is an Indian American Dalit rights activist based in the United States of America. She is also a transmedia storyteller, songwriter, hip hop musician and technologist. She has been actively campaigning for the rights of the marginalized in the midst of structural casteism. She is the founder of Equality Labs, the largest Dalit civil rights organization in the United States. Soundararajan is known for her advocacy work against caste discrimination in the United States and India, and for her contributions to the field of media and technology justice. She has co-authored reports on hate speech and disinformation on social media, and has spoken out against caste-based harassment in the tech industry. Soundararajan's book "The Trauma of Caste" explores the intersection of caste, gender, and mental health, and advocates for the recognition and healing of caste soul wounds as a prerequisite for caste abolition. She has also been involved in art and storytelling projects, including the creation of the #DalitWomenFight movement and the curation of Dalit History Month.
Personal life
Soundararajan was born in the United States to parents that migrated from a rural area near Madurai, Tamil Nadu in India. Her father is a doctor and her mother has had a college education, the first woman in her family to have had one. Soundararajan has said that there was inter-caste violence in their village. When Soundararajan was in the fifth grade, after reading about the effects of the Bhopal disaster on the Untouchables, she learned from her mother that she was a Dalit. She was raised with both Hindu and Christian beliefs, but she has eventually chosen to follow Buddhism.
Soundararajan publicly revealed that she was a Dalit when she made a documentary film on caste and violence against women as a part of her college thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. For Soundararajan, this decision had many consequences: while fellow Dalits secretly confided in her about their identity, she has also stated that she faced discrimination from all but one of the Indian professors in her campus and that they refused to advise her on projects.
Professional life
Soundararajan is a filmmaker, transmedia artist and storyteller. Soon after her graduation, she founded a media training organisation called Third World Majority in Oakland, California, which operated between 2001 and 2008. It served as a new media training and production resource centre for women of color, focused on media and technology justice. She was also a co-founder of Media Justice Network, anchored on Third World Majority. She worked with over 300 community organizations across the United States in this context.
She gained media attention in April 2022 when her scheduled talk for Google News employees during Dalit History Month was cancelled due to some employees accusing her of being "Hindu-phobic" and "anti-Hindu". Soundararajan appealed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who comes from an upper-caste family in India, but her talk was still cancelled, leading some employees to believe that Google was ignoring caste bias.
Work at Equality Labs
In 2015, Soundararajan founded Equality Labs in Oakland, which is now described as the largest Dalit civil rights organisation in the United States. She co-authored a report that described a survey about caste and caste discrimination in the US, which was the first of its kind in 2016. In May 2019, Equality Labs partnered with South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), API Chaya, and the office of representative Pramila Jayapal to hold a congressional briefing on caste discrimination in the United States in Washington, DC. This briefing was the result of a caste survey that Equality Labs conducted in 2016–2017 to gather quantitative data on the existence of caste within the South Asian diaspora in the US. The organization found that anecdotal data was not enough for thorough advocacy around the issue, and a deeper understanding of how caste operates within the diaspora was needed. During the briefing, Soundararajan and other panelists shed light on the pervasive caste discrimination experienced by Dalits and other marginalized communities in the United States. They shared how on college campuses, "upper" caste students often refuse to share rooms with Dalits, and how Hindu students' associations leave out all those who do not adhere to "upper" caste Hindu practices and culture. Soundararajan's advocacy group, Equality Labs told the Washington Post that more than 250 tech workers had come forward in the wake of the Cisco lawsuit, which brought caste discrimination in the US to the fore, to report incidents of caste-based harassment.