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Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

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Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

#341

Post by numpad0 »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #254
coldtea wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it really isn't. American I presume? You have full rights to use elements of our culture from this here part of Europe (not that you ever asked our permission, you use them anyway. But it's not like we care either...).

No, your presumption is wrong and I'm Scottish. Everybody has the absolute right to use elements of others' cultures – and using them in a disrespectful or exploitative manner is something that I find distasteful and think its reasonable to object to.

Yours is the original idea of cultural appropriation criticism but the way the word is used is to gatekeep “Traditional American Lifestyle” from non-white cultures. The word’s dead.

Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

#342

Post by jfengel »

dspillett wrote: post #195
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a British person with Caribbean family background, I found the reaction to this from the internet so strange. In Britain it's normal that the different cultures here mix. Shops selling Baltic bread, next to shops selling jerk chicken, across the road from a traditional English pub. People of all colours and backgrounds frequenting all of them. From an outside perspective, people in the USA seem very pre-occupied w…

The issue is people being offended on behalf of others (which is itself not a bad thing: we should be conscious of where we might be using culturally significant signals inappropriately, or otherwise causing offence) but being hyper-sensitive and seeing offence where it doesn't really exist in the groups that they think they are standing up for. > pre-occupied with continuing a culture of segregation I think were "cu…

The "hyper sensitivity" also cuts both ways. There do exist hyper-sensitive people seeking out reason to be offended... and other hyper-sensitive people seeking out evidence of others' hyper-sensitivity and getting offended about that.

Both are further stirred by major media trawling through minor media and social media for something to declare as "controversial". I had never heard of the Adele thing, and a quick Google turned up a CNN article which said[1]:

> The singer was quickly accused of cultural appropriation by some users for the hairstyle and top.

How many users is "some"? A dozen? A hundred? Does it really merit "controversy"?

Much of the time, I've found, one hypersensitive person is piled on by a thousand people who have found yet more evidence that there is an enormous social effort to repress them. They rarely or never encounter anybody who actually puts them down, but they hear about somebody else, and that's repeated so often that it sounds massive.

I've even seen it here on HN an awful lot: "I can't even say X anymore without being told how bad I am by a bunch of snowflakes", blithely ignoring how much of a snowflake that makes them. All they want is to be able to say whatever they want without anybody disagreeing -- is that so wrong?

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/31/entertainment/adele-bantu-kno...

Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

#343

Post by lstroud »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #96
drumhead wrote: post #62

Adele, the singer, was photographed at the Nottinghill Carnival (a massive Carribean street festival over the August bank holiday in London) with her hair in Bantu Knots and wearing a bikini top in the colours of the Jamaican flag. As soon as it was on twitter the you started getting tweets from Black Americans about cultural appropriation, but this was met in turn by fierce opposition from African and Carribean post…

As a British person with Caribbean family background, I found the reaction to this from the internet so strange. In Britain it's normal that the different cultures here mix. Shops selling Baltic bread, next to shops selling jerk chicken, across the road from a traditional English pub. People of all colours and backgrounds frequenting all of them. From an outside perspective, people in the USA seem very pre-occupied w…

The cultures here mix too. It’s a preoccupation of a loud minority.

Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

#344

Post by krainboltgreene »

snakeboy wrote: post #128
onion2k wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why is it so common in the BLM movement to rally behind violent criminals on the receiving end of justifiable responses? Are you seriously trying to assert that ending someone's life is a justifiable response to them shoplifting or trespassing? No doubt these are crimes, and the people doing them should not have been doing them, but the suggestion that the inevitable outcome is someone dying is completely ridicul…

Fortunately in the US, 99.998% of police encounters don't result in a death.

I mean that's just verifiably untrue: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

#345

Post by gambiting »

kgabis wrote: post #325
coldtea wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, the "problem" is that there are not many different races in Poland, so it is hard to judge how racist we are. Well, the Poles didn't bring in slaves from Africa and had them working at their planations and so on for centuries though, so there's also that...

You don't need slaves from Africa if you can enslave your own people through serfdom.

In Poland pretty much all land owners, anyone of any wealth and intelligentsia were killed either by the Nazis or the Soviets. It's as if the US had a purge 70 years ago and anyone of any means was killed or sent to a labour camp. US still reaps the benefits of both slavery and the past and ongoing discrimination of its minorities - Poland on the other hand does not. First the Partitions of Poland have erased the country from existence for nearly 100 years, then Nazis killed over 2 million people starting with anyone who had anything valuable first, then 50 years of communism made sure than any kind of systematic exploitation based on serfdom was eradicated and burnt to the ground. While it is taught in history books, the entire class of people who might have been perpetuating the practice have simply been killed off or exiled.

Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

#346

Post by Symbiote »

StavrosK wrote: post #216
somerandobrit wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never heard of this being an issue and I’ve visited Greece several times and have Greek coworkers.

Basically the marbles were stolen decades ago, and the argument was that Greece was in no shape to hold them, so England was protecting them. Now we have the Acropolis museum, that argument doesn't hold so well any more.

Just to make the history clearer, they were taken centuries ago -- they were taken to Britain between 1801 and 1812.

Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

#347

Post by romanoderoma »

akvadrako wrote: post #324
romanoderoma wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Racist police is a popular media narrative, but it's not backed up by evidence. What I posted earlier IS evidence. It comes from official statistics https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/ Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites I imagined people from the US knew their country better than me, that am from Italy…

You may be misreading that paper because it doesn't back up your claim. Blacks are more likely to have confrontations with police and also more likely to be killed by them. There are explanations for that which aren't police racism. Blacks also have a higher fatality rate for being murdered by criminals. The ratio is many times higher than 2.8. Are you saying the criminals are racist?

I have confrontations every time with the police in my country.

I'm still alive.

Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

#348

Post by dang »

waheoo wrote: post #2

+1 from Australia. Our police kill more white people in custody per capita than black. I'm so over hearing about this bullshit here. The aboriginal people of Australia face real problems. The police isn't one of them. PS, keep your debates to yourselves too. Nobody cares and your media cutting Trump out of context is obvious and gross. You are literally becoming the fake news he always said you were.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. We don't want flamewars here, and you did it repeatedly in this thread. Not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

#349

Post by throwaway23555 »

dang wrote: post #348
waheoo wrote: post #2

+1 from Australia. Our police kill more white people in custody per capita than black. I'm so over hearing about this bullshit here. The aboriginal people of Australia face real problems. The police isn't one of them. PS, keep your debates to yourselves too. Nobody cares and your media cutting Trump out of context is obvious and gross. You are literally becoming the fake news he always said you were.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. We don't want flamewars here, and you did it repeatedly in this thread. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you able to comment about what's happening here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24652987

All of the comments are getting flagged and killed. I don't see any rule breaking.

Re: Looking at the experience of black Britons through an American lens

#350

Post by dang »

throwaway23555 wrote: post #349
dang wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. We don't want flamewars here, and you did it repeatedly in this thread. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Are you able to comment about what's happening here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24652987 All of the comments are getting flagged and killed. I don't see any rule breaking.

1. Repeatedly creating accounts to circumvent bans is not ok.

2. Nothing good is going to come out of adding to that flamewar.

3. It crosses into personal attack, which is particularly not ok.

4. Please email hn@ycombinator.com with questions like this, rather than posting off-topic comments. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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