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“X for black people” sounds so bizarre to me(non-American). The cultural divide between the people must be insane.
by f6v 5y ago
“X for black people” sounds so bizarre to me(non-American). The cultural divide between the people must be insane.
- runjake 5y agoI wouldn't call it a cultural divide (despite what our media wants), I would call America more a collection of cultures and I love being exposed to multiple different cultures just outside my proverbial front door. That said, this is a great idea and I wish this company the best. I'd love to see something similar for the Hispanic community, as well.
- whymauri 5y ago>I'd love to see something similar for the Hispanic community, as well. 24/7 Caso Cerrado, let's goooo
- hn8788 5y ago"Netflix for black people" implies that the color of someone's skin determines so much about their personality that they need their own separate streaming service to watch shows on. I don't see how this is any improvement over the existing streaming services that already include a ton of indie content from a lot of different cultures.
- werber 5y agoThey explictly say that they're trying to break out of homogenous black programming. Obviously being black doesn't correlate to a consistent personality, but it does in many ways lead to a shared experience that someone who is not black has not had.
- Uzo0312 5y agoI can certainly see where saying "for black people" doesn't sit well with a lot of people. However, that's exactly who we're targeting with the content. That doesn't mean it has to be exclusive. Most of the lyrics in rap songs are generally by black people and intended for black audiences, but it doesn't mean other people don't love it, can't appreciate it, or shouldn't listen. It just means the artist wanted to reach a certain demographic, a demo that was also likely wanting to hear an artist that spoke to how they see and live in the world.
- robertlagrant 5y ago> Most of the lyrics in rap songs are generally by black people and intended for black audiences, but it doesn't mean other people don't love it, can't appreciate it, or shouldn't listen. We tried "rap music for white people" and we decided we preferred the rap music for black people :D
- em-bee 5y agodo you really mean rap for black people or rap from black people?
- robertlagrant 5y agoIt was a joke my friend :)
- tines 5y agoI feel like the cultural divide may be encouraged by certain groups. There's money to be made in market differentiation.
- josteink 5y agoSeconding this. And imagine the outrage if someone had made “X for white people”. There’d be riots in streets. The bizarreness and racist double standard behind this is just astounding seen from the outside.
- allenbrunson 5y agowith precious few exceptions, pretty much every media outlet in the USA is already "X for white people." it's not necessary to phrase it that way, everybody already knows. personally, i think it's great that the founders have chosen to sell this as "X for black people." it is much more honest and cuts right to the point. if they had not, if they had instead chosen words like "diversity," then inevitable drill-downs would be criticizing them for trying to hide their true intentions.
- afavour 5y ago> imagine the outrage if someone had made “X for white people”. There’d be riots in streets. The difference between majority and minority is surely not that difficult to comprehend from outside the US?
- josteink 5y agoThey are only a “minority” because someone decided to come up with a way (race) to divide people into groups where one group is bound to end up smaller, and somehow claim that division is of significant importance. IMO the solution to that problem is definitely not to reinforce that division.
- werber 5y agoThe United States is 76.3% white ( https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219 ), it's not a division it's a number, there are just literally less people of color in the country, a minority of the population.
- 5y ago
- daviddaviddavid 5y agoCompletely agree, especially since it would be pretty easy to reword things to focus on the diversity of the content as opposed to the intended audience, thereby removing the divisiveness inherent in the title.
- raclage 5y ago"divisiveness inherent in the title" seems wildly overblown to me. Isn't identifying an underserved audience and marketing to them like a cornerstone of business? Do you feel that hair products marketed toward Black people are divisive? Subscription boxes for millennials? Shoes for moms?
- dneri 5y agoThis was my first thought as well, an I'm American. Word to OP, this is a catchy title but I would be really careful going out of the gate with that kind of slogan.
- spicymaki 5y ago> This was my first thought as well, an I'm American. However, X for white people is often the default case and is left unsaid. As an American you should be well versed in this. No one is saying that non-black people cannot watch the content, the implication is that the content it is tailored for black people.
- bilbo0s 5y agoI'm just being honest right now, and I know this is an unpopular opinion, but this is brilliant right now in this moment. These are entrepreneurs. Their job is not to teach everyone melting pot kumbayah culture. Their job is to make money for themselves and their investors. After about 35 years of travel and living I'm intimately familiar with Africa and Asia. There are changes in Africa right now. Changes that feel much different than any changes I've lived through previously, and this product strikes a brilliantly resonant chord with those changes. People, particularly the 18-35 demographic in Africa, will eat this up. They get some black american and african celebrities along with someone like Wode Maya on this thing, and having blackoak would become a status symbol in Africa. At least among the young. Sure, not great for global society, but awesome for business. Only people who don't realize how quickly Africa is growing would think otherwise.
- HarryHirsch 5y agoIt's more understandable when you think about the Irish Troubles. The Black-White issue is really an interethnic conflict.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Veen 5y ago"Neflix for Protestants" and "Netflix for Catholics" would be considered similarly unhelpful.
- HarryHirsch 5y agoBoth will be VC-financed and need to increase viewership. So Popeflix starts a series about the heroic exploits of a Provo brigade bombing British garrisons. Prodflix responds with a series about a crack Specials unit that hunts down the coward bombers mercilessly because the nationalism works. In another timeline this has already happened. We merely have Governors Abbott and DeSantis and Delta Covid.
- dharmab 5y ago"for Black stories" would be a positive way to phrase this.
- ldargin 5y agoCalling a it a "Netflix for Black People" works for a informal elevator spiel; it shows that they squarely target black American viewers. "Black stories" is used by Netflix and Hulu.
- sokoloff 5y agoBET wasn’t offensive me. Telemundo wasn’t offensive to me. Nickelodeon wasn’t offensive to me. Food Network wasn’t offensive to me. Serving targeted programming to an identifiable minority audience seems like a perfectly reasonable business (and social) proposition. I don’t know that “Netflix for Black People” will test well, but it seems perfectly fine to me. [white middle-aged male if context matters]. Edit to add: It seems like Fubu* is another extraordinarily successful story that used a similar Black solidarity message and targeting to positive effect. * "For Us, By Us"
- h3daz 5y agoMy only problem with marketing "X for black people" is that marketing "X for white people" isn't socially acceptable.
- jandrese 5y agoYou say this like the Hallmark channel or Lifetime don't exist.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- h3daz 5y agoI am not familiar with those channels since I'm not american, but I am fairly certain that they are not marketed as "for white people".
- ethbr0 5y agoThey're well known for being the most reductive, base, inoffensive content possible. In the sense that shows and movies seem like the result of endless series of meetings, where anything that anyone might object to is censored and removed.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoThey are not, but their programming makes it quite obvious who their target audience is. And I don't think this is a bad thing, at all. For example, Hallmark has a large number of programs where characters are very overt in talking about and praising their faith and religion, which is much less common on other networks. To echo what others have said, though, if you are not a member of a minority, it can be difficult to understand how affirming and wonderful it can feel to experience, just for a brief moment and even if by fantasy, to exist as if you were the majority. For example, I am gay, and here are some common thought processes that go through my head that are basically completely foreign to straight people: 1. When I walk down the street with my partner of 20 years, deciding to hold hands is not something I can just do spontaneously. It is essentially a political act when I do it, and so my first thoughts always go to (a) am I safe and (b) do I feel like making a political statement right now. 2. When I travel, the first thing I think about is whether I am going to a place that is accepting of gays. I'm just too old to want to deal with anti-gay attitudes when I'm supposed to be enjoying myself on vacation. 3. When I introduce myself to new people, I do a mental calculation as to whether I feel like mentioning my partner and thus outing myself in that situation. Again, it's always a conscious calculation, where it almost never is for straight people. So the first time I visited the Castro (a well-known gay neighborhood in San Francisco), it was kind of magical to me, to just walk down the street and have people assume I was gay before assuming I was straight, and it was really the first time I could completely relax and feel like what it was like to be a member of the majority. So that's what things like BET, LogoTV, Telemundo, etc. are really about, it's about actually feeling like you are the focus of attention for a short time.
- afavour 5y agoI don't know what country you're from but if you don't think there are subcultures in your country under-represented by the dominant media I'd assert you're almost definitely wrong. Perhaps it feels a little strange from the outside that such a subculture is definitively "black" but yeah, that's basically how things are in the US. The country has a deep history of racism and black people being literal slaves, in that context it isn't surprising that a distinct culture developed. But I don't think the divide is anywhere near as insane as you're imagining. People don't just belong to one culture and ignore any external infulence. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, etc. people all watch the NBA, NFL, watch Marvel superhero movies, so on and so forth. It's just that everyone also has additional niches.
- bgroat 5y agoI used to believe that media representation didn't matter. After all, fictional characters are fiction, why should I expect them to look like me? Then someone pointed out to me that my favourite super-hero was Spider-Man because Peter Parker is a 20-something loser, just like me.
- dragontamer 5y agoMiles Morales is one of the most successful new Marvel characters too. But there's something authentic about Miles when other characters feel like pandering. ---- Nick Fury Junior is technically a newer character. (The original Nick Fury Senior is white). They just handwaved the difference by sticking a junior in the name without elaboration though. ------ Black Panther from the 70s is definitely pandering lol. But the writers were good at it. (Blatant pandering isn't necessarily a bad thing in the right context)
- mc32 5y agoYeah people used to say video games and violence on TV had no effect on people -that is was just made up worlds and allowed people to role play, etc… now they are admitting there is influence and it does affect people…
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- lallysingh 5y agoIt really is! I'm Asian and have bounced between a few communities over the years. The largest group can act as if the others aren't significant enough to bother with. The other groups constantly have to defend their differences from constant influence and comparison with the majority.
- chokeartist 5y agoThank the media. We weren't obsessed with race until recently. Also shoot every journalist.
- lettergram 5y agoYes the country has lost its mind. They’re reconstituting segregation in the U.S. at the moment
- tag2103 5y agoWhy does "Netflix for Black People" scarily remind me of "Water fountains for Black People". This is horrifying, OP please consider this in your approach.
- tcoff91 5y agoYou’re essentially saying that black people need to erase their cultural identity and assimilate into the dominant culture and shut up and watch tv shows about white people like the rest of us and be happy about it. Black people live a different experience than other groups, and maybe they want different shows that resonate with them. BET has been successful for a long time and this service is BET for the internet.
- flyingfoxxx 5y agoWhat constitutes as the “black experience”? Are you speaking in terms of the modern day experience of black people? This is a genuine question, and I would really appreciate to hear a response from one who is black. Also, is “black” a culture? No really, aren’t there different cultures that make up the black population, just as there are for whites? Or is there also “white culture”? Or “brown culture”? These seem like dangerous over-generalizations that lack the nuance they deserve.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cphoover 5y agoA Nigerian, or Jamaican may have a completely different understanding of culture than black people whose family history ties back to US slavery. It is weird how we just tend to generalize over all of this because of the color of one's skin.
- blacktriangle 5y agoJust wait till you find out there's a National Anthem for Black People.
- tootie 5y agoHaving dedicated cultural venues or channels for a subculture isn't the same thing as like segregated bathrooms. It's more about appealing to a niche audience that isn't lucrative enough for a mass market purveyor. It's not really different from genre channels like sci-fi only or comedy only except that it's geared to an ethnic demographic who want more representation in their media. When a giant company like Netflix is allocating budget for new content, they will get the most returns by appealing to the largest of broadest groups.
- racl101 5y agoExactly. Nobody complains about the Latino channels on TV. lol
- nix23 5y agoOut of curiosity, do all black people in the US have the same cultural background? Or is it just the skin color?
- MattGaiser 5y agoSlavery crushed a lot of them into a cultural group with a shared history no matter where their ancestors originally came from or their cultural backgrounds. There are of course those who immigrated later.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pedrosorio 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_culture
- HarryHirsch 5y agoThat's precisely the trouble. In NI, when someone ask you if you are Catholic or Protestant and you answer you are Danish, they leave you alone. In the US on the other hand, you get dragged in no matter what. If you are from Nigeria you still get thrown in with regular "African Americans". That has interesting results, because for university admission purposes, black is black. However, amongst Nigerian immigrants education is highly regarded, amongst Americans in general, not so much. One would predict that at top-25 universities, Nigerians are highly overrepresented.
- jacobsenscott 5y agoI suspect you are from a fairly small homogeneous country. It hard to understand the racial dynamics of a very large diverse country if you haven't lived there.
- ricardobeat 5y agoSomeone from India, a fairy large and diverse country, might have the same difficulty understanding it.
- Anisa_Mirza 5y agoAs someone who lived in Italy and Pakistan all her K-12 education years, your comment is so damn off base. Are you seriously saying that India (and Pakistan for that matter) have the same racial dynamic as America? Yes, India is diverse. Yes, we are not all the same. But that is not akin to the racial structures I have seen in the US.
- neonate 5y agoAre you sure you read that comment correctly? It seems to me to be making the same point that you are, i.e. exactly the opposite of how you've interpreted it.
- tekromancr 5y agoIndian Muslims, a group that experiences increasing marginalization within that large diverse country; would probably not
- cblackthornekc 5y agoIf you are generally curious about why this is something that is required, I suggest "Trigger Warning with Killer Mike" on Netflix. Specifically the first episode which deals with Mike trying to get to a concert only using black products and services. Long story short: The average lifespan of the dollar is approximately 28 days in Asian communities, 19 days in Jewish communities, 17 days in white communities — and just six hours in Black communities. Meaning after that time, that dollar has to go into another community for a product or service.
- BtM909 5y agothanks for the suggestion. Will watch!
- illuminati1911 5y agoExactly this. This racial segregation fetish mostly fuelled by leftwing Americans is insane.
- zentiggr 5y agoI'm really not sure what you're trying to say here. We in the US have a long history of subjugating and violently suppressing the rights of black slaves (and every black person after outlawing slavery). The last few years have shown that the number of people who still believe that should happen is much larger than we suspected. It's not a fetish - it's a straight up fight to end discrimination against a group of people. If it wasn't for the rightwingers (American and otherwise) who want blacks to sit in the corner and shut up, or get attacked and discriminated on, there wouldn't be a problem.
- illuminati1911 5y agoHow is explicit discrimination and racial segregation ”a fight to end discrimination”? All this ”we have long history is america black slavery blaablablah” is not any kind of a counter argument. By segregating people you are doing exactly the same thing what slave owners, south africans and those hillbilly right wing extremists do.
- rdiddly 5y agoIt looks to me like simple economics - there's a niche market with unmet demand.
- mschuster91 5y agoIt's not a "cultural divide", it's a "representation divide", and it goes way beyond ethnicity and it's also way beyond the US. Many institutions in the Western sphere either don't match the demographic/ethnic composition of the target market any more or never have. Parliaments, cabinets, newsdesks, movies, highest level management in big companies, even access to voting - all of this has been dominated by white, straight and often old men, with women, non-White people and LGBT not being represented at all. Over time, many of the discriminatory policies fell - but the reality was, until maybe a decade ago, representation still lacked - and now, change is coming in ever faster and faster. You now have female-centered superhero movies, Black superhero movies, transgender people in parliaments, a Black US President... and the speed of that change was for many conservatives simply too high, so they framed the quest for equal representation across all parts of society as a "culture war" instead.
- unixhero 5y agoThe US must be sooooo ripped apart by now.
- krapp 5y agoNo, it's just mostly triggered white people concern trolling as usual.
- endisneigh 5y agoPersonally I’ve never, ever encountered someone who isn’t in the privileged class having these concerns lol.
- imbnwa 5y agoSaddening that the top comment is a banner rally for questions that are posed naively whose direct answer can easily be gotten at by asking an actual Black person in real life instead of a niche space like this one. But that's not the point. You should see the diversity threads on this board. It's the same dog whistling every time, but here its about some made-up 'we're reverting back to segregation' argument but no one had a problem with Minari winning awards about the Korean-American experience. It's the same idea, simply expanded to an entire platform of such content.
- rootusrootus 5y agoThat is the impression you get if you only experience life through media.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mattlondon 5y agoAgreed. Where I work (US-company, but I work outside of US) it is similarly weird to me. We appear to have gone backwards in the past 5-10 years in my view - no longer can you just be "you", but now it feels like we have to be labelled, categorised, and segregated into different groups. We now have to make a big deal and a big song-and-dance to highlight our differences and define what our ethnic backgrounds are (apparently to "celebrate" it or whatever), despite there being various laws (at least in the UK) about this sort of thing being a protected characteristic that you simply cannot talk about during interviews - its weird. What if I don't fit into some neat pigeon hole on some spreadsheet? What if I don't want to explain in detail my family tree and pointing out which ethnicity my ancestors were? This idea that people are 100% Ethnic-Category-A/Ethnic-Category-B/Ethnic-Category-C and fit neatly in those slots without any kind of overlap seems willfully ignorant at best, and subversive at worst.
- allendoerfer 5y agoYou are describing Identity Politics. The harshest critics call it Neo-Marxism, because it ought to be well-meaning but might ultimatively be disastrous.
- liotier 5y agoI'm typical French and my daughters' mother is African... I had to explain to my daughters the whole concept of race categories and I struggled because it seemed ridiculous and aberrant to them - it is alien to their multicultural daily life. They would laugh at having to chose between being black or white. I don't understand how Americans tolerate being categorized this way. My category: "Other" - always.
- cptaj 5y agoMan, this is always such a spicy comment to make. Americans always get mad but its true. As a Venezuelan I always find the racism stuff coming from the US completely baffling. I think most of the world is just completely weirded out by how US culture tackles this issue.
- rootusrootus 5y agoMuch of the rest of the world is more casually comfortable with racism, it does not cause the angst that it does in the US.
- okwubodu 5y agoTrue. It’s very funny when people from countries that could be considered the forefathers of racism down the US for talking about it while refusing to acknowledge the cries of their own underclass.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fnord77 5y agoit's pretty bad. Not just on race. Youngest vs Young vs middle age vs old. leftist vs liberal vs conservative vs rightwing. LGBT vs non-LGBT. Working-class vs white collar class. nortnern states vs southern states. California vs flyover states. hipsters vs squares. punks vs. preps. It's really tiresome.
- imbnwa 5y agoReally? Hipsters vs Squares is an equivocal history to that of LGBTQ+/Straight socio-political dynamics, or dare I say, the history of racial dynamics? Did you consult any queer folk on that one? Did you ask any Black folk about that?
- LordHumungous 5y agoYes, Black Americans have their own culture from music to literature to TV shows like Good Times and the Jeffersons. This is not seen as a bad thing here, it has produced many great things.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tisthetruth 5y agoI agree. This encourages segregation, which if i remember correctly was a pretty big issue in America. Who would have thought that a movement to treat people more equally has offspring ideas which cause more segregation. What a joke. This is just a greedy attempt to capitalize on the divide in the US and profit off it. How very American of you to put profit against society's current landscape. Carry on. However maybe, just maybe you should focus your efforts on an idea that is more integrating vs divisive. What's next? Here are a few ideas: The NBA channel for white people and please only white basketball players on the teams Track and Field channel for asian people with only asian athletes on the teams Chess for dogs channel with only dogs playing chess, poor cats they are not allowed to play chess on this channel Landscaping for black people with only black landscapers on the shows What i like about the porn industry is there are many sub-genres within it, so one could argue that this BlackOakTV is an attempt at a subgenre. However at a time like this in the US... You know, Edward Bernay's was right in his book Propaganda, create a suggestive environment and people will buy what ever the environment suggests and they will think it was their own idea for wanting to buy it. But who knows, maybe the equality and diversity crowd really is screaming inside for more segregation and preventing all sorts of freudian slips from surfacing. Actually i have a better idea for the chess dogs, let's only have dalmatian dogs playing chess and keep golden retrievers from enjoying any media attention while playing chess on this channel. This will lead to great narratives in the minds of the niche consumers and dalmatian ownership will skyrocket along with chess board sales. Anyone want to give me funding? Good luck with it regardless. More friction in the market means someone is making money. Let it rip.
- poisonarena 5y agoI have been living bouncing back and forth between Brazil, Israel, and Colombia for the last several years. I use Tinder and Bumble a lot, and I notice in all these countries if you look at girls Instagram profiles(not all but many many), have their countries flag emoji in their profile, or maybe "100% Colombiana", or Israeli flag with hearts, etc etc. But when I visit America the girls display the flag that their like grandparents immigrated from and seemingly nobody wants to be "American" and it seems like a redneck or low class thing to put your american emoji in your profile. I have noticed this in larger American cities, it seems nobody wants to rep their flag, and it is a great contrast to other places I have been. Just an observation from a lurker
- Fellshard 5y agoIt isn't /completely/, but many are invested in making it more divided than not.
- menzoic 5y agoIts simple really, the cultures in America are very diverse, which may not be the case in your country. Indian Americans regularly consume music and foods that most other Americans don't. Hispanic Americans mostly are bilingual with Spanish/English. There are more spanish only speaking hispanics than there are english only speaking. America has a history of racists laws (goverment) and bylaws (corporations, institutions, universities) created directly to disenfranchise non-whites that shaped present day distribution of races in different states, neighborhoods, socioeconomic status, cultural values and more. As recently as the 60s, blacks were expressly banned from many colleges so in order to fill the gap, HBCU (Historically Black Colleges & Universities) were created because black people had no good options. Most media in America is created by whites and the stories are based largely on white American culture. The Indian and Chinese Americans are another group that have a very hard time finding tv shows and movies that resonate with their culture. BlackOakTV looks like an attempt to offer more content representing the real differences in black American culture written from the perspective of those who actually understand it.
- dathinab 5y ago> “X for black people” sounds so bizarre to me(non-American). The cultural divide between the people must be insane. Is more or less what I thought, (with the difference that I thought "Y for Z people"). So I can't judge if it's necessary or makes sense, but from the point of the author it seems to be the case. Which is sad as black people are not a small minority in the US and so I would expect more representation of them. I mean Netflix (or any thing similar) should be "for everyone" featuring a diverse mix at least similar to reality (or maybe slightly more diverse (1) ). (1): For <small> minorities in a country representation with a mix "like reality" would mean they would not get much representation as just a <small> number of content thingies would represent them. So increasing the degree of diversity above it is I think a good idea.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> “X for black people” sounds so bizarre to me(non-American). “Black” in America is, confusingly to lots of people, the name of an ethnic/cultural group formed by centuries shared experience of kidnapping, deliberate eradication of prior cultural identities, deliberate ongoing disruption of the family unit, slavery (and after slavery de jure discrimination, and after that substantial ongoing public and private discrimination in fact) to which the racial group also labelled “black” was subjected in America.
- nickdothutton 5y agoSo far as I can tell the whole “melting pot” experiment didn’t really work, absent powerful enough unifying vision/motivation/ideals and the cultures were immiscible. So now they’ve gone the multicultural route. I’m interested to see where this ends up for the US.
- dang 5y agoThese guys don't deserve to have their launch thread turned into the Nth copy, for extremely large N, of a same-old flamewar. That's what you started here, and it was entirely predictable from your comment, which means you broke the site guidelines. Please review them and stick to the rules. This kind of thing is nasty and avoidable. "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- f6v 5y agoThe guidelines are very far from being an exact science and your comment is too subjective. And even if I started it, it was up to dozens of others to not comment on my comment. Could have just downvoted it to oblivion.
- dang 5y agoOf course, dozens of others did their share. But commenters are responsible for the statistical outcome of what they post, and in this case the expected value was definitely negative. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- aeoleonn 5y agoyep, it's quite silly. many americans recognize how silly it is. it's the dualistic messaging of mutually exclusive A & B: A. We're all equal! B. We need something special, because we're different!