6 ms·

Agreed. 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 -

• allendoerfer 5y ago
  You 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 ago
  I'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.
  • meiraleal 5y ago
    You get to understand when you see the divide of prosperity, government support, unequal laws, school access, etc in numbers.
    • skyde 5y ago
      which unequal law? Is will smith victim of a law that a white actor would not?
      • api 5y ago
        The effects of entrenched discrimination in the US fade quite a bit when you hit upper middle class or above. They don't vanish entirely, but you have a lot more of a cushion and generally can avoid the problem areas. You can also fight back legally if necessary.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • menzoic 5y ago
        There are plenty examples of unequal laws. Look up how Georgia is disenfranching the black vote with recent laws they passed after the last election. We also have unequal enforcement of the law and unequal punishments.
    • bilbo0s 5y ago
      There are no unequal laws. Now I concede there is grossly unequal enforcement of laws. But the words on the page are just the words on the page. It's the people who enforce those laws in an inequitable fashion.
      • menzoic 5y ago
        Before it was illegal/unconstitional many unequal laws were passed. Now that there are explicit laws banning the practice, any newly passed unequal will not be explicit in its language otherwise it can easily be striken down and made unenforceable in court. This may be why you can't recognize modern unequal laws that do exist and likely will continue to be passed in the near future.
  • skyde 5y ago
    Most people of dark skin color also don’t try to isolate themself from the rest of the population. But USA is special it is now trendy to try to tell other you are the biggest victim. And it’s easier for the black community to win this battle and officially be the biggest victim. I watched “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” as a kid and absolutely loved it. But today’s show about black African American try drill in people heads that black are different and always victim of racism. It might be true but it make the tv show extremely boring for everyone black and white.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Bellamy 5y ago
    Brilliant! This made me happy. I also sometimes forget that there is actually this thing about whites versus blacks versus whatever colored people.
    • EnlightenedBro 5y ago
      Anyone who notices race is the racist in the room.
  • leephillips 5y ago
    Growing up in the US, I learned to exist happily within a small rational subculture embedded withing a larger culture that is simply insane. The superstitions around “race” are just one aspect of that insanity. There is also the crudest form of Christianity that has ever existed, a reification of “democracy” that is part of a national religion and conflates what is popular with what is right, the prejudice against being educated....it goes on, and I could go on, forever.
• warent 5y ago
  The problem is that white Americans don't have the same American experience as black Americans, which is where the divide comes from and it creates another culture. It's been getting a lot better, but there are still two legal systems, two education systems, etc. My perspective as a white man is that when black people create something for themselves like this, it's reclaiming the power. Like how they use the N word with each other, or how Gay people use that word, it's a reclaiming. Taking the hurtful racist division and turning it into something empowering is the point. I have no idea if that works in the long term or not, but I always think about Morgan Freeman who said something like the only way we can solve racism is if we stop talking about it
  • bxjaii 5y ago
    This is 100% false. Cops brutalize anyone who slightly offends them. More black people are disaffected by this, but it happens to us all. I am white and was nearly killed by a black officer in South Florida. He piled drived me head first onto a concrete floor on video tape. Prior to that, he choked me and threatened to kill me. I was in Miami to attend the VMAs with a billionaire, yet they claimed I tried to fight them. Eventually all charges were dropped. The cop was actually working private security when this happened. It’s just men, testosterone, and power emboldened by a badge. The cop — Mr. Ritchie — later won Detective of the Year, while his Sheriff went to federal prison. Reality is different than what you read in the papers.
    • bubbleRefuge 5y ago
      From south florida and yeah there are allot of aggressive cops. Some of whom I grew up with. They have to deal with very dangerous and aggressive criminals on a daily basis and put their lives on the line. Its a tough job and its a grind, but we need them to protect us from criminal psychopaths in the community. We need to fix the root causes of crime: educational inequality, broken families, lack of opportunity, and the crime/poverty cycle. When and if this happens, the policing problem will go in the opposite direction.
      • JackFr 5y ago
• dleslie 5y ago
  > 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. Likewise here in BC. I believe it is illegal to discuss race, gender, pregnancy, family planning, and so on and so forth during the interview.
• ahoka 5y ago
  This is the harsh reality if identity politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics Very harmful.
• Ninjinka 5y ago
  You just gave the argument against critical race theory.
  • samkelly 5y ago
    Critical race theory is about learning what actually happened to different groups of people to create the society we live in right now, not about segregating them today. If you don't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    That argument does have nothing at all to do with the content of critical race theory...which is pretty much exactly like most arguments I’ve seen “against” it recently. Probably has something to do with all the right-wing rage mongering about that term being attached to things that have nothing to do with CRT, and about keeping teaching it out of domains where no one is even interested in putting it.
• jpfed 5y ago
  It is possible that American culture has already been divided more than most HN readers have been aware of. See Michael Harriot's "blackfamous" thread: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/1205695846391721986 https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/120569584639172198...
  • dleslie 5y ago
    That thread was interesting. It had me thinking about all the people that _I_ consider to be famous, but which I doubt most people would be able to recognize. I will admit, I did not know who Stacy Adams is. I wonder about the size of the portion of people who know who Stacy Adams is, or who Louis Vuitton is, that also know who Corrinne Yu is.
• JohnWhigham 5y ago
  We've gone from "don't label me, I'm not a soup can" in the 90s to literal label worship nowadays.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > We've gone from "don't label me, I'm not a soup can" in the 90s to literal label worship nowadays. No, we haven't. “Don’t label me, I’m not a soup can” was a reaction by certain people against what they saw the current dominant culture to be at the time in exactly the same way that pointing to that as an ideal today is. Except that the latter adds in the construction of an idealized view of the recent past on top of it. EDIT: But, it is true that the 90s—basically the last period of sustained, strong, broad economic expansion (subsequent expansions have been much worse distributionally)—was also a local high point in subjective perceived quality of race conditions, though not particularly in objective measures. People are a lot more prone to be concerned with fairness issues when their experience falls short of expectations than when they don't.
• tomc1985 5y ago
  There's a meme floating around that America is no longer the Great Melting Pot (where everyone assimilates to American culture), now we are the Great Salad Bowl (where everyone is their own unique and special thing) Personally, I don't really understand all this need for individual representation, but then neither do I really have to.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > 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. I’ve been alive for almost half a century, and I notice no such change. I have noticed lots of people feeling like there is a recent change when they realize the identities that arr important to many people outside their immediate bubble (or even inside, though those are often just silently assumed within in-group dialogue or by dominant groups), often in the late teens or 20s. > We now have to make a big deal and a big song-and-dance to highlight our differences and define what our ethnic backgrounds ar No, we don’t. Some aspects of identity are important to some people. Why some people who notice that then suddenly also feel the fact that certain dimensions of identity are important to other people implies a general obligation, I don't know. People for whom Black is an important aspect of their identity don’t, as a rule, think it is important for being White to be central to White people's identity. (And the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with other dimensions of identity.) > What if I don't fit into some neat pigeon hole on some spreadsheet? Then...you are just like everyone else, in that regard. > 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. Sure. But many of the people to whom minority identities are most critically important and worthy of attention would be the first people to tell you that; in fact, they have a whole analytical framework around it (intersectionality.)
• garaetjjte 5y ago
  >What if I don't fit into some neat pigeon hole on some spreadsheet? See story on that from Les Earnest: https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/earth/mongrel.html https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/earth/mongrel.html