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Why do people need to meld their ego with some nebulous "classification"? Like yo I'm black. Yo I'm white. Yo I'm asian. In reality, all humans are a continuo
by randomopining 5y ago
Why do people need to meld their ego with some nebulous "classification"?
Like yo I'm black. Yo I'm white. Yo I'm asian.
In reality, all humans are a continuous spectrum based off of groups of people that evolved in certain conditions over thousands of years.
What does a "white" person from Ireland have in common with a "white" person from the Caucuses?
What does a "black" person from Sierra Leone have in common with a "black" person from the deserts in the northeast of Africa?
Why does the media make us segregate ego formation based off of these shallow descriptors? Black white etc.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago> Why does the media make us segregate ego formation based off of these shallow descriptors? Black white etc. Because it mases us fight eachother, and not the ones that we should be fighting.
- booleandilemma 5y agoDivide and conquer.
- abc_lisper 5y agoIt is like the ship of Theseus. Aggregates exist because that's how we abstract, even though calling it identity would be wrong. I don't know what a good solution is.
- refenestrator 5y agoIdeally we could unmoor it from the arbitrary 100 year old census categories. Yeah, you have to draw arbitrary lines somewhere but our current set is really dumb.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chickenpotpie 5y ago“ What does a "black" person from Sierra Leone have in common with a "black" person from the deserts in the northeast of Africa?” They face the same discrimination in America and in that they find companionship
- scarmig 5y agoContemporary African immigrants significantly outperform those descended from slaves. Moreover, they have higher educational attainment, household incomes, and professional success than American white populations. Nigerian immigrants even outperform Chinese and Indian immigrants.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- retrac 5y agoWhite British immigrants to Canada today, outperform white Canadians of British descent whose ancestors freely moved there in the 19th century, as do their children. I suspect for the same reason that causes what you've noted. People who emigrate as skilled immigrants internationally are not average people. In both cases we're seeing the cream of the crop (intentionally selected for by the immigration system), educated and driven, often with some wealth established already. And then comparing them to a large population of locals who have varied circumstances determined by local history, not the current immigration criteria.
- mikeyouse 5y agoAnd in the case of barbers - they have the same type of hair.. Why is this confusing for HNers?
- minikites 5y agoI can think of at least two possibilities: a privileged/sheltered upbringing or an intentional mis-framing of the issue to make something reasonable seem unreasonable.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- antihero 5y agoBecause membership of a group, especially for marginalised and oppressed peoples, is a way to have shared strength and be able to relate to others' experiences and protect each other. Which is an incredibly powerful and necessary until the world is significantly fairer. Also in the case of barbers, it is plainly obvious: Experience working with hair of a certain type.
- randomopining 5y agoWhat I'm saying is that the people in this "group" may have almost nothing in common at all, except for having a darker shade of skin color. Aka get rid of the simple descriptors of "white" "black" etc since they mean very little or nothing at all.
- micromacrofoot 5y agothese descriptions mean a lot when they determine how you're treated by society
- minikites 5y ago>may have almost nothing in common at all, except for having a darker shade of skin color That darker shade causes them to be mistreated in similar ways by American society.
- jimkleiber 5y agoI don't think the media is the only thing that determines whether we form racial or any other social identity categories. I think racial categories are identities imposed by us and by others. By us because sometimes, especially when we're in groups of people who don't look like us, we may tend to stick closer to people who do. By others, when they see someone who looks different, they often label us with a term separating us from their group. I agree we're all a meld and deeply human, with a lot in common, and I also think we tend to form social groups that focus on how we are different from others and how others are different from us.
- sergiomattei 5y agoA shared set of experiences. I'm Latino, and when I visit the United States I get along well with other Latino folk because we share a set of experiences we can relate to. We probably grew up in different places but there's a background we have in common, like our language. It's called culture.
- randomopining 5y agoThat's my point. You share language, el mundo espanol, etc. That's true cultural linkage. Whereas a "white" person from Ireland and a "white" person from Ukraine have very very little in common. A "black" person from South Africa and a "black" person from Colombia have very very little in common. And yet these are the main descriptors used in pop culture, Instagram, the media... and it's silly.
- sergiomattei 5y agoHuh, that's interesting. Although to be fair I haven't seen these descriptors used outside of the United States.
- jimkleiber 5y agoThey may share the experience of being called "black" by people around them. Maybe not in their respective countries, as racial categories tend to change a lot based on society, however maybe if they were to meet in the same place. For example, many of my East African friends didn't realize they were "black" until they came to the US. Similarly, I felt more "white" when I was living in Tanzania as there were very few people who shared my skin tone, hair style, eye color, etc. So while I may not have had the same language as a Danish person in Tanzania, we shared a lot more physically than I did with some of the local Tanzanians and were often categorized the same by them anyways.
- lemmsjid 5y agoBy focusing on shared experience of cultural context or upbringing, you're ignoring the shared experience of how people are treated by others. People do have things in common based on skin color. For example, my sister is Filipina. She lives in a white dominated area which has a lot of xenophobia about Mexican immigrants. She has experienced several events where she gets mistaken as Mexican, simply by her skin color and is threatened and/or told to go back to Mexico, sometimes quite angrily. These experiences are quite traumatic. The typical person doesn't make a close study of other cultures, so if they're actively racist/xenophobic/what-have-you, they don't look to the nuances of their target's background before they lash out. Being ANY minority, especially a visually identifiable minority, creates a shared experience regardless of peoples' actual backgrounds. This causes communities and identities to form as people group around shared experiences. Yes, most ways of categorizing people and identities are arbitrary and diffuse, but in the end its people bonding over shared context and experiences, real or illusory, and I'd be hard pressed to call it silly, any more than other human behaviors that don't follow, I dunno, strict logic.
- Spivak 5y agoBecause you're being willfully obtuse of the authors meaning to make a point about semantics. Context and intersectionality (or PIE if you want a more nerdy less loaded term) matters here. White and black have specific meanings, a shared cultural history, and face similar issues and struggles in the US. And there's more to a person than just their "race" despite race being a particularly "loud" (i.e. strong predictor) part of a person's identity which is why you have to take into account its interactions and how it melds with all the other aspects of their identity to get a complete picture of a person.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y agoSuch a comment like the one you are responding to comes around like clockwork on HN whenever "black" is mentioned.
- imbnwa 5y agoYeah, let's not forget the thinly veiled uproar in the "Netflix for Black People" thread[0] [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087309
- dang 5y agoThat's to be expected from any large, open, anonymous internet forum and is why the site guidelines say this: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. If people didn't feed it, it wouldn't grow. Therefore the problem is entirely a co-creation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y agoIt's understood from the context that the ethnic group of concern in the article are African-Americans.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MisterBastahrd 5y agoBlack hair isn't white hair and black shared experiences in America are not white shared experiences in America. Sometimes you need to talk and vent without a bunch of resistance from outsiders to that experience.
- mosseater 5y agoWell, in terms of this article, we're talking about black barbers. This isn't a racism thing. There is a culture associated with black barbers. I was a white kid, I grew up in the hood. I would hang out with my friends while they got their haircut. Racism didn't keep me from getting my haircut there, the literal texture and makeup of my hair did. They specialized. And in black culture, the barber shop is one of the main socialization spots. It's a place demanding similar levels of respect as going to church, minus the dress code. It's a place, outside of so many other places in this white dominated world, where they can be themselves. It's a place "for them and by them". They can be themselves, the subconscious relaxes, they don't have to worry about someone being a bigot towards them. Like it or not, black culture is a thing. Just like white culture is a thing. No one has to feel bad about it. Color is beautiful. The whole "I don't see color" concept is disingenuous to the human experience.
- adolph 5y ago> Why does the media make us segregate ego formation based off of these shallow descriptors? Black white etc. the basic scenario is that we’ve had a years-long moral panic in which elite white tastemakers adopted the political posture of radical Black academics out of purely competitive social impulses, trying on a ready-made political eschatology that blames the worlds ills on whiteness and men and yet somehow leaves space for an army of good white people and good men to cluck their tongue about it all. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/who-tells-them-what-they-dont-want https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/who-tells-them-what-the...
- runeblaze 5y agoWhile it is true that there is much diversity within each minority group, it is also true that the society often imposes discrimination solely based on one's skin color, and we can't just ignore society. I also think that this article is really mainly talking about the descendants of the enslaved people, which form the majority of US's black population, and is commonly referred to as the Black community.