25 ms·

Farewell to America: Returning to England After 12 Years in the US

92 points by nkurz 11y ago

DrScump 11y ago
The same article (exact same, not a different agency) was already posted twice... yet you change the title to put it through a third time?
- nkurz 11y ago
  Yes, I think this is an important article for Americans to read, and it hasn't yet received any significant discussion on the site. Specifically, I changed the URL to resubmit it. The change to the title was to increase clarity as to the content, and incidental to the resubmission. And until I tried to submit it myself, I had thought that it had only appeared once. The previous submissions are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811591 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820574, each with only 2 comments and fewer than 10 upvotes.
  - chrisfosterelli 11y ago
    That usually means the community isn't interested. Just because you believe it should be on the front page is not a justification for posting duplicates :)
    - programLyrique 11y ago
      Well, it seems to have arrived on the front page now, so it might also be a question of timing...
      - colmvp 11y ago
        Exactly. Stories posted on HN/Reddit are clearly influenced by timing and title.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - ams6110 11y ago
        And now it's gone... too controversial, apparently?
    - ScottBurson 11y ago
      Just because you believe it should be on the front page is not a justification for posting duplicates I think it is, actually. I've seen stories take three or four tries to hit the front page -- at which point they get quite a lot of attention; there's no doubt they were HN material. I think all frequent HN readers should contribute some time curating new stories -- don't spend all your time on the front page. If more people did this, maybe good stories wouldn't need multiple postings so often -- making the front page would be less accidental.
      - iLoch 11y ago
        Indeed. I'd like to see a split view on the home page - top articles on the left, new on the right. Probably bad UX but often times I come here and look at what's directly in my line of sight - clicking on a different section of the site is usually not my primary use case on HN.
      - mistermann 11y ago
        > I think all frequent HN readers should contribute some time curating new stories I might do this if there were separate buttons for "upvote" and "save". As it is, I don't want to pollute my saved page with excess bulk.
        dang 11y ago
        We're open to decoupling 'upvote' from 'save', but what would the interface for 'save' be? I'm loath to just keep adding links for everything.
        maxerickson 11y ago
        Forget buttons on the saved stories page? It would be nice to be able to forget saved comments too.
        dang 11y ago
        Clever. But you'd still have to upvote something in order to save it, and people we hear from about this mostly want the two decoupled.
    - dang 11y ago
      Your argument assumes that once a story has appeared once or twice, the community has probably seen enough of it for lack of votes to count as a consensus. That's a natural assumption, but false: it overestimates how much attention /newest gets and underestimates the impact of randomness. When I became public as moderator I heard from a lot of users (e.g. [1]) that the biggest problem with HN was high-quality stories not making it to the front page. At first I was skeptical. I was looking at /newest a lot as a moderator and hadn't been noticing much good stuff on the cutting room floor. But the users saying this were good, observant HNers, and I kept hearing it, and it got me worried. So I started looking at /newest more systematically, and then I was shocked. Not only were many high-quality stories being overlooked, probably most of the finest submissions—the out-of-the-way, intellectually interesting, totally unexpected submissions that make for the best of HN—were getting ignored. I'm still not sure how I could have missed that; I must have been looking at /newest at least as much as anybody. Since last summer, we've put a lot of effort into addressing this. One simple thing we did was clarify that a few reposts are ok if a story hasn't had significant attention yet [2]. That's why it's ok that nkurz reposted this one. ScottBurson hit the nail on the head, I think: giving good stories multiple cracks at the bat is one way to counteract the randomness of what gets traction here. Sometimes people abuse it, e.g. by reposting things that don't belong on HN or by being overly promotional, but those are fairly easy problems to solve and their cost is much smaller than the benefit of having more substantive stories—especially those out-of-the-way gems—on the front page. The above isn't an opinion about the current article, which I haven't read, but it's clear that nkurz reposted it for the right reason, which is that he thinks it's intellectually interesting and well-written. That's the kind of thing we want users to do. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494367 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
      - DrScump 11y ago
        But this runs in direct opposition to the title-matching rejection algorithm that is in place. (If posters preserve an article title properly, their attempts to repost are intercepted and redirected to the predecessor.) If it is intended that duplicates be allowed, then perhaps the discussion threads for such duplicates should be merged together, rather than getting such posters in the habit of not honoring original titles.
    - bootload 11y ago
      "That usually means the community isn't interested. " Maybe, could also be because the newest stack is broken. Submissions are furiously added, yet few stories are selected off the stack, leaving new submissions to drop off and disappear. Good on you @nkurz for re-posting.
    - liyanage 11y ago
      I'm glad he did. I missed it the first two times, saw this third submission, read the great article and upvoted it.
    - JesperRavn 11y ago
      If you think the story is inappropriate you can also flag it.
      - DrScump 11y ago
        Not every reader has the flag option available. Also, there should be a distinction between "I'm flagging because this content does not belong or is spam" versus "I'm flagging because this is the 8th copy of it in the 50 most recent postings."
    - enraged_camel 11y ago
      >>That usually means the community isn't interested. No it doesn't. Stories rarely stay on the front page for more than 24 hours. This means that it's very easy to miss great articles if you don't visit HN for a day or two.
  - DrScump 11y ago
    "Yes, I think this is an important article for Americans to read, and it hasn't yet received any significant discussion on the site." Problem being, if it is, in fact, worthy of discussion here, there are three different discussion threads for this article... and a given reader is unlikely to see more than one. For example, your extensive comment on copy #2 goes unseen by those reading comments for this copy only... as most readers would.
mnglkhn2 11y ago
"My decision to come back to Britain was prompted by banal, personal factors that have nothing to do with current events; if my aim was to escape aggressive policing and racial disadvantage, I would not be heading to Hackney." Not sure what we're talking about here then. The whole article sounds like a post factum rationalization. Lots of feelings with not so many arguments.
- Retra 11y ago
  You want arguments against racism?
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    If the racism is so bad, why are so many people trying to immigrate to America, Canada, New Zealand , Australia and Northern Europe?
    - istvan__ 11y ago
      Racism is hijacked nowadays in the USA, it almost exclusively means white racism against blacks. The original meaning (discriminating against any "race" by any other "race") is greatly lost. If you want proof just go to twitter and look up some of the recent threads about Rachel Dolezal case.
    - ashwinaj 11y ago
      He's talking about racism specific to black people in the US.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - mnglkhn2 11y ago
    why does he make his decision to return to UK to be related to racism when he himself admits that it was a purely personal motive?! To me this is incoherent and manipulative race baiting in order to puff up his article for clicks. The fact that this simple argument is discarded by you in order to maintain your agenda, shows more about how tolerable and inclusive you are not than about how racist I am.
JesperRavn 11y ago
This article is one sided in that it assumes that White fear of Blacks is baseless, when in fact Blacks commit crimes at around 5x higher rate than Whites. Not all this difference can be explained by poverty, but even if it could, most White people are also afraid of White people who come from social classes with very high crime rates. I'm not saying that most or any of the attitudes of Whites described in the article were justified, but it's one sided to focus entirely on the police and White attitudes and ignore Black crime.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- arthurcolle 11y ago
  The incarceration rate is 5x higher, not "the rate that Blacks commit crimes" as you falsely assert. Tone down the racism, it isn't very becoming of a member of the HN community. And the capitalization of the Whites/Blacks just makes you come across as Dylann Roof. Take a chill pill and try to find sources when you want to make assertions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_incarcerated_African-American_males https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_incarcerated_Afr...
  - JesperRavn 11y ago
    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_rate_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S... How is stating the truth racist? I think you are the one who needs to "take a chill pill". EDIT: You need to scroll down in the wiki article to get rates for specific crimes. E.g. from the Homocide section: the offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites. EDIT 2: And regarding capitalization, see http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173974/are-white-and-black-ever-capitalized-when-referring-to-people http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173974/are-white-... It's not just murderers who capitalize Black and White.
    - late2part 11y ago
      I think arthurcolle's point is that most people believe our justice system is inherently racist; poor minorities do not have access to the same financial means for legal resources, they are not given as many breaks as rich white people, etc. His concern seems to be that your stated source focuses on "offending" which implicitly infers that they are caught and charged by law enforcement. Your assertion was about "commit[ing] crimes" while your fact is about "offending" or charged or convicted with crimes.
bruceb 11y ago
The author brings up things that a lot of people might not know such as whites generally over estimating the age of black youths. The problem is he then goes on to assume every negative experience with a white person is because he is black.
- aeontech 11y ago
  I don't see that at all. This comment says more about your mindset than anything else, to be honest.
  - bruceb 11y ago
    What mind set is that?
    - aeontech 11y ago
      Well, I do not presume to know your mind, like you seem to presume to know the mind of the author of the article. However, your comment does seem to dismiss the the article as a list of personal grievances of the author, rather than illustrations of common cultural issues. To me, the article obviously consisted of considerably more than that. Unsurprisingly, privilege makes it easy to dismiss concerns of the groups that are "other", that do not reflect our personal day to day experiences. For me, the value of articles like this is in providing a window into the issues that most of us do not have to deal with normally, and making me review my own preconceptions to see if I have unwittingly treated people differently than I should like.
      - bruceb 11y ago
        Do I know the mind of the author fully? No. But I can look the long article he wrote and the thoughts he puts forth. I didn't dismiss the article. I stated it brings up things that need to be known (a positive). I then went on to say the problematic part. Some of his Hhis thinking is also inline with what I see in some social media that turns things in to an examples of racial discrimination or privilege when that simply isn't the case. Outrage over giving Dlyn Roof a bullet proof vest or food when in fact that is a common practice not a reward.
sparkzilla 11y ago
I'm somewhat confused about why this is on HN. The guy doesn't work in technology. He's not leaving because of technology. The article doesn't talk about technology. It doesn't even talk about the immigration process -- which immigrant entrepreneurs and technology workers on visas can relate to. Y'know, despite all the troubles I'm having with my visa (After seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested I have to leave the country and re-apply for a different kind of visa -- a major pain) I still want to stay here. The U.S has many problems, but at least they are out in the open and people are working on them. This is a great place to work and has far, far, more opportunity than the UK. The writer may want to read Cory Doctorow's recent article [1] about how London has become almost impossible to live in. [1]http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html
- DanBC 11y ago
  Do you think HN should only have articles that have a link to technology?
  - lowmagnet 11y ago
    > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      But sparkzilla doesn't mention any of that, and only mentions lack of tech.
cb18 11y ago
This appears to be a long-winded telling of the kind of nonsensical crap that has been circulating as of late that tries to convince people a circle is a square, or up is down or something equally preposterous. How did the descendants of immigrants become xenophobic? The founders of the USA were not immigrants, they didn't immigrate to join Indian tribes, they were founders of a country. And until very recently, immigrants to the USA immigrated and integrated, they became Americans, they didn't immigrate and expect to receive special treatment because they were a member of group X. It's not xenophobic to simply not want your country and culture to be overrun with competing cultures. The idea of multiculturalism is nonsense. Cultures can't coexist that's just not how it works, a culture is the dominant way of life in an area, you can't invite another culture to come and live within the confines of another culture, that makes no sense. What is being done in such a case is you are inviting significant changes to the host culture, and it shouldn't be surprising that most people are pretty content with their home culture and they're not receptive to the idea of having foreign cultures thrust into their home. cannot pay a visit to their home country because they are undocumented Are you f-ing kidding me? Can't do you something because it is likely to reveal that they are in violation of a law they willfully chose to violate? That's some kind of big problem we should be concerned with? A nation without laws is no nation at all. What's the point of any country having rules and regulations for the people they admit if people who break those rules are simply overlooked, much less greeted with pity and concern for their plight of possibly getting caught? When matters such as these are written about in the media why is it that preference is so often given to euphemisms such as 'undocumented' when what they are actually trying to describe is illegal alien? - Another commenter mentioned the race angle that was brought up in this article, I luckily missed most of that in my brief skimming. The real race problem that never seems to be addressed, and it's an uncomfortable reality and whatever the solution is, it is not immediately apparent and I suppose that is one reason why there is a near and total blackout on the subject in the national media. But it doesn't explain why the national media tries to portray the facts in a way that is near 180 degrees opposite to reality. The real race problem is that when it comes to interracial violence, and black on white vs white on black, the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence. It's not even close.
- kingmanaz 11y ago
tokenadult 11y ago
It's always refreshing to see descriptions of America by people who have lived here a long time after living somewhere else long enough to be without American presuppositions about how life works. One of the things I found most startling about coming back to the United States at age twenty-six-going-on-twenty-seven after three years of living overseas was reverse culture shock. When I first went to the other country I lived in (Taiwan), any time an experience felt strange, which was often, I would just say to myself, "Of course this is strange, this is a foreign country." But I was very taken aback when I returned to the United States and found out that many experiences feel strange here now--I know that the United States is not the center of the Universe. Now that I've lived in more than one country, it's a whole lot harder to have a standard for "normal" for many aspects of life. The writing in this article is very interesting, and the author reports many interesting incidents. This article deserves your close reading attention, and I predict it will be good food for thought for the readers who read it from top to bottom. I look forward to a future article by the same author about what he thinks about Britain after he lives there for a while following so many years away in America.
- danjayh 11y ago
  Can you give any examples of experiences that felt strange when you returned? Just curious what types of things you noticed...
  - wozniacki 11y ago
    Seconded. Three years is an awfully short time to notice things uniquely as though one were an insider. It has been my experience that cultures do not unfurl that easily for outsiders to be allowed in and wrap one's head around, all the motivations for the reasons why a society organizes itself in a certain manner much less, comprehend the complex inner dynamics of such organization. edit: HN is starting to become a strange place. Take the time to explain how your experiences abroad - even the short ones - helped you gain non-threadbare insights about that culture, which fully invalidate my disagreement above, rather than partake in purely intellectually-lazy flaming.
    - 11y ago
argonaut 11y ago
I agree with the overall point of the article, but one nit is that it isn't great to cite Michael Brown's shooting as evidence of police racism. There is evidence (witness accounts consistent with physical evidence) to back up the officer's claims. Citing that only weakens your case. The other examples are valid, though.
- enraged_camel 11y ago
  Your comment is very strange to me. So, in your opinion, a point that would otherwise be valid becomes not valid if the author does not cite the best example for it?
  - ams6110 11y ago
    He said using a weak example weakens the point.
    - dominotw 11y ago
      I remember sitting in 3 different queues to see a doctor for a (semi) emergency at a NHS hospital.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  Many police shootings are "justified" by US standards, which are much lower than they are in some other places. You don't get to the low number of police shootings in the UK, Germany, etc. using US standards. In other words we have both a specific individual problem of racism, and a systemic problem that tells cops to shoot.
  - bruceb 11y ago
    Are lots of bad cops not fired, absolutely. But of course UK and Germany don't have millions of handguns laying around like the US does. The number of UK police killed in over 100 years fits on to a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officers_killed_in_the_line_of_duty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officer... There are considerably more US cops killed.
nextos 11y ago
As a Scandinavian that has lived in the UK for a bit more than a year, I think racism might be lower here in exchange for a rampant classism and bad public services when compared to average EU places like France, Belgium or Spain.
- wozniacki 11y ago
  Could you perhaps expand on what you might mean by "bad public services" ?
  - nextos 11y ago
    NHS is quite saturated, the road network and Internet are working way over capacity.
rebootthesystem 11y ago
It has become impossible to have objective discussions about something like this --or anything political-- on HN. In this case you'll be labeled as racist if you disagree with the article (already happened in one post I saw). So, there's no discussion at all. Game over. Done. I happen not to agree with much of what this writer said. I have lived in four cultures in three continents in my life. The USA is most definitely NOT what this author paints us as being. I have noted how, for at least the last twenty years, the overwhelmingly left leaning media has made it their job, perhaps unintentionally, to destroy the US from the inside. This is nothing less than despicable. While working in Europe fifteen years ago I noted that CNN and TV shows out of Hollywood were the primary exposure to "America" most of the world got. And what an ugly, unfair, one-sided, twisted and hateful image it is. I would hate us too. No, this article is hateful and highly biased. Go ahead, call me a racist if you must. It'll only add to the nonsense.
- ams6110 11y ago
  We've always had people who make their living on causes. Maybe they first got involved out of genuine concerns but at some point, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, a person can't be expected to find solutions when his salary depends on the existence of the problem. Also, and related to another post[1] on the front page right now, we have the rather recent element of twitter and other social media that is deliberately manipulated to create and amplify emotional, flash-mob types of dust-ups over isolated events in order to make it appear that there is a huge systemic crisis happening. That gambit is as old as politics, but the rise of social media and the "report first, get the facts later" type of approach to "news" reporting taken by many blogs and even some previously objective media sources has made it much more efficient. ---- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9826200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9826200
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  Where have you lived in the US? Edited to add: I don't read Younge as suggesting that all Americans are racists. If it were that bad, I suspect, he would have left a long time ago. And I think it's very odd to see a piece like this as an attempt "to destroy the US from the inside". I think he is pointing out real problems that affect a lot of people, and that we need to deal with. To me that's constructive criticism; why you read it as something else is not clear to me. Here's another post along the same lines (though much shorter), by Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141204174020-261404895-it-s-time-to-revolutionize-race-relations https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141204174020-261404895-it-s...
mynameishere 11y ago
Fleeing one "racist" white country to another "racist" white country. Eventually there won't be any racist countries left to flee to, given how non-whites are so abundantly attracted to them, racism be damned. Does that occur to our author? Why doesn't he flee to Equatorial Guinea?
- me_again 11y ago
  He explicitly states he isn't leaving (or fleeing, if you want to be needlessly dramatic) because of race. Try reading the article.

92 points by nkurz 11y ago

The same article (exact same, not a different agency) was already posted twice... yet you change the title to put it through a third time?

nkurz 11y ago
Yes, I think this is an important article for Americans to read, and it hasn't yet received any significant discussion on the site. Specifically, I changed the URL to resubmit it. The change to the title was to increase clarity as to the content, and incidental to the resubmission. And until I tried to submit it myself, I had thought that it had only appeared once. The previous submissions are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811591 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820574, each with only 2 comments and fewer than 10 upvotes.
- chrisfosterelli 11y ago
  That usually means the community isn't interested. Just because you believe it should be on the front page is not a justification for posting duplicates :)
  - programLyrique 11y ago
    Well, it seems to have arrived on the front page now, so it might also be a question of timing...
    - colmvp 11y ago
      Exactly. Stories posted on HN/Reddit are clearly influenced by timing and title.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - ams6110 11y ago
      And now it's gone... too controversial, apparently?
  - ScottBurson 11y ago
    Just because you believe it should be on the front page is not a justification for posting duplicates I think it is, actually. I've seen stories take three or four tries to hit the front page -- at which point they get quite a lot of attention; there's no doubt they were HN material. I think all frequent HN readers should contribute some time curating new stories -- don't spend all your time on the front page. If more people did this, maybe good stories wouldn't need multiple postings so often -- making the front page would be less accidental.
    - iLoch 11y ago
      Indeed. I'd like to see a split view on the home page - top articles on the left, new on the right. Probably bad UX but often times I come here and look at what's directly in my line of sight - clicking on a different section of the site is usually not my primary use case on HN.
    - mistermann 11y ago
      > I think all frequent HN readers should contribute some time curating new stories I might do this if there were separate buttons for "upvote" and "save". As it is, I don't want to pollute my saved page with excess bulk.
      - dang 11y ago
        We're open to decoupling 'upvote' from 'save', but what would the interface for 'save' be? I'm loath to just keep adding links for everything.
        maxerickson 11y ago
        Forget buttons on the saved stories page? It would be nice to be able to forget saved comments too.
        dang 11y ago
        Clever. But you'd still have to upvote something in order to save it, and people we hear from about this mostly want the two decoupled.
  - dang 11y ago
    Your argument assumes that once a story has appeared once or twice, the community has probably seen enough of it for lack of votes to count as a consensus. That's a natural assumption, but false: it overestimates how much attention /newest gets and underestimates the impact of randomness. When I became public as moderator I heard from a lot of users (e.g. [1]) that the biggest problem with HN was high-quality stories not making it to the front page. At first I was skeptical. I was looking at /newest a lot as a moderator and hadn't been noticing much good stuff on the cutting room floor. But the users saying this were good, observant HNers, and I kept hearing it, and it got me worried. So I started looking at /newest more systematically, and then I was shocked. Not only were many high-quality stories being overlooked, probably most of the finest submissions—the out-of-the-way, intellectually interesting, totally unexpected submissions that make for the best of HN—were getting ignored. I'm still not sure how I could have missed that; I must have been looking at /newest at least as much as anybody. Since last summer, we've put a lot of effort into addressing this. One simple thing we did was clarify that a few reposts are ok if a story hasn't had significant attention yet [2]. That's why it's ok that nkurz reposted this one. ScottBurson hit the nail on the head, I think: giving good stories multiple cracks at the bat is one way to counteract the randomness of what gets traction here. Sometimes people abuse it, e.g. by reposting things that don't belong on HN or by being overly promotional, but those are fairly easy problems to solve and their cost is much smaller than the benefit of having more substantive stories—especially those out-of-the-way gems—on the front page. The above isn't an opinion about the current article, which I haven't read, but it's clear that nkurz reposted it for the right reason, which is that he thinks it's intellectually interesting and well-written. That's the kind of thing we want users to do. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494367 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
    - DrScump 11y ago
      But this runs in direct opposition to the title-matching rejection algorithm that is in place. (If posters preserve an article title properly, their attempts to repost are intercepted and redirected to the predecessor.) If it is intended that duplicates be allowed, then perhaps the discussion threads for such duplicates should be merged together, rather than getting such posters in the habit of not honoring original titles.
  - bootload 11y ago
    "That usually means the community isn't interested. " Maybe, could also be because the newest stack is broken. Submissions are furiously added, yet few stories are selected off the stack, leaving new submissions to drop off and disappear. Good on you @nkurz for re-posting.
  - liyanage 11y ago
    I'm glad he did. I missed it the first two times, saw this third submission, read the great article and upvoted it.
  - JesperRavn 11y ago
    If you think the story is inappropriate you can also flag it.
    - DrScump 11y ago
      Not every reader has the flag option available. Also, there should be a distinction between "I'm flagging because this content does not belong or is spam" versus "I'm flagging because this is the 8th copy of it in the 50 most recent postings."
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    >>That usually means the community isn't interested. No it doesn't. Stories rarely stay on the front page for more than 24 hours. This means that it's very easy to miss great articles if you don't visit HN for a day or two.
- DrScump 11y ago
  "Yes, I think this is an important article for Americans to read, and it hasn't yet received any significant discussion on the site." Problem being, if it is, in fact, worthy of discussion here, there are three different discussion threads for this article... and a given reader is unlikely to see more than one. For example, your extensive comment on copy #2 goes unseen by those reading comments for this copy only... as most readers would.

mnglkhn2 11y ago

"My decision to come back to Britain was prompted by banal, personal factors that have nothing to do with current events; if my aim was to escape aggressive policing and racial disadvantage, I would not be heading to Hackney." Not sure what we're talking about here then. The whole article sounds like a post factum rationalization. Lots of feelings with not so many arguments.

Retra 11y ago
You want arguments against racism?
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  If the racism is so bad, why are so many people trying to immigrate to America, Canada, New Zealand , Australia and Northern Europe?
  - istvan__ 11y ago
    Racism is hijacked nowadays in the USA, it almost exclusively means white racism against blacks. The original meaning (discriminating against any "race" by any other "race") is greatly lost. If you want proof just go to twitter and look up some of the recent threads about Rachel Dolezal case.
  - ashwinaj 11y ago
    He's talking about racism specific to black people in the US.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- mnglkhn2 11y ago
  why does he make his decision to return to UK to be related to racism when he himself admits that it was a purely personal motive?! To me this is incoherent and manipulative race baiting in order to puff up his article for clicks. The fact that this simple argument is discarded by you in order to maintain your agenda, shows more about how tolerable and inclusive you are not than about how racist I am.

JesperRavn 11y ago

This article is one sided in that it assumes that White fear of Blacks is baseless, when in fact Blacks commit crimes at around 5x higher rate than Whites. Not all this difference can be explained by poverty, but even if it could, most White people are also afraid of White people who come from social classes with very high crime rates. I'm not saying that most or any of the attitudes of Whites described in the article were justified, but it's one sided to focus entirely on the police and White attitudes and ignore Black crime.

deleted 11y ago
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arthurcolle 11y ago
The incarceration rate is 5x higher, not "the rate that Blacks commit crimes" as you falsely assert. Tone down the racism, it isn't very becoming of a member of the HN community. And the capitalization of the Whites/Blacks just makes you come across as Dylann Roof. Take a chill pill and try to find sources when you want to make assertions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_incarcerated_African-American_males https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics_of_incarcerated_Afr...
- JesperRavn 11y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_rate_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S... How is stating the truth racist? I think you are the one who needs to "take a chill pill". EDIT: You need to scroll down in the wiki article to get rates for specific crimes. E.g. from the Homocide section: the offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites. EDIT 2: And regarding capitalization, see http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173974/are-white-and-black-ever-capitalized-when-referring-to-people http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/173974/are-white-... It's not just murderers who capitalize Black and White.
  - late2part 11y ago
    I think arthurcolle's point is that most people believe our justice system is inherently racist; poor minorities do not have access to the same financial means for legal resources, they are not given as many breaks as rich white people, etc. His concern seems to be that your stated source focuses on "offending" which implicitly infers that they are caught and charged by law enforcement. Your assertion was about "commit[ing] crimes" while your fact is about "offending" or charged or convicted with crimes.

bruceb 11y ago

The author brings up things that a lot of people might not know such as whites generally over estimating the age of black youths. The problem is he then goes on to assume every negative experience with a white person is because he is black.

aeontech 11y ago
I don't see that at all. This comment says more about your mindset than anything else, to be honest.
- bruceb 11y ago
  What mind set is that?
  - aeontech 11y ago
    Well, I do not presume to know your mind, like you seem to presume to know the mind of the author of the article. However, your comment does seem to dismiss the the article as a list of personal grievances of the author, rather than illustrations of common cultural issues. To me, the article obviously consisted of considerably more than that. Unsurprisingly, privilege makes it easy to dismiss concerns of the groups that are "other", that do not reflect our personal day to day experiences. For me, the value of articles like this is in providing a window into the issues that most of us do not have to deal with normally, and making me review my own preconceptions to see if I have unwittingly treated people differently than I should like.
    - bruceb 11y ago
      Do I know the mind of the author fully? No. But I can look the long article he wrote and the thoughts he puts forth. I didn't dismiss the article. I stated it brings up things that need to be known (a positive). I then went on to say the problematic part. Some of his Hhis thinking is also inline with what I see in some social media that turns things in to an examples of racial discrimination or privilege when that simply isn't the case. Outrage over giving Dlyn Roof a bullet proof vest or food when in fact that is a common practice not a reward.

sparkzilla 11y ago

I'm somewhat confused about why this is on HN. The guy doesn't work in technology. He's not leaving because of technology. The article doesn't talk about technology. It doesn't even talk about the immigration process -- which immigrant entrepreneurs and technology workers on visas can relate to. Y'know, despite all the troubles I'm having with my visa (After seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested I have to leave the country and re-apply for a different kind of visa -- a major pain) I still want to stay here. The U.S has many problems, but at least they are out in the open and people are working on them. This is a great place to work and has far, far, more opportunity than the UK. The writer may want to read Cory Doctorow's recent article [1] about how London has become almost impossible to live in. [1]http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html

DanBC 11y ago
Do you think HN should only have articles that have a link to technology?
- lowmagnet 11y ago
  > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    But sparkzilla doesn't mention any of that, and only mentions lack of tech.

cb18 11y ago

This appears to be a long-winded telling of the kind of nonsensical crap that has been circulating as of late that tries to convince people a circle is a square, or up is down or something equally preposterous. How did the descendants of immigrants become xenophobic? The founders of the USA were not immigrants, they didn't immigrate to join Indian tribes, they were founders of a country. And until very recently, immigrants to the USA immigrated and integrated, they became Americans, they didn't immigrate and expect to receive special treatment because they were a member of group X. It's not xenophobic to simply not want your country and culture to be overrun with competing cultures. The idea of multiculturalism is nonsense. Cultures can't coexist that's just not how it works, a culture is the dominant way of life in an area, you can't invite another culture to come and live within the confines of another culture, that makes no sense. What is being done in such a case is you are inviting significant changes to the host culture, and it shouldn't be surprising that most people are pretty content with their home culture and they're not receptive to the idea of having foreign cultures thrust into their home. cannot pay a visit to their home country because they are undocumented Are you f-ing kidding me? Can't do you something because it is likely to reveal that they are in violation of a law they willfully chose to violate? That's some kind of big problem we should be concerned with? A nation without laws is no nation at all. What's the point of any country having rules and regulations for the people they admit if people who break those rules are simply overlooked, much less greeted with pity and concern for their plight of possibly getting caught? When matters such as these are written about in the media why is it that preference is so often given to euphemisms such as 'undocumented' when what they are actually trying to describe is illegal alien? - Another commenter mentioned the race angle that was brought up in this article, I luckily missed most of that in my brief skimming. The real race problem that never seems to be addressed, and it's an uncomfortable reality and whatever the solution is, it is not immediately apparent and I suppose that is one reason why there is a near and total blackout on the subject in the national media. But it doesn't explain why the national media tries to portray the facts in a way that is near 180 degrees opposite to reality. The real race problem is that when it comes to interracial violence, and black on white vs white on black, the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence. It's not even close.

kingmanaz 11y ago

tokenadult 11y ago

It's always refreshing to see descriptions of America by people who have lived here a long time after living somewhere else long enough to be without American presuppositions about how life works. One of the things I found most startling about coming back to the United States at age twenty-six-going-on-twenty-seven after three years of living overseas was reverse culture shock. When I first went to the other country I lived in (Taiwan), any time an experience felt strange, which was often, I would just say to myself, "Of course this is strange, this is a foreign country." But I was very taken aback when I returned to the United States and found out that many experiences feel strange here now--I know that the United States is not the center of the Universe. Now that I've lived in more than one country, it's a whole lot harder to have a standard for "normal" for many aspects of life. The writing in this article is very interesting, and the author reports many interesting incidents. This article deserves your close reading attention, and I predict it will be good food for thought for the readers who read it from top to bottom. I look forward to a future article by the same author about what he thinks about Britain after he lives there for a while following so many years away in America.

danjayh 11y ago
Can you give any examples of experiences that felt strange when you returned? Just curious what types of things you noticed...
- wozniacki 11y ago
  Seconded. Three years is an awfully short time to notice things uniquely as though one were an insider. It has been my experience that cultures do not unfurl that easily for outsiders to be allowed in and wrap one's head around, all the motivations for the reasons why a society organizes itself in a certain manner much less, comprehend the complex inner dynamics of such organization. edit: HN is starting to become a strange place. Take the time to explain how your experiences abroad - even the short ones - helped you gain non-threadbare insights about that culture, which fully invalidate my disagreement above, rather than partake in purely intellectually-lazy flaming.
  - 11y ago

argonaut 11y ago

I agree with the overall point of the article, but one nit is that it isn't great to cite Michael Brown's shooting as evidence of police racism. There is evidence (witness accounts consistent with physical evidence) to back up the officer's claims. Citing that only weakens your case. The other examples are valid, though.

enraged_camel 11y ago
Your comment is very strange to me. So, in your opinion, a point that would otherwise be valid becomes not valid if the author does not cite the best example for it?
- ams6110 11y ago
  He said using a weak example weakens the point.
  - dominotw 11y ago
    I remember sitting in 3 different queues to see a doctor for a (semi) emergency at a NHS hospital.
Zigurd 11y ago
Many police shootings are "justified" by US standards, which are much lower than they are in some other places. You don't get to the low number of police shootings in the UK, Germany, etc. using US standards. In other words we have both a specific individual problem of racism, and a systemic problem that tells cops to shoot.
- bruceb 11y ago
  Are lots of bad cops not fired, absolutely. But of course UK and Germany don't have millions of handguns laying around like the US does. The number of UK police killed in over 100 years fits on to a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officers_killed_in_the_line_of_duty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officer... There are considerably more US cops killed.

nextos 11y ago

As a Scandinavian that has lived in the UK for a bit more than a year, I think racism might be lower here in exchange for a rampant classism and bad public services when compared to average EU places like France, Belgium or Spain.

wozniacki 11y ago
Could you perhaps expand on what you might mean by "bad public services" ?
- nextos 11y ago
  NHS is quite saturated, the road network and Internet are working way over capacity.

rebootthesystem 11y ago

It has become impossible to have objective discussions about something like this --or anything political-- on HN. In this case you'll be labeled as racist if you disagree with the article (already happened in one post I saw). So, there's no discussion at all. Game over. Done. I happen not to agree with much of what this writer said. I have lived in four cultures in three continents in my life. The USA is most definitely NOT what this author paints us as being. I have noted how, for at least the last twenty years, the overwhelmingly left leaning media has made it their job, perhaps unintentionally, to destroy the US from the inside. This is nothing less than despicable. While working in Europe fifteen years ago I noted that CNN and TV shows out of Hollywood were the primary exposure to "America" most of the world got. And what an ugly, unfair, one-sided, twisted and hateful image it is. I would hate us too. No, this article is hateful and highly biased. Go ahead, call me a racist if you must. It'll only add to the nonsense.

ams6110 11y ago
We've always had people who make their living on causes. Maybe they first got involved out of genuine concerns but at some point, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, a person can't be expected to find solutions when his salary depends on the existence of the problem. Also, and related to another post[1] on the front page right now, we have the rather recent element of twitter and other social media that is deliberately manipulated to create and amplify emotional, flash-mob types of dust-ups over isolated events in order to make it appear that there is a huge systemic crisis happening. That gambit is as old as politics, but the rise of social media and the "report first, get the facts later" type of approach to "news" reporting taken by many blogs and even some previously objective media sources has made it much more efficient. ---- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9826200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9826200
ScottBurson 11y ago
Where have you lived in the US? Edited to add: I don't read Younge as suggesting that all Americans are racists. If it were that bad, I suspect, he would have left a long time ago. And I think it's very odd to see a piece like this as an attempt "to destroy the US from the inside". I think he is pointing out real problems that affect a lot of people, and that we need to deal with. To me that's constructive criticism; why you read it as something else is not clear to me. Here's another post along the same lines (though much shorter), by Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141204174020-261404895-it-s-time-to-revolutionize-race-relations https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141204174020-261404895-it-s...

mynameishere 11y ago

Fleeing one "racist" white country to another "racist" white country. Eventually there won't be any racist countries left to flee to, given how non-whites are so abundantly attracted to them, racism be damned. Does that occur to our author? Why doesn't he flee to Equatorial Guinea?

me_again 11y ago
He explicitly states he isn't leaving (or fleeing, if you want to be needlessly dramatic) because of race. Try reading the article.