Comment by jankens | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jankens | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> This, folks, is a racial (and gender) pathology claim.

Could it not also/instead be a social upbringing thing instead?

If the media I see regarding African Americans is indicative to their culture, we have no further to look than BET and the cornucopia of movies like "Hot Tub Time Machine", "Black Coffee", and "Dear White People".

The current african american culture appears broken. Single parent households are everywhere, anti-intellectualism is paramount... Book learning is "white people stuff".

It's always a pleasant shock to meet those from the African nations over here. They're kind, intelligent, and well spoken. It's especially funny/sad when american blacks try to communicate with them, and get distant and nasty when they realize they are from Africa.

Women, on the other hand, are trained from elementary school that they are good at "english, social studies, and soft sciences". Boys do the hard stuff. That is little to do with capability, but bad training from a scholastic age.

There's a form of this point that could be correct--but the way you've framed it is pretty problematic.

1. Your examples of "Black Culture" just reflect the biases of the people who select examples of "Black Culture" for white people (and I'm pretty sure Hot Tub Time Machine, at least, is firmly a product of White Culture--did it have a single black writer?). I think you'd be better off looking at Blackish, Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, and ahem Barack Obama.

2. When you set up an argument like this, I suggest you also explain why you think "Black Culture" is "broken." Because its easy to read what you've written as bottoming out in the claim that black people have created a broken culture. Why? Well there must be something wrong with black people! Lots of people do seem to make this argument (accidentally, of course--its often an attempt to make a racist attitude sound socially acceptable), and I doubt you'd want to be associated with them.

Yeah "Hot Tub Time Machine" is super bizarre. There were a couple black people in it, I guess? I think it shows the poster's bias more than anything. "It was a trivial movie with stupid humor -- therefore, black culture"

And viewing "African immigrants" as representative of all Africans? More than a little selection bias there. Far fewer Africans immigrate to the US than would like to.

Also, there are far more complicated and varied relationships between native Africans and Americans with African ancestry.

One can point out that a culture is broken without blaming the people in it. Redneck culture is broken too, not least because it's very racist.

(I grew up surrounded by rednecks, including family members. The rednecks in my family are also the ones with the most problems: low income, drug problems etc.)

Part of my assumptions also revolve around my experiences with African American (and African) colleagues. We've talked of similar issues, WRT race and culture, and they have expressed similar problems.

Those are most certainly single data points, but they also tell of pervasive issues: being a good student was "bad", book learning was "white", males be a player rather than a father, sexual abuse and general abuse proliferate in their music, movies regularly play to "black" stereotypes....

Obviously all don't ascribe to these. That's the problem with stereotypes. But when the culture gains a critical mass of these 'problems', there needs to be a more critical discussion about the actions.

I'm perfectly fine that a great deal of laws through the last 300 years has caused a great deal of their culture to go a direction. And that falls on us all.

Yup, same experience. Nerdy stuff is "white" stuff and peoples into gaming and tech were harassed and ridiculed by other immigrants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com