Comment by dlwdlw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlwdlw | Hacker News Reader

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It's not that simple and it's not just about greed.

The Asian cultures have centuries more experience dealing with high density people situations. Violence is not as legitimized as a method of boundary enforcement for example because people have learned to deal with each other without killing each other. Sure it creates super thick-skinned rudeness (China/NYC/India) or super thin-skinned rule following (Japan) but boundary enforcement based on things like status markers(Like LV bags and iPhones) or rules or much better than those based on violence.

The U.S. is unique in its sheer mix of cultures but also because of the presence of its youngest culture (African American culture) that is today still reeling from the shock of being torn from its mother culture in Africa. Racism and the lack of a reliable justice system for them has forced their culture to rebuild from 0, going through stages where each person had to have the ability to dole out personal-justice/violence.

What's normal in China becomes rude in the U.S. What's justice in one culture is violence in another.

The locals who call a place home see this and want to preserve their own culture. Despite economic incentive allowing them to move anywhere else, their dollar is limited by their software in what it can do. It's like a project that has github dependencies forced to only use dependencies on some other place like gitlab. The project might as well die and start over. And though projects and start over, people can only die, and they will go down swinging.

Younger and newer cultures learn to be more flexible and adaptable. The software/culture limitation that prevented their parents from living like kings in Thailand is removed because their dependencies aren't as rooted. Some are even completely standalone and super flexible at the cost of having no way of influencing things. (eternal vagabonds w/ no long relationships)

Meanwhile new dense hardware developments can only be populated by software that can deal with the density and find it worthwhile. Thus you get H1B 'slave houses' filled with Indians/Chinese.

I think your comment is pretty good, and I don't know what's up with the downvotes :welp:

That said, as good as your point is about African American culture, it's far from our youngest; there's also the Chinese and Italian migration waves, the Armenian refugee wave... On the west coast, you would definitely also have to consider the effects of Japanese internment during WWII. That might be the most recent, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was another wave between now and then.

This doesn't detract from your overall point, or the severity of the effect on specifically African American culture, but I don't think you can call that America's youngest culture.

Japanese internment during WWII is laughably incomparable to the damage inflicted upon African Americans over the last few hundred years or so. I think the OP meant age-range, or at least that was how I initially interpreted. Though I'm not sure that's true either. Even if OP meant something different, there are waves of Cubans, Chinese, Hmong, and many others. Who knows?

Not sure about the downvotes, you're right.

To borrow some momentum from modern pop culture via Bane from Batman. Japanese-american culture resisted the influence of darkness inflicted by the american culture that was consumed (temporarily) by the darkness. African American culture was seeded in that darkness. One culture resisted hate due its experience with hate, for the other, hate is all it knew.

Those cultures are still connected to their mother cultures though. Though they start to become unique as they mix with American/other cultures the link and the advantages it confers have stayed whole. The studiousness of Chinese immigrants for example is a downstream effect from the exam based society of ancient China and is a feature that took hundreds if not thousands of years to develop. It's also not a perfect feature despites its evolution, it often trades max top speed for stronger initial acceleration.

I don't think that African Americans are the youngest culture in America but rather one of the oldest, considering the slave ship theory they've been here quite a while. However I strongly agree that they're still very wounded and needing healing.

Further, there's evidence being brought out that there actually were aboriginal Americans that we would call black.

What I mean by age is age of connection to older cultures. Almost all western countries have wealth, either literal or cultural from Greek and Roman civilizations. Asias subcultures have roots in Chinese culture. African American culture was fully severed from the mother culture in Africa so it's age is much younger compared to the thousands of years other cultures have evolved over. One example of a cultural strength, appreciation for education, is often taken for granted. Racism is the idea the blacks have an innate disdain for education but it's actually an ubiquitous cultural strength common to all cultures EXCEPT slave/severed cultures. Affirmative action is unfair from the lens of the present, but it is basically compensation from the lens of history, speeding up development of this basic cultural strength. Affirmative action that doesn't heal this rift annoys me as the compensation is not going to the victims. The vanity metric of black skin is often achieved by pulling from Africa where the ancestral culture links had stayed intact.

Trying to assign 100% of the differences between people(s) to their ancestral cultures is a grossly oversimplified post-modern mythology and unsupported by facts or a contemporary understanding of the science of human populations, and I'm fairly sure many Asians and Asian-Americans would be quite offended by the statement that their ephemeral "roots in Chinese culture" are what lead them excel where others struggle.

Don't be blind. Culture definitely provides tailwinds and headwinds in certain areas. Ignoring your attack on the strawman of 100% explanatory power the actual degree of effect may be very small but compounded over time.

A simple example is being good at multiplication in kindergarten. This small advantage can become a desire for continuous academic excellence via courage towards math. If a child's parents are stereotypically prudish, another "advantage" is the ability to sidestep distractions of athletics/sex.

If the natural momentum a culture can build isn't appreciated, people become shallow and hoarding. In my family for example, the idea that Asians are naturally smarter and Blacks dumber is common and was the impetus for my thoughts in this area. I see a greed and lack of empathy developing that is difficult to watch.

The most common actual real world usage I get out of explaining this model is more support for affirmative action. Perhaps other people can see it as having other value. No need to trash it. All models are simplifications of reality and thus "wrong".

The japanese and german communitys in the US are also in need of healing- after the misstreatment in world war2.

Um, fuck no. That's vastly different in terms of scale currently and past.

Hey New Yorkers aren't rude but we are intense, quick walking, quick talking, and impatient. Most of Manhattan is not dense at all and is covered with brownstone instead of high rises.

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