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Comment by dkdbejwi383 | Hacker News Reader

As a British person with Caribbean family background, I found the reaction to this from the internet so strange. In Britain it's normal that the different cultures here mix. Shops selling Baltic bread, next to shops selling jerk chicken, across the road from a traditional English pub. People of all colours and backgrounds frequenting all of them.

From an outside perspective, people in the USA seem very pre-occupied with continuing a culture of segregation, where black and white people live different lives and mixing is frowned upon. I see this attitude on both sides.

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The issue is people being offended on behalf of others (which is itself not a bad thing: we should be conscious of where we might be using culturally significant signals inappropriately, or otherwise causing offence) but being hyper-sensitive and seeing offence where it doesn't really exist in the groups that they think they are standing up for.

> pre-occupied with continuing a culture of segregation

I think were "cultural appropriation" is being called hyper-sensitively, it is more an over-active sense of guilt-by-association[†] than any desire to segregate. This very much exists in the UK as well, though it isn't as pronounced as it seems to be in the US.

Finding the right balance point can be difficult. The dividing lines between cultural appreciation, cultural mixing, cultural appropriation, and cultural subjugation, while sometimes obvious & clear are often much more subjective.

[†] association with the past racist history of the nation and/or the many still current problems

> Finding the right balance point can be difficult. The dividing lines between cultural appreciation, cultural mixing, cultural appropriation, and cultural subjugation, while sometimes obvious & clear are often much more subjective

In my opinion, this hypersensitivity was turned into a weapon to shame people who have no ill-will. Compounded with Twitter bandwagoning, it’s downright dangerous, and now people are self-censoring anything to avoid censure

It is sometimes weaponised, often as a distraction method in political discussions, or as a defensive come-back ("yeah, I X, but you Y"), but from what I've seen it is more often people being overly sensitive and/or with too much time on their hands and looking for something to discus.

The problem is being hyper sensitive is subjective. What is hyper sensitive to you is absolutely normal to someone else. I don’t ever find it wrong to “culturally appropriate” and I don’t even know how it became a thing. I can’t actually think of any reason why it would be bad to start sharing aspects of culture whether it is clothes, music, or language. It brings people together with commonality. People enjoy copying things they like. I wouldn’t ever say someone can’t wear my outfit because my outfit is important to me. The way I see this term used in America is use by racists as a way to be racist against whites who they perceive don’t deserve the freedom to dress any way they want.

The "hyper sensitivity" also cuts both ways. There do exist hyper-sensitive people seeking out reason to be offended... and other hyper-sensitive people seeking out evidence of others' hyper-sensitivity and getting offended about that.

Both are further stirred by major media trawling through minor media and social media for something to declare as "controversial". I had never heard of the Adele thing, and a quick Google turned up a CNN article which said[1]:

> The singer was quickly accused of cultural appropriation by some users for the hairstyle and top.

How many users is "some"? A dozen? A hundred? Does it really merit "controversy"?

Much of the time, I've found, one hypersensitive person is piled on by a thousand people who have found yet more evidence that there is an enormous social effort to repress them. They rarely or never encounter anybody who actually puts them down, but they hear about somebody else, and that's repeated so often that it sounds massive.

I've even seen it here on HN an awful lot: "I can't even say X anymore without being told how bad I am by a bunch of snowflakes", blithely ignoring how much of a snowflake that makes them. All they want is to be able to say whatever they want without anybody disagreeing -- is that so wrong?

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/31/entertainment/adele-bantu-kno...

To be clear there were plenty of Black British people who were annoyed at the Bantu knots, as well as people who didn't care.

> I found the reaction to this from the internet so strange

That's because "the internet"'s voice isn't the prevailing opinion of the general population. It is the fad-driven prevailing opinion of socially dysfunctional people aged 14-27.

Social media addiction is a disease, and en masse it has cast a shadow over all of political discourse.

<27 seems generous :)

In an attempt to lighten the mood a little, I would just like to relate a quick story about a restaurant I saw while visiting Liverpool many years ago. It was called, "Jamaican me Hungry". :)

And... how was the food?

It was closed, damnit!

Maybe you can go backee and try it another day?

Was it a Jamaican and Hungarian restaurant, because that would be awesome! I would try a Jerk Chicken Goulash in a heartbeat.

Carribbean, and it appears to be a Raggas franchise now.

* https://www.raggas.co.uk/

Lark Lane, Liverpool seems quite apposite here. Two Turkish restaurants, an Italian-American one, a Mediterranean one, a Thai one, three Chinese takeaways, a burger place, an Indian restaurant, a Tandoori house, a pizza place, a middle-eastern restaurant, a Greek restaurant, and two bistros.

One of the takeaways is a vegan "Chinese chippy" named Woo Tan Scran.

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scran#English

Exactly, compare the prison systems:

America’s is segregated by race. You can’t mix with the other race or borrow something from them, or even sit on their table.

In Britain the races mix, there’s no strict segregation, if there is any, it’s more segregated by town and county and areas.

In US prisons, the prisoners segregate themselves, btw - the prison itself doesn't do this.

I know. It was a comment about the culture comparisons.

> America’s is segregated by race.

That was not true in any of the prisons I was in in Texas. There were four that I lived in over ten years and several others that I traveled through. I've heard about it being the case in some prisons, but to present it as a universal truth is wrong. The most strictly segregated prison system I've heard of is California's, but it's based on alliance rather than race alone. The AB-aligned whites are allied with Sureños (a Hispanic group) while blacks are allied with Norteños, and fraternization is fine within the alliance but not outside of it.

Your perception that in the US "black and white people live different lives and mixing is frowned upon" seems like it's been heavily influenced by some less-than-honest talking points. The idea that the UK is an oasis of racial harmony versus a segregationist USA is pretty far from the truth.

Not that far I'd say. While the British have their nazis and everything in moderation, at least they're not generally 24/7 preoccupied with race. (They are however preoccupied with class a lot).

at least they're not generally 24/7 preoccupied with race

1. Not true of Americans, and

2. Probably a newsflash to all the British people who are subject to discrimination on the basis of race.

British views and issues around race are different from American ones. The article has value, because this point is important and often missed – even if it's not new.

But too many people in the UK use this idea as a "harrumph here in good old Blighty we're above all this American racism nonsense" and give themselves a good pat on the back while ignoring our entirely different and still serious problems.

Good thing this article came along so we can point at actual race related problems British people face, but not people from the states.

It's normal in the USA as well, only the vocal micro minority on twitter get enraged at everything. I really hope it's just a decade long trend that will go away. Social justice warriors get mocked for a reason.

The cultures here mix too. It’s a preoccupation of a loud minority.

what happens in the U.S. is that white people take everyone's culture and continue to marginalize and disrespect minorities. It happened with the bible. It happened with karate. It happened with rock music. So people kind of have their guard up. Misinformation is so rampant here that adele very well could become the inventor of dred locks if people don't make enough noise about it.

So people still react like this because it wasn't too long ago that back to the future was implying that Chuck Berry stole the idea for Johnny B Good from a white person. That's an example right there straight from my parents' childhood.

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