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I'm typical French and my daughters' mother is African... I had to explain to my daughters the whole concept of race categories and I struggled because it seemed ridiculous and aberrant to them - it is alien to their multicultural daily life. They would laugh at having to chose between being black or white. I don't understand how Americans tolerate being categorized this way. My category: "Other" - always.

You get to understand when you see the divide of prosperity, government support, unequal laws, school access, etc in numbers.

There are no unequal laws.

Now I concede there is grossly unequal enforcement of laws. But the words on the page are just the words on the page. It's the people who enforce those laws in an inequitable fashion.

Before it was illegal/unconstitional many unequal laws were passed. Now that there are explicit laws banning the practice, any newly passed unequal will not be explicit in its language otherwise it can easily be striken down and made unenforceable in court. This may be why you can't recognize modern unequal laws that do exist and likely will continue to be passed in the near future.

Brilliant! This made me happy. I also sometimes forget that there is actually this thing about whites versus blacks versus whatever colored people.

Growing up in the US, I learned to exist happily within a small rational subculture embedded withing a larger culture that is simply insane. The superstitions around “race” are just one aspect of that insanity. There is also the crudest form of Christianity that has ever existed, a reification of “democracy” that is part of a national religion and conflates what is popular with what is right, the prejudice against being educated....it goes on, and I could go on, forever.

> despite there being various laws (at least in the UK) about this sort of thing being a protected characteristic that you simply cannot talk about during interviews - its weird.

Likewise here in BC.

I believe it is illegal to discuss race, gender, pregnancy, family planning, and so on and so forth during the interview.

We've gone from "don't label me, I'm not a soup can" in the 90s to literal label worship nowadays.

> We've gone from "don't label me, I'm not a soup can" in the 90s to literal label worship nowadays.

No, we haven't. “Don’t label me, I’m not a soup can” was a reaction by certain people against what they saw the current dominant culture to be at the time in exactly the same way that pointing to that as an ideal today is. Except that the latter adds in the construction of an idealized view of the recent past on top of it.

EDIT: But, it is true that the 90s—basically the last period of sustained, strong, broad economic expansion (subsequent expansions have been much worse distributionally)—was also a local high point in subjective perceived quality of race conditions, though not particularly in objective measures. People are a lot more prone to be concerned with fairness issues when their experience falls short of expectations than when they don't.

It is possible that American culture has already been divided more than most HN readers have been aware of.

See Michael Harriot's "blackfamous" thread:

https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/120569584639172198...

That thread was interesting. It had me thinking about all the people that _I_ consider to be famous, but which I doubt most people would be able to recognize.

I will admit, I did not know who Stacy Adams is. I wonder about the size of the portion of people who know who Stacy Adams is, or who Louis Vuitton is, that also know who Corrinne Yu is.

The problem is that white Americans don't have the same American experience as black Americans, which is where the divide comes from and it creates another culture. It's been getting a lot better, but there are still two legal systems, two education systems, etc.

My perspective as a white man is that when black people create something for themselves like this, it's reclaiming the power. Like how they use the N word with each other, or how Gay people use that word, it's a reclaiming. Taking the hurtful racist division and turning it into something empowering is the point.

I have no idea if that works in the long term or not, but I always think about Morgan Freeman who said something like the only way we can solve racism is if we stop talking about it

This is 100% false. Cops brutalize anyone who slightly offends them. More black people are disaffected by this, but it happens to us all.

I am white and was nearly killed by a black officer in South Florida. He piled drived me head first onto a concrete floor on video tape. Prior to that, he choked me and threatened to kill me.

I was in Miami to attend the VMAs with a billionaire, yet they claimed I tried to fight them. Eventually all charges were dropped. The cop was actually working private security when this happened.

It’s just men, testosterone, and power emboldened by a badge. The cop — Mr. Ritchie — later won Detective of the Year, while his Sheriff went to federal prison. Reality is different than what you read in the papers.

From south florida and yeah there are allot of aggressive cops. Some of whom I grew up with. They have to deal with very dangerous and aggressive criminals on a daily basis and put their lives on the line. Its a tough job and its a grind, but we need them to protect us from criminal psychopaths in the community. We need to fix the root causes of crime: educational inequality, broken families, lack of opportunity, and the crime/poverty cycle. When and if this happens, the policing problem will go in the opposite direction.

> They have to deal with very dangerous and aggressive criminals on a daily basis and put their lives on the line. Its a tough job and its a grind, but we need them to protect us from criminal psychopaths in the community.

That is nonsense.

I love cops in general. I am a cop supporter. I have known excellent cops.

But cops enjoy a great license in the performance of their duties. Because of that it’s very important that we 1) hire cops of outstanding character, not just bullies who want a civil service pension, and 2) hold them to very high standards, a standard of behavior higher than you would an average citizen.

If dealing with aggressive criminals turns you into one you simply don’t have the strength of character to be a cop. And good cops who tolerate bad behavior in their peers are not good cops.

If you feel that there are two education systems, eg one for Black people and one for White people, aren't you simply reinforcing that by having more segmented services?

Separate but equal was a dismal failure in the US. I don't understand why it deserves a second attempt.

The reality is that most of the country remains extremely segregated.

There are apps that cater to comic book fans, are they promoting the comic nerd divide? What is wrong with a service that caters to a content niche? Separate but equal is only a bad thing when people cannot choose which of the two systems they select into. A black person can choose to get regular netflix instead of this niche service.

it’s bad because it create a bubble. It’s like the instagram for republican (parler). It turned into a social network for dangerous extremist very fast and is one of the reason the capital got attacked

I guess it's time to ban HN and force everyone onto reddit then, because HN is a bubble.

I disagree with your implicit assumption that all bubbles are inherently negative.

While HN is a bubble it will not result in burning the country to the ground. The problem is when polarization create war between 2 camp.

Is this still about BlackOakTV?

Regardless, who decides which category a site/app falls into? There are legal remedies that can fix literal "war between 2 camps", everything else is freedom of expression.

> Separate but equal was a dismal failure in the US.

It was not a failure, it was an lie that succeeded quite well at exactly what it was supposed to do, and was struck down for exactly that reason.

But there is a difference between de jure segregation of public services to assure that one community is underserved and crafting of commercial services to the serve a distinct set of preferences associated with a particular demographic.

I think you may be horrified to learn that American schools are still segregated

https://www.epi.org/publication/schools-are-still-segregated...

> These data show that only about one in eight white students (12.9%) attends a school where a majority of students are black, Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian. (We refer to this group collectively as students of color hereafter.) In contrast, nearly seven in 10 black children (69.2%) attend such schools (see Figure A).

That seems less like segregation and more of just statistics. If black students are a minority, then by definition they won't be a majority in a random subsample.

> As shown in Figure B, black students are also in economically segregated schools. Less than one in three white students (31.3%) attend a high-poverty school, compared with more than seven in 10 black students (72.4%).

That's probably the stronger argument in your link. That outcome isn't surprising given that most school funds come via property taxes - if most economically depressed areas are minority occupied due to lower costs, then those same schools would also be economically depressed.

Keep going! How did there come to be schools that were predominantly black? Why is school funding tied to property taxes? Why isn't there a level of mobility that would allow students to go to a more well funded school? Who made these policies and why?

> How did there come to be schools that were predominantly black?

The residents in their area are mostly black.

> Why is school funding tied to property taxes?

That's how most of your city is funded.

> Why isn't there a level of mobility that would allow students to go to a more well funded school?

There is? Like, you can move to a different school district but it's going to be more expensive. Nobody is preventing you.

> Who made these policies and why?

It's not clear what policies you are referring to. That we fund things via property taxes?

Was it really equal the last time around? As a thought experiment, which is better: amalgamated but unequal or voluntarily separate but truly equal?

> The problem is that white Americans don't have the same American experience as black Americans, which is where the divide comes from and it creates another culture. It's been getting a lot better, but there are still two legal systems, two education systems, etc.

It's really more about how much money you have in your pocket, what neighborhood you're in - but please continue driving a racial wedge to further divide the nation and distract from our broken system's root causes.

> It's really more about how much money you have in your pocket, what neighborhood you're in

And the most important that you don't mention, the mobility. If there is no mobility and black people will be forever on the poor side, the elephant is still in the room.

Even wealthy black Americans get harassed by police more often than their equivalently wealthy white counterparts, sometimes simply for being in the neighborhood where they live.

If you want to focus on the root causes "money in your pocket" and neighborhood, look at the root cause for why there is a racial wealth gap and why neighborhoods have been historically segregated.

Freeman recanted that statement. You can't solve bad culture by not taking about it. It will just thrive. Imagine a corporation had a toxic culture. In what way could not talking about it ever fix the company culture? The toxic people would just thrive. Would sexism and sexual harrasment just end if we stopped talking about it? The only thing close to what he said that would make sense is if parents and media stopped teaching their kids racists ideals both consciously and subconsciously.

> The problem is that white Americans don't have the same American experience as black Americans

This implies that there is a "white experience" and a "black experience" which is simply false and subtly racist. This is kind of the point of the parent's post--we've gone from understanding that variance within a race far exceeds variance between races to a mistaken belief that different races have such different experiences that we basically can't understand each other, that we're practically different species. Consider the white translator who was forbidden to translate the work of a black poet, the eminently qualified white school board volunteer who was forbidden from working with students because he wouldn't "understand the experiences of nonwhite students", or the anti-standardized-testing folks who argue that blacks are innately unable to compete in standardized tests.

On that latter point, there's a popular analogy[0] circulating over the last decade that implies that different races are like different species of animal--chimps, goldfish, elephants, penguins, etc--and standardized testing is like a tree-climbing test. To put a fine point on it, these folks are implying that blacks are innately inferior at standardized testing while whites (and presumably Asians) naturally excel.

[0]: https://twitter.com/JamaalBowmanNY/status/137652006277390336...

I agree with morgan freeman this is also why I don’t think making a black tv channel and black churches and black university help it actually make the problem worse because it increases divide.

As someone that grew up extremely poor. I am not aware of the two education system other than the “historically black university”.

What do you call the “white education system”?

> I don’t think making a black tv channel and black churches and black university help it actually make the problem worse because it increases divide.

You seem to not be informed that black people were expressly banned from many American universities as recently as the 1960s. Even after racial bans were made illegal racial discrimination was heavy, things don't change instantly just because a law is passed.

The only reason black universities exist is because black people didn't have other options. Creating black univerisites couldn't possibly make the problem worse.

The media is dominated by white writers and actors and as a result the large majority of content is based on white culture with storylines that appeal to white people. Black actors audition and black stories are pitched, but most don't get hired or funded. BlackOakTV is making a space for those who are rejected and can't get funding for stories appealing more to a black audience.

> We appear to have gone backwards in the past 5-10 years in my view - no longer can you just be "you", but now it feels like we have to be labelled, categorised, and segregated into different groups.

I’ve been alive for almost half a century, and I notice no such change.

I have noticed lots of people feeling like there is a recent change when they realize the identities that arr important to many people outside their immediate bubble (or even inside, though those are often just silently assumed within in-group dialogue or by dominant groups), often in the late teens or 20s.

> We now have to make a big deal and a big song-and-dance to highlight our differences and define what our ethnic backgrounds ar

No, we don’t. Some aspects of identity are important to some people. Why some people who notice that then suddenly also feel the fact that certain dimensions of identity are important to other people implies a general obligation, I don't know.

People for whom Black is an important aspect of their identity don’t, as a rule, think it is important for being White to be central to White people's identity. (And the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with other dimensions of identity.)

> What if I don't fit into some neat pigeon hole on some spreadsheet?

Then...you are just like everyone else, in that regard.

> This idea that people are 100% Ethnic-Category-A/Ethnic-Category-B/Ethnic-Category-C and fit neatly in those slots without any kind of overlap seems willfully ignorant at best, and subversive at worst.

Sure. But many of the people to whom minority identities are most critically important and worthy of attention would be the first people to tell you that; in fact, they have a whole analytical framework around it (intersectionality.)

>What if I don't fit into some neat pigeon hole on some spreadsheet?

See story on that from Les Earnest: https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/earth/mongrel.html

There's a meme floating around that America is no longer the Great Melting Pot (where everyone assimilates to American culture), now we are the Great Salad Bowl (where everyone is their own unique and special thing)

Personally, I don't really understand all this need for individual representation, but then neither do I really have to.