Comment by Baghard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Baghard | Hacker News Reader

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It is not racism. It is (positive) discrimination.

If we keep everything the same, but target a different demographic this service could be called: WhiteStream, a Netflix for whites and white-culture movies.

"The persuit of happiness" is classified as an Afro-American movie. Why is that? Does it portray black culture? Or is it because one or more actors have a black skin? I think it is the latter, because the theme from the movie is universal and transcends race.

James Bond is a hero, not because he is white, but because of his actions. Asking why there is no black James Bond is forcing race on an old fictitious English character (why do you care about the skin color of your heroes?). How to classify Morgan Freeman movies on the Afro-American scale? Add "Driving Miss Daisy" to the catalog, but leave out "Evan Almighty"?

"I’m going to stop calling you a white man. And, I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace and you know me as Morgan Freeman. You don’t say, "Well, ahem! This white guy named Mike Wallace." You don’t say it."

The point is that Netflix is already WhiteStream. Being 'race-blind' isn't inherently a bad thing, but within a white-biased culture, some things need to change before we can leave race behind.

The point remains valid - why isn't there a black James Bond? Because Hollywood doesn't think Americans will go to a movie starring a black hero. It's really a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you don't film the movie, they won't watch it.

(Driving Miss Daisy is not a great example of Afro-positive movies, but whatever)

are you guys for real? half the movies from hollywood have a black or gay lead.

this isn't the 50s anymore. i don't know about france. but hollywood is way past that

That's an absolutely ludicrous statement to make, for lots of reasons. Half!? I'm going to just leave some actual, scientific studies instead regarding race and gender in movies.

(17% of movies didn't even have a single speaking black character, as of 2013)

http://annenberg.usc.edu/pages/~/media/MDSCI/Racial%20Inequa... http://annenberg.usc.edu/pages/~/media/MDSCI/Gender_Inequali...

Just for fun, check out http://everysinglewordspoken.tumblr.com/

It takes a movie and cuts together every single word & sentence spoken by an actor of color. Often the intro music is longer than the compiled lines. Moonrise Kingdom: 10 seconds.

Per capita in the US, it's far worse for women.

I love Morgan Freeman by the way. A man who played a president of the USA, and God multiple times, is exactly what you need to show everywhere, not only on Afrostream

Is it positive discrimination ? Since there is a political implication there, I don't think so, but I will try to answer.

Do you know the movie "Ride Along" ? It did more than 100M$ in the American market for a budget of 25M$. This movie has one of the best start of any movie all time in January.

Do you know how we could see this movie outside USA. Not in a movie theater in France, though. Piracy is the first channel to see african-american movies in Europe and Africa.

Some movies are not well distributed and it appears so that a lot of these movies are from or with an African descent castings. That's not fair. We will correct this fact. And if you want to call this positive discrimination, why not.

Afrostream is a service which will permit to show movies which are not shown in a lot of countries in a legal way. That's our political statement.

I am all for positive discrimination. For instance I do not think it is a bad idea to have all-women hackathons -- I do not think that's unfair. I furthermore wish you all the best with the business and I get the pitch: Besides the mainstream movies there is an entire untapped market of non-Hollywood movies with a lot of potential for growth. This is, after all, a business, not a political party (please avoid this debate entirely).

> Afrostream is a service which will permit to show movies which are not shown in a lot of countries in a legal way. That's our political statement.

this is my gripe with positive discrimination. it is still discrimination.

you could have been embracing everyone. but you did the same that was being done before, and picked the single second largest group. why not call it low-budget-movies-netflix. or hard-to-watch-in-france-netflix? why pick one group/race and leave others out? that is just ...bad business practice :) you could have been streaming iranian movies as well, for example.

You give me an idea with iranian movies ;)

you don't understand my point here : We do not do a service for specific people, we do a service with specific contents.

I will try with another argument : Tyler Perry is one the most prominent performer of the USA. He did movies, series, theater. All successful. He is maybe the most complete artist in the USA. These productions were distributed in the USA. You can't find these production in France by example, but either in a lot of countries. Why ?

Afrostream's goal here is to distribute Tyler Perry and other talents all over the world. As I said, I don't know if this is positive dsicrimination, but Afrostream is my political statement to this 'Why'

so you think it's valid that the racist movie distribution industry in France only distribute non-African culture (whatever that is) movies? i mean, by your standard, limiting by skin color is doing a service to someone...

The problem here is that movies with black people (as we said in France, we need to call a cat a cat, we need to define clearly the skin here), had to be seen everywhere, not only in France, because that's why the movies need to be : to watch by the most. And that's what we are doing, making exposure to underserved movies. And we are doing even in some underserved countries

We don't need to deal with racism, we want to tackle it.

It's not really discrimination, since nobody is excluded here. If you weren't into sports, would you complain about ESPN excluding non-sports-watchers?

But in answer to your implied question "Why do you need a space/channel/site of your own?", the answer is that the larger space (France) is already white by default. Whites don't really need their own space, because they're the dominant majority, and media is generally made with them in mind already. So, if minorities don't carve out their own spaces, they will live entirely in a culture that doesn't represent them.

My fiance is half-black, and she's not that into TV/movies. I once asked her why, and she said that after a while, she just got tired of rarely seeing people like herself on-screen.

It's serving a specific market. Is it discriminatory that Maybelline, the makeup company, doesn't...embrace...men? or that there are specific makeup lines for people with dark skin? or light skin? Is it discriminatory that there exist companies that translate books only into Estonian, a language that very people read? Clearly they should also do Spanish and Xhosa to be "non-discriminatory," despite selling only in Estonia. DramaFever focused initially on Asian content; is that discriminatory? People wanted that stuff, and then paid for it. Just like tall people buy pants that are longer, and there's an IDE specifically for Ruby! (Positive discrimination, I cry!!)

To demand that every company do everything is ridiculous. It is very American to think that focusing on Afro-diaspora culture is somehow "racist" or "discrimination." The company is launching in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Senegal and Ivory Coast. Why would they stream Iranian movies as their first move? Should they also include documentaries and calculus lessons?

Why pick one group, one business goal? Because they'd like to have a successful business and that's how you start.

> black james bond

so are we going back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaxploitation? how is that even portraying 'african' culture if you just get British culture and put black skin on it?

To have a black James Bond, we need to have a better representation of what is black.

Blaxploitation (yet I would love to have this movie in Afrostream) was positive in a sens that it gives positive heroes who are black and it's very important to me that Black people think they could be what they want to be.

By the way, I dreamed to be Shaft when I was younger.

But let's face it, We don't have a lot of movies like that anymore, or they are not internationally distributed.

That's the question we want to solve with Afrostream.

And, again, African Culture does not exist.

Of course African culture exists, it's the culture of the African continent and its diaspora, which is widespread, rich, and diverse. What does the "Afro" in "Afrostream" stand for if it isn't African culture? And of course there are subcultures. It's the same situation with (East) Asian culture.

Exactly there is a lot of culture from Africa, and not a unique African Culture. or subcultures. I don't know what subculture is :)

That's the point of Afrostream, to have a great place to celebrate African Diaspora descendants and all of these different points of view.

I think it would help to say that African culture is not homogenous, rather than say it doesn't exist.

Out of curiosity, are you going to include Egyptian films?

That is not, for sure, a territory we have yet explored, (becasue there is a LOT of contents to explore in other countries first, and we have more a West Africa background), but yes we will look for Egyptian movies in the future.

"Hancock also kept top placement in France, estimating $4.4 million" --Wikipedia

Yeah I love Will Smith too, even in Hancock :)

Let's face it : Will Smith played in a lot of top movies in this decade. Could you name another one ? :)

In France we have a Will Smith example too, His name is Omar Sy (saw in the last Jurassic World).

For one Will Smith, you have here in USA Tyler Perry, Kevin Hart, Chris Tucker, Chris Rock, Spike Lee (sorry for all the women I forgot here). These guys are awesome too. We want them everywhere in the world.

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