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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

Can any French, Belgians, or Dutchies with significant Black African sub-culture comment? I am curious: If there was a French-language or Flemish-/Dutch-language "Netflix for black people" in your country, what would be the reaction?

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> Black African sub-culture comment

Africa is both one of the largest and one of the most populated continent on earth. There is no Black African subculture in France. There are African immigrants from many different places in Africa each with their own cultures and many descendants of immigrants with a mix of sensibilities towards the culture of their parents places of origin.

As a French, the idea that you could have a "Netflix for black people" in France slightly insulting but our culture is extremely different from the American one. We used to have a channel dedicated to the cultures of French oversea territories but it was stopped as it wasn't doing very well.

French people of African descent are not culturally the same as American Black people. Black culture is unique in that it was created artificially by kidnapping millions of people from the African content and stripping them of their cultures, family ties, and names, prompting those people to construct a new culture (while uniting them for another 100 years in the experience of apartheid and the civil rights movement). It's its own powerful, interesting thing.

But, of course, there are TV stations for all sorts of ethnicities all over the world, so the answer to your question is just "nobody would care except message board trolls".

"Black culture is unique in that it was created artificially by kidnapping millions of people from the African content and stripping them of their cultures, family ties, and names, prompting those people to construct a new culture."

That certainly isn't unique.

I don't think my point is "no other group of people has endured what Black people have". At any rate: I don't think I have much more to say about this that would be relevant to Uzo and Iyanu's startup, which is neat and deserves the attention.

I interpreted it as the culture was unique, not the way it evolved, but re-reading it, I can see how you interpreted it that way, too,

In France blacks don't really have a different culture, except when they carry their own from their country of origin, sometimes passed into french-born blacks. It's not like in the US where (it seems) there's a clear black-american culture with visible boundaries.

Blacks of different origin also have different cultures.

I mean, if one tried to start up a netflix for blacks in an european context, with the same leiv motiv as this one (political) it would be very difficult as different blacks come from different backgrounds.

They surely share stuff, to a same degree one would say white europeans share stuff too.

Also, I haven't discussed this issue with black people, but my gut feel given their reaction to other stuff is that the suggestion that they have a "different culture" to the country they live in may even be offensive to them.

Since the american worldview is always trying to get influence through media and the internet, this may be changing with newer generations.

The US is a somewhat unique case because of (of course) slavery, and in particular how long it lasted and how difficult it was to eradicate the last vestiges of explicit or implicit slavery. (People were still being treated as de facto slaves into the 1960s, for example: https://www.livescience.com/61886-modern-slavery-united-stat...)

In most other countries, including other countries that practiced slavery, either more of the original cultural of Black residents remains intact, or there's been more time post-slavery for a united-by-slavery monoculture to more visibly break up into smaller subcultures, or both.

There has to be more, because in Europe, and particularly in southern europe there has been slavery for thousends of years. Everyone has been slave to everyone, like a free for all.

Yet there's no one making claims based on that, and I'm not aware that such claims existed in the past neither. People just accepted as a fact of life and moved on.

If you look at how all the relations played out between southern europe, the Ottoman empire and northen africa in general, you'll see this isn't from so distant past.

A lot of black people arrived in Europe comparatively recently, the last ~60 years or so, and often from a specific country rather than the vague concept of "my ancestors several hundred years ago came from somewhere in Africa, but who knows where exactly?"

Besides, not all forms of slavery are equal; what made American slavery fairly unique is that you were born in to it, was for life, based on skin colour, and was an important part of society/the economy.

While the general concept of slavery goes back to before history, this particular combination is actually fairly rare as far as I know. In modern Europe slavery was never part of society in the same way (i.e. you didn't have a slaves in England or Belgium, just the colonies), and in more ancient times slavery was a lot more "flexible" (detail differ greatly) compared to US slavery, in some cases being a temporary thing as punishment or crimes etc.

There has only been one time in human history where slavery was "racialised". The whole concept of "race" was invented to support this kind of slavery.

The descendants of people who bear the same skin hue of the formerly enslaved still have to live with the stigma caused by slavery.

This (and in many other ways as pointed out by the last commenter), is what makes the effects of the Translantic slavery still reverberate today - because people are still judged by skin colour because of that precedent that was set back then.

I don't know why this has to be continually explained to supposedly intelligent people - wilful ignorance?

> I don't know why this has to be continually explained to supposedly intelligent people - wilful ignorance?

Not everyone is from the United States; reasonably sure the person I was replying to isn't (I'm not either).

In America, I'd expect "Black African sub-culture" to mean the culture of recently-arrived immigrants from Africa. That's a very different thing from black American culture, which evolved under an entirely different set of conditions over the last few centuries. Significant differences exist between native-born black Americans and recent African immigrants in terms of median income, educational attainment, family structure, and mainstream cultural assimilation. CNN wrote an account of these differences in 2009 which I couldn't imagine them publishing today:

https://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/14/africans.in.america/index....

>Ezeamuzie recalled finding himself more confused by his experience with some African-Americans: Why were they so cliquish? Why did they mock students for being intelligent? Why were they homophobic and bent on using the n-word? Why did every conversation seem to involve drugs, girls or materialism?

Are you aware there is a significant cultural divide between African Americans (many generations) and one or two-generation immigrants from the Carribean of Black African origin? When I lived in New York City, I was surprised to learn about this significant cultural divide. Most Black Carribean people who immigrated to the United States are much high class and education than African Americans.

There is also a significant divide between Brazillians that immigrate to the United States. If you are five generations removed from Germany, but born in Brazil (essentially 100% Caucasian / white), there is a huge social gap with mixed and Black African origin Brazillians. I was also surprised by that in New York City.

You may find further comments here :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9903503 ("Afrostream (YC S15) Is Netflix for African and African-American Movies")

Reply on news.ycombinator.com