Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaniard89277 | Hacker News Reader

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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).

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