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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> I sincerely believed that we were in a post racial world.

I grew up in a post-racial world as a "brown" immigrant in a deep red Virginia county in the 1990s. My daughter, meanwhile, developed a strong "brown" identity from her teachers in our deep blue state. I don't blame Obama for it. But there was a definite shift in thinking during his administration where the distinct politics of black democrats--which is highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons--became generalized to the hispanics and Asians that democrats sought to court. It was a couple of years into the Obama administration that someone called me a “person of color” for the first time, as if you can properly group people together based on skin color.

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> highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons

This is something I get but it always buffles me. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't they, in their own interests, and the interest of groups they aspire to represent, attempt to unite people above skin-color differences and emphasize our human aspect?

In order to bring people together, it's necessary to acknowledge the harms that have been caused. That is part of repair and trust building. Germany had war crimes trials. South Africa had truth & reconciliation. The US can't paper over the ways in which marginalized populations have been harmed, especially since large parts of the country either don't believe harm has been caused or activity endeavor to perpetuate that harm.

I was raised, quite deliberately on my parent’s part, not to have any racial identity. I don’t think anything good can come out of reminding white people that I’m “brown”—especially in the educational and workplace contexts where it’s become common to really emphasize those differences. I think that actually makes people more racist in their treatment of individuals: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen....

I guess liberals have more faith in white people’s capacity to not be racist than I do. I don’t think people can simultaneously emphasize differences but not treat people differently as a result. The only workable approach to having a multi-ethnic society is to synthesize disparate people into a new group, like America did with the category of “white people” or China has done with the category of “Han Chinese.” And ultimately I suspect even that is a fragile status quo.

Perhaps, like me, you grew up in the era of the great "Melting Pot". At that time (I was young, it was the 1970's) it seemed fine. Come to the US, melt together with us (okay, it was a little weird, but like some kind of stone soup, I got the gist).

By the time I got my Education degree in college though the melting pot was out. Cultures coming to the US don't want to abandon their language, their foods, music… these are a part of their culture and heritage they want to still celebrate.

It slowly became clear to me that this was correct—further, it enriches the U.S. to accommodate it. (Mardi Gras down in New Orleans comes to mind as an example—a little poorer the U.S. would be to have tossed that in the name of homogeneity.)

The problem is that culture isn’t just food and music. That’s the tip of a much deeper iceberg: https://commisceo-global.com/articles/intercultural-training.... When I immigrated to the US, I dressed like an American I listen to American music. I ate American food, but my mom still socialized me like a Bangladeshi. All the little adjustments and guidance that parents give their small children throughout the day—that’s different between cultures. I didn’t realize how different it was until I started started raising kids with my Anglo-Protestant wife. (And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.)

Culture is substantive it’s a type of social technology. It’s strongly influences the kinds of societies and communities that people create. I’m having a discussion with my dad right now about American individualism. From his Asian perspective, Americans don’t care about each other because they have very weak family ties compare compared to Bangladeshis. I thought that too. But what I realized is that Americans teach their kids to love abstract systems snd rules over people. For example, Americans spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about sharing or not littering. Whereas Bangladesh, she spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about how to address, elders, or how to reciprocate, affection, or other social norms that are designed to foster kinship relationships within a more tribal social structure.

> And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.

Oh I'd love a heated argument over that! And I'm sure plenty of Americans, including a lot of protestants, would disagree with your conclusion, too.

On a more meaningful note, wouldn't it be wonderful to have an amalgamate with the best of these worlds - including sharing, socializing, addressing elders properly etc. and not littering.

I’m from the subcontinent, so I’d love to live in a place where families stay together like India but has public order and good governance like Massachusetts. Where is that place? Good governance (stable, efficient, low corruption, free—not just in the formal government but across society’s institutions) and public order is a luxury reserved for a handful of the world’s population. Basically Scandinavia, a few states in the U.S., and the Anglo countries (UK, AUS, CAD, NZ). Where else? Japan and Singapore come close, at the cost of pretty top-down management of the population.

And for places that don’t have order and good government, progress towards those things is non-existent. People in my home country of Bangladesh have spent their 55 years of independence doing everything they can to remain poor and dysfunctional. They just held sham elections (again) after overthrowing the government (again). And the guy in charge of the sham elections was a Nobel Laureate lauded by the international community.

So I’m much more afraid of the few islands of prosperity regressing to the global mean than I am aspirational about trying to have it all. I’ll endure donuts cut in half and running out of food at potlucks in return for order.

> It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.

100% disagree, I love being able to enjoy and learn about different cuisines, it's an opportunity to connect with people I wouldn't have otherwise. In my metro area there's Ethiopian, Oaxacan, Ukrainian, Yemeni, etc. If it weren't for the variety, eating out would have no appeal to me.

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