
Farewell to America: Returning to England After 12 Years in the US - nkurz
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/gary-younge-farewell-to-america?
======
tokenadult
It's always refreshing to see descriptions of America by people who have lived
here a long time after living somewhere else long enough to be without
American presuppositions about how life works. One of the things I found most
startling about coming back to the United States at age twenty-six-going-on-
twenty-seven after three years of living overseas was reverse culture shock.
When I first went to the other country I lived in (Taiwan), any time an
experience felt strange, which was often, I would just say to myself, "Of
course this is strange, this is a foreign country." But I was very taken aback
when I returned to the United States and found out that many experiences feel
strange here now--I know that the United States is not the center of the
Universe. Now that I've lived in more than one country, it's a whole lot
harder to have a standard for "normal" for many aspects of life.

The writing in this article is very interesting, and the author reports many
interesting incidents. This article deserves your close reading attention, and
I predict it will be good food for thought for the readers who read it from
top to bottom. I look forward to a future article by the same author about
what he thinks about Britain after he lives there for a while following so
many years away in America.

~~~
danjayh
Can you give any examples of experiences that felt strange when you returned?
Just curious what types of things you noticed...

~~~
wozniacki
Seconded.

Three years is an awfully short time to notice things uniquely as though one
were an insider. It has been my experience that cultures do not unfurl that
easily for outsiders to be allowed in and wrap one's head around, all the
motivations for the reasons why a society organizes itself in a certain manner
much less, comprehend the complex inner dynamics of such organization.

edit: HN is starting to become a strange place. Take the time to explain how
your experiences abroad - even the short ones - helped you gain non-threadbare
insights about that culture, which fully invalidate my disagreement above,
rather than partake in purely intellectually-lazy flaming.

~~~
DanBC
TokenAdult is talking about his perspective as an outsider.

He was in the US for 26 years, left for 3 years, and then returned to the US.
He says that 3 years away from the US was enough time for somethings to feel
strange when he returned.

------
argonaut
I agree with the overall point of the article, but one nit is that it isn't
great to cite Michael Brown's shooting as evidence of police racism. There is
evidence (witness accounts consistent with physical evidence) to back up the
officer's claims. Citing that only weakens your case. The other examples are
valid, though.

~~~
Zigurd
Many police shootings are "justified" by US standards, which are much lower
than they are in some other places. You don't get to the low number of police
shootings in the UK, Germany, etc. using US standards. In other words we have
both a specific individual problem of racism, and a systemic problem that
tells cops to shoot.

~~~
ams6110
Perhaps another explanation for a disparity of police shootings in the US vs.
UK is that US police are confronted with armed and/or aggressive criminals
more often.

Are you familiar with US and UK law enforcement standards on use of deadly
force? I rather doubt they are significantly different.

~~~
soneil
I believe they really are very different.

The best example that comes to mind is
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX5CPx4RKWw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX5CPx4RKWw)
\- a man with a machete actively engaging uniformed officers on the streets of
London. While it does look like it should be set to the Benny Hill theme, the
man was apprehended alive. They didn't just contain him and wait for a armed
unit (which are highly available in London).

Perhaps I'm stereotyping US police forces, but I do think the same situation
in inner-city US would have been a clearly justified shooting.

They do get a bad rap, and there have been some very debatable exceptions. But
I truly believe that overall, we set a very different bar for justifying
deadly force.

~~~
argonaut
That's a pretty bad example. Firstly, if I was with 29 other officers I
wouldn't shoot anyone who didn't have a gun either. But if I was alone (as the
officer was) I'd be pretty stupid to try to take on a physically larger man.
Also, I'm pretty sure you could find examples of American police officers not
shooting people who were armed. A negative examples doesn't prove much.

I agree that American police are more (overly) aggressive. But there is also
truth to the statement that America has more violent criminals.

~~~
Zigurd
It is not likely that all 29 policemen showed up at once. They managed not to
shoot him until he could be subdued. US police have both a racism and a
doctrine problem.

------
nextos
As a Scandinavian that has lived in the UK for a bit more than a year, I think
racism might be lower here in exchange for a rampant classism and bad public
services when compared to average EU places like France, Belgium or Spain.

~~~
wozniacki
Could you perhaps expand on what you might mean by "bad public services" ?

~~~
nextos
NHS is quite saturated, the road network and Internet are working way over
capacity.

------
bruceb
The author brings up things that a lot of people might not know such as whites
generally over estimating the age of black youths.

The problem is he then goes on to assume every negative experience with a
white person is because he is black.

~~~
aeontech
I don't see that at all. This comment says more about your mindset than
anything else, to be honest.

~~~
bruceb
What mind set is that?

~~~
aeontech
Well, I do not presume to know your mind, like you seem to presume to know the
mind of the author of the article.

However, your comment does seem to dismiss the the article as a list of
personal grievances of the author, rather than illustrations of common
cultural issues. To me, the article obviously consisted of considerably more
than that.

Unsurprisingly, privilege makes it easy to dismiss concerns of the groups that
are "other", that do not reflect our personal day to day experiences.

For me, the value of articles like this is in providing a window into the
issues that most of us do not have to deal with normally, and making me review
my own preconceptions to see if I have unwittingly treated people differently
than I should like.

~~~
bruceb
Do I know the mind of the author fully? No. But I can look the long article he
wrote and the thoughts he puts forth.

I didn't dismiss the article. I stated it brings up things that need to be
known (a positive). I then went on to say the problematic part. Some of his
Hhis thinking is also inline with what I see in some social media that turns
things in to an examples of racial discrimination or privilege when that
simply isn't the case. Outrage over giving Dlyn Roof a bullet proof vest or
food when in fact that is a common practice not a reward.

------
rebootthesystem
It has become impossible to have objective discussions about something like
this --or anything political-- on HN. In this case you'll be labeled as racist
if you disagree with the article (already happened in one post I saw). So,
there's no discussion at all. Game over. Done.

I happen not to agree with much of what this writer said. I have lived in four
cultures in three continents in my life. The USA is most definitely NOT what
this author paints us as being. I have noted how, for at least the last twenty
years, the overwhelmingly left leaning media has made it their job, perhaps
unintentionally, to destroy the US from the inside. This is nothing less than
despicable.

While working in Europe fifteen years ago I noted that CNN and TV shows out of
Hollywood were the primary exposure to "America" most of the world got. And
what an ugly, unfair, one-sided, twisted and hateful image it is. I would hate
us too.

No, this article is hateful and highly biased. Go ahead, call me a racist if
you must. It'll only add to the nonsense.

~~~
underwater
Perhaps the reason we can't have a discussion is because you post rambling
meta-commentary complaining about HN, insult your audience, and then post
unrelated rant-ish statements complaints about left leaning media.

~~~
rebootthesystem
Nope, it's mostly because some in the HN audience fail to recognize "Emperor
Has no Clothes" situations mostly due to indoctrination and a refusal to truly
think things through. It is astounding to see how otherwise intelligent people
fall pray to some of the most obvious ideological manipulation. I can only
ascribe it to youth and lack of life experience.

I mean, here we are actually lending credence to the idea that the US is a
racist society, when in reality, the vast majority of Americans are not. At
all.

This is utter nonsense promulgated by political actors that benefit greately
from minorities, racial and ethic groups being angry at "America". Having
these groups remain angry, poor and disenfranchised is a strategic political
goal aimed at creating large voting blocks. After elections they are dropped
on their heads because improving their standing in life would lose them votes.
This is sick. And this isn't limited to the US.

Your profile says you work at Facebook. If this country is overwhelmingly
racist, how many of your coworkers would you say are racist? 50%? 25%? 10%?

I mean, you have over 10,000 coworkers from all walks of life. Surely there
are a bunch of fucking racists in there since the USA is such a racist nation,
right?

How about at Apple?

Google?

Tesla? SpaceX?

Surely Microsoft, don't you think?

No, your shit doesn't stink. The racists have are "those" people. Over there.
The old couple living on a farm who own three shotguns. The fucker who watches
Fox News, she is a racist, yeah, every las one of them!

Or is it more likely that the correct explanation is that racists (who are
despicable pieces of shit) might be just as abundant as rapists, child
molestors, murderers or criminal thugs. In other words a very small segment of
human manure that is the sad reality in any society.

The vast majority of the people in this country are good honorable people.
You, your parents, siblings, extended family, circle of friends, their
families and friends, etc.

Chances are most of them are great people who don't hate anyone and would not
hurt a fly. Yet here we are lending legitimacy a pile of bullshit pushed
forward by a sick ideology that uses people like pawns for political gain.

If I am wrong, please, pray tell, how many people in your family and life are
racist? Surely your family, friends and coworkers are no different on average
from similar circles around the nation.

You see, when you slow down to think a bit and bring things down to a
relatable level the perpective is quite different.

Does racism exist? Of course. Is it rampant? Of course not?

------
cb18
This appears to be a long-winded telling of the kind of nonsensical crap that
has been circulating as of late that tries to convince people a circle is a
square, or up is down or something equally preposterous.

 _How did the descendants of immigrants become xenophobic?_

The founders of the USA were not immigrants, they didn't immigrate to join
Indian tribes, they were founders of a country. And until very recently,
immigrants to the USA immigrated and integrated, they became Americans, they
didn't immigrate and expect to receive special treatment because they were a
member of group X.

It's not xenophobic to simply not want your country and culture to be overrun
with competing cultures. The idea of multiculturalism is nonsense. Cultures
can't coexist that's just not how it works, a culture is the dominant way of
life in an area, you can't invite another culture to come and live within the
confines of another culture, that makes no sense. What is being done in such a
case is you are inviting significant changes to the host culture, and it
shouldn't be surprising that most people are pretty content with their home
culture and they're not receptive to the idea of having foreign cultures
thrust into their home.

 _cannot pay a visit to their home country because they are undocumented_

Are you f-ing kidding me? Can't do you something because it is likely to
reveal that they are in violation of a law they willfully chose to violate?
That's some kind of big problem we should be concerned with?

A nation without laws is no nation at all. What's the point of any country
having rules and regulations for the people they admit if people who break
those rules are simply overlooked, much less greeted with pity and concern for
their plight of possibly getting caught?

When matters such as these are written about in the media why is it that
preference is so often given to euphemisms such as 'undocumented' when what
they are actually trying to describe is _illegal alien_?

-

Another commenter mentioned the race angle that was brought up in this
article, I luckily missed most of that in my brief skimming.

The real race problem that never seems to be addressed, and it's an
uncomfortable reality and whatever the solution is, it is not immediately
apparent and I suppose that is one reason why there is a near and total
blackout on the subject in the national media. But it doesn't explain why the
national media tries to portray the facts in a way that is near 180 degrees
opposite to reality.

The real race problem is that when it comes to interracial violence, and black
on white vs white on black, the facts are black on white racial violence is
off the charts compared to white on black racial violence. It's not even
close.

~~~
artimaeis
>> "The idea of multiculturalism is nonsense"

Say that sentence on St Patrick's day sometime and see how much sense it
makes. Or Cinco de Mayo. Or eat at a cal-mex or tex-mex restaurant. Here in
America we _celebrate_ our multiculturalism. We sure don't avoid it because
it's "nonsense".

>> "the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to
white on black racial violence"

Care to cite that? I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be citing, but I was
pretty quickly able to find that the majority of hate crimes are committed by
white offenders: [https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-
crime/2010/narrat...](https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-
crime/2010/narratives/hate-crime-2010-offenders)

~~~
cb18
_Say that sentence on St Patrick 's day sometime and see how much sense it
makes. Or Cinco de Mayo. Or eat at a cal-mex or tex-mex restaurant._

Those are examples of heritage. Multiple heritages can form a culture.
Cultures are the formal and informal laws, social mores, and general modus
operandi of a people. An example of the unwelcome effects of attempting to
fuse incompatible cultures -
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rotherham+rapes+pakistani](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rotherham+rapes+pakistani)

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-
unspeakable-...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-unspeakable-
truth-about-rotherham/article20335529/)

 _Here in America we celebrate our multiculturalism. We sure don 't avoid it
because it's "nonsense"._

It's not a question of whether it is celebrated or not. It's a matter of if
you think about it for a bit it makes no sense, it's logically impossible.
There could be two or more adjacent cultures and as history shows, they are
likely to come into conflict. But there cannot be one culture that is composed
of multiple cultures because what a culture is, it's very definition, is what
a group and area have in _common_.

Also, as you may or may not be aware, Cinco de Mayo is a mostly American
invention.

And if "multiculturalism" whatever that is, is so great, you'd think someone
would have come up with support for that notion by now beyond "Ethnic food!"

 _Care to cite that? I 'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be citing, but I
was pretty quickly able to find that the majority of hate crimes_

If it wasn't clear, by 'violence' I meant things like rape, murder, and
assault.

You cite something for which there is actually a degree of ambiguity,
discretion, even politics in its prosecution, 'hate crimes.'

Why don't we just stick to the basics, numbers to numbers, dead bodies. A
murder seems to be ipso facto a hate crime. Blacks kill whites far more often
than vice versa.

~~~
g8oz
>>A murder seems to be ipso facto a hate crime. Blacks kill whites far more
often than vice versa.

Wrong. Murder committed in the course of a robbery is not a hate crime. Even
robbing and killing a white person because "white people got money" is not a
hate crime. A quick Google search will let you know the real definition.

~~~
cb18
I'm not talking about the politically motivated definition of "hate crime."
Look up "ipso facto."

I made the point that anyone who kills another individual for some trivial
material gain, or other arbitrary reason, no doubt harbors more than a little
hate for themselves, others and society.

-

On a meta note, I wish people would learn to formulate their cases without
leading with a blurt of things like "Wrong." Then they would hopefully devote
a little more thought to the issues they are discussing, especially the
important ones

------
DrScump
The same article ( _exact_ same, not a different agency) was already posted
twice... yet you change the title to put it through a third time?

~~~
nkurz
Yes, I think this is an important article for Americans to read, and it hasn't
yet received any significant discussion on the site. Specifically, I changed
the URL to resubmit it. The change to the title was to increase clarity as to
the content, and incidental to the resubmission.

And until I tried to submit it myself, I had thought that it had only appeared
once. The previous submissions are
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811591](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811591)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820574),
each with only 2 comments and fewer than 10 upvotes.

~~~
chrisfosterelli
That usually means the community isn't interested. Just because you believe it
should be on the front page is not a justification for posting duplicates :)

~~~
dang
Your argument assumes that once a story has appeared once or twice, the
community has probably seen enough of it for lack of votes to count as a
consensus. That's a natural assumption, but false: it overestimates how much
attention /newest gets and underestimates the impact of randomness.

When I became public as moderator I heard from a lot of users (e.g. [1]) that
the biggest problem with HN was high-quality stories not making it to the
front page. At first I was skeptical. I was looking at /newest a lot as a
moderator and hadn't been noticing much good stuff on the cutting room floor.
But the users saying this were good, observant HNers, and I kept hearing it,
and it got me worried. So I started looking at /newest more systematically,
and then I was shocked. Not only were many high-quality stories being
overlooked, probably most of the finest submissions—the out-of-the-way,
intellectually interesting, totally unexpected submissions that make for the
best of HN—were getting ignored. I'm still not sure how I could have missed
that; I must have been looking at /newest at least as much as anybody.

Since last summer, we've put a lot of effort into addressing this. One simple
thing we did was clarify that a few reposts are ok if a story hasn't had
significant attention yet [2]. That's why it's ok that nkurz reposted this
one.

ScottBurson hit the nail on the head, I think: giving good stories multiple
cracks at the bat is one way to counteract the randomness of what gets
traction here. Sometimes people abuse it, e.g. by reposting things that don't
belong on HN or by being overly promotional, but those are fairly easy
problems to solve and their cost is much smaller than the benefit of having
more substantive stories—especially those out-of-the-way gems—on the front
page.

The above isn't an opinion about the current article, which I haven't read,
but it's clear that nkurz reposted it for the right reason, which is that he
thinks it's intellectually interesting and well-written. That's the kind of
thing we want users to do.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494367)

2\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

~~~
tzs
Do these reposts have to be by different people, or can the original submitter
of a story that goes nowhere resubmit it a couple more times over the next day
or so to try to get lucky?

~~~
dang
They don't have to be by different people.

------
mnglkhn2
"My decision to come back to Britain was prompted by banal, personal factors
that have nothing to do with current events; if my aim was to escape
aggressive policing and racial disadvantage, I would not be heading to
Hackney."

Not sure what we're talking about here then. The whole article sounds like a
post factum rationalization. Lots of feelings with not so many arguments.

~~~
Retra
You want arguments against racism?

~~~
tosseraccount
If the racism is so bad, why are so many people trying to immigrate to
America, Canada, New Zealand , Australia and Northern Europe?

~~~
istvan__
Racism is hijacked nowadays in the USA, it almost exclusively means white
racism against blacks. The original meaning (discriminating against any "race"
by any other "race") is greatly lost. If you want proof just go to twitter and
look up some of the recent threads about Rachel Dolezal case.

------
mynameishere
Fleeing one "racist" white country to another "racist" white country.
Eventually there won't be any racist countries left to flee to, given how non-
whites are so abundantly attracted to them, racism be damned. Does that occur
to our author? Why doesn't he flee to Equatorial Guinea?

~~~
me_again
He explicitly states he isn't leaving (or fleeing, if you want to be
needlessly dramatic) because of race. Try reading the article.

------
JesperRavn
This article is one sided in that it assumes that White fear of Blacks is
baseless, when in fact Blacks commit crimes at around 5x higher rate than
Whites. Not all this difference can be explained by poverty, but even if it
could, most White people are also afraid of White people who come from social
classes with very high crime rates.

I'm not saying that most or any of the attitudes of Whites described in the
article were justified, but it's one sided to focus entirely on the police and
White attitudes and ignore Black crime.

~~~
underwater
That's the textbook definition of racism. All white people aren't judged by
the actions of white criminals. But all black people are.

~~~
JesperRavn
More like Black victimization by police is considered a racial issue, but
Black crime is not.

~~~
underwater
The two issues are distinct. Stop trying to justify racism.

~~~
JesperRavn
You'll have to explain that better. Stop trying to shut down debate with the R
word.

------
sparkzilla
I'm somewhat confused about why this is on HN. The guy doesn't work in
technology. He's not leaving because of technology. The article doesn't talk
about technology. It doesn't even talk about the immigration process -- which
immigrant entrepreneurs and technology workers on visas can relate to. Y'know,
despite all the troubles I'm having with my visa (After seven years and
hundreds of thousands of dollars invested I have to leave the country and re-
apply for a different kind of visa -- a major pain) I still want to stay here.
The U.S has many problems, but at least they are out in the open and people
are working on them. This is a great place to work and has far, far, more
opportunity than the UK. The writer may want to read Cory Doctorow's recent
article [1] about how London has become almost impossible to live in.

[1][http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-
london.html](http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html)

~~~
DanBC
Do you think HN should only have articles that have a link to technology?

~~~
lowmagnet
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
> evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or
> disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's
> probably off-topic.

~~~
DanBC
But sparkzilla doesn't mention any of that, and only mentions lack of tech.

