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231 points rntn | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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unpopularopp ◴[] No.35413183[source]
Good. Americans are usually not aware of the extent of american cultural imperialism which is basically everywhere, not just in Europe but you can see it very strong here

I'm not saying it's bad or good. But I wish we have less Hollywood, less Netflix, less american music, less american videogames, less imported american culture topics etc when actual local music, movies, books, games exist.

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1. thesuperbigfrog ◴[] No.35413491[source]
>> Americans are usually not aware of the extent of american cultural imperialism which is basically everywhere, not just in Europe but you can see it very strong here

I would argue that the US (and perhaps some other English-speaking countries) need more cultural diversity imported from other parts of the world.

Many Americans are unaware because they have not traveled outside of the US nor have they studied other languages, cultures, music, etc.

The Internet and the growth of global media has helped, but it's not the same as going to another place and meeting the people there.

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2. samus ◴[] No.35414871[source]
That might not help that much. The US is already one of the most popular destination for immigration. Immigrants either assimilate into the wider culture or stay restricted to their enclaves, either social or location-based ones. I can't recall any event in history where immigrants have been able to significantly change the culture of the destination country unless they began to assert political dominance as well.
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3. opportune ◴[] No.35416838[source]
The assimilation goes both ways. American culture is heavily influenced by our immigrants. Looking at food, we Americanize practically any culture’s food, which may just mean changing the seasonings a bit (like making it less hot-spicy), swapping ingredients (Americanized Asian food in the US doesn’t commonly include organ meat), or branching out in tons of directions like we’ve done with pizza.

Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants have shaped a lot of our urban culture. Before Irish and German immigration exploded, the US was a whisky country, then it switched to beer. Germans introduced social institutions like kindergarten and fraternal societies that included the working classes (which eventually evolved into things like the American Legion) and of course workers’ unions. The three cultures greatly changed the religious makeup of the US from one dominated by British Protestantism to a pluralistic mix of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. The US is the primary home of the world’s Jewish people (we have more Jewish people than Israel and the rest of the world combined, if you include mixed/secular Jews), and Jewish immigrants kickstarted the US’ involvement in industries like international banking and some kinds of manufacturing. Plus Jewish people have been hugely important in making US tertiary education and research some of the best in the world. Before these three groups immigrated, the US was agrarian and pretty homogenous, and these groups pushed the US towards cultural pluralism and assimilation.

In the modern day, Asian and Hispanic immigration are mixing things up too. I don’t have statistics but anecdotally I think Asian women are much more likely than other women to pursue careers in STEM, which has done a lot to make formerly male dominated jobs more gender inclusive. Spanish is basically a de facto co-official language in many areas. Americans outside these cultures are beginning to adopt multigenerational living (also because of cost of living) which is likely influenced by both of these. In almost all Asian countries, savings habits are very different than the default in the US, and I think you can see the effects of this in US areas with high numbers of Asian immigrants in things like property prices or a focus on value (like stores with lower margins and less marketing).

Basically none of these groups have been large enough to subsume American culture, but they’ve all contributed pieces on top of the base of Anglo Protestantism and culturally/actually genocided West Africans. And the sheer number of disparate immigrant groups have made the US the pluralistic society it is today, which is likely a big factor into why American culture easily exports to the rest of the world.

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4. samus ◴[] No.35419394{3}[source]
While these things are quite influential and continue to the appeal of American culture, they are unable to affect many core attitudes like capitalism, Manifest destiny, and other hallmarks of American navel-gazing.
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5. opportune ◴[] No.35433835{4}[source]
They can and do influence internal politics and foreign policy quite heavily, for example Cuban immigrants are a large voting bloc in Florida, a swing state, which is a major reason that Democrats don’t just end the embargo on Cuba. Also one of the reasons Israel is so supported by the US is that a lot of Jewish US citizens lobby for it and care about it a lot.

It’s a high bar to put capitalism (plus an obsolete concept and handwavy other things) as what immigrants need to overturn to have been considered influential to US culture, since in a lot of cases that is precisely what brings them to the country to begin with, and is like the main thing the US is known for.