White people rarely ever see the other sides of
these doors. It's a
foreign environment, where things happen that we can't comprehend.
Often, we don't even know where the black barbershops are. We're usually content to just go to Cost Cutters. Or the mall...
So, you can imagine my surprise(and my new barber's) as I passed through those doors a few months ago...
The management seemed incapable of greeting me at first, as though I was trying to make some sort of statement, when all I really wanted was my ears lowered. It was next mentioned that there wasn't any space in their appointment schedule for me, although they only had one patron at the time. Oh well...
Finally, a young man spoke up and informed the receptionist that he could take care of me. "But I had to wait".
I waited.
It was during the wait that I became privy to the spiritual art that is one Black man cutting another Black man's hair. It is all at once the rituals of a necessary physical maintinance, a cosmetic alteration, and a spiritual re-awakening. In here, loving care and attention is put into the maintenance of the customer's personal image. The barber's job in this alteration is to re-instill in the man a pride in himself and his ethnicity. The experience made me feel high. I noticed deep feelings of belonging and comfort welling up inside me, even though I felt out of place. Out of a status group.
In the same stupid ways that I handle everything, my mind turned to comedy, "I'm going to get blonde hair all over this place and they're not going to know what to do with it." It was my joke for the day.
My haircut was a liberation. I had my long locks trimmed into the respectable short of the adult world. And I walked out a significantly changed man. Maybe it was the reflection on race and integration that I had just gone through. Maybe it was my new hairstyle.
It seems that all they can do for a whiteboy is a clipper-cut.
I think It looks good.