Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
Your friend and his team has put that space to a great use; Congratulations.
I just feel it's almost impossible to learn mentoring and 'giving back' when you haven't been either the target of it, or been witness to it.
The loss of meatspace community can mean falling into a counterculture that is, ironically, at once met with suspicion by the mainstream, but also better at helping members manage difficulties and better at enforcing certain nominally-embraced but practically-ignored moral standards. For example, late-century LGBT communities (who encouraged unconditional love for one's neighbors better, them or your local ministry?).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_the_Confessional_and_t...
That’s just not a good-faith statement.
Younger people meet friends through work and school. Some of them – gasp – even know their neighbors!
But let’s be clear here: for even very close friends it’s often not preferable to burden them with my deepest chronic mental issues. They aren’t professionals and they don’t know how to approach those problems.
On top of that, there are negatives to that “village” system. Namely, peer pressure, shunning, gossip, etc. Sure, I want to confide in my family and friends, but there’s a line I won’t cross where a skilled, neutral, confidential party is the better choice.
I see the professionalization of mental health help to be an overall good thing. If I don’t trust my neighbor to help fix the engine control unit in my car why would I trust my neighbor to help me sort out complex mental health issues and find management tools and medication?
I’d guess that most of my family or neighbors’ or friends’ mental health advice is clinically, verifiably wrong/damaging/counterproductive.
That resonated with white kids in suburban america too (i'm one) who had the same experience, with friends' grandfathers the longtime town barbers. My grandfathers had both died when i was tiny, so it was the only grandfather situation i had recurringly, and it wasn't just white or just black, btw.
it's just a healthy thing, so good seeing it still goes on!
It's not just dude's safely talking about their problems as the article highlights, that's an aspect, its literally dudes speaking freely without female intervention, e.g. men talking sex, etc.
When a mother comes in to drop off her son or waits idly with him until he's gotten his cut, or a barber's girlfriend makes a quick stop in, the topics will change. Dudes don't just keep talking about the multiple women that they're engaging simultaneously in the presence of women (I understand one may find this topic distasteful but that's how some men use that space) , particularly since in these neighborhoods there are three degrees of separation or less, if not out of simple decency.
Edit: Just to inflect this even more personally, my mother even was explicit about her desire for me to be acculturated more thoroughly in common Black masculinity by dropping me off at the barber shop because I was, relative to the other men in the world I grew up in, too bookish and (what gets called) introverted (I don't really like the use of that term but that's a different discussion), i.e. relatively feminine. That didn't really work, lol, but it was one of the few times she made her thought process explicit in my presence, which is why I distinctly remember it.
Obvious disclaimer: there are plenty of women who like trains, electronics, shooting, cars and other stuff, but that doesn't change the very high chance of finding the romanticized "all-male-space" if you show to a rail fan meetup.
That's pretty much the kind of thing that is available for men.
This article and the positive comments highlights a need for actual mental health advocates aimed at men.
My comment: Men need to see therapists and barber shops have filled in the gap but are woefully inadequate [because they are filled with ignorant toxic vitriol, which you may not notice if you aren’t familiar with the culture] but one person is raising awareness about that using barber shops.
Yours and another comment: re-education!? policing speech!? wrong think!?
I literally have no idea how you and others came get that reading from what I wrote while the article is saying the same thing.
Clearly men are resonating with these barbershops, clearly they find emotional and mental value in them, as far as I can tell there hasn’t been some streak of violence or angst generated by their members, so what more could you ask for? I think these men know better about what is best for themselves than you do from the outside looking in.
I think you’re getting criticism because “actual mental health advocates” - when these men are self-selecting their mental health advocates already - sounds like coded language for “mental health advocates I find more palatable”.
my point is for there to be more options, perhaps even licensed professionals which is somehow weird to suggest, in my model people can still go get their toxic dose of reality at community barbershops, they just don't have to rely on that
Since they can no longer party, a replacement group is needed and they all immediately share in common that they don’t want to drink or take drugs.
Maybe this is common knowledge but it was a lightbulb moment for me when I realized it.
We’re all struggling.
There are plenty of groups based on application of religious lore (often, very similar to the lore applied by AA) to aspects of behavior besides addiction.
Early in the movie Kevin Hart's wife tries to get him to go to therapy and he says 'Black people don’t go to therapy. They go to barbershops to talk about their problems. And then they watch “Barbershop.”'
I think therapy can be useful for people of all races, shapes, sizes, and genders, and I support all initiatives that encourage mental health.
1. Religion.
Pros: Going to church has tied communities together for millennia, and if you could just find some better pastors, it could continue for several millennia more.
Cons: Secularly administering religion like a drug to treat social ills is against the precepts of every known religion, due to the fact that we'd all expect missionaries to believe what they're preaching. People who go around saying "I believe because it helps me" but who do not actually believe anything notwithstanding, we all know that's not self-consistent.
2. An amalgamation of historical myths and power structures that tie people together on the basis of perceived brotherhood.
Pros: People love being tied together on the basis of perceived brotherhood, tribal identity has been around a long time, and there is no debating with the idea that it works.
Cons: This is a description of every supremacist organization.
3. You talk to the guy at the barbershop.
Pros: You like to talk to the guy at the barbershop.
Cons: You can't go if you don't have the money for a haircut.
None of these options are perfect... but the barbershop plan is not that bad.
Let's think about a couple more ways that you could go about obtaining a community in the US.
leisure: clubs, cafes, live music events, bars, gyms. proximity: neighborhood, induced parent communities from child communities. functional: PTAs, HOAs, coworkers, colleagues.
etc.
You mentioned gyms:
tl;dr: Karate dojos are a kind of gym with lots of community -- maybe too much!
Original post:
Gyms are an interesting one. Most are relatively anonymous, I think. But my (somewhere between first- and second- hand) experience of karate dojos was that they are very tight-knit, almost cultish (though not entirely in a bad way). People's SOs often joined, not really because they were interested in karate per-se, but because it was a way to spend more time together.
The hunt for the Third Place, especially among those that are “not 20” is very real and comparatively difficult.
I happen to have met a smallish group of people that I can start to grow as a community with that I actually want to, but this is a recent development and I’m grateful to the people that found me.
A country club?
A service org like Rotary / Lion's Club?
I'm not sure what's out there, but there must options other than Jihad, Kristallnacht, or barber shop.
This is something that people are unaware of (sort of on purpose), but barbershops in black communities become ad-hoc community centers, where black men can just go and be among other black men. Gatherings of black men were (and are) seen as suspicious or "gang-related", but if there's a large gathering of black men at a barbershop, they're all just there to get a haircut, and everyone needs a haircut.
It's not expected of people to get a haircut.
Originally, it may have been a kinda-sorta-secret, but given the prominent role that barbershop-as-Black-social-nexus has played in popular media portrayals of Black American communities targeting general (not just Black) audiences for the last several decades, that's hardly the case any more.
People are unaware of lots of things. Ask, who are your two senators. You'd be surprised in today's day and age of constant media barrage, but many people can't answer.
It’s even referenced in a Disney (Pixar Animation Studios) film (Soul, where the main character’s history of arms-length interactions in that context as a violation of social norms is called out.)
And when you have your special barber, he would cut your hair even when you have no money. That's another assumption a lot of non-black peoples do not know.
I'm black African. I went to live in Rome (Italy) and went 3 times in a "normal" barber shop and the Italians were just doing the haircuts as it is required by their jobs and talking about moundane things. I joined the conversation but ... They are professional. They don't have time to talk about personal problem and stuff. This is not the place.
I switched to a black barbershop and, just near Termini train station. Man, the first day I was there the barber told me and asked me personal stuff and it wasn't "unprofessional" in my view.
We bonded. And now he even call me to ask me how if a problem I have told him previously is solved yet, he has a plumber who can help me fix things and stuff...
So in our culture barbers are well respected.
This isn't specific to blacks. I've seen it first hand in every culture that has barber shops. Which is every culture.
The key ingredient is that the barbers are members of their community and there's work culture (or lack of work culture depending on the individual) that provides enough free time to actually congregate.
The director figured that it is far more likely that men could get their heart checked if they didn't have to go out of their way to get to a hospital, and that was the right place to do it. He trained the main barber there on how to use the machine because he understood how much he cared about his friends, acquaintances, and the community he had fostered. IIRC he did that in many other barber shops in the area.
Funny enough, this approach also saves a lot of money because health problems can be identified faster than otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond%27s
Although Desmond's wife was usually around, and he had a white apprentice:
And, yeah. A barbershop is a decent stand-in.
In contrast, the mental health picture for isolated urban professionals starts with self-regulation, then jumps straight to being treated by The System. Therapists catch a broad range of problems that don't need all their training just by virtue of being the first rung on a ladder that starts 20 feet off the ground.
It's pretty wild how poorly equipped some parts of the country are to treat mental health. My younger sister (13) suffers from anxiety and depression. She says she just needs a therapist to talk to, but every time my parents have reached out to local resources covered by insurance they all want to immediately destroy her future, institutionalize her FULL-TIME in a residential program, and pump her full of drugs for the next five years. School and college prep? Forget about it.
Like, what the fuck? She just needs an affordable therapist... thankfully, I passed on some resources about sliding scale therapy and affordable options outside Florida Medicaid (Open Path Collective is run by angels, IMO). Yeah, she probably will need some medication, but the idea that, with only one major incident, a 4.0 GPA gifted student with a bright, educated future should essentially be orphaned and doped up through adulthood sends shivers down my spine.
The options covered by Medicaid are:
1. No treatment at all, because the system is overloaded, likely leading to further decline.
2. A social and mental nuclear option, certainly leading to further trauma and isolation. TBH, it's heartbreaking to me to think about how many parents have been duped into believing this is the only option (especially with affordable remote counseling being a more available option now).
Great system. We're lucky I have a well-paying software job, otherwise it's like the state wants people to suffer.
1. They are cheaper.
2. You get a haircut.
3. Community.
4. They are trained in the real world, and within the community they are serving.
5. The barber's incentives are aligned with yours. If they solve your problem, you're still a repeat customer. In the case of therapists and chiropractors, they are incentivized to manage your problem indefinitely or to find new problems.
You look up all the providers who take your insurance, call around, all the ones you try are booked up 3 months out...
And all this at a time when small hurdles are enough to stop you from doing literally anything
Indeed, in sociology this building of community is typically called the 'third place' [0].
- Highly tailored to cultural nuances. Many immigrant communities only have religion as their fallback. I cannot overstate how important this is to such communities.
- In some cases, a diverse set of people and backgrounds from different points in their life.
- Many religions instill a sense of humility.
Other cons: - By nature ripe for abuse, without checks and balances in the structure.
- A lot of work and time/financial commitment by its members.
- In practice, some of the nastiest and most egotistical people I’ve met attend churches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Amsterdam_(2018_TV_series)...
Sometimes people just need to vent towards an 'objective' (external) listener who will provide feedback of some sort.
Thankfully my hair is simple to cut, although.
Which is honestly not a bad thing. I don't need to bother someone or get bothered when I'm going shopping or just want a meal, and I might not necessarily socialize well with my co-workers even if I work well with them. But we need other avenues for adult socialization. Current apps like social media and Tinder are garbage.
Apps have the fundamental intention down: connecting people with similar interests. But online is not a replacement for in-person, all these popular social media apps are gamed and monetized. It's a hard problem.
Once they feel cornered, their only perceived course of action is usually anger and violence in extreme cases.
In reality, all humans are a continuous spectrum based off of groups of people that evolved in certain conditions over thousands of years.
What does a "white" person from Ireland have in common with a "white" person from the Caucuses?
What does a "black" person from Sierra Leone have in common with a "black" person from the deserts in the northeast of Africa?
Why does the media make us segregate ego formation based off of these shallow descriptors? Black white etc.
Because it mases us fight eachother, and not the ones that we should be fighting.
They face the same discrimination in America and in that they find companionship
I suspect for the same reason that causes what you've noted. People who emigrate as skilled immigrants internationally are not average people. In both cases we're seeing the cream of the crop (intentionally selected for by the immigration system), educated and driven, often with some wealth established already. And then comparing them to a large population of locals who have varied circumstances determined by local history, not the current immigration criteria.
Your argument makes no sense.
Do they, though? I think African Americans and African immigrants face very different problems in America. My next door neighbors on one side are from Ghana, my next door neighbors on the other side are African Americans. They have very different issues that they deal with and their lifestyles couldn't be more different.
My Ghana neighbors:
- Struggle with things like renewing work visas, applying for citizenship, immigration-related issues
- Buy/cook all their food from raw ingredients from African grocery stores
- 2 parent household
- Pay their own rent
My African American neighbors:
- struggle with substance abuse, truancy, obesity, unemployment
- Eat McDonalds/junk food/drink astronomical quantities of soda pop daily
- Single parent household
- Rely on the state for rent (HOC)
These are not isolated incidents - out of my neighborhood block here in Montgomery County, MD, there are multiple points of data that point to this segregation of lifestyles between African and African American. I see the police all the time at my African American neighbors' house (at least 3-4 times per year), whether it be because one of the teens was caught shoplifting, or they were making tons of noise in the middle of the night, or because of a domestic confrontation turning violent, etc. I've never seen the police once at my Ghana neighbors' house.
That doesn't mean both groups aren't discriminated against.
None of that means that recent Ghanaian-American immigrant families aren't also subject to anti-black racism in the United States in a way that is important, potentially unifiying, formative for their children who grow up experiencing it, etc.
https://www.ft.com/content/ca39b445-442a-4845-a07c-0f5dae5f3...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
Ghanian and Nigerian Americans make above the median white household income. Barbadian, Trinidadian, Jamaican, and Haitian Americans all make above the median African American household income. Mexican Americans score below African Americans, but above Puerto Ricans. Dominicans are dead last. Would you conclude, based on the data, that Hispanics face WORSE discrimination than blacks, even when they're born citizens like Puerto Ricans? Could this be a reason that the left is bleeding hispanic voters, when they're constantly being fed a racial narrative that's incongruent with their day-to-day experience and needs? When a Mexican American who may have a black boss hears on TV that blacks have it worse than anybody else do you think they might start losing a bit of trust in the experts?
Sadly necessary disclaimer: I'm not black or white I'm just calling it as I see it.
Also in the case of barbers, it is plainly obvious: Experience working with hair of a certain type.
Aka get rid of the simple descriptors of "white" "black" etc since they mean very little or nothing at all.
That darker shade causes them to be mistreated in similar ways by American society.
I think racial categories are identities imposed by us and by others. By us because sometimes, especially when we're in groups of people who don't look like us, we may tend to stick closer to people who do. By others, when they see someone who looks different, they often label us with a term separating us from their group.
I agree we're all a meld and deeply human, with a lot in common, and I also think we tend to form social groups that focus on how we are different from others and how others are different from us.
We probably grew up in different places but there's a background we have in common, like our language.
It's called culture.
That's true cultural linkage.
Whereas a "white" person from Ireland and a "white" person from Ukraine have very very little in common.
A "black" person from South Africa and a "black" person from Colombia have very very little in common.
And yet these are the main descriptors used in pop culture, Instagram, the media... and it's silly.
Yes, most ways of categorizing people and identities are arbitrary and diffuse, but in the end its people bonding over shared context and experiences, real or illusory, and I'd be hard pressed to call it silly, any more than other human behaviors that don't follow, I dunno, strict logic.
My only issue is the level at which that single one-word descriptor is used above all others. So much focus is placed on "black" "white" etc... that it devalues the nuance of other descriptors. Like "immigrant", "rich", "poor", "college-educated" etc.
Two people walk into a random corner store. One is a poor, immigrant person who happens to be white. The other is a rich, college-educated citizen who happens to be black.
Guess which one most shop owners are gonna be keeping an eye on.
I am a white father of black children. My hometown has a notorious speed trap that every person in the community knows snares black motorists. If my children were white, I wouldn't even have to mention it except in passing. But they aren't, and if they ever drive around in that town when they are older, I will have to specifically point out to them where the speed trap is to keep them safe from the people who are supposed to be there to protect them.
The one-word descriptor IS the most important one for dealing with strangers and law enforcement in the US whether anyone likes it or not. It's unfortunate and unfair, but unfairness and misfortune never stopped the world from turning.
This complex representation is what the area of academia that studies identity has come to call intersectionality. I.e. being black and gay is a particular experience that is also modified by the person's other demographics.
But imagine translating that level of complexity to national discourse (i.e. a CNN article). Doing so leads to two simplifying approaches: one is to attempt to simplify by using broad categorizing terms ('black', 'white', etc); the other is to attempt to reject those terms by not using them. You're describing problems with the first approach. The problems with the second approach are that it can sweep actual experiences under the rug. For example, while 'black' is an incredibly broad term, that is in fact how a large portion of the population labels another large portion of the population, irrespective of their background, which does create a shared black experience that can and should be talked about, but then always at the risk of ignoring other labels that also make sense in context, such as wealth, education, etc.
I don't know a rhetorical way out of this situation. This is why academic texts (by that I mean authors who are attempting to tackle the subject without any undue attempts to simplify) dealing with the subject can become so twisted and hard to read, because actually describing the context of an individual person can lead to a per-person book-level explication of their experiences that also includes a not-insubstantial explication of the author's experiences.
This is a problem with language. Every time I'm personally in a situation that ends up getting written about in the media, a situation where I'm sufficiently involved to understand the nuances of what happened, the article feels like a comic book simplification and reflection of what happened. But then did I experience that event in the same way that other participants did? No. That's the subject matter tackled, for example, in Roshomon. An 'event' in history is a generalization and narrativization of something that will be probably be interpreted very differently by the actual participants involved.
The problem with exercises like what I just wrote is to use the lack of conclusive and easy categorization to justify inaction or disengagement, i.e. "There is no black identity, let's just treat everyone as though they're the same race." That flies in the face of a great deal of lived experience. Especially because a white person in America can afford to act that way, but a black person cannot.
We're talking about black American males who are local to their barbers and they use the time to talk about the issues that affect them.
There are literally movies (Coming to America, the Barbershop) and TV shows (The Shop: Uninterrupted) which directly feature these concepts. So if they're as unimportant and silly as you suggest, then why are they so prominent?
Could it possibly be because these people find the experience important in a way that you've missed?
I personally wouldn't care if you acted a certain way, my definition of a Latino isn't that stereotypical.
Latinos can be white, black, native, or anything else. You share a culture with them regardless of skin color.
People in the US forget that most Latinos are white. There are several South American countries that are more white than the US.
I have a friend with a European name that appears European but emigrated with his parents from Argentina at a young age. He told me he doesn't identify as Latino in the US despite being Latino because he suspects that he's being judged as an imposter.
No, people forget that “race” is a social construct, not a biological fact, and that as socially constructed in the US, Latinos are generally nonwhite, despite the fact that (in an attempt to protect the illusion of race as a genuine biological trait) the US government explicitly created the notionally orthogonal “ethnicity” axis with only two values (“Hispanic/Latino” and “Not Hispanic/Latino”) for government reporting.
“White” is a fluid concept that is socially constructed differently in different societies, even—especially—by pro-White racists in each society.
Like it or not, black culture is a thing. Just like white culture is a thing. No one has to feel bad about it. Color is beautiful. The whole "I don't see color" concept is disingenuous to the human experience.
the basic scenario is that we’ve had a years-long moral panic in which elite white tastemakers adopted the political posture of radical Black academics out of purely competitive social impulses, trying on a ready-made political eschatology that blames the worlds ills on whiteness and men and yet somehow leaves space for an army of good white people and good men to cluck their tongue about it all.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/who-tells-them-what-the...
It's useful to ask whether people who say they are operating on the pretext of "healing," and "trauma," are really just morbidly attracted to weakness and vulnerability, and if so, why. These barbershops are places created by black men as a place to gather and have some community, and the reasons for a CNN reporter to pay them any attention at all should be treated with suspicion. Journalists aren't part of the communities they cover, they are scavengers and mainly a nuissance to what they perceive to be power, so if you start seeing them, it's probably because there is something nearby whose vulnerability or weakness has made it a target to co-opt into their narrative. Those barber shops are community treasures, and I'd wonder whether they benefit from having someone else co-opt their story and re-tell it on their behalf.
I'm not really sure what this means... are you lumping in licensed therapists and social workers in here? Seems unfair to me, IMO.
I guess just a little clarification would be useful, not trying to tear down your view or anything. I'm equally skeptic of journalists from big orgs like CNN coming into these spaces.
Maybe this coalition is doing good work, but anyone who leads with problematizing men talking about their feelings earns very reasonable suspicion, imo. The main reason I see men having trouble connecting is because they haven't spent enough time around another men to learn the normal cues and boundaries. Setting up their friendships in yet another relationship that treats them like problem children isn't going to help them.
Of course, this is a practitioners view which perhaps does not reconcile itself to theory.
A second, related issue is that the culture of therapy since Freud is heavily influenced by romanticism, a 19th century social and aesthetic movement that prioritized sentimentality and emotion as the source of individual authenticity and creativity. Being in touch with your emotions can be valuable for certain kinds of artistic expression, but in many circles those ideals has become so powerful, they're synonymous with mental health. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the values of the artistic class don't find traction among working class.
Is discouraged to repeat the same adjective again and again in a paragraph. Using a synonym the second time you see again the same concept is better.
Rules for poetry are more permissive or sometimes even encourage it for emphasis. In prose to see -black- barbers... -black- clients... -black dogs-... -black- neighborhood... would sound stupid and boring after a while.