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This guy walks into a bar and says... - Jun 1, 2006 - Printable Version
- Never Touch a Black Woman's Hair!
(Gray Like Me: Part 5)
by Ken Shade
The final two episodes of "Black. White." were filled with stupidity and hope, like the night I took my little sister to see Shaun Cassidy. (I have a sneaking feeling that I have used the phrase "stupidity and hope" in a previous Faulking Truth column, but I'm too tired to go back and check.) I took my sister, and several of her friends, to see Shaun Cassidy back when he was hot stuff for tweenie-bopper girls. I did it because I was, and still am, the coolest brother in the world. I didn't expect to enjoy it. In fact, I almost took a book and a penlight. I had spent the post-Beatles 70's listening to Eric Clapton, Pure Prairie League, Woody Guthrie, pre-disco Rod Stewart and Queen, all of which I considered serious, sophisticated, adult music. Recently, I had discovered The Tubes, The Sex Pistols and Talkingheads, as well. I was in no mood to spend an evening enduring children's ditties without something to distract me.
I couldn't find a penlight, so off I headed with four prepubescent girls in tow. I took some comfort in knowing that I was not going to a disco act. Just as there are no words to describe the depth and intensity of my loathing for George W. Bush today, there were no words to describe the depth and intensity of my loathing for disco back then. Had they wanted me to take the to see the Bee Gee's, they'd have been S.O.L.
I tried not to think about the fact that I was going to see a Hardy Boy who wanted to be a singer, but who was really only the younger brother of a lunch box. All the way there I was reminding myself that I loved my sister, and this was for her.
We arrived during the opening act, a group called "Virgin," an emotionally charged word to twelve-year-old girls at the time. It probably isn't so charged anymore, what with twelve-year-old virgins about as common as manatees. Something about Virgin had these little girls ripping each other apart over discarded sweaty towels. Their little faces were red, their little eyes were bulging and their little claws were out every time the shirtless Virgin front man tossed one into the crowd.
It was a little bit frightening. I wondered what kind of hormonal hell would be unleashed on the world when the headliner appeared.
When the headliner did appear it was as a backlit silhouette, projected against a large, circular scrim. He was wearing a white tux with glitter on the lapels and a white top hat. He had a white cane in one hand, and a microphone in the other. To me, he looked ridiculous. To my sister and her friends, he was an avatar. The arena erupted, but in a far nicer way than the dark maelstrom Virgin had stirred up. He was buoyantly singing a song called "That's Rock and Roll," the very antithesis of disco and everything it stood for. The atmosphere was joyful, and the little girls were eating it up. In fact, I was eating it up. I had spent the last year having my ears and sensibilities assaulted by 4/4 time, 140 BPM encomiums to chest hair and polyester, so the sound of happy, three chord pop tunes came as an epiphany. What I heard and saw showed me there was light at the end of the musical tunnel. These kids didn't know what Studio 54 was. They weren't out to boogie oogie oogie 'til they just couldn't boogie no more. They didn't care if Gloria Gaynor survived, or not. Whatever they liked in the coming years would be the music after disco, and it just had to be better.
It could not possibly be any worse.
I went to school the next day and told everybody there was hope; that Shaun Cassidy had shown me a brighter tomorrow. They all laughed at me, but I didn't care. Deep in my music-loving heart, a small candle now flickered.
The final two episodes of "Black. White." were like that: full of stupidity, but still positive in the end.
It would be difficult to describe all the ways the people on the show were acting stupid. There were so many. One example occurred when Carmen went to a hair salon for African-American women. She goes there as an ersatz black woman to commune with real black women. This was a pretty good idea, but she ruined it by doing something stupid. She asked the ladies there if she could touch their hair. She touched it and said things like "Ooh!" She was trying to pass as a black woman, but she committed one of the most idiotic and ignorant social misdeeds possible. What black woman would feel any curiosity at all about how a black woman's hair feels? None would, yet there she was, acting like she was petting a llama for the first time.
NEVER TOUCH A BLACK WOMAN'S HAIR! Just don't! Don't get it wet. Don't breathe on it. Don't make suggestions about it. Don't try to buy hair care products for her. Don't complain about the amount of time she spends on it. Don't get involved in any decisions regarding her hair, even if she begs you to. Don't even let her catch you looking at it. It only leads to trouble. If you're a white man with a black wife, or the white friend of a black woman, just shut up about hair. It's an issue you can't possibly comprehend.
Before I married my late wife, I already knew that women have complicated relationships with their hair. What I did not know was how much more powerful it is with women of African descent. If you are a woman of European descent, or you are married to one, I have a little math that will explain the difference to you.
F x (10 x R) = BF
F = the amount a white woman frets about her hair on any given day.
10 = the factor by which you multiply F to arrive at the amount a black woman will fret about her hair on that day if there is no rain in the weather forecast.
R = the chances for rain on that day.
BF = the amount that a black woman will actually fret about her hair on that day.
Rain enters into it because, if a white woman's hair gets wet, she can dry it and put it back like it was in a relatively short time. If a black woman's hair gets wet, she has to be rushed into a salon on a gurney, like a scene from "E.R." Only a specialist can revive the patient. These stylists are among the most respected and appreciated people in the community. They are also powerful. If a woman is kept waiting for three hours by her stylist, she will likely keep her annoyance to herself rather than risk offending her by complaining. It is easier to rearrange her schedule than it would be to find a new miracle worker. I once accidentally offended my daughter's stylist, and was the family goat for several weeks thereafter.
Hair is a very touchy issue in the black community. Karla, my wife, used to call African hair "the curse." It is brittle, hard to comb, hard to tame and hard to style. Black men can shave it all off and look cool. The women don't usually consider this an option. In the community, there are the terms "good hair" and "bad hair." Karla had "good hair." It was thick, shiny and grew pretty long, but still a challenge to deal with. "Bad hair" may be dry, ingrown, brittle, sparse or not grow very long, and is even harder to deal with. The more similar to European hair is, the "better" it is.
The term "bad hair" makes some people, Bill Cosby is the example that leaps to mind, angry. Cosby doesn't have much patience with the belief in "good hair" and "bad hair" because it passes negative judgment on an intrinsic quality we use to designate a person's race. I think he's right, but I also think he needs to have more tolerance with women who use these terms. They fight so much with their hair. Frustration is understandable.
Renee was just as foolish as Carmen in the final episodes. She decided she wanted to see what "white America" was like, so she went to a scrapbooking club.
Scrapbooking? What the hell was she thinking? Her choice of scrapbooking as a doorway into white America told us a lot about her view of white people. She acted on the presumption that, if white people were to be found being themselves, it would be in some activity she perceived as empty and unrewarding. Up until these episodes, she had been comparatively aware, but her bias did all the thinking for her, this time. If she wanted to see white America, she didn't need to go looking for it. It's all around her. She reads it in her newspapers. She sees it on her television. She overhears it in the conversations most of the people she encounters every day are having. She tastes it in almost every restaurant she goes into. She's wearing it when she walks out of a clothing store. Eurocentric culture isn't exactly scarce in these here parts. If she really felt she had to search it out, there are a lot of better places she could have chosen. I would have recommended she go to the local little league baseball or soccer field on a Saturday morning. Of course, if she'd done that, she'd have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of seeing that the white couples around her were not empty vessels; that they loved, cheered for and worried about their children just like Renee. Instead, Renee went out of her way to see caucasians as different from her, just as Nick and Carmen had done when the situations were reversed. In so doing, she passed up an opportunity to gain a little understanding.
Bruno didn't do any new stupid things in the end. He just continued with the same hardheaded, myopic ritual of denial he'd been engaged in since the beginning of the series.
Brian remained frustratingly thick by continuing in his quest to get Bruno to notice the elephant in front of him. It wasn't about to happen. He may as well have been hitting himself on the head with a ball peen hammer.
Q: Why do you keep hitting yourself in the head with that hammer?
A: Because it feels so good when I stop.
The whole series came to an abrupt halt in the final episode. It didn't feel finished. Clearly, they were going to pull the plug at that point, no matter what was happening. The families just said good-bye, and went home. Nothing truly enlightening or inspiring happened at all.
During the final interviews participants talked about their experiences, and about the people they'd been living with for six weeks. Only one of the adults, Carmen, claimed to have come to like, or even been changed by, their counterparts. Nobody, save Carmen, even claimed to have learned anything. Whatever individual viewers got out of the show, I certainly haven't noticed any mass public atonement and reformation in the weeks since it went off the air. Has anybody, or anything, changed? Was this all a waste of time? Did "Black. White." serve no other purpose than to give Ice Cube, the executive producer, a place to flog his new CD every week?
I am sure most people, whose experiences in life have only given them a broad brush to pain with, would probably say this is the case.
I saw a light amidst all this stupidity, just as I saw a light at the Shaun Cassidy concert. The light I saw shined when I heard Bruno, Renee, Carmen and Brian continually use the word "respect" to describe how they felt about each other. I am sure there will be no Sparks/Marcotulli reunion picnics, but they did say they had come to respect, if not like or agree with, one another.
If you ever watch boxing, you have seen that the fighters almost always hug at the end of a fight. This is not because they love each other. It is not because they want to be best friends. In fact, they may hate each other. What makes them hug is the fact that they have shared an intimate experience, fighting, which nobody else was part of. This is why war buddies are so extremely close, in spite of the fact that they may come from vastly different backgrounds. They have shared something that nobody else can ever understand just by having it explained to them. The families on "Black. White." went through their own little war, their own fifteen-rounder, and there is now a respectful intimacy among them that they will always remember.
One of the funny, clichéd things that has happened many times when I have been in the position of pointing out to people some unpleasant racial attitude they have shown is that they so often say something akin to: "One of my best friends is colored." They tell you that so you'll think they are above prejudice. (Nobody is devoid of prejudice of some sort.) They tell you that because they truly believe that the fact that they have a friend of a different race means they are free from the responsibility to examine themselves. They truly do believe this, even while sometimes holding terrible biases against entire classes of people. My late wife and I called this the "Negro-that-I-know Syndrome." The person with this syndrome may think all blacks, Asians, Hispanics, whites or Native-Americans are lazy, aggressive, dirty, arrogant or primitive, except for their friend. "All negroes are bad except for the negro that I know. He's OK."
The people on "Black. White." may not have changed much in their feelings about races, but they now have found one member of another race that they respect, and this is how change happens: one person at a time. I know out-and-out bigots who adore my children. They think all African-American kids are gang-affiliated reprobates except my three cute, goodhearted kids. I have sometimes wondered if I should sever my association with some of them because they are prejudiced, don't even realize it, and sometimes say insulting things. The man who helped me protect my son after he was recently attacked and put in the E. R. is one such person. He was willing to face violent criminals in order to help my son feel safe at the bus stop, yet he was still racially illiterate and insensitive enough to say: "Anthony's a good kid. He may be black, but he was raised white."
What do you say to something like that? This man tells me he doesn't even see color, yet he comes complete with all these unsavory notions about how black and white people raise their children and what it even means to be "black." Should I be outraged at his appalling, accidental self-revelation? Should I deprive him of the company of my children, and the chance to serve and learn from them because he says things that curdle my blood? I could do all that, and be justified. I choose not to because I believe that human beings can change.
When we think of profound change, we like to think of a "Saul on the road to Damascus" scenario: a blinding light, after which the person is completely transformed. We like that thought because it's quick, complete, dramatic and above all, easy. It puts our responsibility to look inside ourselves on hold while God, "Black. White." "Black Like Me," or some other force does all the work for us. We are not challenged to improve ourselves. We are not asked to see through our own confusion. We do not have to tolerate the intolerant, or admit that we might be among them.
It is so much easier to pray for a miracle than to create one.
No, my children are the negroes this man knows. He sees the good in them. Someday, he may meet more black folks, and actually get to know them. When he does, there will be more acceptable African-Americans. After this happens enough, he'll be forced, without even realizing it, to abandon racial nonsense he believes today. On the other hand, someday I will tell my children all about this kind man's racial illiteracy. They'll be surprised. They'll look back on their experiences with him and say: "Well, he was always kind to me." Perhaps they'll see the same thing about others, as well. I hope that, when they do, they'll learn that ignorance, not humanity, is the enemy; that they do not have to always be afraid of those who do not yet understand; that change is possible, and they can be a part of it. I hope they'll learn not to look for a miracle in society that fixes everything, but for little miracles in the hearts of people, that change us all, one weak and imperfect person at a time.
This is the fifth part of the series "Gray Like Me", with more to ceme. Stay tuned.
“I Am The White Sheep Of My Family.” (Gray Like Me: Part One)
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/GuyWalksIntoBar/1012.html
I Was Illiterate (Gray Like Me: Part Two)
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/GuyWalksIntoBar/1013.html
“I don’t want to have to watch my words!” (Gray Like Me: Part 3)
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/GuyWalksIntoBar/1014.html
Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Gray Like Me: Part 4
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/GuyWalksIntoBar/1015.html
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