Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays

by R. Eric Thomas

specifically hierarchical about my experience of a black barbershop. The space exists for the cutting of black men’s hair, of course, but also to host overtly heterosexual camaraderie and community, which I’ve found most often expresses itself through machismo. The more macho one was, the blacker one was. This showed up in topics of discussion, in grooming, in the unspoken rules of who could and could not be there (rarely any women, besides moms, and even they would sometimes drop their sons off and come back). The rule, as I understood it, was that a successful man devoted time and attention to his hair to attract women and to be presentable in a largely white society that had a limited capacity for accepting new hairstyles. But you also wanted your pride and your preening to be rooted in masculinity. There wasn’t, and isn’t, a wide spectrum of ways a black man could express himself—his beauty, his pride, his love for his own being—in the spaces I passed through. This came from centuries-old external pressures on him, namely the presumption that he was a savage and therefore not actually a man at all. Having a strict understanding of how a black man operated in the world kept us safe. As someone whose deviations from that model were always clocked by others, I understood that.