Haircuts and Racism in Small Town America.

I needed a haircut. In fact, it has been nearly five months, I’m starting to look like I did in the 70’s (at least from the ears up – I can only dream about the remainder), and I still need a haircut. But I am NOT getting it done at Walmart: the thieves of just about every honest business in small-town America. The old Italian gentleman who cut my hair the first few times I came up here has arthritis too painful to continue working. He really didn’t want to retire, but eventually the decay of old age forces us all out to pasture. There is not, so far as I can tell, another old-fashioned barber between here and Poughkeepsie! Well, maybe there is, and I have a place that I will try on Thursday, an hour’s drive from here. That’s only about half way to Poughkeepsie.

Anyway, last week I went to just about the only other non-Walmart barber in town (there are a couple of so-called beauticians, but I shy away from perms and frostings). The place is called Norwich Haircutting & Hairstyling, on 86 East Main Street in Norwich. They do business on the first floor of an old house. I walked in without an appointment and there were three older White gentlemen in front of me. A normal scene in upstate New York, since this county I live in is probably 95% White, at least apparently. There was another room off to the far side, and a woman beautician giving a permanent to an older female customer. Strike one, I hate the smell of that gunk! On the side of the house where the entrance was, I passed an empty barber’s station to get to the backroom, where the three men were awaiting a female barber who appeared to be from the Philippines . I can make that estimation, since I knew hundreds of those people as a youth back in New Jersey. Well, that’s at least two strikes. I might suffice getting my hair cut by a woman – especially since I’m looking more and more like a commie war protestor. But a Filipina? Extremely unlikely. Maybe one day I will write about my up-close-and-personal observations of them. Anyway, I decided to hang around a few minutes, thinking I’d get lucky. There was an empty barber’s station and it was early afternoon. I hoped that perhaps whoever worked there would return from having lunch.

So I began my wait by looking at the covers of the magazines laying around the room , none of which I would read (if only for the sake of mental hygiene), and then at the placards and any other distraction I might find to amuse my thoughts with. Then I noticed a bookshelf sitting next to that empty barber’s workstation. Looking at the titles of the books on the shelves, I was surprised to see quite the collection of what certainly appeared to be anti-European, or at least anti-Colonialist, hard-cover tomes. I then came upon a book entitled “White Devil – A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America”. Well, that’s at least strike three – and probably four. There was no way I was staying here. I looked on the wall opposite the bookshelf at the barber’s license hanging there. It belonged to someone with the surname Vasquez (a name that, incidentally, originally belonged to White Spaniards).

I immediately took my large, White, blue-eyed frame the hell out of there. There is no way I am going to let an alien who possesses such books anywhere’s near the back of my head while holding a pair of sharp scissors. But there’s more to it than that. I descended from some of those Colonial Americans. I’ve also read a lot of their literature, and my view of the early days of European settlement in this land is quite different than that Latino’s. I wish I’d have written down the names of the other books. This Latino is obviously quite full of anti-White sentiments. Little does he (or perhaps she, since I never did stop to read the first name on the license) realize that if it weren’t for the White man, he would NEVER have a nice comfortable job in such a nice place, in such a peaceful little town as Norwich. In fact, he and his kind would all still be wearing loincloths and cutting their hair on a stone with a piece of jagged obsidian, amongst all the other discomforts of their primitive, savage lives. This Latino has a lot of nerve, making a comfortable living around White folk while at the same time despising those very people he depends on for that living! He should go cut hair in the Bronx, and see how he is treated there.

I often get scoffed at by my own kinsmen for my feelings about race and culture. But how many of them could see what I saw in that barbershop, and understand the implications of it? While the “White Devils…” book was written by a White man, he is a self-hating liberal living in the Netherlands, an Englishman who has never had any real knowledge of the American Experience, or the experience of all the pre-Columbian White men who settled this land, whom he does not even consider. I have lived around the Latinos, Negros and Filipinos all of my life. I can claim to know exactly what they are thinking of Whites, and it isn’t very nice. And evidently now it’s no longer only down in the city, but also here in rural upstate New York. Since I got here last December, even I hadn’t expected that.