Not A Folk Singer

The Hair Bigot, Part Deux

It appears that many of you were sufficiently outraged at my hair stylist's racism. I'm not defending her behavior, but I don't think she even realizes that what she is saying is inappropriate and offensive; in fact, I doubt her supervisor would get it either. Calling the salon isn't going to do much good; I suspect that the owner and the stylist would call me a politically correct liberal and then tell stories to all the other clients about this woman who thought it was--gasp--offensive to dress up like a black girl for Halloween.

I don't mind being the subject of their story; it's just that I don't think complaining will do any good, not when racism is institutionalized here within a particular cultural group to which Alissa, her colleagues, and many of the patrons of this salon belong.

I'm not arguing that Alissa's religion endorses racism, but I do think that many who practice this religion are deeply xenophobic and they use their religion to justify their beliefs. It's an easy thing to do given that the church has its own, fairly recent, xenophobic past.

Alissa reminds me a lot of the students I used to teach. When I taught a religion class at a public college, I was always astounded by the prejudices that students openly shared with me and their classmates under the assumption that we must all agree that white Christians are the superior cultural group. Most people who are legitimate bigots either know that they should keep their mouths shut about their beliefs or they openly share them because they want a response. In the case of my students, I always got the sense that they didn't know their beliefs were wrong. They weren't necessarily pushing buttons; they just didn't realize that their beliefs were narrow-minded and offensive.

I don't miss teaching at this school, but I do miss the impact I had on students. In fact, I think I did more for my students in the two years I taught there than I have done in my entire teaching career. Sure, I think I'm pretty effective now, and my students are leaving my classroom with real marketable skills and a greater understanding of how to use those skills. But when I taught Humanities classes, I felt like I changed lives--I changed entire worldviews. I attempted to show my students why it isn't okay to make generalizations about entire groups of people, and I'm pretty sure I taught them the reasons it's not okay to dress up as a black girl for Halloween, not the least of which is that it's simply in poor taste, but also that the history of race relations in American means that painting one's white face black carries with it more meaning than Alissa probably realizes.

But when I taught Humanities, I never began a semester by stating that I intended to change students' beliefs, particularly their religious beliefs (even though I think their misguided religious beliefs were often the cause of their bigotry). Instead, I tried to teach them that we owe every culture the courtesy and the respect to attempt to understand them free from our own biases, values, and judgments about what's right and wrong.

In the first weeks of class, I often heard incredibly inappropriate racial slurs; more often, though, I heard offensive statements about religious groups. My students tended to be most resistant to learning about Judaism. They frequently told me that "the Jews need to stop whining about the Holocaust" or that "the Jews killed Christ." They were less resistant to learning about Islam, for some odd reason, than they were to learning about Hinduism, which they thought was downright ungodly. They were scared of Catholics, but they thought Quakers and the Amish were quaint.

Every class period, I refereed discussions: they could ask any question they wanted and comment on anything, but they could not make a value judgment. If someone said, "I think Catholics are weird," they had to rephrase it as, "Catholics practice different things than I do in my religion. It seems foreign to me." Maybe it's all semantics, but I really felt like they learned how to express curiosity and fear about people and beliefs different than their own without being rude or bigoted about it.

By the end of the semester, I still think most of them were fundamentally xenophobic, but at least they were armed with some knowledge. Our final essay asked them to choose three major religious and discuss the similarities, the idea being that the commonalities between them and Jews, for example, are more striking than they might have originally realized. I'm not sure I changed the world or anything, but I think I was doing my small part to create more sensitive, more sensible, young people.

I'd like to spend a few hours with Alissa and talk to her about things she says. I don't think anyone has ever told her that she's expressing herself inappropriately, particularly in a professional situation. I suspect that Alissa doesn't hate the groups of whom she derisively speaks; I suspect that Alissa is repeating what she's heard, and nobody has ever challenged that doxa.

But as Alissa's client--the woman whose hair she cuts--I doubt I'll have much impact. The best I can do is avoid her and hope that someday she decides to educate herself.

In the meantime, I'm back to the hair drawing board.

Posted expressly for you @ 5:31 PM