Yes, Lorenzo! I remember talking to my friend Lorenzo back in 2013-14 when he was just starting this. So proud to finally see someone I know as the top story on HN :-)
There's a scene[1] in the Pixar movie 'Soul' where the main character(a black man) goes for a haircut to a black barbershop and has a deep philosophical discussion. Director Kemp Powers says 'There's really no more authentic black space in the community than a barber shop'[2] for the reason to have that scene.
Your friend and his team has put that space to a great use; Congratulations.
For me, this article is about mentoring younger people and benefits it provides. I mentor a young brilliant programmer who I used to work with. I maintained a relationship with him after I retired. He called me up last night frantic about some issues. I know he drinks too much and that he has mental health issues, so I was able to talk him through it. We talked about solutions for his drinking problem. He thanked me later for helping him. He calls me about 3 times a year with these freak outs. Helping him makes me feel useful and doing some good. I have a similar relationship with my son, so this programmer is like an adopted son, which I encourage because my philosophy is we are not alone in the world, but have people around us that care about us and are willing to help if we can put down our pride and ask for help. I wouldn't be alive today if I hadn't asked for help and then let people help me.
Thank you. I think most healthy people have this goodness in them but the modern world puts more emphasis satisfying the self. I discovered the benefits of practicing kindness when someone was kind to me.
I feel we're not exposed much to that kind of positive behaviour while growing up. Busier and busier parents and grandparents, overwhelmed teachers, goal-oriented sports coaches. I can locate a few forks-in-the-road in my formative years, and they have to do with someone noticing I was hurting and being a little shit not to hurt others but out of despair, boredom, frustration, etc. and taking the time and energy to steer me towards creating, investing in doing rather than thinking (high school librarians), or to make me think on myself and what I was bringing to the teacher/student relation (later high school librarian) and helping prepare me for university.
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.
This used to be the case for most communities in America, before we decided that externalizing and professionalizing everything was the "economically efficient" solution. If you had a problem, you'd talk to the elder folks in your community and see what they thought about it. Now we barely know our neighbors and our community elders are shipped off to special-purpose holding facilities.
I don't know, the confidentiality of a professional therapist is huge. Plus a lot of the elders I know would advise you to deal with depression by sucking it up. Or try to pray the gay away.
Now a professional therapist might not want to tell you to do anything at all. The ones I've met have been very passive. They listen, it's great, but they don't point in any direction.
depends on the therapist and your situation. lots of difficult decisions in life come down to what you personally value. the therapist can talk it through with you, but they can't decide your values for you. on the other hand, if you're depressed and spend most of your time in bed, the therapist might strongly recommend that you try going outside more.
While it's true that my therapist never tells me to do much of anything, he often offers me some much needed perspective I can use to make my own decisions to do or not do things. So, I guess you can say I indirectly get direction from my therapist.
Should add that unlike any professional oath or body, Catholic priests will literally die before breaking the Confessional Seal. They will never follow any government or politician order to break it, and even the Pope himself cannot order them to do so. Many have gone to jail or been martyred keeping the Seal (as listed a bit lower in the same article).
There are plenty of issues people have that aren't related to being gay. Most of them, I'd guess. That doesn't help if that's your issue, but it also doesn't mean the entire practice is useless.
Out of curiosity (because of the topic): do you consider this to be an an evidence based belief (taking into consideration the comprehensive nature of it)?
It's give and take. Everyone knowing your problems can make you a target for persecution, but it also makes it more difficult for you to get involved in things that your community disapproves of (again, sometimes this is bad, but sometimes it's good).
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?).
This strikes me as rose-tinted nostalgia, along with straight up misinformation/weasel words. “Elders are shipped off to special-purpose holding facilities?” Really?
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.
Unfortunately, the trusted person in many communities could sometimes make things far, far worse. In my community there were a handful of priests and teachers at a local private school who abused children entrusted to their care.
The rate of sexual abuse by priests is slightly lower than that by public school teachers. Obviously there’s a lot of factors here, but “proximity to and frequent interactions with children making sexual abuse more possible” may be the biggest.
I think that was just a natural progression brought on by the advances in psychology/psychiatry. Similar to how we've decided trust people with mental health issues to take their meds while participating in society, instead of just locking them away in an institution like we used to. Plus the other good points that people have brought up, like anonymity and generally sound, unbiased advice.
This is really interesting and seems like a great example of how small businesses are better for their community than chains. When I lived in Fort Greene brooklyn I was surprised by how many barbershops and hair salons there were, like 5 or more on the single little triangular block at fulton and greene. It seemed clear they were providing more of a community function than just the utility of getting a haircut that i was familiar with. On a side note I never got comfortable with making conversation while getting my haircut and eventually settled on just cutting my own hair at home. That said I never tried the barbershop-type places and usually went to pretty generic haircut shops.
The black community in America has known this forever. We've had to rely on these kinds of businesses, not just as sources of goods and services, but as literal community centers that help people out, sometimes for free. Thats still true, same for salons, corner grocery stores, churches etc. Growing up, these little pieces of community were amazing and still are. While people are of course a little different, I still see these things in the community where I live and they still have the same compassionate professionals most of the time. They dont just sell things. They also give.
McDonald's is a place people come with their community. Older folks sit there for hours etc because it's air conditioned/warm. The community doesn't really intersect with the employees though, besides the employees being friendly when the people order.
No mention of Coming to America, where this happens?
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 isn't because they are barbers. That is secondary. These are men's groups. This is men helping other men. Thanks to continued differences re hairstyles barber shops are one of the very few all-male places left in modern society (other than locker rooms which have a distinct competitive air). So it is no surprise that many urban men feel at home and are more willing to talk at the barber than anywhere else.
It goes against pretty much everything in the zeitgeist, but yeah, men and boys are really hurting from this lack of all-male spaces. I hope culture boomerangs around enough to permit them sometime soon.
Duke has a space for men: "The Duke Men's Project is an initiative to call men in to conversations about feminism and gender oppression. It aims to create a space of brotherhood and fellowship dedicated to interrogating male privilege and patriarchy as it exists in our lives, our campus and our society." as sponsored by the Duke Women’s Center.
That's pretty much the kind of thing that is available for men.
Yeah, that and an enormous number of other nearly all-male hobbies. Unfortunately this leaves men who aren't in to trains, electronics, shooting, cars, or other stuff with few options.
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.
Judging from the number of views machining videos get on YouTube, I suspect at least machining will have a chance of growing big again, under the name of "making".
I recently came to realize that many addiction groups are actually a social replacement for buddies who used to go out drinking / partying all the time.
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.
My ideal would be a group with some shared interest and shared goals who meet on a recurring basis. Typically that is merged with working in an office, so the demand for such a group is mostly satisfied. But it really leaves behind people who work from home (and people who have few coworkers and/or don’t like them).
> I’ve long wished for AA type groups for people who arent necessarily struggling with addiction.
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.
I can vouch that in both Black and Puerto Rican barbershops, the ones in my neighborhood and have attended for most of my life, the range of possible topics is much less confined than a unisex space. Like, to the degree that I have to question your level of experience.
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.
Eh, as a Black male, the possibility of ignorant shit tends to accord with how young the age average of the barbers is, older/elderly barbers aren't treated as peers usually and so have a modicum of authority to curtail discussions when they feel its out-of-line or inappropriate, not to mention they're usually more thoroughly religiously observant. The church use to be a space for discussion with an authority figure like that but most Black men, particularly younger ones, have evacuated the church.
As someone who sees a therapist, there are issues more amenable to a public discussion with other men of your background (we're social animals after all) and there are issues that definitely should be addressed to a dispassionate professional. If the studies the article cites demonstrate literal public health improvement for Black men from attending that kind of space, there is something right being done there.
You may not realize this, but policing the speech of communities and advocating that they be re-educated by the proper authorities has historically been the stuff of nightmares.
The article: Men need to see therapists and barber shops have filled in the gap but are woefully inadequate but one person is raising awareness about that using barber shops.
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.
What’s does an “actual mental health” advocate for men look like to you?
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
This is timely because just yesterday I was watching "Central Intelligence" with Kevin Hart and The Rock.
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.
If HN can look past the usual tropes, there's something interesting here. Lewis is trying to solve a problem a lot of other people are trying to solve: how can you have a normal community in US culture? Let me list a few solutions and you will see why his is better than average.
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.
> Cons: You can't go if you don't have the money for a haircut.
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.
> 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
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.
There were a couple of movies around this trope. Black TV also has this trope (kind of like how other comedies might insert a bar(tender) scene).
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.
> There were a couple of movies around this trope.
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.)
Oh, I think there is still some ignorance, I just don't think what remains is really much attributable to the “sort of on purpose” concealment by the community as to disinterest in the lifestyle of other subcultures by people outside.
> 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.
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.
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...
This was addressed in the tv-show "New Amsterdam". The medical director of the New Amsterdam Public Hospital identified that barbershops are indeed community centers, after an almost fatal event where a black man almost died playing basketball.
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.
Someone in my town (~100,000 people, somewhere on the East Coast) created a "nerd space" where you could rent video game consoles, PC/Macs with pro software, some rudimentary woodworking equipment, a board game/CCG store, and generally hang out. I thought it would become my third place, and for a while it was. I met some awesome people, briefly collaborated on a game that went nowhere, taught some classes, attended trivia nights, etc. It expanded into more buildings and felt like it could become a bedrock of the town. Then it slowly started to contract. I think the only thing left is the donut shop with a small board game collection. The original buildings were demolished in favor of apartments. My guess is they couldn't pay the skyrocketing rent, and couldn't find a good spot in town where people could just sit and theoretically do whatever they wanted. Maybe a library less dependent on profit would make for a better venue?
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of HN'er count a coffee shop or something as their "third place." For me, the cafe at the Barnes & Noble near my apartment is basically my "third place". Well... more like "second place" right now due to pandemic induced WFH status, but you get the idea.
Maybe not anymore, but the public library comes to mind from my youth. Kids would hang out there, and they had computers that you could play some games on. Runescape was very popular there.
Option 3 is actually the plot of an episode of the medical drama series "New Amsterdam". The main character of the show is the director of a fiction NYC public hospital. In episode 4 of season 2 he tries to encourage black men to get medical checkups. He choses to teach the barbers how to take blood pressure and prescribe some basic meds. The episode centers around the mistrust that black people in the US have of public healthcare, and how barbers are a natural social center for that community.
Once upon a time, some barbers had dual jobs: cutting hair and taking care of common medical conditions. The first modern surgeon was a barber by trade. The red and white of barber poles represent blood and bandages, after all.
- 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.
You can bond with people over similar ethnic or life backgrounds without devolving into supremacy... people do this all the time around the world. Obviously, there need to be reasonable limits around the 'tribal identity' that preclude supremacist behavior, but it's certainly a valid way to build relationships and feel supported.
There's also therapy. Way more expensive than a haircut, and it's highly stigmatized especially among men. It doesn't provide community, per se, but it can help a person work through the issues that are making it hard for them to find and keep friends.
In an ideal world there would be a professionalism gradient for mental health the same way there is for physical health. The physical health gradient starts with yourself (trying to eat healthy), passes through your friends casually assisting (participating in outdoor activities, discussing food, telling you they're staying home because they're sick), then hits easily accessible treatments (pharmacy), moves on to more difficult treatments (doctor's visit), and then finally to ultra-expensive high-risk technological approaches.
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.
>In contrast, the mental health picture for isolated urban professionals starts with self-regulation, then jumps straight to being treated by The System.
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.
Absolutely, we've got the same problem in Canada. We waste so many resources on treating emergencies, because we can't spare a buck to help folks with minor/moderate problems. And of course, "universal healthcare" doesn't cover mental health, dental or vision -- those are privileges for folks with upper-crust jobs.
I really appreciate this comment. What I've seen in my life is that if I call it mental health, I probably still see it as disjointed as that. If I call it emotional health, it seems to open up a much broader spectrum of services. Then me calling my friend and talking about how I'm feeling, about my stress, confusion, anger, joy, excitement, dreams and fears, helps me to process some of those feelings and share them more. And it doesn't have to be a friend, it can be journaling to myself, or talking to a barber or someone on a plane or someone at a bar, or someone via online forums. It could even include the physical activity as well, as I like to define emotional = mental + physical. So going for a run or a swim or throwing a ball with a friend can provide avenues for this as well. At least for me, I find the term "emotional health" helps me see the gradient more.
In an ideal world, people would largely communicate ideas face-to-faced and keep text communication to a minimum. The average person needs to hear voices that don't originate from their own heads. We're creating entire generations of narcissists who, because they have the capability to read and have been taught that their opinions "are just as good as anyone else's" have decided that echo chambers are appropriate places to find themselves.
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.
Freemasonry. And for a near-exclusively African-American patronage, there are Prince Hall Freemason lodges[1]. While most Masonic lodges have a "belief in a Supreme Being" requirement, lodge activities are more secular and grounded in their application.
No, I'm saying that black communities are disproportionately affected by poverty. Simply put, country clubs are not an option for the vast majority of Black Americans, not to mention the overt racism.
Ah got it, makes sense. I guess I was just responding to "how can you have a normal community in US culture?" in abstract, not in regards to the people in the article.
Gaming both tabletop and video abounds with groups of different varieties, commitments, sizes. The video gaming side can tend towards the superficial or toxic not as a rule but as a tendency, due to access and anonymity. But a good board gaming/RPG group is hard to beat as a third place.
This is such a poorly crafted argument that it's hard to imagine it's not in bad faith. You listed religion twice! The only way this is representative of any kind of "normal" culture is if you have defined it that way.
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.
I disagree that most of your examples are comparable, with the exception of gyms and coworkers/colleagues to a degree. Getting your hair cut is a qualitatively different type of experience. You have to sit still while it's happening, you can't just wander off. And there's even a degree of physical intimacy involved, even if it's purely professional. Likewise, in church you have to sit still, you can't go on your phone or leave early without people judging you. I think there's a reason why fitness quasi-cults like Crossfit and Soul Cycle have emerged, because the same principle is at play, social interaction with strangers is baked into the process. Sure, there are strangers at bars, concerts, etc., but you don't really have to engage with them and can walk away or go on your phone at any time.
> I disagree that most of your examples are comparable, with the exception of gyms and [...]
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.
As a person in their mid-30s who is having to meet and rebuild their friend group, it’s fascinating to me how the list of places you provide almost entirely are “go with a group, don’t want to be bothered” places.
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.
One word about the cons of #3, you can absolutely go to a black barbershop with no intentions of ever getting your haircut. Older black men will sometimes hang out there, or stop by through the day on the weekend just to catch up with one another.
This is common with cosmetology and all people regardless of background, my mother has been in that business for her entire working life and it’s surprising how much therapy she has to do outside of just cutting hair.
There's an outstanding featurette on Disney+ about "Soul" (part of the "Inside Pixar" series, I think) where Kemp Powers, the co-director and screenwriter talks specifically about adding the barbershop scene(s) because it's such an important part of the African-American culture.
The barbershop scenes from Soul were one of the things that made me think they were trying to make an authentic, specifically black movie that nevertheless had universal resonance (and they succeeded).
Because I have thick hair that grows fast I have to go to the barber often. So when I go to a barber I go for the quietest most disinterested barber I can find. I'm not good at doing small talk with the people cutting my hair. If they don't speak English even better.
Barbers are one of the few jobs left where the people servicing you actually converse with you. Grocery stores, restaurants, ride-shares, gyms, even your office are getting more impersonal.
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.
The option to speak at length with a client while carrying out the work is a very satisfying quality in a job. I drove a pedicab every weekend for five years in downtown Austin and one of the great pleasures of the job is having your clients’ undivided attention for 5-10 min. It’s a perfect amount of time to get to know someone. Many times I would hit it off with them so well that we either exchanged info or I parked up up my cab and we continued to hang out for the evening. I’m someone who abhors small-talk, but if you give us time enough to connect in a sincere way it leaves you feeling great about the people you can meet.
I think being able to talk about issues in your life and have an attentive ear is 50% therapy right there. Too many men keep things to themselves for too long.
Once they feel cornered, their only perceived course of action is usually anger and violence in extreme cases.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
While I find the article and some of the comments interesting, I don't think it's a good fit for HN. Articles should provoke curious conversation; this one, judging from the number of dead posts, is provoking too much tribalism.
There are plenty of curious comments in this thread. Those take time to show up, because they require reflection, not just reflexivity, and that function is just a lot slower. Repeating something from a hot, bubbling cache—pre-boiling rage!—is super fast. That is why comments show up so quickly to muck up fresh threads with angry reflexes.
Of course, those comments trigger angry reflexes in others, so we're in a flamewar before curious conversation has had a chance to put its boots on. Blaming "HN" for this is a red herring—the overwhelming majority of HN readers and commenters are doing nothing of the sort, and some of them have interesting things to say about barber shops.
I don't think you see the whole of the harm done here. Yes, the extreme opinions come from one side, but to deal with it, the non-extremists have to take opinion-suppressing measures. Just the process of recognising and flagging posts that are bad for us is polarising.
There's a balance to be struck: I don't like the idea that the extremists determine what interesting content is permissible to discuss on HN. But while bringing attention to and discussing this article is good for consciousness-raising, I think this polarising process is damaging HN.
You posted flamewar comments repeatedly to this thread. That's vandalism, if not arson, and definitely not cool.
We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do this. Also, please don't post political flamebait as submissions (you've been doing that repeatedly recently), and definitely please don't use HN primarily for political battle, because that's definitely something we ban accounts for (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for past explanations).
A shared set of experiences. I'm Latino, and when I visit the United States I get along well with other Latino folk because we share a set of experiences we can relate to.
We probably grew up in different places but there's a background we have in common, like our language.
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.
> People in the US forget that most Latinos are indeed white
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.
Funny, I don’t get along with many other Latinos despite being one. I think it’s this attitude that I’m supposed to speak the language and act a certain way as part of the “culture.”
Well, everyone's different. I find it much easier to relate to others that come from a similar culture to mine. We don't need to speak the language, but talking about stuff like our upbringing or whatever helps bond.
I personally wouldn't care if you acted a certain way, my definition of a Latino isn't that stereotypical.
By focusing on shared experience of cultural context or upbringing, you're ignoring the shared experience of how people are treated by others. People do have things in common based on skin color. For example, my sister is Filipina. She lives in a white dominated area which has a lot of xenophobia about Mexican immigrants. She has experienced several events where she gets mistaken as Mexican, simply by her skin color and is threatened and/or told to go back to Mexico, sometimes quite angrily. These experiences are quite traumatic. The typical person doesn't make a close study of other cultures, so if they're actively racist/xenophobic/what-have-you, they don't look to the nuances of their target's background before they lash out. Being ANY minority, especially a visually identifiable minority, creates a shared experience regardless of peoples' actual backgrounds. This causes communities and identities to form as people group around shared experiences.
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.
The focus is there because race has been the descriptor of choice for generations to quickly, lazily and cruelly discriminate against minority groups, and the lasting effects haven't even been fully understood yet, let alone remedied to the point where we can just ignore what has and is still happening because of someone's skin color.
I believe fundamentally people are ill equipped to deal with this kind of complexity. When labeling people, rather than using a small set of discrete terms, it's closer to a probabilistic clustering problem where each individual is represented by a high dimensional vector where the clusters are generated on the fly and per-use, parameterized by time and space and the observer's viewpoint.
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.
They may share the experience of being called "black" by people around them. Maybe not in their respective countries, as racial categories tend to change a lot based on society, however maybe if they were to meet in the same place. For example, many of my East African friends didn't realize they were "black" until they came to the US. Similarly, I felt more "white" when I was living in Tanzania as there were very few people who shared my skin tone, hair style, eye color, etc. So while I may not have had the same language as a Danish person in Tanzania, we shared a lot more physically than I did with some of the local Tanzanians and were often categorized the same by them anyways.
What's silly is your characterization of these barber shops.
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?
> They face the same discrimination in America and in that they find companionship
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.
There are selection biases when it comes to immigration to the first world that select for things like emphasis on high educational attainment/striver mentality, plus common cultural differences we see with immigrants from all over with respect to the relative strictness of parenting. Recent immigrants from Africa are also not coping with the multigenerational trauma of slavery, Jim Crow, &c., in the way that black Americans generally are.
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.
Contemporary African immigrants significantly outperform those descended from slaves. Moreover, they have higher educational attainment, household incomes, and professional success than American white populations. Nigerian immigrants even outperform Chinese and Indian immigrants.
White British immigrants to Canada today, outperform white Canadians of British descent whose ancestors freely moved there in the 19th century, as do their children.
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.
I can think of at least two possibilities: a privileged/sheltered upbringing or an intentional mis-framing of the issue to make something reasonable seem unreasonable.
So a person from Sierra Leone who's never stepped foot in the United States would thus never have experienced this "discrimination" and thus are not part of the "black" group?
That would be verifiable by looking at the economic and educational outcomes of African and Caribbean immigrants in comparison to ADOS. If discrimination is all there is to it then their outcomes should be the same. Spoiler alert: It's not the same.
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.
Selection bias: immigrating to the US from a far away country is easier if you’re educated and rich. Doesn’t mean you’re treated any better once you get here.
How do you explain the people that arrived in the United States through asylum? I wouldn't say that the Chinese immigrants who immigrated to the US during the Cultural Revolution in '70s or the swell in Indian and African diaspora in the '90s were rich. Most left everything they had behind including family members and had to start from the bottom rung. And yet, in one or two generations, they're sons and daughters are the ones populating Stanford and Silicon Valley.
So your prediction would be that African immigrants would underperform other immigrant groups originating from far away countries, owing to racism once they land here?
No, my prediction is that regardless of what country someone came from, many people in the US will only see them as Black and theyll treat them differently for it.
But, immigrants from Thailand are no less well-off than immigrants from Nigeria. If Nigerian immigrants face discrimination because many people will only see them as black, does that mean Thai immigrants will outperform them? Or do Thai people face an equal amount of racism targeting them?
> Why does the media make us segregate ego formation based off of these shallow descriptors? Black white etc.
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.
Because membership of a group, especially for marginalised and oppressed peoples, is a way to have shared strength and be able to relate to others' experiences and protect each other. Which is an incredibly powerful and necessary until the world is significantly fairer.
Also in the case of barbers, it is plainly obvious: Experience working with hair of a certain type.
I don't think the media is the only thing that determines whether we form racial or any other social identity categories.
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.
It is like the ship of Theseus. Aggregates exist because that's how we abstract, even though calling it identity would be wrong. I don't know what a good solution is.
Ideally we could unmoor it from the arbitrary 100 year old census categories. Yeah, you have to draw arbitrary lines somewhere but our current set is really dumb.
While it is true that there is much diversity within each minority group, it is also true that the society often imposes discrimination solely based on one's skin color, and we can't just ignore society. I also think that this article is really mainly talking about the descendants of the enslaved people, which form the majority of US's black population, and is commonly referred to as the Black community.
Well, in terms of this article, we're talking about black barbers. This isn't a racism thing. There is a culture associated with black barbers. I was a white kid, I grew up in the hood. I would hang out with my friends while they got their haircut. Racism didn't keep me from getting my haircut there, the literal texture and makeup of my hair did. They specialized. And in black culture, the barber shop is one of the main socialization spots. It's a place demanding similar levels of respect as going to church, minus the dress code. It's a place, outside of so many other places in this white dominated world, where they can be themselves. It's a place "for them and by them". They can be themselves, the subconscious relaxes, they don't have to worry about someone being a bigot towards them.
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.
What does a "white" working class Italian who's parents came over in the 50's have in common with a "white" old money millionaire guy who's German ancestors came over in the mid 1800's?
What does a "black" kid who went to a private school, then Ivy League, and now works at a Private Equity fund in NYC (this is my actual friend) have in common with a "black" kid growing up in Detroit?
The "white" and "black" descriptors of all of these people have little correlation with their daily lives... and yet it's the single adjective that media/Instagram etc speak the loudest about and make it into this huge thing.
Really the biggest separator in our society is socioeconomic wealth. And that should be the main descriptor.
You don't get to opt out of the primary ethnic conflict of your society. If you get read as white and treated as white then you are white. No one is going to ask you to pronounce parsley when the time comes.
Nothing! You’re literally describing intersectionality. Other than you don’t like the terms black and white for some reason as things that are part of people’s lives we’re saying the exact same thing.
A black kid who grows up rich and goes to an Ivy League school still will still have the conversation with their parents about being black to explain why the other kids treat them differently or why they get stares in convenience stores.
Class has more of an effect on your day-to-day life than race. Sure. Fine. But your race is still a part of who you are and affects how you’re treated at all incomes which is the point. Like Jesus, Obama is rich AF and was the most powerful man on earth and his blackness was front and center his whole political career. There is no way a white political figure would have to deal with his haters posting bad photoshops of him in tribal garb where the whole thing is that he’s a scary foreign African. They might have to deal with other bullshit but not that which is the point.
Black hair isn't white hair and black shared experiences in America are not white shared experiences in America. Sometimes you need to talk and vent without a bunch of resistance from outsiders to that experience.
Viewing masculine gatherings and mentoring relationships through the lens of "therapy," is patronizing and another example of filtering culture through the narrative of powerlessness. Here's another take. Most people who say they want you to talk about your feelings are predators looking for angry and vulnerable young people who they can manipulate with sympathy and groom for other pipelines and agendas. The barber shops represent a barrier to those people because heterosexual men typically don't relate well to the sort of enablers who prey on young men, and those personalities cannot navigate masculine environments well.
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.
The idea that abusers "cannot navigate masculine environments well" is absurd, ignores the fact that much abuse has taken place in masculine environments throughout history, and imagines that abusers somehow give themselves away by not presenting as traditionally masculine. Where are you getting this?
Abuse, e.g. sadism, opportunism, deception are all definitions of unmasculine behaviours. There are men who behave in unmasculine ways, and I'd reassert they usually disqualify themselves from deeper friendship with men who don't. Among men, I would also say that negative traits are necessarily also unmasculine because they are usually immoderate instances of other qualities.
Of course, this is a practitioners view which perhaps does not reconcile itself to theory.
I'm having trouble following you. The behaviors you describe above are neither 'unmasculine' or 'unfeminine'. They are behaviors that can be evidenced across the gender spectrum.
I think you are right that many therapists expect their clients to adopt a position of helplessness and submission, and label them as uncooperative if they don't. We constantly hear about the stigma among men against going to therapy, but no acknowledgment that men's approach to emotions is influenced by the fact that men are the main breadwinners in most households. The typical stoic male approach to emotions isn't just arbitrary "male culture", but a product of the fact that if you as a man can't get out of bed in the morning, people go hungry.
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.
>Most people who say they want you to talk about your feelings are predators looking for angry and vulnerable young people who they can manipulate with sympathy and groom for other pipelines and agendas.
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.
The examples I was thinking of came from growing up in a city where there is a layer of social workers, teachers, "educators," and even therapists who encourage young men to blame their problems on society and an oppression narrative instead of equipping them with the tools to develop constructive masculine friendships with boundaries. There are real systemic social issues that men who are american and black must face, but the article reframing normal relationships as therapy is precisely the kind of framing that harms male friendships.
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.
A question on the article title from someone who is not aware of the latest words to use w.r.t. race - why is it "Black barbers" but "African American men"? Why aren't both "black" or both "African American"?
Questions like that can be interesting but unfortunately there is no way that a comment like this will lead to interesting responses—just flames from users who, for whatever reason, have other, stronger feelings than curiosity right now. Therefore it's best, as the site guidelines ask, to "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
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.
I know it's well-intentioned, and I know American society has very real structural race problems which shouldn't be ignored or denied, but articles like this really risk being patronizing, and worse, implying that most or all black childhoods are as flawed as the one described.
They used to be high quality. Many news organizations have dropped a few notches. It is unfortunate that Hong Kong has lost its independence and suffering more and more from Chinese Communist policies.
