Speaking from personal experience and firsthand knowledge, one feature that most African American males value is their hair.
I’m sure you have seen in your surroundings how a plethora of black people sport fancy haircuts with intricate, and sometimes symbolic designs that dazzle–or sometimes make dizzy–whomever dares to look and wonder–wonder why that person couldn’t just get a “normal” haircut.
An example of the type of haircuts some blacks-Americans get. Cooleasyhairstyles.com
I myself am one of those black-Americans you will see occasionally ask for a design (or three) on my waves-spinning, trimmed cut for two reasons: one, I think it’s a really cool way to express yourself (in my opinion, even cooler than tattoos) and two, it’s a feasible way to identify with a culture which you inhabit.
Obviously you can’t just snap your fingers, pull a Houdini and magically make appear your ideal haircut–in most cases you have to make that trek to the barbershop!
I have the pristine luxury of being in astoundingly-close proximity to three–yes, I said three–barbershops, and since all three of them have employed people that can really cut hair, it can become a burden figuring out to which one I should go.
Yes I know, #firstworldproblems right?
So the other day, I went to one of those super-local ‘shops down my street to get a regular one-cut, with no design this time around.
As I’m waiting for my turn, I began looking around and eyed numerous sports memorabilia (replica championship belts), famous athlete posters (from Hank Aaron to Joe Frazier) and autographed pictures (too many to count)–it was as though I was waiting inside a sports museum, let alone a barbershop.
But then after getting my snazzy, make-me-look-good cut and exited the premises something dawned on me that surprisingly never lighted up my noggin before–sports has unequivocally been the driving consummate mechanism behind barbershop culture.
Sure, there are a wealth of other characteristics that one can associate with the prototypical urban shop–the one barber everyone goes too, the one barber nobody goes too and has no business cutting hair in the first place (I still wonder why many of those barbers are employed), the random gab about palpable nothingness.
However, the one constant theme present in these establishments, on an interstitial yet cultural level, is how sports through the decades have come as a symbolic feature on each local ‘shop across the United States.
Now as you read this, you might be saying “talk about stating the obvious” or some other uncleverly snide remark, which is fine and I to a certain extent can understand your sentiment.
My rebuttal: is it really that evident? For those who have frequented the type of barbershop I have assiduously described, you know that while you’re there you sit around, listening or joining in a discussion about whose football team is the best or which team will win the NBA finals for countless minutes, yet hardly anyone truly thinks about how sports can help even the least wordy male individual ignite conversation.
Think about this: imagine a world without sports.
Pondering that, you may have a catastrophic, Armageddon-like scenario propped up in your mind and that’s okay because you’re not alone in thinking that way.
All day, every day in a barbershop. Sporcle.com.
But now imagine how that would affect the urban barbershop.
What would you talk about?
How would you, the customer and the employee, pass time as you wait your turn and subsequently get your turn to get a haircut or spend the day cutting many people’s heads?
Now there are some other topics about which people could banter–women, money, politics?–but let me say this: in many years of getting a ‘freshie’ I have learned that while the aforementioned three topics can generate comical albeit confounding discussion, sports is the one central prompt while other things to talk about are conduits sprouting from it.
While I have illustrated sports as something noticeable in a barbershop, it really isn’t because it’s not something you think about.
It has an omniscient-esque impact on ‘shops–it’s everywhere, yet not something about which you wonder either while inside or after paying for you ‘cut and leaving.
If what I have said is something with which you don’t agree, just go to one of the many shops in urban America, sit back, listen, gander at your environs and watch.
Then get at me.
Not Your Average Sports Talk 