The Barbershop That Changed My Life

A friend and community organizer, John Rasberry, invited me to come down to his barbershop on Myrtle Avenue in January of 2011 to join in on a community meeting. This meeting included residents from the micro-local neighborhood, as well as adults and minors who have lived in the villages of Bushwick, Bedford Stuyvesant, and Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York.  The discussion during the meeting was centered on the heightened police presence in the immediate area surrounding their homes, and what this presence would mean for them, their families, and their safety.

Mr. Rasberry started out by having us go around in the shop, stating our names, where we were from, and why we were here. When it was my turn, I explained, “My name is [redacted], I’m originally from Providence, and I moved to Brooklyn to study photography at Pratt over on Willoughby. I am committed to social justice, and that’s what brings me here.” I looked up to see faces of surprise; I was looking for acceptance. It was more than just an acceptance to pacify, to make me feel less intimidated and uncomfortable. I was looking for an acceptance, a trust, that would allow me to be a constructive member in such a gathering.

This night would have a more profound effect on me than I had originally anticipated. It was a humbling experience to be in this space, to sit in solidarity. No matter how many times I put myself in situations where I see a dire and immediate need for social action, the same feelings reoccur. This one was particularly intense.

For the most part, I listened. After all, this meeting was about them, their homes, and their human rights being violated. It was about these white police with no sensitivity nor connection to the area’s deep seeded and systemic social and economic issues. I was captivated by their forwardness and honesty when recounting their experiences.

The only woman other than myself in the room had a compelling story to tell. She was beautiful, and you could see it immediately, even through the thickness of her skin. She spoke of how she had some degrading experiences at the 79^th precinct while she was in an abusive relationship. The precinct’s refusal to help her forced her into staying in a dangerous situation with her children. It was not the police, but other members of the community in Tompkins housing, that pulled her out of her situation and helped bring her life out of darkness.

As I heard more and more stories I became increasingly more depressed about the state of their lives. I had barely walked a mile down the road to find a group of seriously oppressed individuals. All I could do was internalize this information. It weighed heavier on my mind as we sat and talked. My life as a young white woman is no comparison. I do not have these daily struggles. I tried to imagine these experiences happening to me, the constant harassment, the violation of my personal space, the helplessness that comes with asking for help and receiving none, but they just plain don’t. At one point the room silenced for me to speak and all I could do was look down at my hands. I said “I truly wish I could relate to you all better, but all I can say right now is that these hands of mine are white, and it disturbs me that a certain pigment of skin has eliminated all of these worries throughout my life. Because it’s so ludicrous an idea. ”

After the meeting adjourned, John came up to me and told me that he had a lot of respect for my openness and honesty towards my skin color. It was refreshing to have a conversation about race in what they are calling a ‘post-racial’ world. I’m sick of hearing that there is no need to talk about it. We need to talk about it.  It is not an underlying problem, or a single issue, but rather an intersectional reality in peoples everyday lives. This experience taught me it was possible to feel acceptance as the other. It was to eliminate the feeling of otherness, to see the commonalities, and to let the differences fade away, if even for a brief moment.

Donnell Alexander’s essay “Cool Like Me” explains something that has been fluid throughout the history of African American culture. They have been able to create and maintain despite their oppressions as a people. “Cool is all about trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents…they devised a coping strategy called cool, an elusive mellowing strategy designed to master time and space. Cool, the basic reason blacks remain in the American cultural mix, is an industry of style that everyone in the world can use. It’s finding the essential soul while be essentially lost.” (Alexander)

Alexander’s essay is essentially a comment on the revolutionary nature of black people. When economic and racial systems pushed them one way, they pushed back in a genius manner. Now their ideas have dominated mainstream culture whether it is through hip-hop music or “Air Jordans, Tupac, and low-riding pants.” All of these styles and movements are reactions to how society has declared their human lives somehow inferior. (Alexander)  

Cornel West is a leading scholar in racial justice. His book Race Matters speaks of intense black nihilism in which “the accumulated effect of the black wounds and scars suffered in a white dominated society is a deep-seated anger, a boiling sense of rage, and a passionate pessimism regarding America’s will to justice.” This could have easily and understandably caused the majority of those sitting in the barbershop to react to my presence with a number of different, but nonetheless negative, emotions. After all, we were discussing brutality and ignorance among the mostly white people of the 79^th precinct police. (West)

But otherness disappeared this night at the barbershop. It was powerful to witness it. The beauty in this situation is that I was supposed to be the perceived ‘other’ because I was with people who were in very different situations in comparison to my own. In the context of patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist society, though, these black and brown people are constantly perceived as the ‘other’. The roles were reversed, but there was this intangible cohesion between us. We never left race out of the discussion. We didn’t tip toe around it. We didn’t pretend like the differences did not exist. We were, however, honest about our differences, and with this came an overwhelming amount of respect. I walked out of the barbershop feeling renewed. It’s that intangible feeling that I must hold onto, hold onto it with everything, I thought. Call it trite, but I still think it’s worth saying. I have hope, and hope is powerful to possess.

Works Cited

Alexander, Donnell. Cool Like Me.

West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon, 1993.

An Image Makers Contradictions

She is out of control, and somehow, through that freedom, she remains in equilibrium with reality.

Thoughts dance. 

She is the first realization of reflection in a stream. Her constructs are a lit echo of ever flowing distorted estimations.  She is a pulpit, a microphone, and an orator simultaneously. She is a novel with no ending or beginning. She cries without tears. She is a scholar, a teacher, a radical, and a criminal. She spits rhetoric abrasively. She is seeped in justice for the unseen, the unheard, and the abandoned. She is empathy, and her arms are long enough to reach across continents. She embraces the dirt of the earth as she caresses it between her fingers. She is a dissident holding a puppet, with eyes that sting of teargas. She is a martyr who bleeds human blood, the blood of us all. She is her own language, a language composed of a vast, worldly vocabulary of imagery. She is a feeling, sometimes wasted.

She is raunchy and stark. She seduces anyone who would dare to look into her. She fiends for perceptual pleasure. She seeks the suspended orgasm of thought and idea.  And that is high. She runs in all directions at the same time. She has the skin of a chameleon, the teeth of a sabre, and the feet of a dusty footed philosopher. She is dumb and pure like an infants first breath into sunlight. She is a priest, an imam, a rabbi, and a shaman. She has no home, for her only residence is within her own soul. She is light.

She has not been created vicariously, in any particular image and likeness; rather, she is constantly shifting into the image and likeness of independent thought. She stands alone on the stage. Her layers peel away, entrancing her voyeurs. She is conceptual by nature, and that is what makes her such a dangerous creature. She is wonder. She is anything her creator has internalized as valuable. She is never static, for new eyes change her existence.

I see her standing there, at the crossroads of immaturity and enlightenment. I am her creator; her voice is my voice. I am her origin. I lift up the glossy photograph and stare at it blankly. Is it just a piece of paper without my omniscient presence? And I begin to weep over the probability of her awesome meaninglessness. 

Deface Everything

Flying through back alleys,
Constructing characters from 
Shadows falling on rotten city streets.
Wheat pastes that stare back,
Make me circle the block just for a second look,
at your beauty and poise.
Never grime.

MTA erasers,
The veil that is grey paint
on Williamsburg pylons.
Covering signatures,
Covering expressions.

I wish you could see what I see.
The cultural necessity that is deviance.
The joy that is scrubbing hands of spray paint.
The freedom that is art on walls,
and doors, 
and poles, 
and streets.

Makes me want to circle the block just for a second look,
at your anger, 
your politic, 
your resistance,
Never grime.

In Any War

'Didactic' is how you describe me.

Well, Your patriarchy deserves patronizing.

Your racism deserves patronizing.

Your ethnocentricity deserves patronizing.

Rip your poster off the subway wall,

Screaming

"No, you don't get to speak." 

Compartmentalization

Ism after ism

When all I wish to be

Is human.

Frustrations To Be

All you fucking artists think you're so

                                   Con cep tual,

The only concept I see is reality.

The only approval I need is My Own.

My vagina is not up for discussion,

                                 Or for show,

                     Or for your pleasure.

I am woman 

      And I am stronger than you.

I am power

      And my inner liberation

                                    Is priority.

                                    Is transcendent of your oppression.

I will simmer

I will allow your comments to permeate.

Until I boil

       And exorcise

       Your hateful spewing



To Always Be Whole.

Philosophy as Conversion, and Stoic Wisdom during Tumult

Practicing philosophy is a conversion of the soul. Once knowledge has seeped into the brain, it is quite difficult to get it out, despite its sometimes, unpleasant nature and the subsequent effect on the emotions we have. The cognition of ideas is an inherent prerequisite to understanding those ideas. It does, however, lack the dimension of analysis. It is knowledge, but without contextualization. In turn, being able to understand ourselves, our reactions, and how to have control in such an uncontrollable and violent world is difficult, but attainable. Plato spoke of virtuous education with young children and why early in life is an important time for education. In times of crisis, the Greek Stoics, like Epictetus and Seneca, who were in some ways inspired by the writings of Plato, have remarkably helpful exercises for the spirit. They had a significant amount to share as to how we can maintain that life is still worth living, despite its vast uncertainty.

            Plato takes children very seriously, realizing that this conversion of the soul to virtue and knowledge must begin at the youngest age, when the child is learning how to exist in their world and within their society.  “You know, don’t you, that the beginning of any process is most important, especially for anything young and tender? It’s at that time that it is most malleable and takes on any pattern one wishes to impress on it.” (Rep. Book 2, 377A) Plato realized the importance of the teacher and the content that is explored with children. As a philosopher, he believes that “We must first of all, it seems, supervise the storytellers. We’ll select their stories whenever they are fine or beautiful and reject them when they aren’t… they will shape their children’s souls with stories.” (Rep. Book 2, 277B-C) He is making it clear that the soul is impressionable at the youngest stages of life and therefore positive understanding must be exposed to them in order to shape them into good adults functioning in a complex society.

            If the virtuous teachings should begin young, and begin as a kind of exploration, one must ask what are the ways in which we can do so, and what topics will they concern? The Stoics were rooted in principle, that is, our “inward opinions,” (Discourses, Chap XI) as Epictetus said. It seems that as Plato recognized the child to have the capacity to learn the truth, the Stoics recognized that the only way to be true as an adult is to be true to oneself, not an idealized form, and to be able to maintain that fortitude even in times of situational unrest and disadvantage. These theories are complementary in that the good that is instilled as a child will make it easier to understanding oneself and therefore to be good as an adult.

The Stoic Seneca said, “As long as you live, keep learning how to live” (Letters to Lucilius, Letter LXXVI, 10 ). Philosophy is not a single conversion, like a conversion learned in childhood and obeyed in adulthood. It is not a conversion that happens in one moment’s time. It is a series of revolutions, of constant conversions, of adaptations, of enlightenment through new knowledge. There is no end goal with philosophy, only more questions. Through this, a web of learning and therefore analysis can be acquired. Seneca also said “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable” (Letters to Lucilius, Letter LXXI, 3) 

 The Stoics understood the nature and importance of context. The spiritual life is the life of that particular individual and one must assess the present situation to make decisions on how one will respond to that situation or act upon new knowledge.  The more knowledge is present, the better the judgment or use of that knowledge can be. This can be used most effectively to create inner pleasure or peace and avoid inner strife or pain, although the reality may not appear widely or objectively pleasurable. 

The Stoics related the spiritual life to that of how an individual responds to good fortune. As much as they preached happiness in the moment of crisis, they also knew that wealth is a destructive force in the spiritual life. Seneca stated, “It is not the man who has too little but the man who craves more, that is poor” (Letters to Lucilius, Letter II, 6). This alludes to the hunger for more material items in order to feed happiness. The spiritual life includes a detachment from the constant seeking of the materials of pleasure. The Stoics are actually making a distinction between what is pleasurable and what constitutes happiness. Instead of falling in love with our wealth and status, the strength of our mind is what should be valued. Wealth is an empty dream of comfort and indulgence, and the feeling that one could always acquire more. Such wealth will in fact not bring an end to strain and stress but will actually facilitate more of it. This is why wealth should not be valued as important in the spiritual life and why wealth will corrode the mind of the spiritual person, changing ones value systems and undoubtedly ones actions. 

Another core principle of the spiritual life for the Stoic is realizing that we cannot control everything around us. We can only control our mind, our actions, our judgments and ourselves. This takes a significant amount of practice, as it is quite natural to be affected by the happenings of the outside world. Particularly, the Stoics thoughts on death can be helpful to understand the ultimate lack of control, that is, the moment of imminent death. Epictetus stated, “In a word, neither death, nor exile, nor pain, nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles” (Discourses, Chap XI). With this as the model, we must move within the uncertain world with only certainty in ourselves and our commitment to what we believe. We must practice our principles in action by exercising them as often as life permits. Epictetus said, “Every habit and faculty is preserved and increased by correspondent actions, - as the habit of walking, by walking; of running, by running” (Discourses, XVIII). As much as we can speak about our principles, it is of the most utter importance that we practice them when the time comes that our principles are challenged, and we must be unwavering in our commitment to them. “Shall I show you the muscular training of a philosopher? … A will undisappointed; evils avoided; powers daily exercised; careful resolutions; unerring decisions” (Wherein consists the Essence of Good, VIII) said Epictetus. Doing these mind work outs will help us to strengthen our intellect so that in the face of adversity, we can weather the mental storm well and live in a healthy state of mind.

Philosophy does awaken the mind to an understanding of itself. The mind must participate in training to carry out the principles it ponders and thinks about. Particularly, our harness on our mind can help us deal with unpleasant situations, especially those situations that are well out of our control. We must at times understand our powerlessness to change the situation around us and instead convert our mind space into a place to harbor positive thoughts and hopeful will.