There’s a fairly subtle line between ignorance and hatred that can be difficult to discern from time to time. If, for example, a barber refuses to cut the hair of a black man…
I am a black physician looking for a change of scenery after 30 years of working in a major U.S. city.
While visiting other medical practitioners in Bellows Falls, I thought I would have a haircut. I walked into a local barbershop.
Two gentlemen were playing cards inside. I asked them if the barber was in and one of the men said the barber was not. So I returned an hour later and the same person who said that the barber was not in was cutting a Caucasian patron’s hair.
I am very pleased to know that I would not want to work or live in Bellows Falls with the above behavior of your local businesses.
Darryl Fisher, MD,
Silver City, N.M
…may not be hateful of blacks, but that doesn’t mean this incident (which has been confirmed by the barber) was handled well or with any grace or tact. We had a demonstration in Bellows Falls on Saturday to process this incident, possibly respond to it and address it. It was fascinating, frustrating, and challenging, and I’m not sure if there are good ways for me to describe this well, but I will do my best to try.
So the focus was not on the barber himself. Most of us seemed to be working under the assumption that he was just someone who did an extremely poor job of handling a situation which was unfamiliar to him. Not all barbers know how to cut all hair types and if he’d simply said “I’m sorry– I don’t know how to cut your hair,” this would have probably never become an issue.
But it did, and now we’ve got African Americans getting the impression of Vermont as being racist, and we’ve got townspeople in Bellows Falls feeling like they’re unfairly being associated with an incident which, regardless of intent, comes across as racist.
When I said above that the focus wasn’t on the barber, I meant that, and it was a little easier to keep the focus off the barber himself, before I read that he…:
…seems angry that Fisher spoke out about what happened.
“What does he have to go stirring this up for?” he said, adding that he believes black people are more racist than white people.
[…]
He said he’s not worried about the negative publicity affecting his business. A few customers mentioned the letter in the paper, he said, but they tended to bring it up as if it was “a big joke.”
So.
Uhm.
Okay. The point still isn’t about the barber, but dude? Seriously? You’re not helping.
[sigh]
Anyway, back to the point.
This is hard to address, and it came out easily how hard this is to address based on the conversations that took place during and after the small rally. Several of us talked about the complexity of prejudice and how much of it there is across multiple levels. Someone pointed out that there seems to be a lot more prejudice against gays in Bellows Falls than blacks. Someone else mentioned the dangers of oppression olympics in which you try to figure out who has it worse. I just suggested that that’s probably because there’s a lot more of us who are visibly queer than visibly non-white, so it’s easy to see homophobic actions directed at people in the town.
But here’s the thing: I’ve seen racist incidents in Bellows Falls in the past. At one business, I heard one (white) employee making a joke to an African American co-worker (who didn’t respond but looked visibly uncomfortable) about watermelon and fried chicken. It is not uncommon at all for me to hear people use the phrase “Jew ’em down.” I routinely see homophobic comments being made by teenagers.
Vermont’s a strange place. People from outside the area think we’re super liberal. About some things, we are, but there are plenty of people here who are afraid of people who are not like them, whether it be non-whites, transsexuals or the homeless. It’s not something we like to talk about, but in the past, we’ve even seen anti-gay incidents even in Burlington.
Vermont’s unusual, but it’s not immune from these issues. Before I read the barber’s additional comments, I was willing to attribute the incident to simple ignorance. I can’t do that now, and maybe it’s for the best that I can’t so easily escape the fact that my area, just like any area, has racist elements to it. Vermont elected Obama by the highest percentage of any state in the union (though DC beat us by a fairly large margin) but that doesn’t mean we’re post racial.
What this incident and its follow-up tell me is not that there was a single incident in Southeastern Vermont with racial overtones, but that there’s a large enough population supporting a local business’s inartful handling of someone from a different ethnic group to give its owner the impression that the proper response is to be more overtly racist.
This, for me, just went from being a matter of concern to a serious problem.
There is ample evidence that racism has not been eradicated.
It is a bit surprising, though, that the follow-up article in the Reformer completely fails to mention that a public accommodation, such as a barber shop, is prohibited by law from discriminating on the basis of race. The owner of the shop could be subject to injunctive relief, damages, punitive damages, and attorneys’ fees in a civil action arising out of this incident.
http://www.leg.state.vt.us/sta…
Meanwhile, it’s encouraging that other residents of Bellows Falls and vicinity are taking this very seriously.
“What does he have to go stirring this up for?” he said, adding that he believes black people are more racist than white people.
Okay, it’s not the Kingdom, but still…
This sounds just like the Deep South. Outside agitators. Blacks are the real racists. Everything’s fine so long as they don’t get uppity. Oy.
I know where to go if I want a ‘Pure’ haircut.
Sad, it is.
But not surprising.
Touring some folks around BTV last year from the midwest I was shocked when I overheard the statement ‘Wow, I didn’t think you had many of those people up here…’
It is out there. Sometimes deep below the surface, many times just below the surface, other times worn on the sleeve proudly for all to see.
Look, Vermont is the whitest state in the country. So quite aside from people who hold deeply negative attitudes of prejudice and bias, we have plenty of people whose attitudes result from profound ignorance — they’ve never worked or lived with any number of people of color. I was NINE YEARS OLD before I met an African-American. I was EIGHTEEN before I spent any time with an African-American who was my age. One of my grandmothers — a firm supporter of civil rights and school integration — thought that African-Americans had poor eyesight. She knew this because the one black woman she’d met had poor vision. Many of today’s Vermont children only know people of color as the adopted children of white parents. It isn’t possible to be “post-racial” if you’ve never been “interracial.”
Beyond the insensitivities born of ignorance, though, is the problem common to all human groups: there is always a significant percentage of people governed by irrational fear, which tends to cause vicious attitudes. This last election showed that up very clearly. These same attitudes show up over and over again, all over the world, throughout recorded history. Barring massive transformation of human DNA, they will always be with us (not allowing for this reality tends to cost liberals elections, btw). The most any society has been able to do is just what Bellows Falls is doing: make this a concern of the community. Help reflexive attitudes become conscious so that they can be processed and changed. Embrace diversity with trust. And make sure that the law reflects what is right and that the right is enforced. Paranoia is not cured by legal and societal disapproval, but its expression can be limited in public transactions.
My husband and I have seen some blatant examples of racism in Burlington, and that is another reason that diversity training and a more diverse faculty is needed in Burlington schools.
My daughter is a paramedic in South Carolina. Today, she is driving home from an out-of-state trip with friends. Here is the text message I just received:
Although she has not lived in Vermont for five-years, and since graduating high school in 2001, she has lived in North Carolina, Atlanta, Vermont, California, and now South Carolina, she is quite aware of the racism she sees or hears almost every day. Our whole family finds it quite disturbing.
When I was in high school in a small town in VT, we had one black family. They were full integrated and accepted by everyone in the school and the town (at least I never heard anyone say anything).
I remember hearing someone say, ‘See, Vermonters aren’t racists!’
And I thought to myself, yeah we have one upper-middle class family whose kids are A students and on all the extra-curricular groups. This town would change that tune if half the population were unemployed young black males!
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And I know of one woman and her son who moved to Tennessee because the racism there was MUCH LESS than here. She lived in Section 8 housing in Barre and heard racist comments all the time, every day from the other residents and especially from management. She went to an eatery in Waterbury Center and was doused in ketchup by the racist patrons with the approval of the racist business owner!
Vermonters say they aren’t racist simply because there’s almost no non-whites to act racist toward!
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I make sure my children know that it is the (almost) all-white state of Vermont that is the anomaly, that there are lots of other people in the world. I take them down to New York City once every so often so they can see other people and hear other languages and know that people are not all the same color. Right now my kids are watching the musical version of John Water’s ‘Hairspray’ which is about both Fat Acceptance and Racism. My kids were astonished to hear that biracial relationships were illegal as recently as when I was born!
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And finally this reminds me of when my mom went into the venerable No-Knees Bar in Bristol (in 1989) and ordered a Manhattan. The bartender honestly told her, ‘This is a gin-joint, lady. I don’t know how to mix fancy drinks’. She had a Gennie Cream Ale instead.