This was crossposted to Green Mountain Daily
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.