My barber called Kamala Harris a “ho.”
The shop I go to is not the stuff of Black culture lore. It’s not a boisterous place. It doesn’t reek with toxic masculinity. It’s a nice, quiet, family friendly kind of enterprise.
The worst I have been subjected to in the nearly three years I’ve gone there is being referred to as “Ma’am,” which though appropriate at my age, still takes some getting used to. There’s also “young lady,” which is patronizing, but I shrug that off.
In the five minutes it takes to trim my undercut, I tend to stick to pleasantries: offspring; the Golden State Warriors; vacation plans.
More serious topics, like vaccines, or the evils of pork, come up, but things never get heated.
On my last visit, though, as we both lamented the number of Black women who have lost jobs since President Donald Trump reentered the White House, it was my barber who quoted the number: More than 300,000. That’s how many Black female workers left the public and private labor force between February and July of this year.
Which made what followed all the more surprising.
Trump is trouble, he said, but if Harris had been elected, “That ho would have taken my guns.”
I reminded him that Harris had insisted during her campaign for president that she is a gun owner.
“She still would have taken my guns,” he said, adding that White men would have been allowed to keep theirs.
“Not if your guns are registered and you pass a background check,” I said. I didn’t address the fact that he’d referred to Harris with the H word.
I get that not all Black folks love or even like, the former California prosecutor, Senator and Vice President. But that this Black man who has daughters of his own, referred to another Black woman in such vile terms left me speechless.
As a sorority pledge in college, my moniker was the “Little Ivy who hates to talk.” I’ve been put on the spot in book clubs and other discussion groups with a probing “What do you think, Elaine?” I had a pre-marital therapist who advised me not to edit myself so much. When I accepted a job on the editorial board of the Boston Globe, a coworker said, “I didn’t know you had opinions.”
True, I do operate on the adage that it is better to be silent and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. I prefer to have my ducks in a row before stating a fact or expressing a point of view.
I get it honest. I grew up in a household in which my mother and sisters were full of chatter. My father, from whom I inherited my love for journalism and the written word, was a man of very few words. But when he had something to say, it was meaningful. I like to think I take after him. And when someone else says it better, I’m happy to yield my time.
In the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, who couched his bigotry in a veneer of open debate, several pundits, including Democrats and liberals, tripped over themselves to hail Kirk’s commitment to “open dialogue.”
Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates challenged the echo chamber of gushing postmortems in a piece in Vanity Fair:
“By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy,” the intro to Coates’ article read. The essay, titled “Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause,” included a litany of Kirk’s racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, and antisemitic provocations.
Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist, author and podcaster, and one of the apologists Coates had singled out, responded: “Coates compared what I was doing there to the whitewashing of the Southern cause after the Civil War.”
So as pundits with platforms do these days, he invited Coates to join him on his podcast, the Ezra Klein Show.
“One thing for me is that in the immediate hours after somebody is murdered in public, when you see that sort of grief and horror pouring out of the people who loved him — and many people loved him — my instinct then is to just sit with them in their grief,” Klein offered in his defense.
“To say: ‘I can for this moment find some way to grieve with you, to see your friend in some version of the way you saw him.’ That’s not my view of the person’s whole legacy, but going to people when they’re grieving like that and saying: ‘Listen, I want to tell you what I really thought of your friend’ — just feels like not what you do in a community.”
“Was silence not an option?” Coates asked.
As a person of few words, that question resonated with me. In this age of the defunding public radio, the extortion of corporate media and the shameful acquiescence of social media moguls, is silence ever an option?
The most appropriate response to Charlie Kirk’s hateful speech was more speech. I certainly understand Klein’s impulse as a journalist to say something about the horror of such a public assassination, while not speaking ill of the dead.
I also believe that Coates’ essay was the appropriate response to the whitewashing of Kirk’s bigotry.
***
Back at the barbershop. I walked out of the shop before I could fully collect my thoughts.
I texted a friend. “My barber just called Kamala a ‘ho.’ Now, I’m gonna have to find someone else to cut my hair.”
That’s a challenge. A previous barber had pontificated on the Jeffrey Dahmer case: “If you are going to be gay, don’t be gay with White people,” as if Dahmer’s Black victims somehow deserved their gruesome fates. I don’t remember how we ended up on that subject, but I couldn’t get out of that chair fast enough.
I’ve thought about going back to my barber and simply telling him that he offended me. “Young man,” I could ask, “What gave you the impression that you could look at me and show that kind of disrespect toward another Black woman?”
Or is silence the best option?
Sometimes it is, usually it’s not.
Did my barber have a right to call Vice President Harris out of her name?
Sure. But I have a right to not let him touch my hair.
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