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Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men

edition.cnn.com

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Re: Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men

#101

Post by whymauri »

whatshisface wrote: post #92
klyrs wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also therapy. Way more expensive than a haircut, and it's highly stigmatized especially among men. It doesn't provide community, per se, but it can help a person work through the issues that are making it hard for them to find and keep friends. And, yeah. A barbershop is a decent stand-in.

In an ideal world there would be a professionalism gradient for mental health the same way there is for physical health. The physical health gradient starts with yourself (trying to eat healthy), passes through your friends casually assisting (participating in outdoor activities, discussing food, telling you they're staying home because they're sick), then hits easily accessible treatments (pharmacy), moves on to mor…

>In contrast, the mental health picture for isolated urban professionals starts with self-regulation, then jumps straight to being treated by The System.

It's pretty wild how poorly equipped some parts of the country are to treat mental health. My younger sister (13) suffers from anxiety and depression. She says she just needs a therapist to talk to, but every time my parents have reached out to local resources covered by insurance they all want to immediately destroy her future, institutionalize her FULL-TIME in a residential program, and pump her full of drugs for the next five years. School and college prep? Forget about it.

Like, what the fuck? She just needs an affordable therapist... thankfully, I passed on some resources about sliding scale therapy and affordable options outside Florida Medicaid (Open Path Collective is run by angels, IMO). Yeah, she probably will need some medication, but the idea that, with only one major incident, a 4.0 GPA gifted student with a bright, educated future should essentially be orphaned and doped up through adulthood sends shivers down my spine.

The options covered by Medicaid are:

1. No treatment at all, because the system is overloaded, likely leading to further decline.

2. A social and mental nuclear option, certainly leading to further trauma and isolation. TBH, it's heartbreaking to me to think about how many parents have been duped into believing this is the only option (especially with affordable remote counseling being a more available option now).

Great system. We're lucky I have a well-paying software job, otherwise it's like the state wants people to suffer.

Re: Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men

#102

Post by dragonwriter »

jedimastert wrote: post #75
whatshisface wrote: post #18

If HN can look past the usual tropes, there's something interesting here. Lewis is trying to solve a problem a lot of other people are trying to solve: how can you have a normal community in US culture? Let me list a few solutions and you will see why his is better than average. 1. Religion. Pros: Going to church has tied communities together for millennia, and if you could just find some better pastors, it could con…

> Cons: You can't go if you don't have the money for a haircut. This is something that people are unaware of (sort of on purpose), but barbershops in black communities become ad-hoc community centers, where black men can just go and be among other black men. Gatherings of black men were (and are) seen as suspicious or "gang-related", but if there's a large gathering of black men at a barbershop, they're all just ther…

> This is something that people are unaware of (sort of on purpose), but barbershops in black communities become ad-hoc community centers, where black men can just go and be among other black men

Originally, it may have been a kinda-sorta-secret, but given the prominent role that barbershop-as-Black-social-nexus has played in popular media portrayals of Black American communities targeting general (not just Black) audiences for the last several decades, that's hardly the case any more.

Re: Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men

#103

Post by andyxor »

[deleted] wrote: post #90
andscoop wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is so far from my reality that I feel we must have different definitions of systemic racism. So I’m curious, what does systemic racism mean to you? Or to flip your statement around, what would systemic racism look like to you if it were to exist?

[deleted]

Don’t bring up controversial political points if you don’t want to hear opposing views.

Re: Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men

#104

Post by truffdog »

randomopining wrote: post #83
Spivak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you're being willfully obtuse of the authors meaning to make a point about semantics. Context and intersectionality (or PIE if you want a more nerdy less loaded term) matters here. White and black have specific meanings, a shared cultural history, and face similar issues and struggles in the US . And there's more to a person than just their "race" despite race being a particularly "loud" (i.e. strong predicto…

Actually, not at all. What does a "white" working class Italian who's parents came over in the 50's have in common with a "white" old money millionaire guy who's German ancestors came over in the mid 1800's? What does a "black" kid who went to a private school, then Ivy League, and now works at a Private Equity fund in NYC (this is my actual friend) have in common with a "black" kid growing up in Detroit? The "white"…

You don't get to opt out of the primary ethnic conflict of your society. If you get read as white and treated as white then you are white. No one is going to ask you to pronounce parsley when the time comes.

Re: Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men

#105

Post by motohagiography »

Viewing masculine gatherings and mentoring relationships through the lens of "therapy," is patronizing and another example of filtering culture through the narrative of powerlessness. Here's another take. Most people who say they want you to talk about your feelings are predators looking for angry and vulnerable young people who they can manipulate with sympathy and groom for other pipelines and agendas. The barber shops represent a barrier to those people because heterosexual men typically don't relate well to the sort of enablers who prey on young men, and those personalities cannot navigate masculine environments well.

It's useful to ask whether people who say they are operating on the pretext of "healing," and "trauma," are really just morbidly attracted to weakness and vulnerability, and if so, why. These barbershops are places created by black men as a place to gather and have some community, and the reasons for a CNN reporter to pay them any attention at all should be treated with suspicion. Journalists aren't part of the communities they cover, they are scavengers and mainly a nuissance to what they perceive to be power, so if you start seeing them, it's probably because there is something nearby whose vulnerability or weakness has made it a target to co-opt into their narrative. Those barber shops are community treasures, and I'd wonder whether they benefit from having someone else co-opt their story and re-tell it on their behalf.

Re: Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men

#106

Post by lemmsjid »

randomopining wrote: post #47
sergiomattei wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A shared set of experiences. I'm Latino, and when I visit the United States I get along well with other Latino folk because we share a set of experiences we can relate to. We probably grew up in different places but there's a background we have in common, like our language. It's called culture.

That's my point. You share language, el mundo espanol, etc. That's true cultural linkage. Whereas a "white" person from Ireland and a "white" person from Ukraine have very very little in common. A "black" person from South Africa and a "black" person from Colombia have very very little in common. And yet these are the main descriptors used in pop culture, Instagram, the media... and it's silly.

By focusing on shared experience of cultural context or upbringing, you're ignoring the shared experience of how people are treated by others. People do have things in common based on skin color. For example, my sister is Filipina. She lives in a white dominated area which has a lot of xenophobia about Mexican immigrants. She has experienced several events where she gets mistaken as Mexican, simply by her skin color and is threatened and/or told to go back to Mexico, sometimes quite angrily. These experiences are quite traumatic. The typical person doesn't make a close study of other cultures, so if they're actively racist/xenophobic/what-have-you, they don't look to the nuances of their target's background before they lash out. Being ANY minority, especially a visually identifiable minority, creates a shared experience regardless of peoples' actual backgrounds. This causes communities and identities to form as people group around shared experiences.

Yes, most ways of categorizing people and identities are arbitrary and diffuse, but in the end its people bonding over shared context and experiences, real or illusory, and I'd be hard pressed to call it silly, any more than other human behaviors that don't follow, I dunno, strict logic.

Re: Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men

#107

Post by whymauri »

motohagiography wrote: post #105

Viewing masculine gatherings and mentoring relationships through the lens of "therapy," is patronizing and another example of filtering culture through the narrative of powerlessness. Here's another take. Most people who say they want you to talk about your feelings are predators looking for angry and vulnerable young people who they can manipulate with sympathy and groom for other pipelines and agendas. The barber s…

>Most people who say they want you to talk about your feelings are predators looking for angry and vulnerable young people who they can manipulate with sympathy and groom for other pipelines and agendas.

I'm not really sure what this means... are you lumping in licensed therapists and social workers in here? Seems unfair to me, IMO.

I guess just a little clarification would be useful, not trying to tear down your view or anything. I'm equally skeptic of journalists from big orgs like CNN coming into these spaces.

Re: Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men

#108

Post by hhs »

whatshisface wrote: post #18

If HN can look past the usual tropes, there's something interesting here. Lewis is trying to solve a problem a lot of other people are trying to solve: how can you have a normal community in US culture? Let me list a few solutions and you will see why his is better than average. 1. Religion. Pros: Going to church has tied communities together for millennia, and if you could just find some better pastors, it could con…

> Lewis is trying to solve a problem a lot of other people are trying to solve: how can you have a normal community in US culture?

Indeed, in sociology this building of community is typically called the 'third place' [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Re: Black barbers have become mental health advocates for African American men

#109

Post by scarmig »

chickenpotpie wrote: post #100
neither_color wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be verifiable by looking at the economic and educational outcomes of African and Caribbean immigrants in comparison to ADOS. If discrimination is all there is to it then their outcomes should be the same. Spoiler alert: It's not the same. https://www.ft.com/content/ca39b445-442a-4845-a07c-0f5dae5f3... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U... Ghanian and Nigerian Americans make above…

Selection bias: immigrating to the US from a far away country is easier if you’re educated and rich. Doesn’t mean you’re treated any better once you get here.

So your prediction would be that African immigrants would underperform other immigrant groups originating from far away countries, owing to racism once they land here?
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