#122 - Hair Today

Hair Today

9/13/08 (#122)

In North Portland, the paths of the various public buses overlap, including the #4 and the #44. They eventually service different sections of the fifth quadrant* but travel through similar neighborhoods for the early parts of their journey, allowing some residents to take either bus. I was riding the #44 last week when we pulled into the Rose Quarter Transit Center, a hub for bus and train transfers, and as we pulled up alongside a large group of African-American high school boys, one of them looked in the window and remarked, "Damn, it's all white people. Let's wait for the next one." And wait they did---our bus pulled away without picking up a single rider. (It's worth noting that I do see a broader racial mix on the #4, as I often take that one too---unlike that young man, I take whatever bus will get me home soonest.)

The decision of those boys stuck with me. It didn't feel like a "racial incident" (as the news would call it), as we all tend to gravitate to people who look like us: I'm a blue-collar man at heart, and if I had to choose to eat lunch with a table full of folks in three piece suits and a table full of folks in work shirts with embroidered names, I'd opt for the latter---I have nothing against suits (heck, I ear a tie to work every day), but my experience has been that the salt of the earth tend to be more welcoming and open. Is that any less (or more) of a judgment than what that rider said that day? I don't know, and frankly, I don't care. What stuck with me was the frankness of his statement: There was no lie told to disguise the truth, just a blunt exclamation of why he wanted to wait for the next bus.

Courtesy of the 2008 political race, America has supposedly been talking about race this year, still wrestling with an uncomfortable history and the enduring impact of that history. Yet most discussions offer theoreticals and hypotheticals in a language that seeks not to offend.

The blame for this non-discussion could be blamed on the censorship known as political correctness, which allows a racist to adjust his vocabulary to mask his motivations, but political correctness has done nothing to tighten our tongues on many matters: Most people have no compunction with mercilessly lambasting those who espouse a different political vision, making grand statements of damnation with no regard to sensitivity. (Just listen to a conservative talk about Liberals---if you substitutes "white" for conservative and "black" for liberal (or vice versa), and it would qualify as hate speech.) Race remains the proverbial elephant in the room, the topic most of us identify as a significant issue in America yet few of us (including me) will discuss with the passion we display for politics. Is it because ideologies tend to have unifying characteristics while people of a particular skin color can collectively possess a diverse array of opinions, and thus a blanket statement about liberals is simply more accurate than a blanket statement about Latinos? Is it that subscription to an ideology is a decision while our skin color is involuntary, and it's impolite to talk about something over which we have no control?

I think the discussion of skin color in America could learn a lot from the the discussion of hair color in America.

The discussion of hair color, you ask? Unsure where to find the forum that is hosting such a conversation? I'll end the suspense---there is no discussion of hair color in America. As a rule, nobody cares what color your hair is.

This puzzles me---have you noticed the incredible follicular diversity that exists in our country, with every camp daily flaunting their differences with casual nonchalance? Blond, black, brunette red---and those are just the catch-all adjectives. Within the category of blonde, there are strawberry blonds, golden blonds, platinum blonds, dirty blonds, honey blonds and more, and every other color has similar subcategories to further define the nest of threads on our respective heads.

Yet somehow, we all manage to live in peace. No one complains about certain jobs being primarily filled by redheads; there are no events downtown that attract disproportionate and disconcerting numbers of blonds; when you're looking for an apartment, no one points at a map and says confidentially, "Just so you know, there's a large brunette population in that neighborhood"; no brunettes accuse other brunettes of "acting redhead"; I've never heard a teenager assess the riders of a bus and say, "Yikes, look at all the black hair---let's wait for the next bus."

Yet hair color is just another genetically predetermined pigmentation, a chromosomal coincidence that has no impact on our intellectual and emotional abilities. Hair color is an irrelevance because we have, collectively, made it an irrelevance.
With the exception of blond jokes (which are usually inaccurate---and blond self-esteem gets balanced out with the perception that blonds have more fun), we don't pass judgment on hair color. Sure, we all have our preferences, but no one at the office goes to their boss and says, "It's just really hard working with people with chestnut brown hair. I mean, I'm not saying their any different than we are---some of my friends are chestnut browns---but when you get a bunch of them together, it's like they're talking a different language." No brown-haired man wonders if their wife was having an affair just because their baby has born blond.

I was blond as a child, and my hair gradually grew darker, and I'm convinced it has grown darker with each passing decade, a crayoned self-portrait once requiring tan, then raw umber, then brown, until now, burnt umber peppered with flecks of silver and white. No one has ever called attention to this fact, never accused me of "acting brunette". My hair color is a non-issue.

Perhaps we don't judge hair color be because we do not have to accept out hair's birth color. Hair dyes allow us to slip incognito into another sect, so brunettes can become black-haired and blonds can become redheads and the casual observer is generally unaware. Imagine if we had that much flexibility with our skin tones, greeting a long-lost friend on the street and saying, "Wow, you've gotten so much more caucasion---last time I saw you, you were more like a mocha, now you're a vanilla latte. It looks good with that outfit."

I don't have answers, just questions: Why do we make assumptions about people based on one inherited trait yet disregard the impact of another? Why is skin-color something we are uncomfortable discussing, yet hair-color is something that doesn't warrant discussion?

I can't figure it out. Maybe because I was born blond?

* The Fifth Quadrant is an increasingly common sobriquet for North that amuses me for its embrace of the annoying disregard our section receives in the city---for instance, the Willamette Week continues to categorize its eating sections as NW, SW, SE, and N/NE, despite N/NE comprising nearly 40% of the city real estate.

©2008 wpreagan