I’ve never admitted this to anyone, but what I wanted that late spring day was to feel beautiful, more whole. Men enter the barbershop for untold reasons, and sometimes a haircut is the least of them. We aren’t expected to be beautiful. It isn’t a label typically ascribed to the physical markers of male identity. Despite measures of progress in the media, which conditions much of how people are perceived — I’m thinking of films like Moonlight and texts such as Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped and Danez Smith’s [Insert] Boy — beauty, for all the dimension it possesses, is not how society, on the whole, understands manhood. For black men, this can be especially true.

So you begin to wonder if the world had seen Philando Castile or Terence Crutcher or Jordan Edwards as beautiful, perhaps they might be with us today. We are desperate to be rendered visible. We want to be acknowledged by others, assured and held tight. In the heritage of American horrors, black men and boys have paid a particular price for this desire to be seen — and all for what? To be granted some semblance of selfhood, of humanity. It is rarely spoken, but I think men enter the barbershop seeking a form of beauty, be it in their physical appearance or their inner self. Maybe it’s clarity with regard to a personal issue, or the ease of fellowship the space provides. Maybe after a burdensome week, you are in need of release among your tribe. These are intimacies camouflaged in a simple request: Look at me.

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For all the regressive politics about sexuality or gender it sometimes harbors, the black barbershop has remained a space of pride, community, and reflection across generations, much in the same way the black church has. Much of its power is culled from its communal ethos: for hours, men rhapsodize about sports or dating or music or The First Black President. In this way, the space is a lot like fire — it crackles and yaps and roars. It is a warmth desperately yearned for. An identity less afforded to the barbershop is how intimate and vulnerable of a place it can be. The hiss of clippers clicks on, and your head suddenly becomes a canvas — it is the barber as sculptor and as counselor. Maybe he cradles your head like so, fading your sides with a hushed confidence, or maybe he tilts your chin upward, lining your beard and going on about his kids and the importance of “being there” for people when they need you. If barbering is a kind of art, then the relationship the barber has to his artwork, the client, is defined by these moments of tenderness and a genuine, knowing trust.