It Was The Moment I Feared...

Brothers,

A time of reckoning is approaching. In the next few years my beautiful and brilliant spouse will finish up her undergrad work, and then go tackle her dream. That dream (which we shall leave unsaid for now) could potentially land me in a land where certain cultural barriers will come into play. This is not about white people per se. Oh sure had you told me ten years ago that I might end up in, say, Oregon, I'd have stabbed you with my Afro pick, sung the second verse of our National Anthem (Stony the road we trod, Negroes) and then waved the red, black and green.

But I'm enlightened now, and all postracial up in this piece. I don't just have white friends, I have flavors of white friends--Italian white friends, German white friends, Jewish white friends, even white friends who insist their not white (those would the Jews.) The point is that I'm all into everything, I can even now admit that, yes, Christie Brinkley was hot. I'm so proud of myself. Sometimes I forget that most of my audience is white. But only for an hour.

And yet despite my new found tolerance, I'm aware that there are some barrier that even I--archon of the color-blind--can not transcend. Among them, as we've noted here, are the barber shop. Hence I've always wondered what the one brother out in Idaho (Not Boise) does to keep the fresh caesar. Should I just go to barber school now? Should I just resign myself to the busted 'Fro? What do you do when you need a cut but your one of the 2 percent in Sioux Falls?

Truth be told, I'm kind of a dandy. And every day I approach this reckoning with no way out. My greatest worry is landing in one of these towns where Negroes are so rare, you don't just speak when you see each other, you hold an entire conversation and then exchange numbers. I'm not fit to survive in such climes. So I'm calling on cats from Parker, Arizona (1.88 percent black) Lakewood, Washington (1 percent  population), Nitro, West Virginia (0.25 percent) and other parts unknown to Negroes.

What's a black man in America--Real America--to do?

Signed,
About to thrown in dreads, racial profiling be damned...