It’s the undying conviction that governs hair culture on the sidewalks of Philadelphia: Who touched your hair last, young buck? Your mother? The barber school by Lawncrest Library? Doesn’t matter. They messed you up.
The furrowed brows of Philly’s hair stylists betray something deeper than salesmanship. There’s genuine concern. And these comments aren’t just roasts; they’re counsel you can trust.
Longtime barber Corey Harris was cleaning his clippers between cuts at the chair that has long served as his office. Actually, he was holding court — talking to a customer about his diet. The barbershop isn’t just a place a brother can go to get an expert opinion on his scalp. Increasingly, it’s seen as a place for candid thoughts on sports, politics, and life.
Why?
“Because it is,” Harris said in the back of the Mecca Unisex Hair Salon. You know: Lil Uzi Vert’s barbershop — the wide-windowed storefront two doors down from 15th and Cecil B. Moore.
Harris would know. He watched his father command the clippers in West Philadelphia, then took them up himself at shops around the city: Germantown. North. A brief jaunt at a joint on his apartment building’s ground floor, during the months his late mother spent battling cancer. He’d seen his clients through some of their most important moments.
“Being a barber, you’re right there in the midst of their lives,” Harris said.
When we first walked in, Harris had been talking to a customer about his decision to quit eating meat. He’d reevaluated his lifestyle when his mother, the actress and singer Joliet F. Harris-Lawton, died in November 2022. Meat these days was too processed, too toxic, he decided.
That’s personal.
Sometimes, the younger Harris brings his mother’s and grandmother’s notebooks to work, their pages thick with exquisite handwriting. He does quite a bit of writing himself. That’s personal.
But then came the political: In July, Former President Donald Trump implied that his opponent wasn’t truly Black. Vice President Kamala Harris, who is biracial, had robed herself only in South Asian identity early in her career, Trump told a gathering of Black journalists in Chicago.
“Then, all of a sudden, she happened to turn Black,” Trump griped.
It was a bald-faced lie, channeling Jimmy the Greek and Uncle Ruckus. Even the veteran reporters in the room gasped and groaned.
But the media didn’t know whether the claim had resonated with the public, especially the millions of young Black men said to be giving Trump a second look. So, in a report produced by Harrisburg’s CBS21 and re-aired to thousands of viewers on CNN’s “Smerconish,” a reporter popped into a barbershop and asked: Is Kamala Harris Black?
One can just about guess the answers with a quick Google search. Top results: The New York Post and Fox News.
Michael Smerconish reappeared after CNN’s cut ended. Callers to his radio show had dubbed the barbershop men “low information voters,” he assured the audience. Four guys awaiting a line-up didn’t speak for the nation’s 20 million Black men.
And yet: What else could that CBS21 reporter have been thinking, draped in a gaudy Jumpman T-shirt and blazer? What else were CNN’s producers imagining when they pulled that tape and ran it that Saturday morning?
“For one, it’s laziness, because they don’t have any connections beyond that,” said Linn Washington, Jr., a longtime local journalist now teaching at Temple. “It’s the low-hanging fruit: ‘Let’s go to a barbershop. There should be some people there.’”
Somewhere between the 18th-century Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner’s Virginia slave revolt, the American legal system developed a phobia of large, majority-Black gatherings. Barbershops became one of the few places African American men could congregate without violence and suppression from the outside, according to the National Institutes of Health.
The Black church exists, too, and other spaces. Yet CBS21 didn’t walk in on a sanctuary.
Even the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee filmed an ad attacking Pennsylvania Republican candidate Dave McCormick in a hair salon. And Donald Trump’s restoration bid used an Atlanta barbershop for a “Black business” forum.
Like church, people trust the cuttery with big moments in their lives—first dates, funerals, and job interviews. They’re putting their lives in the hands of people like Harris and fellow stylist Leticia Kelly-El. Might as well talk about politics, sports and life.
“The church is a safe space for us,” Kelly-El said. “And the barbershop is a safe space, too.”
We rose to clear out. Harris’s eyes locked onto my hairline. His voice got low.
“Hey…” he looked up. And down. Back and forth. Up again—no easy task. “Are you planning to do something about that?”
Be the first to comment