A minority experience - bowl haircuts

Asian american males typically joke about the bowl haircuts they received as kids. The running gag is that asian parents simply place a rice bowl on top of their kid's head and then trim off any exposed hair. And of course, they did it themselves to avoid the expense of paying a barber. I hated those bowl haircuts, but knowing that the look served to emphasize how different I was from mainstream America actually isn't the most unpleasant memory I have associated with those haircuts.

My folks didn't actually use a bowl when they cut my hair, but they did use a set of electric clippers; haircuts were much quicker that way. One day, my father was giving me my haircut when he accidentally clipped the top of my right ear. This started an exchange that went kinda like this (translated into English at some points):

"OW!"
"What's the matter?"
"You cut my ear!"
"No I didn't"

I'm not sure when I started crying. It may have been before or after I showed him where my ear was bleeding, to which he responded:

"Well, it's not that bad."

I didn't develop a pathological fear of clippers. My ear healed completely.

What makes it memorable is that it went pretty much the same way conversations go when the topic is a grievance and the participants in the conversation include a minority and a non minority.

The issue is typically not the initial injury. The issue is the frustration that results when the initial injury is made to seem to be trivial - or even worse, there is no avenue to even air the grievance.

And that kind of frustration doesn't just fester. It corrodes the soul.

And this is something non-minorities just don't seem to understand.

More often than not, we're not seeking to redress grievances. We're just looking for empathy. We're not talking about sympathy. You may feel badly about someone else's situation, but that's not empathy. Empathy is about being able to understand and share someone else's feelings. It often takes a vindictive direction because it seems to be the only way for the aggrieved to get any sort of sense that the transgressor understands the impact of the transgression which usually goes beyond the actual injury.

While I'm a minority, I can't claim to understand what it feels to be black, or maybe even worse, native american. But I think that I do understand what it feels like to have no voice, to feel marginalized. When you try to state your case reasonably, you get ignored, which often results in feeling like you have to do something extreme to make your voice be heard. When you resort to something at that level, you get their attention, but now they're in a defensive state of mind because your actions are perceived as being threatening in some way.

And it sucks.