His remarks were emblematic of the anger that many African Americans have over the interpersonal problems that we need to address.
On the week that Bill Cosby made his remarks two years ago, I was at my grandfather's house for a funeral in the family. The day before, I decided to walk to Sam and Terry’s barbershop to get a hair cut. For 50 years Sam and Terry’s has been one of the few enduring institutions in the African American community in Tacoma. I got my first haircut there in 1983, at the tender age of five, from Sam Moore, the co-founder still going strong in his 9th decade. Anyone with a inkling of sense, history or any sort of cultural sophistication knows that the African American barbershop is one of America’s great conservative institutions, a sort of folk lyceum, where a democracy of Ideas is permitted to flow free from politically correct discourse and dogmatism. A lot of my pragmatic Hurstonian conservative philosophy comes from the hundreds of conversations I have overheard and had at Sam and Terry’s, as well as my taste in soul music and African American literature. I also owe a lot more to Sam personally, because he was the last man to cut my father's hair when he was in the hospital, rife from the spiral meningitis and complications from diabetes that would kill him only a few weeks later; an act he didn’t have to do, because for the last 20 years of his life my father was a degenerate dope fiend.…
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