Primary Change Agents: Profile
Chase, 21 | Lifelong Resident of Huntington Beach
Lots of people are usually intimidated by Chase. Just from looking at him, he always looks pissed off and stands at a cool 6 ‘2 (with the fro, his most notable feature). I remember when he started growing his hair out. Our uncle had been taking #3 clippers to his nephew’s scalp every couple of months until he finally jumped out of the chair and insisted on getting a cut like Huey Freeman. Since then, tight curls have dangled down over his forehead and given him the extra inch or so of height that completes his demeanor.
His hair is one of the biggest topics of discussion in the Draffen household. It’s an Afro, so generally, frizz is part of the look. His curl texture is just a bit too silky to keep the shape of that, however. Our (identical) twin mothers will usually descend upon him (and have been for the last 8 years) and ask “When was the last time you combed your hair?” while sharing a disgusted look. Admittedly, the halo of frizz would be off-putting with that curl pattern. One time, a white girl I was friends with in elementary school was complaining about the frizziness of her hair. I remember giggling at her agitation and pointing out my unkempt curls. (At this age, my hair was done 3 of 5 days of the week because my dad was clueless in that regard.) She seemed exasperated with my suggestion, that maybe a few flyaways from her straight hair were nothing compared to my curls.
“Well, it’s socially acceptable for YOUR hair to look frizzy,” she huffed. I wasn’t sure how to take this. At that age, the Twins had been consistently scolding Chase to comb his hair. To a point where my aunt sent him off to school without knowing it was picture day, and the school ID that was returned to her was deemed to look like it belonged to a ‘runaway slave’ by the Draffen collective. Was I then, on that playground with my unkempt curls, acceptable to the surrounding community looking unkempt? As though my hair was a handicap that made it harder to maintain like everyone else, so they made an exception? And did that apply to Chase?
I am going to acknowledge that uncombed hair is uncombed hair. When you get to the age where you insist your mom stops dressing you and doting so you can start the long unsteady road to personal style, everything you put yourself in looks fantastic. And unkempt hair is a defining feature of adolescence. We didn’t know about personal upkeep yet! What 12-year-old boy is making himself look presentable when he’s thinking about getting home and jumping on Xbox Live to make it through the school day? It’s a universal truth that adolescents are just not on top of personal care until at least 16 or so. So why did the infamous ‘runaway slave’ picture get deemed something so derogatory? The same applies to concepts like white trash as well, where an unkempt white person gets lauded with that term. When we see an unkempt version of ourselves we see the stereotype and laugh at it. A fun house mirror, where the joke is knowing yourself well enough to see this insane reduction of who you are. But living in Huntington Beach you’re feeling as though you might have to overcompensate; becoming the polar opposite of your negative reduction, becoming your positive reduction (good student, working citizen, polite)… it’s not as fun anymore.
Within the political and social context that permeates HB, the Twins have developed a very severe response to any misstep taken by the external community AND anyone in the household. A white-bread, Trump-Flag toting neighborhood, plus a black household? Creates a very tedious line between being a dickhead or a racist. The Twins play double Dutch with that line.
“This illogical fallacy is poisoning the well.” After dealing with the painful process of bearing witness to the Twins pull the race card out with such frequency and irrational purpose, Chase became jaded. The friction from the Twin’s pockets eventually ignited the little airy card and it burst into a hollow dust that blew back into our faces. We were tired of the psychological warfare that came with the tools they gave us for navigating this area.
“It becomes a boy who cried wolf scenario, where everyone’s gonna say ‘Well this person interprets everything that happens to them as racist.’”
Their gross overreaction to an infraction made him want to not jump to a racist conclusion, or even assume too much. Whatever ‘moral ground’ his race held was quickly forfeited by the Twins.
One thing that I found extremely interesting during the interview was his point on his expression. He started to wear chains and jewelry fairly recently and noticed his mom having a certain attitude about it. “I know by putting on my chains and rings you cannot identify me as anything other than black.” Conversely, he points out that his mother wears her hair styled straight when it is not braided. These expressions of blackness found in both their hairstyles, accessories, and overall personal expression are more similar than Chase may have considered. Both he and his mother have grown up in what they have identified as ‘rich, white beach towns’. Of course, Laguna Niguel is a little different than Huntington Beach (RICH rich people), but the sentiment towards what few black residents lived in these places and the demographic that made up the community were similar in that they both attributed to shaping their identity.
Chase has been working in southern Westminster (barely a mile from his house in Huntington Beach) for a couple of years now at a grocery store. No better way to understand the general public than staffing at an essential facet of the functioning community structure. Externally, he’s dealt with slurs being hurled at him out of moving cars, deprecating treatment at registers, and things of that nature. But internally, he experienced his bosses sizing him up as the ‘diversity hire’ they needed. He was tokenized in professional settings because of his appearance as an ethnically-ambiguous black man. To perhaps get a little more retrospective, he mentioned that’s how he was perceived in social settings, too. In high school, he made it a point to strictly listen to top 40 pop and R&B solely because that’s what everyone around him was listening to. Music is a key factor in his identity development because that is the main source of connection he finds with social groups other than ethnicity. Being palatable to his peers, and his mom, he was going with a safe option because being outwardly black in Huntington Beach is a universal no. Once he found his taste, he made it a point to share it with his peers. Album recommendations and music trades are his favorite topics to explore and he’s a very talented music analyst. This practice he shared with his close circle of friends was part of the primary change he set upon for freedom of personal exploration and expression. Huntington Beach makes for a very restrictive existence, and as he had pointed out in an anecdote about introducing a co-worker to acid rap, affects most young people here. His coworker similarly stuck with the rapper he felt was the safest option to listen to in HB. But those mutually beneficial relationships with his Asian friends, exchanging culture through music and domestic experience, he found a sense of belonging because there was finally a benefit for his genuine expression of his interests.
We float towards little fringe groups of other ethnic kids because we do not have a general culture here to relate to. The general culture does not acknowledge us, so it does not make any sort of cultural shifts that would suggest we are welcome.
