Monday, The Atlantic provided the long-awaited account of the “lost story of American facial hair,” a story that takes several cultural and aesthetic turns but, author Sean Trainor insists, begins and ends in the same sinister worldview: white supremacy.

After making sure to reference the iconic beards of the Duck Dynasty men, Trainor sets the stage for his tracing of the racist history of facial hair in America.

It begins with white Americans at the time of the Revolution who derided barbering as the work of “inferiors.” It continues with black entrepreneurs who turned it into a source of wealth and prestige. And it concludes with the advent of the beard—a fashion born out of desperation but transformed into a symbol of masculine authority and white supremacy.

It all started with a pre-revolutionary, mostly-racist division of labor, where “slaveholders in need of grooming often turned to their enslaved workforces.” After the Civil War, barbering remained a racist—and sexist—institution.

Thus, thousands of former slaves—many with experience as valets, manservants, and barbers—were foisted upon a market that offered them little in the way of employment, apart from dangerous jobs in manual labor and demanding positions in household service. One of the few jobs that presented even faint hopes for prosperity was barbering. Not surprisingly, it was open almost exclusively to men.

As it was a male-dominated environment, of course the barbershop was a violent place, sometimes requiring African American barbers to walk a fine line in keeping the peace between belligerent white patrons.

Keeping the peace required the lightest of touches. The laws of white supremacy—both written and unwritten—effectively forbade men of color from giving orders to customers or physically restraining them. Besides, many barbers understood the cruel reality that customers’ ability to flagrantly disrespect them was part of the space’s appeal.

The popularity of the beard began to grow in the mid-1800s, and its popularity was inevitably rooted in white supremacy (where it necessarily remains):

...by the late antebellum period, they were more widely accepted, thanks largely to a strenuous public relations campaign that reimagined the beard as a symbol of white, masculine supremacy.

A 21-part series in Boston’s Daily Evening Transcript, published in late 1856, was typical of such efforts. In these wide-ranging articles, pro-beard polemicists argued that the beard represented a rugged and robust ideal of manhood, proving white Americans’ dominion over “lesser” men and “inferior” races. 

Which brings us to Duck Dynasty and the Boston Red Sox...