turbans at the annex: serious business

[substitute]

Our local lame bar, Pierce Street Annex, has revised their policies to allow turbans in the bar, after a Sikh complained and asked for an apology.

The article says: "Sanjum Paul Singh Samagh, 24, accompanied friends to the Pierce Street Annex bar last year, only to be turned away because his turban was deemed to conflict with a rule prohibiting hats."

Good, he can enter with his turban now.

What's not mentioned is why bars ban hats: it's to keep out black guys. American black guys almost always wear a hat going out at night. It's an old, known technique for keeping their presence to a minimum. It's similar to gay bars banning open-toed shoes "for safety" to keep down the number of women who show up to dance with gay guys.

For some time now, Pierce Street has been a destination for black guys from Riverside County who drive out here to be in Newport/Mesa instead of Riverside. I guess the management decided there were too many of them.

Bars are just a disaster in Southern California. Everyone drives home, and a bar can't make money unless you have at least two drinks, so the entire business relies on drunk driving. And then they make desperate attempts to keep a money-making "demographic" in the bar, which they can only achieve by violating discrimination laws and acting like assholes.

I liked the bars in SF and NY, where you could walk home if you wanted. I bet they have similar issues with the "mix of the crowd" though.

Comments

[mizducky.livejournal.com]

I have a friend who perpetually wears a bandana headband, who ran smack dab into a prohibition against such headgear in some bar in the El Centro area. Supposedly the ban was designed to profile Chicano gangsta-looking types. My friend couldn't be mistaken for a Chicano gangsta in a bazillion years (Caucasian skin with a serious case of studio tan, tie-dye-heavy wardrobe, nearly waist-length red hair--the headband is part of his whole leftover-hippy classic-rock musician persona). But they would not let him into this rinky-dink bar with the headband on. Stupid discriminatory rule, but at least they were applying the stupidity in a (stupidly) equal-opportunity manner? More likely that, in the management's bigoted worldview, it never occurred to them that anyone other than their stereotype of Chicano ganstas wear those headbands--let alone that, like, discrimination sucks, y'know?

(What the hell was my friend doing in El Centro in the first place? Playing a gig with his band. Not in the bar that barred his entry, though--too bad, because that would have been a really fun twist to the tale.)