In his novel about beauty, love, and his mother, a Vietnamese beauty worker by trade, Ocean Vuong wrote it best: “To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not always a choice.”
The programs meant for refugee Vietnamese, alongside immigrant enclaves created out of necessity due to racism, made group economics even more vital. They also privileged the middle class and those more easily assimilated into America, those with English proficiency and those with military connections. After the first group of trainees, mostly middle-class, English-speaking, and with military connections, more and more refugees coming from more rural areas or with lower proficiency levels also entered the industry. The success of these new immigrants in a racist institution fostered resentment among longer-standing American minorities. Asians were shaped into a myth of the model minority that many of us took to the bank: our own banks, our own familial networks, or government-sponsored programs. We were also expected to fight against other minorities for space and economic opportunities that white people had no interest in, redlined into the same housing markets and expected to betray each other, told that there was scarcity. It often worked, because racist communities across the United States created scarcity through refusing to lease or lend to nonwhite community members. People implemented racist clauses in housing deeds and rejected or offered outrageously predatory lending terms to nonwhites, permitting exceptions occasionally to Asians only by assuming their proximity to whiteness or to American militarism. Redlining, the shorthand for race-based exclusionary tactics in real estate, has been actively evolving since the term and practice was coined in the 1930s. It has been seen in all the major United States cities: Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit. All of which are beauty hubs, too.
In 2022, Black nail technicians made up less than 10 percent of the industry, even though Black women spend 80 percent more than the general market on beauty products. Since the majority of the nail salons across America are Asian-owned and hire within their race, it is not a surprise so much as a consequence of racial capitalism and white supremacy fostering competition and ethnic isolation that repeats itself in communities big and small.
When you walk into a nail salon, you walk into a living history that fills the air alongside all the acrylic particulates. There is a racial hierarchy you walk into, a play that you participate in over and over again in salons across America, one that compresses race, immigration, exploitation, and solidarity into something that looks innocuous. But ask a Black manicurist how hard it is to find a salon that treats them well versus a Vietnamese manicurist in New York, ask if they are paid equally, if they’ve had to pay a fee to get a job. Ask if there’s resentment there. They’ll say yes if they trust you enough to hold their truth. These are the whisper network conversations of radical honesty about race and solidarity that many beauty professionals are afraid to acknowledge. Editorial nail artists are more likely to discuss this openly, as they don’t rely on the employment of a salon owner to pay their bills—and it has always been Black editorial nail artists who have been outspoken about it to me first and foremost. They’ve walked away from salon booths, from steady hours at a shop, finding it less frustrating to work entirely on their own. When pressed, most of the nail techs I spoke to at length brought this problem back to the Vietnam War, the flooding of the market and shifting price points, the economic opportunities given to one community but never offered to their own.