Peace and Hair Grease

My BIG, BEAUTIFUL Adventure in Boycotting

The Goal:  To Spend Joyfully and with Purpose

By Chalmer Thompson

November 25, 2025

I chuckle whenever I hear this expression.

I remember first seeing it several years ago while reading a friend's email. He closed his message with these words, a soulful valediction that hovered over his typewritten signature. 

All too often, peace imagery is associated with doves, pristine forests, and children happily at play. Hair grease clearly defies these images and helps me awaken to an essential aspect of reality: rarely do the typical images meant to conjure concepts like peace line up with my own.   

I was in my thirties when my friend's closing words had me ponder over what I thought about peace as a "thing."  At the time, I had begun a new research project in which I invited Black female students to share their concerns about encounters with racism with either a Black or White graduate student counselor in one-on-one counseling-like sessions, what my participants didn't know until after the sessions was that I had instructed the counselors either to downplay or address their issues about racism in these encounters. In later years, when I ran similar studies, I removed the downplay-or-address conditions. In other words, I gave no instructions to the counselors and instead closely guided them on how to validate their clients' racism experiences over the course of several sessions.  

Regardless of whether the downplaying was deliberate, one interesting finding across studies was that the clients would often help the therapists by being complicit in these racial-talk "derailments."It was as if both therapist and client took part in a pas-de-deux to find comfort and harmony in the space of their encounter(s). 

I would go on to conduct more studies with different "conditions," including participants and therapists of various racial/ethnic groups, and the findings were at times complex. Still, I speculated and found some support for the conclusion that the clients' reasons for ultimately downplaying the racism were not only to make the therapist more comfortable, but also because they recognized they were not going to receive the help they wanted based on the therapists' responses. Either way, these findings were unfortunate because they signaled that the clients did not consider the therapy session as an appropriate place for sharing their experiences with racism and, therefore, as an outlet for healing and personal growth, making sense of their lives, and working to (re)discover joy. 

It would be difficult to generalize these findings to all therapies, but imagine that this withdrawal from racial talk was a trend in psychotherapy in general, regardless of counselor/client race?! It would become what Toni Morrison once described in her book Playing in the Dark (1992) as "unnecessary lobotomy," an erasure that intends to mask the hurt of racism from both client and therapist. Wouldn't it be much more therapeutic to openly identify its malignancy, helping each client achieve greater wholeness? 

Returning to the matter of peace. My images of harmony within and between people became more crystallized during those early years as a researcher when I observed a handful of my participants persistently giving voice to the racism they experienced despite the therapists' (deliberate) efforts to ignore them. These participants didn't let go, even though the cues of the expert-non-expert relationship might have made them quiet and complacent. They were neither. They were not cooperative, or their stance, their resolve as it were, was not in keeping with the expected. Some might even say that they were unpeaceful. 

This group proved to be the most peace-promoting among all my participants. Their actions were resolute, even when they expressed themselves shakily. They seemed undaunted by their status as "clients" compared to their therapists' greater power. They privately took risks, knowing that their counselors might label them as pushy, subjective, and overly narrow in their scope. I imagined that they accepted the weight they felt needed to be carried, and yet never heavy enough to disrupt an inner peace.  

These meaty, meaningful, and, yes, at times awkward, interactions are what I think of when I think of peace. It's the toil, the inner "knowing," and the constant push for growth that shape my thinking as a person and a peace (and hair grease) psychologist.

Consider Supporting Local Farmers

I've run across a few stories over the past month about price gouging by grocery stores we commonly shop at. The issue isn't merely that prices are going up. We frequent our local stores as we usually do, look for sale items, clip coupons, and seemingly find ourselves stuck in what seems like an inevitability. But the grocery store industry is complicit in practices that create this sense of defeat.  

The jolts we've experienced in our lives have resulted from a vast array of actions at the governmental level, including at the state level in places like Indiana.   Corporate greed is on the rise and protected so it can continue to grow steadily.  

We don't have to feel defeated.

We must understand the scope of the federal government's loosening of regulations across virtually everything. The heads of these businesses can dodge the sorts of actions that protect consumers. People can and have been astute about these practices by pursuing lawsuits against these companies. 

That's too much work and too many headaches. Let's avoid them altogether, or at least as often as we can.

Here's a clip from Inequality Media on the juggernaut of the grocery industry.

These regulations also loosen corporations' responsibility to inform the public about some issues, such as changes in pricing or their complicity in intentionally charging more for items based on shopper profile data. In other words, we cannot trust that they are operating fairly and with the intention of serving our best interests, never mind our survival. Dire, I know.  

Indianapolis, Have You Heard of the Soul Food Project? Here's what is written on their website:

Soul Food Project (originally Temple Gardens) was founded in 2017 to increase food access in the neighborhood of our founder, Danielle Guerin.  Since our founding, we have taught youth and adults how to grow food while establishing a system of urban farms throughout the city. Built on this foundation, our work and team have grown in many ways.

LOVE IT.

They also provide visitors to their website with resources on where to buy food, not only from their farms but also from other farms throughout this region. (Find sources in different places in Indiana). I'm talking about produce, of course, but also other foods, including meats, baked goods, and prepared foods.

Happy Survival Day 2025.  

SOMETHING TO KEEP IN MIND AND HEART

OK, I will admit that I feel more at peace when I see these breathtaking photos of trees evoke feelings

From Doty Simpson-Taylor:

"Starting November 5th, ALDI will be offering a full Thanksgiving Meal for $40.  This includes a whole turkey, chicken broth, cut string beans and WHOLE lot more."  

THANK YOU, DOTY!