“The Black mustache didn’t end with the disillusionments of the post-civil-rights era.”

In a new essay, “My Mustache, My Self,” the New York Times critic Wesley Morris unspools the fraught respectability implicit in his own grooming statement, amid a season of uprising.

“I knew before the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests that my mustache made me look like a bougie race man,” Morris writes.

But as he traces the symbolic trajectory of the Black mustache — from the founding of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund by the eventual Supreme Court Justice (and noted Black mustache-haver) Thurgood Marshall to the Tom Jones dance-a-longs of the sitcom character, Carlton Banks, to the bygone mustaches of his family’s male elders — Morris unveils a love letter to a legacy of quiet defiance.

My Mustache, My Self