before i lose my style

poeticallyspeaking13:

Race Matters…On The Dance Floor

notesonascandal:

I wrote this about two years ago. It pretty much sums up my experience with Whiteness in Black party spaces. 

One thing I’ve noticed as of late, though: Whenever white girls dance to hip-hop/rap music, they are grindin’ and gyratin’ like they’re either gettin’ money or gettin’ fucked. I was puzzled for a lil’ while until I realized that they might just associate gettin’ money or gettin’ fucked with the hypermasculinity of hip-hop/rap music.

Another thing: Both white guys and white girls are VERY intimidated by the bodies of Black women on the dance floor. Whenever I find their dancing invasive or overwhelming, I get in the middle of whatever space they’ve decided to take over and I dance. I use EVERY BIT of what my mama gave me. Hips for days. And all by myself, by the simple act of what is now known as “Peebz Hip Check”, I can reclaim the space. I swear, it works every time. 

Dance floors be racialized and gendered spaces where I’m from. 

Race matters for real. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I’ve started going out to  majority white places. It’s weird. I go out with a group of black friends, we get our drink on, and then venture out to find bars where they’re playing black music. And 99.9% of the time we’re the ONLY ones dancing at these bars. We’re literally the only party going on in these places. And without fail, while we’re enjoying our space to dance and interact with one another, some drunk white college kid will infiltrate our personal space looking for validation. They’ll try to mimic our dances, looking a damn fool at it, and get all up in me and my friends’ faces tryna touch us. It makes me sick. The way we’re fetishized in these places makes me feel hostile, even if I’ve consumed enough alcohol to mellow me out.  And let me be clear that gender makes no difference in this situation. I’ve been groped by more white girls than white guys. It just makes me think of the ways black bodies are viewed in this environment. These kids want to be black so bad! I mean, my friends and I are getting it in our little corner of the bar. The DJ plays a particularly ratchet song and I look up and we’re surrounded by all these white kids desecrating the art that is twerking and begging us to teach them how to dance like us. I remember this white girl asking me to teach her how to do the “walk it out” and me giving up because her feet and the rest of her body didn’t seem to want to coordinate with each other. And if I hadn’t been very tipsy that night I would have shook my head and continued to kill it. Race matters very much on the dance floor. It’s interesting to see how black bodies are viewed in the context of whiteness too and by interesting I mean disturbingly sad. 

DANCE IS IMPORTANT.

(via karnythia)