{"id":8666,"date":"2009-04-27T12:21:16","date_gmt":"2009-04-27T17:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=8666"},"modified":"2017-09-16T18:04:57","modified_gmt":"2017-09-16T23:04:57","slug":"race-entertainment-and-trans-racial-historical-borrowing-the-case-of-lindy-hop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2009\/04\/27\/race-entertainment-and-trans-racial-historical-borrowing-the-case-of-lindy-hop\/","title":{"rendered":"Race, Entertainment, And Historical Borrowing: The Case Of Lindy Hop"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"frankie-bio\"This post is dedicated to Frankie Manning<\/a>.\u00a0 Frankie died this morning<\/a> of complications related to\u00a0pneumonia\u00a0\u00a0 He was one month shy of his 95th birthday.\u00a0 I will really miss him. \u00a0<\/em>Frankie is a lindy hop legend.\u00a0 He choreographed the clip below and is the dancer in the overalls.<\/em><\/p>\n

In the 1980s, there was a lindy hop revival.\u00a0 Lindy hop\u00a0is a partner dance invented by African American youth in Harlem dancing to swing music in the early 1930s. Named after the \u201chopping\u201d of the Atlantic by Charles Lindbergh Jr., it became wildly popular in the 1930s and \u201840s, traveling from the East to the West Coast and from black to white youth.\u00a0Since its\u00a0resurgence, Lindy Hoppers have enjoyed a national scene with websites, workshops, competitions, and city-wide social events that draw national and international crowds.<\/p>\n

Though lindy hop was invented by African Americans, lindy hoppers today are primarily white.\u00a0\u00a0These contemporary dancers look to old movie clips of famous black dancers as inspiration.\u00a0 And this is where things get interesting:\u00a0 The old clips feature profoundly talented black dancers, but the context in which they are dancing is important. Professional black musicians, choreographers, and dancers had to make the same concessions that other black entertainers at the time made. That is, they were required to capitulate to white producers and directors who presented black people to white audiences. These movies portrayed black people in ways that white people were comfortable with: blacks were musical, entertaining, athletic (even animalistic), outrageous (even wild), not-so-smart, happy-go-lucky, etc.<\/p>\n

So what we see in the old clips that contemporary lindy hoppers idolize is not a pure manifestation of lindy hop, but a manifestation of the dance infused by racism. While lindy hoppers today look at those old clips with nothing short of reverance, they are mostly naive to the fact that the dancing they are emulating was a product made to confirm white people’s beliefs about black people.\u00a0 Let’s look at how this plays out:<\/p>\n

This clip, from the movie Hellzapoppin’ (1941) is perhaps the most inspirational clip in the contemporary lindy hopper’s arsenal:<\/p>\n