Blacks, Whites and Dancing

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a blog for the Atlantic that I read periodically. The other day he wrote a brief post that I found pretty interesting. I don't necessarily agree with him but it's an interesting view.

From the Atlantic...

A while back a buddy of mine was critiquing the whole "white people can't dance" thing. His point was that so many black kids, historically, grow up in conditions where all you have to control is your body. You have no other real way to demonstrate power, and so "body control" becomes a measure of power. Indeed the great popular dancers in our cosmology--James Brown, Michael Jackson etc.--had so much control that it almost seemed like they weren't even exerting any. They looked like they weren't trying.

Anyway, he was saying that whenever he hears black people brag about being able to dance better than white folks, he has to laugh to himself. It's like a kid from Harlem bragging to some Wall Street dude about the width of his gold rope. "You have to be able to dance," my buddy said. "because you have nothing else." On the contrary, when you see that white dude out on the floor, he's free to just enjoy himself. He has nothing at stake--nothing hanging in the balance. For us it's ritual. But for them--it's just a good time. And they're free to do that. Hell, we wish we lived in a world where we couldn't dance.