Hallie Gammon - DANC 0163 - Teaching African American Dance/History to a "Post-Racial" Class: Yale's Project O

I think this article raises some very insightful points about our supposedly "post-racial" era. I, like the students in the production, would like to think of myself as post-racial, colorblind, but, as the authors suggest, it's not so much that I can't see race as that I am indiscriminately, idealistically committed to ignoring it. I am bound by the "stubbornly exhilarating buoyancy of an imagination for what the world is like" to the point that I no longer know how to acknowledge or talk about the concepts of race without becoming desperately uncomfortable - to engage in a bit of meta-analysis, I've run up against this issue often already in this course when trying to conceptualize black dance, or even decide whether it's a good idea to try to quantify it. On the one hand, I move through my day to day life without often having to consider the concept of race; on the other, when the question comes up, I am excruciatingly aware of my own (white) ethnicity, which somehow seems to disqualify me from discussing the concept of race at all. As the authors discovered, forcing their students to explore ideas like segregation that went fundamentally against their vision of how the world should be caused them at some points actual physical discomfort, but I think this uneasiness is worth something. Although our "arguably better" lack of imagination for such situations certainly indicates some kind of progress in cultural understanding, it also leads us to ignore ever-present social issues out of a desire to avoid awkward feelings. To me, our "post-racial" world seems not so much an unconsciousness of race as a conscious ignorance of it.

In the same vein, I found the authors' hypothesis about a physical type of "historical knowledge" very interesting. It would seem that, though we profess to be intellectually unaware of race, our bodies are a melting pot of racial expressions, recording changing attitudes throughout our lifetime as expressed through mediums like dance. Though the students cited in the article seem to have deeply multiracial muscle memories, I would argue that there are those among the "post-racial" generation who unconsciously still have deeply racial physical memories. Though I was raised by liberal parents who taught me the importance of equality and the evils of racism, I still went to predominately white, private schools and (probably a particularity of my own school/social circle) spent more time practicing ballroom steps than learning to dance like a "normal" teenager. The concept of a "democracy of the body parts" is completely foreign to my own body, and I'm far more comfortable with the "quaint, simple, controlled, and innocent" dances the students in the article found so constraining. If the authors of the article are correct, my physical "knowledge" is at odds with my own intellectual beliefs. Still, for the majority of my generation I can see how multiracialism has marked not only our minds but our bodies with a blend of converging cultural ideas that are increasingly impossible to sort out (as previously discussed when talking about the concept of "black dance"). I agree with the student cited at the end of the article who argues that we can view this not so much through the lens of "looking back" as by acknowledging that who we are now is "not a revolutionary transformation, but a discovery" of how things have been for a long time.