Dancing Under the Weight of Racism

ABSTRACT

The slogan “I can’t breathe” reverberated in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement protests against police brutality and racial injustices in America. As much as there was an uncanny coincidence with that phrase and the root of the COVID-19 pandemic, the immediate association of those words for me, a dance educator in South Africa, was the 2015 #RhodesMustFall national student protests in South Africa. Black students at the University of Cape Town, and eventually across the nation, vehemently protested racism and the suffocating whiteness of their institutions and curricula. Their motto of “We can’t breathe” resonated in our dance studios and lecture halls. Through personal narratives the author aims to reveal multiple ways in which racism can permeate dance teaching and learning and the adverse effects of this abhorrent phenomenon on dancers and dance education. A lacuna in the dance scholarship on race and racism are first-person accounts that provide rich descriptions of individual’s lived experiences with racism in dance. As a step toward healing and transformation, such storytelling is useful for demystifying a phenomenon that is complex and prone to blind spots and denial. © 2022, Pennsylvania State University Libraries. All rights reserved.