Twerking: Miley Cyrus starts trend in over-analyzing ‘black’ dance
OPINION - Twerking is not something that needs ethnographic explanation. Even if it did, it should certainly not be carried out by the mainstream media...
It’s been nearly two weeks since Miley Cyrus twerked — or something like it — at the MTV Video Music Awards. The initial news reaction consisted of thoughtful essays explaining cultural appropriation, the misuse of black women’s bodies as props, and debunking the idea that twerking was somehow a staple of black culture.
But that worthwhile and highbrow chatter wasn’t enough to curb the media — and public’s — interest in America’s “new” obsession, one so popular that the term twerk recently was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
People over-analyze twerking
Apparently talking about twerking wasn’t enough. People wanted in on the action. They wanted to twerk like Miley!
The New York Post ran a twerking tutorial, an infographic that showed “how to twerk in 4 easy steps.” BuzzFeed properly derided the Post‘s efforts as “the worst thing in the whole world.”
ABC News published a bafflingly bad online report, Twerking: A Scientific Explanation, wherein an actual PhD-holding researcher was called in to explain “such a complex, technical subject,” one that young teenagers on YouTube have somehow mastered with ease, before obtaining even a high school diploma. The expert touted twerking as a way to gain “the stamina to do activities important to most people heavily involved in twerking like say, picking up a screaming child off the floor.” (Does that mean twerkers tend to be babysitters or day care workers, or are most twerkers mothers? I’m confused.)
Twitter responded with the #abcreports hashtag, spawning an epic (and hilarious) clowning of the network for over-thinking such a trite matter through a stream of related tweets.
New York Times adds insult to injury
Never one to be left out of a so-called “trend,” over the weekend, The New York Times found it fit to print an article called Explaining Twerking to Your Parents, which attributed mainstream America’s latest dance craze to “lower-income African-American women,” because somehow the writer is able to determine how much money a woman makes annually by how she dances. (Twitter’s response: #askteddywayne, a hashtag and Twitter conversation lampooning the author of the piece.)
And never to be outdone by the Times, The Washington Post ran an op-ed that tied teenage twerking to the infamous Steubenville rape case — and failed. The takeaway of the article seemed to blame twerking as a cause for teenage girls being assaulted — not predatory boys or rape culture. The Frisky swiftly denounced writer Richard Cohen as a “rape apologist.”
While mainstream America fawns over and over-analyzes twerking with vigor and ignorance, Black America — after the initial wave of insightful thoughts — has mostly been sitting by, heads figuratively cocked, just not understanding the hype.
Newsflash: That’s not twerking!
What Miley did up on that MTV stage was no more twerking than whatever dance they were doing earlier this year when college kids starting jerking and thrashing about on videos, calling that the “Harlem Shake.” (It took Melissa Harris Perry on MSNBC and a few Howard University students to show the masses what the actual Harlem Shake looks like.)
What Miley did was an attempt, but an actual execution it was not.
And while some editorials refer to twerking as coming from “black culture,” as though twerking is a cornerstone of African-American ritual ceremonies, such as jumping the broom and doing the Electric Slide at weddings — it isn’t. Most African-Americans of my generation know the act of twerking as what the spandex-wearing women, including white women, did in 2 Live Crew music videos back in the early ’90s, even if wasn’t called that by the group. New Orleans natives and followers of bounce music know of twerking — the dance and the name — from around the same time period. It’s — obviously — not something everybody does.
Twerking: Not in need of ethnographic explanation
The point is, twerking is nothing new. So why a dance that has existed for 20 years, mostly performed by strippers and dancers in unique circumstances, is suddenly fodder for mainstream news — and called “black” — because a well-known white entertainer attempts to do it publicly is perturbing — and telling.
Some people in the mainstream culture have a historically bad habit of discovering something that already exists — like say, “the Americas” — planting a metaphoric flag on it and declaring it found (as in Christopher Columbus’s “New World”), as if it was lost and had no relevance before they arrived to declare it so. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it — discovering a dance long after its initial hey day doesn’t make it new, or suddenly “in.” It only makes the new discoverer seem late, out of touch, and officially uncool.
Twerking is not something that needs ethnographic explanation. Even if it did, PhDs considering, it should certainly not be carried out by this bunch.
Demetria L. Lucas is a life coach and the author of A Belle in Brooklyn: The Go-to Girl for Advice on Living Your Best Single Life. Follow her on Twitter at @abelleinbk
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