Jamie Utt explains how the YouTube craze being called The Harlem Shake is actually quite problematic.
If you aren’t familiar with the Harlem Shake craze that is sweeping the internet, you may have been under a rock for the past week or two.
I’ll let Know Your Meme explain it to you:
“Harlem Shake”, not to be confused with the hip hop dance style, is the title of a 2012 heavy bass instrumental track produced by Baauer. In February 2013, the song spawned a series of dance videos that begin with a masked individual dancing alone in a group before suddenly cutting to a wild dance party featuring the entire group.
It all started with this video:
Now there are countless takes on the meme:
The strange thing about this meme is that not a single person in any of the videos seems to actually be doing the Harlem Shake:
And while it all seems like just a bunch of bizarre fun, not everyone feels that way.
The REAL Harlem Shake
Though you wouldn’t know it from the meme, the actual dance known as the Harlem Shake is not where one shakes around as if she or he is having a seizure while humping things and wearing a silly costume. It is part of the rich tradition of dance and the arts in Harlem. Dating back to 1981 and drawing upon an Ethiopian dance called the Eskista, the Harlem Shake has long been a staple of hip hop dance in this predominantly African American section of New York.
And some of the folks in Harlem aren’t too happy about the meme:
White Cultural Appropriation
When I’ve pointed that video out to some (White) people who LOVE the meme, though, their reaction has been one of, “They need to relax! It’s fun! Stop taking yourselves so seriously!”
But if you notice in the videos, the meme is, by in large, a White cultural phenomenon. That is not to say that there are not some people of Color who are participating in the videos, but it is a meme that stems from White communities and is being pushed in largely White social circles.
And if the meme were called something else (The Baauer, for instance), it likely would just be some harmless fun. But this meme does not exist in isolation.
It exists within the context of all of the other, countless forms of White cultural appropriation of . . . well . . . everything that is not inherently ours.
The reason that White cultural appropriation is so insidious is that it is not an intentionally racist, but it plays into a system of racism where White people believe that everything is ours, everything is in-bounds to us, so we can take whatever we want, and in doing so, divorce it from its history and meaning.
Take Rock and Roll as an example. If you were to ask the average person on the street which race they associated with Rock music, they would almost undoubtedly associate it as a White art form. But in its inception, Rock and Roll was a Black art form. White record executives saw the profit potential in putting White musicians in front of White audiences playing this Black art form, and Elvis Presley was born. In time, because Black artists were often denied the opportunity to record and perform their own music at a large scale, people associated the art form almost exclusively with White folks, and the rich African American tradition of the music was lost on the common consumer.
Cultural Appropriation and The Harlem Shake
So what does this have to do with the Harlem Shake meme? Well, if you were to ask the average White high school student what The Harlem Shake is, are they likely to tell you about its inception as a dance in Harlem in the 1980s and its connection to African dance forms? No. They are going to describe YouTube videos where mostly White people are humping the air and flailing around wildly to a Baauer song.
And that’s likely why many of those folks from Harlem aren’t too happy about the meme. It’s not that they want to kill your fun. They just know that when White folks get ahold of their art, it becomes something wholly and completely different, much like we’re seeing with this meme.
So before you go making your own take on the meme, consider for just a minute what the folks from Harlem are telling you in that video.
And “Stop that shit.”
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Hamline University, Saint Paul, MN
March 13, 2013
4pm to 6pm
Join us for an important educational forum, as we take a closer look at a fad that has swept the world; “The Harlem Shake”. “The Harlem Shake” that has appeared all over Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, the media and all over the world has been recently called by scholars and public intellectuals, “a modern day Blackface.”
The goal of this event is to understand the history of the real Harlem Shake, as well as look at the phenomenon of cultural appropriation.
We hope that many students, staff, and faculty from universities and colleges in the Twin Cities attend this event so they too can oppose this fad and see how it is not “The Harlem Shake.”
Media is invited, but please contact Josh Wood prior to coming: jwood06@hamlineuniversity.edu or at 612.501.5884
“White record executives saw the profit potential in putting White musicians in front of White audiences playing this Black art form, and Elvis Presley was born. ” Okay, stop right there. Putting aside the notion that rock n roll could be called purely a “black” art form and not a subtle mix of rhythm and blues, country and mainstream pop, Elvis was not a cynical product of white record executives trying to profit off of black music. Elvis grew up eating, breathing and sleeping all kinds of music, from black gospel to opera he heard on the radio. He was… Read more »
appropriation is problematic because it highlights the power imbalance between two cultures, but it is far from the cause of this power imbalance itself. what is criminal about the history of rock and roll is not that the white rockers ‘stole’ from the bluesmen, it’s that the bluesmen didn’t get PAID for it!! in other words, the problem to be yelling about is not white people appropriating black cultural practices, its that black people are not given equal economic and cultural status in the first place – that they are not ‘propriated’ in the first place. to worry so much… Read more »
“what is criminal about the history of rock and roll is not that the white rockers ‘stole’ from the bluesmen, it’s that the bluesmen didn’t get PAID for it!!”
That alone would be bad enough, but it was in the context of decades of earleir erasures and intellectual property thefts – singers in movies not getting credited, on and on.
I’m trying to understand this, I really am but it baffles me. A video with a name the same as another song is inherently racist, as a name (and only a name,) has been copied does not sound like cultural appropriation to me. It is simply using a name. How many songs called “the power of love” have there been? Music moves across cultures all the time. There are many covers by people of different colours to the original act, the majority of dance music is sampled from music of people from more than one racial background. I don’t quite… Read more »
Strange, it doesn’t seem like a big storm in a small teacup to the people being hurt by this example as one of many in a constant barrage of microaggressions and cultural appropriations.
One of the speakers on the panel about this topic put it well last night: “If you punch me in the face, you don’t get to dictate to me how much it hurts.”
If you really believe that Rock and Roll was originally a ‘black’ invention appropriated by white record company executives, you need to read “Where Dead Voices Gather” by Nick Tosches. American popular music has been a mongrel mixture of a number of different sources for a couple of centuries now.
“If you really believe that Rock and Roll was originally a ‘black’ invention..” That’s the racist “rock ‘n roll is jungle music” meme. By the time jazz got started the interprenetration of various West African and British Isles musical traditions was so thorough, at the working class level, that it;’s very hard to identfy the actual origin of just about anything. You see parallel trends in language. The Americana colonies were settled by people from four separate areas in England, with an adstrate of Irish and Scots – often induentured servants living wiht and “marrying” Africans and African-Americans. Quite a… Read more »
Maybe this is an issue Bloomberg could tackle…while he’s waiting for the soda ban to work it’s way through the courts. STOP RACIAL APPROPRIATION NOW. Has a nice balance to it…
“You cant touch that it is ours” seems to be the angle here.
Similar to the “whites only” signs of yesteryear isn’t it. Should we not be striving to share a human culture rather than declaring “this is white” or “this is black”. My grandmother used to go to tea dances, should she have complained at the black couples who went there? after all the waltz is a particularly western dance.
Or you’re doing the exact same thing that the article is describing.
Appropriating a culture and ignoring the context and history from where it comes is a high form of insult. What the post makes clear is that it’s also an insidious form of institutionalized racism. It’s easy to ignore a Klan member, less so somebody that doesn’t recognize their biases.