Great-Grandparents Get Down

A film made in 1955 featuring dance greats George Christopherson and Freda Angela Wyckoff:



Until just the last few decades, whenever prudes complained about how oversexed, vulgar, or promiscuous kids these days are, they always blamed the Crude African Tribalism the Negroes maliciously smuggled with themselves aboard the slave ships. You can still see the idea crawling out of the woodwork when emotions get heated. For example, "GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE," as was recently emailed by U.S. Army recruiter Sgt. Marcia Ramode, in response to a black openly gay man's correspondence, pretty much incorporates the theme.

In the video you've just had the opportunity to see, a couple of pre-boomers, old enough to be my parents, dance in a style they might indeed have learned in their youth after they snuck out of their houses and across the railroad tracks to the local African-American Blues joint. My real parents, who were older still, would have said their morals were corrupted, by the Coloreds.

Nice White girls don't dance like that, they would have said, and good White boys are respectful to ladies, and don't stare so inappropriately, no matter what the provocation. This young man should have fetched a blanket, they would have said, to throw over this horribly vulgar woman. If not for her sake, then for the sake of the innocent on-lookers.

Nowadays, the prudes can blame all the oversexedness, vulgarity, and promiscuity on Baby Boomers, who are alleged to have invented sex ca 1967. This way they can avoid charges of racism. Some of the most cynical among them know this, that they are replacing one scapegoat with another. They know it benefits them politically because, against all reason, the apolitical hippy movement has been identified with the New Left movement, which in turn has been blamed on liberals, even though it was only occasionally liberal (as when Eugene McCarthy drew on some of its energy).

The truth is, Blacks didn't invent sex either. Neither did Adam and Eve. And Mary wasn't a virgin, and you all know it, so cut the crap.

I would never charge prudes with racism. I would charge them with prudery, or more precisely, having their heads up their asses, and rubbing too hard.