My mother is white and my father was black. I am not alone in this. I grew up in the Bronx, New York City. Born in 1967. A relatively safe time and place for a brown girl of ambiguous ethnicity. As the mother of two little brown girls, I like to believe that race doesn't matter much. But the election of Barack Obama woke me up. Ignorance is everywhere. Race labels ring in my ears. They stick and they stain. Even when they fade. This is my rant, from “post-racial America”. Hoping to shed some light.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

The Step Dance Kid

It’s been a couple of weeks since I first read about Drew Lovejoy. 
I can’t shake an almost maternal feeling of pride: There goes another one of us, quietly ascending to peak performance. If you haven’t seen or heard of Drew Lovejoy, he’s worth a google. Drew is the seventeen-year-old Irish Step Dance World Champion. He happens to be biracial, born in Indiana and now living in rural Ohio. He also happens to be Jewish. This is the third consecutive year that Drew has won the World Champion title. He is the only non-white contestant to ever win the title.

Watching him dance in any number of YouTube appearances, it’s impossible to ignore how much he stands out among his predominantly female, entirely white step dancing peers.

I think of my own short-lived dance world aspirations, as a young student at the Dance Theater of Harlem: my not being dark enough to be black, according to my classmates. The tap teacher often positioned me in the first row, so the others could follow my lead, but I was an unpopular outlier in the changing room. Being the best wasn't enough to keep me there. As much as I enjoyed the challenges of dance, not fitting in wore me down.

I’m not the biggest fan of Irish Step Dance. I can’t even say that I enjoy the form. It doesn’t stir me. But I look at Drew Lovejoy, and his story blows me away. Like Tiger Woods, he has accomplished so much more than the obvious athletic achievement. Living in rural Ohio, he claims to have experienced overt racism more than once. So he doesn’t walk his dog after dark.  
But he sure does dance in the light.
(photo courtesy of jspace.com)


Posted by BROWNGIRL at 11:36 AM
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