“Do you know how to do that ‘Black dancing’?” I was asked this in junior high when shows like Solid Gold, which featured nightclub music and contemporary dance choreography, and performances by Michael Jackson were popular. I knew how to moonwalk which was answer enough at the time but I didn’t learn how to pop, lock, and uprock until about a year later when my cousin Kenny showed me more moves. We got pretty good and won a small competition as a duo called the Cousin Connection.

As modern humans, we have the luxury of learning about our DNA endowment to supplement family genealogy and origins lore. For example, I’ve learned that my mother’s ancestry is responsible for the West African and my father’s for the Western European although there are smidgens of Scandinavian on both sides. My ethnicity has been a small-talk staple since I was very young.

Several years ago I took a creative writing class at The Attic on Hawthorne in SE Portland. During each session, we would read aloud what we had written over the week prior. After I read out my short story about a couple making sparks fly at a hoe down, the instructor asked, “How do you know so much about square dancing?”

We out here but not like we were.

My takeaways from the resources mentioned below are that Black folks (with some exceptions like the Mahogany Spin Tips) lost interest in square dancing due to segregated media and the exploitation of Black callers and musicians.