Twerking for the right reasons

I’ve seen a lot of twerk in my day.

For you old folks, or the uninitiated, “twerk,” also known as “juke,” is a style of dancing that involves a woman being really, insanely good at shaking her butt. The best twerkers can move one cheek at a time. Imagine bellydancing, but with a greater emphasis on hip and butt movements. There’s lots of popping of the butt and swiveling of the hips.

Sometimes, twerking involves dancing with one’s back to a man, but the presence of a man is not necessary to twerk. Twerking can be anything from casual dancing in the club to an actual, categorized, unique style of dance.

I went to a culturally and racially diverse high school, and all of our dances were what we affectionately called “twerkfests.” Most of the parties I went to just involved large, dark rooms with hip-hop being played and various people demonstrating their prowess with the dance form.

Now that I’m at IU, four years after my last high school twerkfest, it amuses me that people see twerking as a new and scandalous thing. Frankly, I’m glad the style of dance is finally making its way into a fairly small, predominantly white Midwestern town like ours.

What does disturb me, though, is the discourse about twerk that I hear around campus and in the bars. Our reaction to twerk makes us seem like the townspeople in “Footloose.”

In addition to the slut stigma attached to women who twerk, there’s a serious racial undertone to much of what’s being said.

People call twerking “ghetto,” which is a problematically negative term almost exclusively associated with the black population. Once, back in my sorority days, I heard someone describe twerk as “dancing like a ghetto black girl.” Now, when I see white women twerk, they often puff out their lips in a cruel caricature of a black face, reminiscent of the minstrel shows of decades past.

I’d like to believe that they’re just imitating what they’ve seen in videos and at parties and not consciously trying to be racist, although ignorance never excuses behavior.

The IU community, specifically the community of white students at IU, seems to have a problematic relationship with twerking. In the past two years, the dance style has really taken off. People have been grinding on one another for ages, but twerking, in its current form, is just beginning to get popular.

However, part of the dance style’s popularity seems unhealthily rooted in being a critical spectator and shaming the women that do it, whether just for acting “slutty,” or, on a more subconscious level, for acting too black. By attempting to “twerk,” the woman, no matter the race, is associating herself with the racial “other” many white students at IU have never met.

The white student body is simultaneously fascinated with and intimidated by the black “other” expertly twerking in Internet videos.

Because of this, a white woman popping her butt to a song she likes is a little too close to a black woman in one of the popular YouTube twerk videos doing the same thing. If a white girl is good at twerking, she gets called “slutty” or “ghetto,” as if the terms go hand in hand. So, the white girls who twerk do it with a giggle, as a joke, exclaiming, “I’m not serious!” before stopping and dissolving into self-aware laughter.

Why is it that we associate any trend primarily popularized by the black population with being “ghetto” and why is it that we associate being “ghetto” with being “slutty?”

Is it because, on some level, we associate blackness with promiscuity, based on the skewed images of people of color fed to us through the media? When did all black women become video girls? It’s time for the white population here to do a little self-examination when it comes to their perceptions of people of color.

Twerking is just twerking. But twerking becomes offensive cultural appropriation when it’s approached from a racist standpoint.

If you want to twerk, do it. It’s fun. But be aware of your motivations for doing so.

People of IU, if you twerk this weekend, twerk because it feels right. Not because it’s a slut-shaming, racist joke for you to laugh at later.

-kelfritz@indiana.edu