During an interview for a blog yesterday, I was musing about what made lindy hop so special to me. And that’s when it hit me: Lindy hop didn’t come from a place where everything was rosy and people were always jumping for joy. It came from the African American community during the Depression, amidst systemic and brutal racism.
Lindy hop was a means of expressing defiant joy in the middle of hard times, self-expression when people were trying to take away your voice, freedom in the middle of a system trying to take your power away.
That’s the message that continues to speak to me, in my experience of diminished freedoms and the culture of fear and uncertainty around me. So yeah, let’s keep dancing, ya’ll.