Link: Square Dancing and White Supremacy

[sonia]

This is really depressing. Especially given the political news lately. :-( The article dates from 2017. I had noticed that International Folk Dancing is really white. Square dancing is too, and maybe it's not just coincidental.

Do Si Don't: America’s wholesome square dancing tradition is a tool of white supremacy by Robyn Pennacchia.

To understand how square dancing became a state-mandated means of celebrating Americana, it’s necessary to go back to Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Vehicles. Ford hated jazz; he hated the Charleston. He also really hated Jewish people, and believed that Jewish people invented jazz as part of a nefarious plot to corrupt the masses and take over the world—a theory that might come as a surprise to the black people who actually did invent it.

Comments

[silveradept]

Ah, Henry Ford is involved, and therefore the anti-Semitism and other awful behaviors are never far behind. Funny how we never learned about that part of him while he was being lauded as a titan of industry and an important person in the history of the country.

OMG

[jesse_the_k]

My jaw is resting on my typing hands.

What an evil fucker that Henry Ford was. He enabled the car-centered culture we have to take apart along with his noxious racist and anti-Semitic propaganda.

Irony abounds. I learned square dancing at a Quaker-run social-justice oriented summer camp in my early teens. Also the hora, of course.

Why was this article published in "the make business better" vertical of GO media?