Why African Americans Equate Tap Dancing With Shuckin' And Jivin' & "Uncle Tomming "

The Tap Love Tour, Oct 8, 2020

I'm a black man making thousands of dollars a year tap dancing.  Does that make me an Uncle Tom?

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Edited by Azizi Powell

This is the first post in a three part pancocojams series about the African American disparaging definitions of "buck dancing" and "tap dancing".

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-negative-use-of-term-buck-dancing.html for the second post in this series. The title of that post is "The Disparaging Meaning Of The Term "Buck Dancing" In A 2021 Mo Spears Produced Cartoon Video of That Features Images Of Stephen A Smith." 

Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2024/04/stephen-smith-called-buck-dancer.html for the third post in this pancocojams series. The title of that post is "Stephen A. Smith Called A "Buck Dancer": Comments From Various YouTube Podcasts About Stephen A. Smith's Appearance On The Sean Hannity Show & His Subsequent Apologies".

The content of this post is presented for historical, cultural, and educational purposes.

Thanks to the legacies of past and present African American tap dancers. Thanks also to all those who are associated with this video.

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TRANSCRIPT FOR THIS EMBEDDED VIDEO
Pancocojams Editor's Note- This is my unofficial corrections of the auto-generated transcript in English and my unofficial corrections the captions that appear on that video screen.  This transcript includes changes in words and spelling as well as the addition of punctuation.

Additions and corrections are welcome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id2GeDaLxiE Shuckin' n Jivin' n Tap Dancin'

[narrator] "My name is Travis Knights and I love to tap dance."

[video clip of Angela Rye and Charlamagne Tha God, 2017, sourced from The Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM on YouTube]

Angela Rye-“Oh shout out to the dancers."

Charlamagne Tha God-"I ain't never in my goddamn life. I ain't never had to dance for no White man and my motherf’in life. When you say ”tap dance” to a Black man…

Angela Rye- He’s right. I just took him to a post traumatic stressful place. I apologize”…

[narrator] "Black people of a certain age do not like tap dance."

[video clip of Malcolm X, 1962 speech, sourced from YouTube] “Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.”

[narrator] "That is the question at the heart of the problem with the perception of tap dance in the black community. A critical mass of black people who lived in Canada and the United states during the non-violent movement and the Black power movement of the 50s 60s and 70s do not like tap dance. Iin fact, they loathe it.  And they have raised their kids to have that same level of disdain." 

[video clip of Karen Hunter,2020, sourced from the Karen Hunter Show on YouTube] -“I was so disgusted that so many of us don't realize how much power how much sway we have to control not just our own destiny but the destiny of the entire world.”

[Black man] - That’s right.

[Karen Hunter] – and we’ve got to, we’ve got to step into this purpose. No more placating, we ain’t got to tap dance We don’t got to shuck and jive, change our hair, our vernacular, anything. We got everything”.

Narrator- “They perceive it as demeaning. They perceive it as the ultimate metaphor for an Uncle Tom sellout."

[video clip of Jacob Black, Sr, 2020 speaking at outdoor protest rally for Breonna Taylor, sourced from the Hill, YouTube] - “Did you say her name? Don’t come bringin us that shucking and jiving stuff. Nobody’s nobody’s ready for that. We're tired of that. Don't shuck and jiving and bojangles your way across the street”.

[narrator] "He's right.  Tap dance was a key feature in minstrel shows for  over 100 years.  These blackface minstrel shows acted as propaganda that sold the public on the idea that black people were only three-fifths human and we’re still haunted by the ideas that stem from minstrelsy today.

That's not the end of the story though.  Tap dance has always been an African-American art form.  Check this: After the Stone rebellion in 1739 the colonizing slaveholders banned the use of the African drum because it was understood that the Africans were communicating across plantations  with them.  Now without the drums those rhythms were transferred to the feet.  That rhythmic expression called “buck dancing” was the precursor to tap dance,” That rhythmic expression was our link to roots that the colonial human traffickers of the time tried to sever.  The expression of the dance in black spaces helped to form a highly kinetic folk culture. In the post-emancipation era the folk music that was developed in that culture is jazz.

[video clip of Max Roach Interview, sourced from “The Post Archives, on YouTube”] "Well you're absolutely right.  in fact, the earlier drummers like “Papa Joe Jones and Buddy Rich-these guys were tap dancers. And good tap dancers.. I do a little of that. You know you’d see you had to be good and it was good for your feet ‘cause you were dealing with a lot of things.  You see, I heard that these people were dancers and then drummers."

[Dizzy Gillespie quoted in that same video clip] –  "Dancing inspired the music and music inspired the dancing.The best music is music written for dancing because dancing enhances music. Dancing enhances- Lemme write that down please [laughs]”.

[Narrator- “Jazz culture became a major export of the United States much like Hip Hop is today. Knowing all that, how can black people reclaim our history?

How can we acknowledge the past and design a future with a bold sense of agency that would make our ancestors proud?

I don’t know.  I don’t have the answer to that.

But we can start with tap dance.. The form in itself is a treasure trove of black history.  So let's take it back so let's make it ours again.
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Let’s reconnect to our roots.  Let's really do business with our history.  Let us tell our own stories

The revolution will not be televised."

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ADDENDUM- DEFINITIONS

Additions and corrections are welcome.

WHAT "BUCK DANCING" MEANS IN THE CONTEXT OF THIS VIDEO
by Azizi Powell, 2024
The term "buck dancing" has a number of different meanings. A relatively new (late 20th/early 21st century?) African American vernacular meaning of "buck dancing" is [verb] "African Americans actually tap dancing and/or African Americans behaving in ways that can be construed as "shuckin and jivin" and/or being an Uncle Tom".

"Buck dancing" is the precursor of "tap dancing". Since at least the beginning of the 21st century, because of black faced minstrelsy, a lot of African Americans have had/still have negative opinions about buck dancing and tap dancing. These negative opinions have resulted in those dance forms being a metaphor among African Americans for a Black person who is "tomming" (acting like an Uncle Tom around and for White people, and particularly rich White people and White people in authority.

As a result, among many contemporary African Americans, saying that a Black person is  "buck dancing" is a short hand way of saying that a Black person is "acting foolishly around White people; and/or "shuckin and jivin" and/or "tomming".  When African Americans use the term "buck dancing", it doesn't have to mean that the person is actually dancing. Instead, this term has the same or a very similar meaning as the contemporary African American meaning of "shuckin' and jivin'.

"Shuckin and jivin" means "to act foolishly [act like a clown] around White people, particularly White people (or other people in authority)"

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuckin%27_and_jivin%27  for more information about "shuckin and jivin".

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Shuckin and jivin

The Wikipedia page for "shuckin and jivin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuckin%27_and_jivin%27  quotes this definition from the book Ribbin', Jivin', and Playin' the Dozens: The Persistent Dilemma in Our Schools, Herbert L. Foster writes: "Shuckin' and jivin' is a verbal and physical technique some blacks use to avoid difficulty, to accommodate some authority figure, and in the extreme, to save a life or to save oneself from being beaten physically or psychologically".

-end of quote-
As indicated in that quote "shuckin' and jivin' behavior used to be considered by African Americans as a way of surviving the oppressive conditions by pretending to fit the "Sambo"/"Coon" stereotypes about Black people. The character "Stepin Fetchit epitomizes this "shuckin and jivin' behavior. Here's an excerpt from an online article about Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry (May 30, 1902 – November 19, 1985),who created and portrayed "Stepin Fetchit:

Perry was born in Key West, Florida to West Indian immigrant parents.

Perry ran away from home at 14 to join the vaudeville circuit and adopted the stage name of "Stepin Fetchit," taken from his lucky racehorse. Fetchit found his way to Hollywood in the mid 1920s and made his screen debut in The Mysterious Stranger (1927). Fetchit made an immediate impact in Hollywood and very early on in his career was hailed as one of the greatest screen comedians.

Stepin Fetchit's act continued the "trickster" tradition of slaves: outwitting their oppressors by pretending to be slow-witted and lazy, and thereby exploiting whites' sense of superiority. He became a very wealthy man portraying "the laziest human being in the world," the quintessential coon; shuffling, mumbling, slacking an dozing off whenever he could, his heavy eyelids and loose lower lop forever dangling, scratching his shaved head in befuddlement whenever a White actor upbraided or barked orders at him, as they did all the time. 

He was a living cartoon coon--and the animated cartoons of his day often featured a thinly veiled Stepin Fetchit caricature that was hardly more exaggerated than his own shtick. He also spawned a legion of imitators."
-end of quote-
The "Stepin Fetchit" persona was never admired by African Americans except there was that element that it was an act which may have been necessary in those times to survive. However, it seems to me that nowadays most African Americans don't believe that that act is needed anymore. And we look down on Black men and Black woman who "shuck and jive" around White people for their own self-aggrandizement.        

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Tomming [being an Uncle Tom; Uncle Tomming"
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Uncle%20Tom
"Uncle Tom
noun
disparaging : a Black person who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals)

disparaging : a person who is overly subservient to or cooperative with authority

Uncle Tomming

intransitive verb

disparaging

to behave like an Uncle Tom"
-snip-
It used to be routine for African Americans to use the term "Aunt Jemima" as a referent for Black females who acted like "Uncle Toms". That "Aunt Jemima" referent is still used, but it seems to me that since at least the early 21st century, "Uncle Tom" has also been used as a referent for Black females.

A person who is tomming (acting like an Aunt Jemima) puts their wellbeing over any considerations for or about other Black people. 

A person who is "tomming" may also shuck and jive, but there are other more "white collar"/sophisticated" ways of tomming than acting like Stepin Fetchit character. 

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This concludes Part I of this pancocojams series.

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