One of Maya Angelou's final projects before her death earlier this year was a collaborative hip hop album called Caged Bird Songs. The album was released last month, and now one of the songs "Harlem Hopscotch" has a music video, featuring all sorts of dancers including some familiar faces from Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, and America's Best Dance Crew.
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The 13-track album features Angelou reciting her poetry, set to instrumentals by producers Shawn Rivera and RoccStar and is available on iTunes and Spotify.
DISCUSSION
The irony. Light girls lead, again. So sad that there are no darker-skinned dancing leads in this video. With all of the brown-skinned African American female rhythmic dancers out there, they couldn't include not one?! Well, if you want to include the heavy set Sambo-smiling mammy typecast carrying groceries with the turned over tie-up loafer shoes, unproportioned thick curly weave and mom jeans, that's one. But she is the only one. And the audacity to have a little pickaninny African-featured blackgirl on the opening title billboard, without one black girl in the whole video that resembles this child...
It's sad and disappointing that little dark-skinned black girls will, once again, not see images of themselves as leads in this beautiful upbeat poem narrated by the warm voice of our beloved Maya Angelou. They will be forever aspiring for light skin and flowing hair if we allow insensitive media moguls to cast stereotypical light skinned females and darker skinned males as leads. It looked like Own and their associates were becoming more thoughtful and conscious with Bill Duke's "Light Girls" coming out, but it looks like they are continuing the perpetuation of this disturbing trend of excluding dark/brown-skinned black females from leading the very thing they created (in concert with their fellow black men)—hip hop and African dance and rhythms.
From "Beat Street" and "Breakin'" to "Bring It On," "Drumline" "Pitch Perfect" and "Stomp the Yard," brown skinned black females are systematically left out of the leads or struggling for fair representation as romantic, physically appealing lead dancers.
SMH - Cultural appropriation by our own...