This came across my Instagram feed today and instantly sparked memories, flashbacks if you will. I often talk about this, but I used to teach the Shim Sham on the “1” instead of the “8” in order to make things “easier” for the people that came through the Overland Park, KS swing dance night. I knew it wasn’t right, but didn’t know enough to know why nor bold enough to push back.

Watch the dissonance between people I taught and the people that respected the culture and came up within the culture (Frankie Manning) on the studio’s dance floor. I pushed Play and stayed off the dance floor anticipating the resultant mess.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last time I would water down steps to make things easier in the moment for people. The thing about taking the “easy” road is that you’re ultimately setting students’ up for greater difficulty later on. Difficulty might come in the form of paying for more lessons because the teachers need to unpack more layers in a particular step, injuring themselves or another person since the easy technique doesn’t scale well to the social floor, or needing to unlearn things because they’re about to teach classes and must represent the culture better than you initially did.

It is always worth the time teaching the actual step. If it takes people more time to learn, so be it. If you need to call people in do avoid appropriating steps, it’s worth it. If you need to hire someone else to teach the step, hire them. It’s about doing the right thing and the right thing is doing the steps right and representing the Black culture these steps came from well.