Beaten down, but not broken

I finally had the chance to see the documentary “Rize” about a style of dance coming out of Cali called Krumping or Clowning. To get it right, it was started by a guy named Tommy who called it Clowning. From Clowning came Krumping, a more raw, ancestral form of the lighthearted Clowning. For anyone who has no clue what this style of dance looks like, I advice you to wiki it. The documentary showed the perspective of Tommy, the “founder”, many of his dance students, and the perspective of those who branched off and created Krumping. Then the documentary went into tracing the dancing style’s roots and showed comparative footage of tribes in African performing similar dance rituals. The dancers from the inner cities of L.A., Inglewood etc. described Krumping as a form of storytelling, something that has been said about the tribal dances found in Africa as well. This really fascinated me, that these inner city youth, often labeled as something less because of their lacking quality education and low socio economic status, have found a connection, a deep connection, to their roots, something I don’t think they were aware of. So this brought a question to mind, well a series of questions, but is culture or customs, something that is breed among the different ethnicities? If you have no one to teach you, is it possible to retain your heritage through DNA? This connection between Krumping and the tribal dances of Africans brings another occurrence to mind. While I was in undergrad, I took an art history class, an African American art history class. This content began in Africa, of course, and brought us all the way to contemporary art by African Americans. African art history depicted certain customs of the tribes in Africa, I hesitate to say their names for fear of getting it wrong. One of the customs was the way they built some of their dwellings. Pictures and drawings have been taken of these crude architectural houses, and compared to the dwellings created by slaves and early freed slaves in the south. The dwellings were almost identical, even though they were an ocean away and built hundreds of years apart. These dwellings are more familiarly known as “shotgun” houses in the south. I couldn’t believe how the slaves in the south had retained their heritage, their roots, so to speak, and were able to duplicate in such a way. Even after being separated and assimilated in to the “American” culture, their heritage remained intact.

The documentary also shined a light on what the dancers, mostly teenagers, thought about dancing and the movement that seems to have started. Over and over again I heard that they had nothing better to do with their time. That other than school their was nothing for them. If they weren’t into sports, something they felt was specifically targeted towards African American youth, then you had nothing left but to gang bang. I can only imagine what would have happened to me if there weren’t after school programs and things like that available/free for me. I agree that children/teenagers need something to do after school, and that the worst thing in the world to do to the youth is to get rid of their extracurricular programs. This is something that isn’t new, and has been a real problem in inner cities, cutting programs, cutting funding, building more prisons, and labeling the youth as slack underachievers. A recipe for disaster.

And through all of the hardships the youth face, what saves them in the end? An inbred need to survive, a biological link to a positive side of their heritage. There is hope, there is always hope, and apparently, it comes from within.