‘Why do you have to make everything about race?’
‘Why do you have to make everything about race?’
Square dancing, editing and history
My spouse and I were playing with our toddler last week and got to talking about square dancing, how weird it was that we both had to learn how to square dance in 6th grade PE1, he in southern California and I in northern Colorado.
Was that a Western thing? we wondered. Not Western like “the Western world” but the Old West, “out west,” “westward ho!” Covered wagons, gold rushes, gunslingers and saloons. Were we, as 1980s public-school kids who had no generational ties to our respective hometowns (my husband’s parents came from South Asia and my mom is from Chicago) subjected to a last weird artifact of regionalism before the MTV monoculture takeover?
I popped a little poll on Threads for clues. “If you went to PUBLIC SCHOOL in the US, did you learn how to square dance in PE?” I asked, with four possible answers: “Yes, east of the Mississippi,” “Yes, west of the Mississippi,” “No, east of the Mississippi” and “No, west of the Mississippi.”
I was surprised by the result. Of 449 responses, nearly half — 47 percent — answered “Yes, east of the Mississippi.” My spouse’s and my group, “Yes, west of the Mississippi,” came in second at 35 percent, with the two “No” options sharing the remaining 18 percent.
This is of course not an official poll, but still, seems fair to conclude that no, square dancing in PE was not a Western thing — it was an American thing. People commented that they had it at their fancy private schools too, and at majority Black schools in South Side Chicago. One person said he had it at his school in Canada, another said they were still teaching square dancing at her daughter’s school in 2007.
Which was so weird to me! Because … why? Was square dancing ever so big a thing that its middle-school instruction would be as ubiquitous as “The Diary of Anne Frank” or “Romeo and Juliet”? How come we hear about swing dancing, disco dancing, the twist, the mambo, the mother-effing hand jive as historical dance crazes, but never square dancing? And why is it the only dance we’re taught in school — why not basic jazz, the lindy hop or the electric slide?
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Then I got the money comment that made it all make sense. “Didn’t learn until years later that the Ford Foundation financed that BS,” @greengreg1642 wrote.
You see, automaker and antisemite Henry Ford hated jazz — he called it “monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive of calf love” — and thought Jews were using it to control the Black community and bring about the destruction of the white Protestant world order. The antidote, as he saw it, was the “old-fashioned dancing” of his youth, so he spent years pushing a square dancing revival, including programs to teach it in school. (For more on this, read Robyn Pennacchia’s terrific 2017 Quartz piece.) It’s not that square dancing itself is racist, but our learning it in PE definitely was.
Ahhh yes, I thought. Of course this is about race. Because we’re talking about America.
Anyone who writes about American history is well-acquainted with the reader complaint, “Why do you have to make everything about race?” And the answer is always, “Because we’re talking about America.”
America and race — the idea that there’s a single race called white and a single race called Black,2 — were joint projects created together for a specific purpose: the financial gain of colonial elites.
Before colonization of the Americas, European stratification hinged largely on religion, not melanin — and that wasn’t for lack of contact with melanated people. It’s why England had an African abbot in the middle ages, why Italian cities had Ethiopian embassies in the 1400s (Ethiopians were Christians before Italians were), and why wars were fought against “barbarian Muslims” and not “barbarian browns.” It’s not that people back then didn’t notice variations in skin color — they had eyes, they could write in their diaries, “Visiting Constantinople, met a king of some placed called Nubia with super dark skin!” — it’s just that those variations didn’t have much meaning applied to them.
It’s also why in the early colonies forced laborers of all skin colors were largely treated under the same messy codes. Slaveries already existed, usually prisoners of war, but there was no concept of lifelong, inherited, chattel slavery justified solely by race. Racial stratification evolved over the 1600s and 1700s in the British colonies3 to split, and thus stabilize, the labor pool: Kidnapped African laborers and their children lost access to temporary servitude, to legal redress, to freedom upon religious conversion, etc; Indigenous people, who made terrible forced laborers anyway, were promised sovereignty if they stayed out of the way and didn’t harbor runaways; and poor and indentured white laborers were enticed into allying with their bondholders over their fellow laborers with the creation of white supremacy. Play by the rules and you might be one of the bosses someday, the promise went. It worked. (It still works.)
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Thus began the centuries-long project to apply meaning to race above all other considerations, whether justified by science, religion, government, or cultural supremacy — the latter still rampant today among Americans of all political persuasions, with simplified, “colorblind” histories being both a byproduct and a tool.
You see, racism didn’t used to be a secret. People, especially people in power, were generally more upfront about their white supremacist views, because there was little to no social consequence for doing so. On the contrary, maintaining white power was mostly seen as a legitimate raisons d'être.
Post-civil rights movement, the loud part got quiet, but the story stayed largely the same. It’s how you get presidential candidate Ronald Reagan making a “states’ rights” speech in the small town where three civil-rights workers were killed 16 years earlier; how you get books, genealogy websites and real estate listings still calling people “gentleman planters” (How did the gentleman plant, exactly?); and how you get a single MLK quote as justification for the “colorblind” project (We don’t have to interpret a single quote, MLK repeatedly said he supported affirmative action and reparations).
Oklahoma has a panhandle because of race, for crying out loud, but see if you can find an Oklahoman who knows that!
So we still learned in school about Henry Ford the Automaker, Henry Ford the Innovator — but Henry Ford the Racist? Deleted, or at the very least, deemphasized. The past didn’t change; it is, in fact, inaccurate to talk about Ford without talking about the Jew-hating to which he devoted so much time and money.4 But it’s easier to keep telling the same story with deceptive editing than to write a new story that is more accurate and complex — one, perhaps, that includes Jewish immigrants in the labor organizing and farming cooperatives Ford so opposed, or the Jewish activist Aaron Sapiro, whose lawsuit forced Ford to publicly apologize, or Louis Marshall, the Jewish attorney who wrote Ford’s apology for him.
Again, “making it about race” in this case simply more accurate. Answering the question “Why did we all learn square dancing in school?” with “Because Henry Ford paid for it” doesn’t stand up to the slightest breeze of follow-up: Why did he pay for it? Because he hated Jewish immigrants, because he thought Black music was culturally inferior, because he thought Jewish and Black people colluding would threaten his position at the top. Sound familiar?
“Hahaha, a conspiracy that Jews are using a Black creation to control Black people?! What a stupid idea, people back then were so dumb!” we laugh, as we swipe past another Instagram story claiming George Soros controls Black Lives Matter.
Is it annoying that just about everything in American history is about race? I guess? The more important question is: Is it true? And we see over and over again that it is.
In 2019, a Dearborn historian who wrote about Ford’s antisemitism was fired by the mayor, who said the article was a “distraction” and there was no “compelling reason” to bring it up now. In the offending article, the historian highlighted that the Henry Ford Museum down the road had recently worked with the local Jewish community on a program about Ford’s bigotry. He noted that numerous Ford descendants sit on the museum’s board.
As far as I can tell, no one has accused his family members of “making everything about race” for letting the truth be told.
If you’re among the eensy-weensy sliver of people (surely you exist?) who actually enjoyed square dancing in school, its origin story doesn’t make you racist by proxy. It doesn’t mean square dancing itself is racist. It doesn’t mean square dancing is being “cancelled.” It’s just the truth.
“Physical education” for all y’all non-Americans. Gym class. Sport.
Acknowledging that race is a social construct does not mean that race isn’t “real” or can be ignored. Race is as real and undeniable as money, which is also a social construct.
This process began earlier in Portuguese and Spanish colonies. Many in the British elite found it appalling — until they didn’t.
It wasn’t just the square dancing. Ford published “The International Jew,” a hate-filled screed still cited by the far right. Adolf Hitler commended him by name in “Mein Kampf.”