By Sharanya Gopinathan
Oh, what fun! Great Big Story just released a video on a new form of dance that combines hip-hop and ballet, called hiplet. The video shows trained ballet dancers incorporating elements of hip-hop into a new dance form, and talk about how revolutionary and freeing hiplet is. One of the dancers talks about how she was overlooked in her early ballet classes because she’s African-American, and how hiplet gave her a kind of freedom to be yourself, and go beyond.
Of course, since we’re not allowed to have nice things, the comments on the video have already gone full-whiny and full-racist. Lots of (mostly white) folks have flocked to the comments section, claiming that it’s a “demoralising” insult to ballet, is racist because its “targeted only to blacks”, that it’s “dumb”, “ugly” and “doesn’t look good at all”. It makes you wonder what African-Americans think of white people’s idea of jazz…