Anne, you wrote:

“The word that jumps out @ me here is "sacred." What I'm asking about here is the sacredness of your dancing, and your prohibition against my taking it and using it differently, profaning it.”

I would agree that this making of sacred or making of particular care leaves people and myself open to be hurt and offend in necessary and unnecessary ways.

Yet, knowing this, I choose to hold Dancing sacred. My reasoning is as follows:

I don’t necessarily hold dancing, in its most abstracted form (it as a vehicle), as sacred. I hold the thing behind it, the thing that moves through it, the things that motivates it—expression—as sacred.

I will fight for people’s (my) right to express themselves (myself). I will continually sensitize myself so that my existence, unconsciously and consciously, tries to intentionally give people the space to express themselves.

Whether giving them the space means creating visibility, being a silent listener, or asking questions, I will do it. I will do it (1) because I do hold myself as sacred (but ordinary) and I know what is feels like for people to not allow me the space to be me, be black, be loud, be creative and (2) because I always want to allow for possibility, for alternate realities to be expressed, so that we (I) can grow, be challenged, and ultimately come to know ourselves (myself).

So when the white girl took my dance, she communicated something to me. It wasn’t really the dance step. It is what that step meant—which was at the time: “I want to be free. I felt upset . Now I feel like me. I want to move and say this to Adobe.” That was my song particular to my experience.

So when she took the dance step without taking the meaning, she made my sacred thing—my expression—void. It was like I never said anything after she took it. When she took my dance and should it to her friend like she did it, it invoked the same feelings I have about jazz and how it has become so void of its black essence. It invoked the same feelings I have about America and how it has been trying to remove Blackness from its essence by covering it with whiteness.

People had to dig deep into history’s veins to bring that Blackness that is America’s core, to the surface of America’s constructed whiteness.

That is how I felt when the white girl took my step. Smear my expression with whiteness so that no one knows that the thing that they praise her for (her “new” dance step) came from a black person.

I don’t know if I am clear, but what I am trying to say that Meaning and Making Meaning in general is what I hold sacred. I hold tying and rearranging stories as sacred. I hold memory and recognition and respect sacred. I hold them sacred because they allow people to keep changing, cycling, and sharing. I hold Change sacred. Change that begets Change—and that only happens if you perceive something changing, through recognizing its origin and its new place. I stress recognizing its origin.