User Reviews

A small Black boy dances on a table while White men clap along.

It's been some time since I gave money to spin dancers on the streets of New York, but in my mind that and this are linked. For the modern viewer, there's a lot of racism in the title, some racism in the fact it's a Black child, and probably some sexism in the identification of the child as a boy.... after all, we don't know which of what seems to an old geezer like me the vast multiplication of people's sexual identities about which I am supposed to approve these days. As for the situation... well street performers (they call them 'buskers' in England) are all around, playing music, singing songs, and occasionally doing acrobatics.

I can see this happening in my mind's eye, after which the boy takes off his cap, and the men pitch in pennies, maybe nickels. I don't know about the others' takes on the child's (is that ageist? Oh well) dancing, but it looks pretty good to me.

Or, instead of wondering if this is racist or sexist or some other -ist we must vehemently disapprove of, we can look at it as a relatively benign window into the past. You want terrible, take a look at ALLIGATOR BAIT (1900).

"Dancing Darkey Boy" was what I saw on the internet. It's very short, about ten seconds. I did not hear sound. It is in black and white. There are people all around a table [all white] and they are clapping to a young black boy dancing on a table. Don't hate me people, but I see nothing racist about this short movie--(I don't know what else to call this) except the name."Dancing Darkey" Well, I would see how it would be racist because of his dance moves. He dances like some kind of hillbilly ----- and he's laughing and smiling while dancing on the table.The white people behind him are smiling and clapping for him as well. I guess having a black boy dance the way he does would be racist as the producers who directed it are assuming that all negroes dance like that. But then again, this was filmed in 1897! Of course it's gonna be racist. I think people should see it for a good history lesson. It would only be 10 seconds of their time. It would really teach them how afro americans were treated in the classic days of the movie theater.

History teaches no lessons at all if it allows people to believe that it was somehow the most natural thing in the world for people to be racist in the US in 1897 or at any other time or in any other part of the world.

What is perhaps the most disheartening thing is that that is still the only question that people see. Is the film racist or is it not racist. Do we look at a fil of Annie Oakley sharp-shooting and ask if it is anti-woman? Do we look at a film of Eugen Sandow rippling his muscles and ask if it homophobic?

What we are watching here is a show star performing just as we are when we watch Annie Oakley or Eugen Sandow. The boy in the film is quite clearly a seasoned vaudeville performer doing his stuff. The racecourse and the table and the jockeys are all just mise en scène. So the first question we might ask ourselves is whether he's a good dancer and if we enjoy his performance or not. Personally I think he does a great job and one sees the genesis of modern dance forms - he could be twisting - far more clearer in some of the more staccato buck and break dancing that generated much more ephemeral fashions for crude, slightly violent dances of the "apache" variety.

The audience looks mixed to me - not just "white" - a bit difficult to tell with people in the US because they are nearly all obviously mixed race to some degree or another - and I see no mockery here. I just see a cute little dancer doing his stuff. Their music and dance has been an enormously vector of emancipation for black people in the US and for all I, or anyone else, knws, this boy would go on to be a veritable king of the strut. It certainly cannot have done him any harm to have had his moment in front of the camera.

Dancing Darkey Boy (1897)

** (out of 4)

Another controversial one from Edison features a black boy dancing at a horse show with (white) people standing around watching and cheering him on. Outside the offensive title, this one here isn't as bad as you might think. I'm still not sure if there was a racist point to it but it seems to be just another one of those early, "point the camera there and film" things. I'm sure many will be offended by what they see but to my eyes nothing mean spirited is happened to the point who appears to be having fun shaking around the table. Of course, being 1897 might say something else.