Sports

Rokafella: We watched the battle [breakdancing competition] live, but we’ve watched many battles, sometimes in person, sometimes with one of our dancers, our b-girls, competing.

The kangaroo hop, that was a surprise.

However, what I’m trying to get at is that in b-girl battles occasionally, but more often than not, you will get dancers who are not at a high skill level. In general, we all have to work hard and we have to train. In general, we’re doing the same steps, but mentally, physically, there’s a lot of differences here.

And so when people want to criticise her performance, we trust that the judges will see what we’re seeing. And no, she does not get to move to the next bracket, so we trust that.

Kwikstep: My initial reaction when I saw Raygun was, how does she make it into this, to begin with? What were the checks and balances? In every event, there’s people in last place, but nobody’s focusing on that for days and days, making it into memes. And they’re on talk shows and all of that kind of stuff.

Let me give you an example. So I have a young man who called me, and he was almost in, I can say, in tears. His voice was shaking because he owns a school teaching breaking in a rural area.

And parents came in and said, “Teach my kids the kangaroo.” And he said, “Please don’t come in here and say that to me. It’s very disrespectful.” They didn’t listen. Now they’ve been asking him to teach their kids the kangaroo and sending him memes. He called me, said, “I don’t know what to do because I think I’m going to lose all my students and their parents because this is all they want.”

And I told them, if you lose all of them, it’s time for you to do something else. Because they weren’t loyal to you to begin with. If they had empathy, they would understand you and say, you know what? You’re right, I’m wrong. And remind people that this dance is about soldiers in the trenches.

If you look at the headlines at that time, it said, “New York can drop dead.” They left us for dead, literally. And post-civil rights, where I watched leaders get assassinated, I’m listening to rhymes that say “I am a somebody” and I’m cognisant that that comes from what? Civil rights marches. I am somebody.

And so when you have all of this happening in my mind and in my soul now, here I come to watch the Olympics, and I’m watching people at the top of their game. Some things are missing, but I’m like, it’s cool. The movement is what I’m watching. This is not just about moves. It’s about the movement of the people.

But then they chose to focus on her instead of, you know, Logistx or Sunny or Nicka, for that matter, who’s killing the game. They were incredible. And so you take away all the momentum to focus on this one person who doesn’t have the skillset. But it’s almost like a knee-jerk instinct to make a parody of a Black and Brown dance, because that’s what you were taught how to do. That’s not cool.

And I really feel bad for Raygun and what she has to deal with, because mental health is a real thing. And as a community, we come from a place where we’re mentally up against the wall, and this dance and music healed us. And so to turn around and take this very same culture and beat somebody up with it is not the right thing to do.

Al Jazeera