A reflection on my experiences at Spring Forward Festival 2017.
‘It don’t matter if you’re black or white’ was the ideological soundtrack of my youth. Somewhere along the line, while imitating Michael Jackson moves, we somehow forgot that what he was singing about was an ideal and not yet a reality. I, and many others, grew up with the illusion that we don’t see skin colour, and that it really doesn’t matter if you’re black or white. But it does matter and, by ignoring that, we are at risk over overlooking systematic iniquities in our society. As Anousha Nzume’s writes in her recently-published and very accessible book Hallo witte mensen (Hello white people), ‘if you claim you don’t see colour, you will also not see power structures created on the base of colour.’[1] In order to unravel power structures we have to talk about skin colour, including within the dance field. So here we go.
Photo: Melanie Hofmann 