The Privilege To Fail: How Rachael ‘Raygun’ Gunn’s Olympic Routine Made Breakdancing A Global Joke

Come go back with me to 1970s New York City, right in the heart of the South Bronx.

In the dimly lit underground clubs, on street corners and thoroughfares, a cultural revolution was brewing. Young Black dancers were inventing a new form of artistic expression, spinning on their heads on concrete lined with flattened cardboard boxes and contorting their bodies in ways that defied gravity and convention.

MORE: Who Started Breakdancing? The Black History Of The Olympics’ Newest Sport

Those young people were pursuing a healthy form of street battles in which teams tried to top their opponents – “cut ‘em up” figuratively, instead of literally. The dancing was not exactly combative in nature, but it was very physical and allowed for a release in tension. Organized teams of dancers erupted beyond American ghettos, all over the world, from Canada to West Germany, to Malaysia, fanned by the incredible popularity of Michael Jackson and the films Flashdance, Breaking, and Fame.

Hip-Hop, ya don’t stop

Break dancers danced for tips at shopping malls and hotels, appeared at charitable events, performed at club meetings, school assemblies, and competed at large meets where judges were the audience, signifying their favorites with raucous cheering and applause.

Precise coordination was a must to execute moves with names like the V-spin, the whirlwind, the grasshopper, the baby, the windmill, the Scooby-Doo, and the freeze. Break dancing, a combination of aerobics and gymnastics, had three basic moves—the wave, where bodies moved like rubber; the tick, where they jerked like a strobe light, and the pop, which involved stiff robot-like movements. These techniques formed a basis on which more complicated and difficult moves were built.

Media coverage on this popular dance trend was mixed.

“The head-spinning break-dance craze is creating headaches, not for its youthful practitioners, but for city politicians caught between merchants who want it banned and parents who say it’s good, clean fun,” wrote one San Bernadino, California paper on March 6, 1984.

International papers called breakdancing the most phenomenal dance craze since disco. Some papers showcased pictures of young whites showing off their moves during free dance classes. Editorials griped about the health risks breakdancing posed and cited cases where kids broke their necks, showed up at doctor’s offices with back problems, or died from their injuries. Some pundits of the day called breaking a fad that would soon fade away.

This was the birth of breakdancing, a raw and rebellious art form that would soon become the heartbeat of Hip-Hop culture and eventually, like with many subcultures, become irresistibly intriguing and gradually seep into mainstream consciousness.

‘Rachael Gunn to the dance floor please!’

Now, flash forward more than 50 years.

Breaking made its debut on the global stage at the Paris Olympics last week, bringing with it the rich legacy of those who created it in the shadows of a city that once ignored or demonized them.

“Rachael Gunn to the dance floor please!”

When this 36-year-old Australian cultural studies professor, took to the dance floor, she became an instant meme, a viral joke, and a weird source of inspiration.

Gunn looked like a robot that hadn’t been fully programmed. Sometimes her arms moved in loose, uncoordinated circles. Other times, they flailed out at odd angles. Her legs had a mind of their own, kicking out as if they were trying to escape her body.

Her timing was off, and her descents were so ungraceful they looked like clumsy attempts to find the floor as quickly as possible. Her facial expressions cycled between intense concentration, fleeting panic, forced enthusiasm, and smug self-satisfaction. She even had the gall to grab her chin and stroke the tip of her nose with her thumb, followed by a slight head tilt and a smirk. Those were subtle yet confident gestures acknowledging her own authentic b-girl swagger outchea doin’ the damn thang!

Some people are still laughing at that hot mess of a spectacle. Some viewers even think there was a certain charm and endearing authenticity in her awkwardness and technical flaws.

Gunn even fixed her lips to admit that she knew she wasn’t going to beat out the other dancers. “What I bring is creativity,” she declared.

Does she seriously believe that her lack of skill could be compensated by some vague notion of innovation? Are we supposed to interpret her statement as a genuine embrace of originality rather than the convenient excuse that it is?

This was supposed to be a competition where precision, rhythm and cultural resonance are key. Gunn’s claim to creativity rings hollow because it was a desperate attempt to reframe her performance, to shift the narrative from cringe-worthy failure to uniqueness. In doing so, she not only disrespected breakdancing, but revealed her disconnect from the very culture she was trying—and failing—to represent.

When white privilege tries (and fails) to bust a move

I’m not laughing at any of it! Gunn’s breakdancing at the Paris Olympics wasn’t just an embarrassing series of missteps—it represented something even more sinister.

Her viral performance was a modern-day minstrel show, where cultural appropriation masqueraded as athleticism, and a global audience was invited to laugh at the crude distortion of a cultural expression once demonized because it originated with Black urban youth. Gunn stripped away the history, socio-political significance, and skill behind breakdancing, reducing it to a caricature for the world to mock.

Once again, we got a reminder of how easily Black cultural expressions, once demonized and marginalized, can be co-opted, packaged for consumption, and ridiculed when placed in the hands of those who don’t understand or honor their essence. Breaking has now become sanitized and stripped away of its grittier, more political elements and made palatable for a global audience. It’s sanctioning by the Olympics is now seen less as a voice of the streets and more as an athletic feat.

While some folks believe that breakdancing’s inclusion on the Olympic stage is the ultimate validation of an art form, critics rightly worry that by tailoring breaking to fit the mold of an Olympic sport, that the spontaneity and cultural context will be lost. The codification of moves, the implementation of standardized judging criteria, and the inevitable focus on technical proficiency over style and soul threaten to distance breaking from its roots.  It doesn’t help that someone like Rachael Gunn turned what should be a celebration of Black culture into a crude parody, further distancing breaking from its origins, and reducing it to a hollow imitation.  Her performance represents a subtle form of colonization that is taking a cultural expression from the streets, repackaging it and selling it back to the world.

Cultural theft and a form of modern-day minstrelsy.

If you know anything about history of breakdancing and Hip-Hop, then you know these artistic expressions were forms of a resistance. They were a way for marginalized youth to escape oppression, to claim space and identity in a racist culture than rendered them invisible or as public menaces and economic burdens driving up the national debt.  News reports often portrayed breakdancing as dangerous, associated it with gang violence and urban decay.  Schools banned the practice and cops often harassed b-boys and b-girls, viewing them as engaging in public nuisances.

What’s truly ironic is that if Rachael Gunn truly studied this history, she should have known better than to get on that stage and make a fool of herself. As a Ph.D.-holder in cultural studies with a particular focus on breakdancing, she’s someone who has theoretically immersed herself in understanding the history, significance, and cultural context of the art form.

In her own words, she said, “As I was starting to learn breaking at the same time, what became prominent was that there were these gender politics that could be explored and analyzed. There were changes that I was undergoing as I was learning breaking, the changes in how people responded to me and maybe tried to police what I was doing.”

Given this awareness, how could she not recognize her actions as blatant cultural appropriation? If she had genuinely studied the history and origins of breakdancing, how could she take the stage in such an inauthentic and disrespectful manner?

People “maybe tried to police what I was doing,” Rachael?

Umph, I wonder why.

Could it be that when they saw a white academic fumbling through breakdancing it felt like an awful reenactment of cultural appropriation in real-time?

This wasn’t about policing her. Folks were probably letting Gunn know that she was taking a deeply rooted cultural expression, stripping it of its meaning, and serving it back as a misguided attempt at ‘creativity.’  But she didn’t care.  She took her tone-deaf display of privilege to the world stage, wrapped in the delusion that academic interest gives her a free pass to dabble in a culture that’s not hers while disrespecting the people and artistic expressions she claims to study.

We’ve seen this behavior from white academics before Gunn. They position themselves as experts on cultures they don’t belong to. They attempt to force an “authentic” connection with those people over there, reducing them to mere subjects of academic inquiry, stripping them of their lived experiences and cultural importance. What Gunn showed us wasn’t creativity, it was cultural theft and a form of modern-day minstrelsy.

Just as traditional minstrelsy involved white performers blacking up their faces for entertainment, Gunn’s attempt at breakdancing at the Paris Olympics turned a rich cultural expression into a crude parody.  By stepping onto that stage and presenting her awkward, uncoordinated moves as an authentic representation of breakdancing, she willfully ignored the power dynamics and history of the Black culture she mimicked and trivialized it for a cheap laugh and moment of attention.

White women desiring access to Black experiences

We’ve seen this kind of modern-day minstrelsy before, particularly from white women in academe who inhabit an imagined Black experience with a fascination that borders on obsession.

Remember Margaret Seltzer, a graduate of an elite prep school and ethnic studies major University of Oregon who did radio interviews in a ‘hood accent? In 2008, she penned a memoir titled “Love and Consequences,” supposedly written by a half-white, half-Native-American girl who grew up in South Los Angeles with a Black foster family, running drugs for the Bloods and witnessing gang violence. The entire story was fake. Seltzer’s lie wasn’t just about creating a false narrative; it was about indulging a longstanding white fascination with Blackness—the idea that it’s somehow ‘cool’ to act Black without actually being Black. She was drawn to a world of struggle that she’d never experienced but was eager to claim because it offered her a kind of authenticity she lacked in her own life.

Then there’s Rachel Dolezal, the white former NAACP president and Africana Studies professor who pretended to be Black, and there was Jessica Krug, the George Washington University professor who took it even further by adopting various Black identities as a white Jewish woman from Kansas City. Krug’s confession on Medium—where she admitted to posing as North African and then Afro-Latina—set the internet ablaze.

Parents of NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal say she is not black http://t.co/BO11iPOtOe pic.twitter.com/zuiPiyhgph

— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 12, 2015

So, what is it about white women desiring access to Black experiences? It’s the power to opt in and out of identities, to wear Blackness as a costume when it suits them, and then discard it when it no longer serves them. It’s the audacity to redirect the media spotlight to their farfetched stories, to dramatically defend or chastise themselves before the world, and in doing so, to appropriate not just a culture, but the very struggles that define it.

Rachael Gunn is no different.

Like Seltzer, Dolezal, and Krug, Rachael Gunn leveraged her proximity to Black culture—this time through breakdancing—to stage a performance that was less about honoring the art form and more about inserting herself into a narrative where she didn’t truly belong. Her Olympic performance wasn’t a reminder of how easily white women can abandon Black culture, but rather how they can co-opt and distort it while claiming to ‘study’ or ‘appreciate’ it.

Rachael Gunn didn’t pretend to take on a Black identity, nor did she get caught in a blatant lie like Margaret Seltzer, Rachel Dolezal, or Jessica Krug. But the distinction is a thin one. While she didn’t falsify her identity, she still inserted herself into a cultural space that wasn’t hers, performing an art form rooted in Black culture with an air of authority that only highlighted her disconnect. The similarity between all these white women lies in their entitlement—the belief that they could step into a culture and take from it without truly engaging with its history or respecting its boundaries.

Meanwhile, in a striking display of defiance, refugee breakdancer Manizha Talash, known as “b-girl Talash,” wore a “Free Afghan Women” cape during her pre-qualifier battle. Since the Olympics prohibits political expressions during competition, Talash was disqualified. Her act was not only a personal statement from a 21-year-old who escaped the Taliban’s oppressive regime, but also a powerful connection to a larger political and human rights movement.

In contrast to the viral attention surrounding Rachael Gunn’s performance, which drew ridicule and praise, Talash’s disqualification highlights the privilege white women enjoy while engaging in a Black cultural art form without facing any real consequences or stakes in the narratives they appropriate. Talash on the other hand, represented the authentic rebellious spirit of breakdancing, utilizing her platform to confront genuine oppression and risking everything to deliver a significant message. Once again, we are reminded of the persistent inequalities in how cultures and voices are recognized or suppressed on the global stage.

At the end of the day, when it comes to dance and other cultural expressions, there’s something unique about the way Black people move, the way we hold trauma, joy, resistance, and community in our bodies. This cannot be imitated. Rachael Gunn may study and horribly imitate breaking, but she will never hold water next to the teens from the South Bronx who gave birth to this art 50 years ago, because she lacks the soul.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and the author of Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America.

SEE ALSO:

Fans Rally Around Jordan Chiles As Olympic Gymnast’s Bronze Medal Is Threatened

Mixed Messages: Olympics Welcome Weed Ambassador Snoop Dogg After Suspending Sha’Carri Richardson For Weed

window.addEventListener(‘interaction’, function () {
setTimeout(function () {
var s = document.createElement(‘script’), el = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[ 0 ];
s.async = true;
s.src=”https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;
el.parentNode.insertBefore(s, el);
}, 1000)
});

The post The Privilege To Fail: How Rachael ‘Raygun’ Gunn’s Olympic Routine Made Breakdancing A Global Joke appeared first on NewsOne.

Read more