When George Floyd was murdered, the dancers at Full Out Studios didn’t want to stay silent.

TheOakland dance studioformed an informal board to discuss their options, sparked by a “base-level decent human reaction of being disgusted” by Floyd’s killing, said Full Out co-founder Rocko Luciano. But the staff — multiracial and led by three Asian American studio owners — was anxious about saying the wrong thing. For a few days, they waited to see if other studios would speak out, but they saw nothing on social media.

Four days later, Full Outposted a statement of solidaritywith the Black community on Instagram. And then, Luciano said, “we put our money where our mouth was.”

Full Out raised more than $2,200 for organizations includingHip Hop for Changeand theBlack Lives Matter Global Network, hosted workshops to highlight Black dancers, and revised its policies to include specific anti-racism clauses. All this while struggling to stay open as a small business during a crippling pandemic and grappling with its position as an Asian-led group practicing an art form deeply rooted in African culture.

自弗洛伊德以来的谋杀,完全没有been the only Bay Area dance organization reckoning with issues of race and appropriation. Teams and studios across the country have pledged to honor the history of hip-hop, make their own practices more inclusive and use their platforms to support Black-led community organizations. The resulting change has been hard-fought, uneven at times and necessary, dancers say.

“Before we start posting any black squares or videos, we need to start learning what we’re doing first, because that’s where the respect comes from,” said JC Caoile, the executive director and artistic director ofStr8jacket, a predominantly Asian hip-hop team based in San Mateo.

Hip-hop emerged in the 1970s, created by Black and Latinx youth in a postindustrial Bronx scarred by gang violence and a cratering economy. It has five pillars, according to the New York hip-hop collective Zulu Nation: DJing, breaking, MCing, graffiti and knowledge.

But even from the beginning, Asian martial arts and kung fu movies helped influence break-dancing styles, said Khafre Jay, founder of Hip Hop for Change, an Oakland-based nonprofit that uses hip-hop education to advocate for social justice causes.

Nearly two decades later, Asian American college students who grew up steeped in hip-hop culture began forming collegiate dance teams tied to Asian cultural organizations at their schools. Then the success of groups like the Jabbawockeez, which originated in the Bay Area and won the first season of “America’s Best Dance Crew” in 2008, brought Asian hip-hop dancers to mainstream attention.

“The spirit of it was connected to providing a space where people have a sense of belonging, where people who grew up in hip-hop culture can come together and express that love,” said Arnel Calvario, who startedKaba Modern, the first of the groups, as a freshman at UC Irvine in 1992.

But as mostly Asian hip-hop groups sprouted up across the University of California system and beyond, dancers started using the now-disavowed term “urban dance,” and the ties to hip-hop’s cultural roots began to fray. “We were all of these Asian people doing hip-hop and there were no Black people,” said Sammay Dizon, who danced on UC Berkeley’s Main Stacks team from 2010 through 2014.

In the Bay Area, with Asian American dancers the majority on competitive dance teams, Black dancers reported microaggressions ranging from use of racial slurs by Asian dancers to a feeling of tokenization during routines. Those dynamics were compounded on college campuses like UC Berkeley, where Black students’ share of the population dropped from7.8% of the entering class in 1997— the last year UC schools were allowed to use race as a criteria in admissions — to3% in the 2020-21 school year.

“I get uncomfortable because there’s a predominantly Asian community and then sometimes you guys are dancing to rap and hip-hop songs with the N-word in it and it’s not bleeped out,” said UC Berkeley student and Bearettes drill team member Cherie Hughes, a Black dancer who spoke at an October panel discussing anti-Blackness within the Berkeley dance community.

Last summer, the renewed cultural consciousness spurred by the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement cast those tensions into sharp relief. First to go was the term “urban dance,” with team after teamposting the same messagevia social media apologizing for its “harmful racial implications.”

Danyel Moulton, a half-Black, half-Japanese dancer from Southern California who emerged as a leader in the dance community’s fight for social justice, led virtual conference calls with hundreds of participants to discuss anti-Black racism within the dance community and outlining concrete ways to improve.

In August, Dizon’s former Berkeley team, Main Stacks, issued a statement acknowledging that “after listening to previous members’ experiences, we realize that Main Stacks has not been a place where all BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) individuals have felt welcomed, included, and heard.”

The team pledged to increase its hip-hop education, require leadership to take animplicit bias test并包括一个零容忍clause against racial bigotry in its contract. Over the summer, team members raised $855 for the Black Organizing Project, an Oakland grassroots community organization, through a series of workshops featuring Black artists. They also helped organize the October panel on anti-Blackness in the Berkeley dance community.

Full Out hosted classes to raise money for national and Bay Area Black activist organizations including the Black Trans Protesters Emergency Fund and So Oakland LLC. Internally, the studio educated its training team on the history and fundamentals of hip-hop and revamped its internal contract to include more specific clauses condemning racism and detailing a complaint and discipline procedure for future instances of harassment or discrimination.

Black staff members at Full Out said they’re proud of the work that the studio is doing.

“他们非常支持,他们有这么多resources on their website,” said Raquel Tansier, a Black dancer who began teaching at Full Out last summer after leaving two other local dance studios because they weren’t showing support for Black Lives Matter.

Arayah Fleming, another Black teacher at Full Out, said the support the studio has shown her and other Black staff members has given her the confidence to be more assertive with friends in other aspects of her life. “I got used to non-Black POC not saying anything, but not here,” said Fleming. She and Tansier are two of seven Black leaders at the studio, making up roughly a fifth of the staff.

Str8jacket, which has long incorporated education on the history of hip-hop into its curriculum, added an hour of conversation before its practices to discuss current events and social issues in the dance community, and raised $900 for organizations supporting Black Lives Matter over the past year.

Teams also united for big events. In August, dozens of organizations partnered with the 2020 Project, an Asian American voter mobilization organization, to host Dance to the Polls, a virtual dance workshop series to get out the vote and share dance community perspectives from Asian and Black performers. In November, Main Stacks turned Prelude NorCal, its annual national dance competition, into a two-day speaker series “to investigate the issue of cultural appropriation of hip-hop dance as a Black cultural art form, and our privilege as non-Black dancers.” And earlier this year, Main Stacks and Str8jacket were two of many sponsors of the Invitation, an event to discuss ongoing social issues within the community.

Over the past year, activism within the dance community has happened against a backdrop of ongoing police violence against Black Americans and escalating hate crimes, bigotry and violence against Asian Americans.

Outside of the competitive and studio scene, organizations like Hip Hop for Change are working to build solidarity between Black and Asian communities in the Bay Area, partnering with other community groups like the Chinese Progressive Association. They’ve hosted workshops for dance teams and schools to emphasize a history of Black and Asian community organizing as well as “hip-hop as a pathway for solidarity,” said Hip Hop for Change communications director Stephanie Liem.

Full Out is also continuing to host events to make an impact. On Friday, May 28, for instance, the studio is hosting classes, including one taught by Moulton, to raise money forCompassion in Oakland, a volunteer organization that provides chaperones to seniors in Oakland’s Chinatown.

The efforts show that Bay Area dance teams have sustained their activism, even if Moulton cautions that success stories like these aren’t the norm across every organization. In the 15th month of the pandemic, as many teams haven’t yet held in-person practices or performances, the true test of lasting change will depend on how well their new anti-racist practices translate to a post-COVID world.

“In the next couple months, as more things open up, we’ll see how the wider community has been changing altogether,” said Str8jacket co-director Kristie Lui. “But I think definitely for Str8jacket, we’re forever changed in our mentality.”

Full Out Studios presents “AAPI Fundraiser: Dance for a Cause”:6, 7:30 and 9 p.m. Friday, May 28. $25 for one class or $60 for all three, with a portion of the proceeds going to Compassion in Oakland. Ciel Creative Space, 935 Carleton St., Berkeley.www.fulloutstudios.com/aapi

About this story

This story was produced in partnership with AAJA-SF Bay Area and Comcast California for Rising with the Tides, a storytelling project aimed at amplifying Asian American Pacific Islander stories and voices. AAJA-SF Bay Area is the local chapter for the Asian American Journalists Association, a nationwide nonprofit educational and professional organization based in San Francisco.www.aajasf.org/rising

Related articles

‘A lifesaving thing’: Hip-hop dance groups find new purpose amid pandemic

Slowed by pandemic, renowned choreographer’s studio dancing away again