You do not need to look hard to find footage of Kamala Harris dancing. There she is during last year’s Pride march in New York City, shimmying her way into the Stonewall Inn to the tune of Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam”. Or at the White House’s party celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, moving sweetly to Common and Lil Wayne. Then again at this year’s Juneteenth concert, invited up to the stage for a twirl with the gospel singer Kirk Franklin.
Harris is clearly a music fan. She has been documented emerging from record stores holding Roy Ayers LPs and educating the assembled media on George Clinton and P-Funk. She launched her campaign to the strains of Beyonce’s “Freedom”, enlisted Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon” for an ad and was evidently delighted when Charli XCX aligned her viral album with the vice president and proclaimed “Kamala IS brat”.
Such revelry has clearly spooked Donald Trump. The Republican nominee’s first attack ad against Harris showed the vice president dancing to hip-hop, followed by the slogan: “Failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal.”
Out on the campaign trail, Trump has been dancing too, though his moves are less persuasive: a grimace and an awkward shoulder shift, two fists pumping as the band plays YMCA. The lumpen quality of these gestures and the vintage of the tune seems a statement in itself; a rejection of the contemporary, a desire to remain solid and obstinate.
Dancing is no clear indicator of who might win an election. After all, there have been plenty of presidents who danced (George Washington is said to have been on the dancefloor at one event for “upwards of three hours without once sitting down”). And there have been plenty of others who have not.
But with Harris, the dancing has seemed a constituent part of her campaign message—a reminder of the limberness of her years in comparison with Trump’s ageing physique, but also a representation of her as a leader with forward momentum.
Dancing has seemed a constituent part of the Harris campaign message
It was much the same with Barack Obama, who danced memorably on several occasions: at the inauguration with Michelle, in Kenya with his stepgrandmother, during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, when he and the host shuffled to Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”.
Harris and Obama’s dance moments have proved not only joyful but powerful, suggesting a warmth, a humanity, an irresistible cool. Still, it’s hard to ignore that they have also been the only two black presidential nominees in a nation still riven by racial inequality. And to place their dancing in this context can lead us to an uneasy space—one examined by Childish Gambino with the release of his 2018 single “This Is America”, a song about racial injustice, gun violence, the ghetto and law enforcement.
Gambino’s accompanying music video was analysed as deeply as the song itself. A sharply choreographed montage of African dance, viral routines and Jim Crow poses, the video was taken in part as a commentary on the delicate tension between black popular entertainment and minstrelsy—of the way that music and movement can be used to placate an inherently racist society, while simultaneously existing as expressions of exultation, identity, liberation.
One of the finest music books of recent years is Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, in which the poet ranges freely from Josephine Baker to Merry Clayton to Dave Chappelle and beyond, drawing a compelling portrait of a nation and a people that is both personal and political.
Music had helped to propel the civil rights movement
Early on, Abdurraqib focuses on the impact of the television show Soul Train. Nationally syndicated in the early 1970s, and running for 39 seasons, Soul Train was created by a former journalist, Don Cornelius, who had seen how music had helped propel the civil rights movement—and, in many ways, the show was a continuation of that work. Showcasing R&B, soul and hip-hop artists, Soul Train was also famed for its celebration of dance. It featured a segment known as the Soul Train Line: dancers formed two rows, leaving a central space in which each could perform in turn—a sequence of ever more elaborate struts, swaggers and flips—while their fellow dancers urged them on.
For Abdurraqib, the sight of “Black people pushing other black people forward” was “boundless and joyful”. And that joy was important, a way to redress the perception of African Americans as a people not living but enduring. “A people cannot only see themselves suffering,” Abdurraqib writes, “lest they believe themselves only worthy of pain, or only celebrated when that pain is overcome.”
When Obama first ran for president, back in 2008, the campaign message was hope. With Harris, it is perhaps more boundless; it is freedom, fearlessness, joy. And joy carries. It travels all the way down the line and out onto the floor. It pushes a people forward. It pushes us all forward. It says these days are for living, not enduring. It asks a question aloud: isn’t life just a little better when you’re dancing?
