How close do you have to be to an experience to understand it? The black experience differs immensely from any other racial experience, not solely because of the huge amount of adversity the black community was forced to face over a long period of time, but also because of the surplus of positivity that came from this adversity. Through struggle, the black community created its own distinct forms of visual art, music, dance, poetry, and style. It created a culture that countered the white community. While the traditional white community put value in being clean-cut, stiff, and minimal, the black community was more vocal, more motley, and livelier. In Thomas F. DeFrantz’s “The Black Beat Made Visible: Hip Hop and Body Power”, he discusses how these differences begin to effect the performance of black art, and specifically black dances. DeFrantz discusses how these differences in culture commanded attention from the white community both positively from “white hipsters or weekend trippers” (DeFrantz 1) and…