Oakland’s original boogaloos speak out

August 19, 2020 3:42 PM

Pioneers of a funky Bay Area dance style are fighting to preserve their history, after an extremist alt-right movement appropriates their name.

In early June, the killing of a Santa Cruz police officer made national headlines. The murder was later linked to the drive-by fatal shooting of a security guard at Oakland’s federal courthouse building, during what began as a peaceful protest for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Black Lives Matter. Both incidents were linked to the upstart “boogaloo bois,” a loose national community often described as an extremist alt-right movement.… Dozens of articles describing the movement appeared all over mainstream media outlets, from CNN to NPR to the BBC. But none of those reports mentioned that for more than 50 years, the term “boogaloo” has been associated with an African-American-derived dance culture that began in the Bay Area.

When William “Mr. Penguin” Randolph—a member of the legendary East Oakland dance group The Black Resurgents—found out about boogaloo’s violent doppelgangers, he was appalled. “I heard a news clip talking about these guys in Hawaiian shirts and semiautomatic weapons, talking about they were boogaloos and the boogaloo movement was a movement that would create civil war and neo-Nazism or anti-American government in the United States,” he said. “And I’m like, wait a minute, hold on.” …

Standing in front of the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center (previously the Oakland Civic Auditorium), the site of dozens of boogaloo competitions over the years, Randolph describes the reaction to what he and other members of the original boogaloo community consider cultural appropriation of the worst kind.

“A lot of people said they could not use the term boogaloo to promote what they’re doing, because it’s not correct, it’s not right, it’s not what we stand for,” Randolph said. “I know for a fact the term didn’t originate with these anti-American culture people.”

posted by Lexica (11 comments total)

I suppose all this is the bitter harvest of that idiotic idea that saying "[thing] 2: Electric Boogaloo" at every chance is funny
posted by thelonius at 4:35 PM on August 19, 2020 [10 favorites]

Very cool information and exactly why I'm not accepting the term as stolen.

I was only familiar with Boogaloo as a dance and music culture that originated in the 1960's in Spanish Harlem at the intersection of Latin and African American society. It is still actively taught at larger dance congresses which have a Latin (typically salsa and bachata) focus.

I had no idea the later styles with the same name, but I love this popping walk-out.
posted by meinvt at 4:37 PM on August 19, 2020 [8 favorites]

The attempted appropriation by white supremacists of boogaloo and aloha shirts both genuinely infuriated me. I am still hoping that this is one of those attempts - like the pride rainbow or uh, drinking milk at all - that fails because the appropriated imagery is too familiar to be a useful or reliable in-group signifier, or even one like the OK sign where everyone catches onto it early enough that it fails to develop into a consistently white supremacist signifier and they have to invent some stupid looking new variation to signal each other, which then signals everybody because obviously now we know about it and the whole idea by white supremacists is to pick something ordinary enough to not raise alarms but specific enough to work as a wink and a nod for each other.

Basically, I'm just praying to the random ass forces of the universe that this time we'll get to keep the things. Boogaloo is great and you Nazis can't diminish it.
posted by Lonnrot at 5:03 PM on August 19, 2020 [7 favorites]

They want to appropriate Hawaiian 'Aloha' shirts.
Aloha (/ɑːˈloʊhɑː/; Hawaiian: [əˈloːˌha]) is the Hawaiian word for love, affection, peace, compassion and mercy, that is commonly used as a simple greeting but has a deeper cultural and spiritual significance to native Hawaiians, in which the term is used to define a force that holds together existence
and Hell No.
posted by theora55 at 5:43 PM on August 19, 2020 [8 favorites]

Cool article about the rightful and original term of Boogaloo. Damn stupid white boys are not taking that over. Thanks for posting the dance culture link. The link to the video at the bottom of the page is amazing
posted by biggreenplant at 5:18 AM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

"We like it like that" is a great documentary about the origins of Boogaloo in the Latin community of New York in the 1960s.
posted by Tom-B at 12:45 PM on August 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

I first heard the term in Carol Kaye's bass book. Here is her interpretation of the style.
posted by thelonius at 2:55 PM on August 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

I suppose all this is the bitter harvest of that idiotic idea that saying "[thing] 2: Electric Boogaloo" at every chance is funny

This literally is where it comes from and yes I am astonished by how old that meme is when I think about it.
posted by atoxyl at 11:39 PM on August 20, 2020

right, "Civil War 2" I suppose. Just awful.
posted by thelonius at 6:51 AM on August 21, 2020

Thank you for sharing, I wasn't aware of what Boogaloo was beyond the meme.

With cultural appropriation, why have we gone from "you are a horrible person" (or at least, "yo, that's problematic to use that like that, you should stop") to "oh hey no one gets to use this anymore" ?
The big ones from a few years ago were head dresses at festivals and the phrase "that's my spirit animal".
posted by freethefeet at 9:48 AM on August 21, 2020

With cultural appropriation, why have we gone from "you are a horrible person" (or at least, "yo, that's problematic to use that like that, you should stop") to "oh hey no one gets to use this anymore"?

It goes like this:

1. "Could you stop using this, in that particular way, please? It's really not cool for the following reasons [...]"
2. "OMG n0bOdY cAn dO ANYTHING aNy M0rE!!!!!111! iT's PC g0nE mAd!!!!" etc
3. Patient attempts to express the boundaries of the actually problematic behaviour.
4. Further bad faith responses portraying both the initial request, and subsequent clarifications, as unreasonable and/or impossible to comply with.
5. Lots of bystanders joining in with their own misinformed outrage after falling for the bullshit narratives of #2 and #4.
6. People give up and just go along with "nobody gets to use this anymore", because who the fuck has time to deal with this shit.
posted by automatronic at 11:00 AM on August 22, 2020 [1 favorite]