The Disco Dance Revolution

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For African Americans, gaining freedom has been a hard struggle. Through the Civil Rights Movement that continued well into the 1970s, African Americans fought to gain rights that would allow them the most basic privileges. Though not enslaved anymore, African Americans quickly learned that freedom was not as easy or what they thought it would be. “Freedom” was a white man’s life that included equality within all aspects of life and no discrimination. After returning from war, African American men began to want more equal rights and opportunities, they expected justice form the country that they had fought for. This included the right to vote, citizenship, and desegregation. For every black man and woman, no opportunity was simply given. If they were accepted, it was with criticism and discrimination. With the new freedom that disco music gave black artists, they began to have more options within society. With Disco, black men were given the opportunity to become more than the stereotype. They brought forth a new sophistication, masculinity and sexuality that allowed black “soul music” to create a stake for itself in popular culture and the music industry. “Disco provided a partial map of black America’s shifting relationship to masculinity, upward mobility, and politics in the post-civil rights era.” Their music, though many times seen as a form of conformity and a rip-off of pop music, gave them a presence. It allowed them to “move beyond stultifying racial categorizations that confined them.” No longer were they confined to the accepted stereotype of a male; they started be seen as smooth, lovable, and sexual, everything women wanted and began to respond to. While their music gave men new freedom, many people criticized thei...

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...t about the glitz and the glam of drag queens, sexuality, and throbbing dance floors; it gave those excluded groups the courage to fight for a place in society and caused them to gain that freedom. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” disco gave African American men, gays, and women the strength the demand their freedom, it wasn’t being given after years of movements so through disco and their music, they stood together and fought for it and won it.

Bibliography

Echolls, Alice. Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010.

Oakes, James and Michael McGerr and Jan Ellen Lewis and Nick Cullather and Jeanne Boydston. Of the People: A History of the United States. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.. 2011.

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