Hello Laura! Good probing questions, as always.
I had a conversation with one of our team members who is of Mexican heritage. He was talking about how white people in the USA take and take and take from other cultures and profit off of the appropriation. When I look at the history of music and dance in the United States, there are very few trends that are creations of white folks. I suppose we could add fashion to that list too. I think about all the fake spirituality that my generation stole from Indigenous people when we got disenchanted with Christianity. My friend's point is that he is all for white people reaching for language and culture that actually belongs to their own traditions. For example, why should we steal Native spirituality when there are some pretty intense pagan traditions in Europe? He thinks Morris dancing is great for white folks. We should have culture, just not stolen culture.
In response to your question about other systemic racism in Morris dancing, I guess I could say I am wary of any impulse to say "mission accomplished" regarding anti-racist work. I think it is a pretty low bar to step over to stop using blackface. With that said, I don't think that there are that many systems within the Morris community I am part of. We basically host one gathering per year and run a social media account. So maybe there can't be "systemic racism" in the community if there aren't any systems?
When I think of systemic racism, a prime example I see is red-lining. On the day that red-lining stopped being official practice, the neighborhoods didn't magically integrate and wealth didn't magically transfer to all the people who had been excluded from building generational wealth. Instead, systems continued in other ways to reinforce white wealth. I think in Morris dancing, now that we are collectively not wearing blackface, that might be "step one" in becoming a more inclusive community. Step two might be looking at each team's systems for recruiting new members. Step three might be looking at new places to perform that bring us in front of BIPOC audiences. Step four might be showing up at schools and teaching kids of all races the dances. Step five might be looking at how we "on-board" new members and figuring out ways to meet the needs of new members. Step six might be something I could only begin to think about once we had actually done steps one through five.
During our DEI workshop we talked about single-gender teams; we talked about issues of ability, especially as some of our dancers get older; we talked about how to make a team practice a welcoming space to new dancers; we talked about recruiting outside of the white/male/heterosexual pool of people; we talked about how to balance the desire to be inclusive with a goal of meeting a certain standard of performance.
I suppose the way each team is run is a series of interlocking systems that have combined to produce the results that we have today. The results that we have is a 95% white space. If we investigate each of these systems, we don't know what we will find.
Yes. There is something good about white people coming together to participate in folk traditions from Europe. But in a real sense, those are not "white traditions," but rather they are (in this case) English and Welsh traditions done by Americans. There is no reason we couldn't be inclusive of all Americans, white or not.
