Flexing, also called Bone Breaking, is a style of street dance from Brooklyn, New York that is characterized by rhythmic contortionist movement combined with waving, tutting, and gliding.
I feel they should also add a squicky warning. I had to look away during some of joint twisting stuff. *shudder* But, you know, you should watch it all the way through. It's pretty kewl.
Ta-Nehisi Coates touches on a subject that's been somewhat controversial in the SuperMegaHousehold in the past.
At any rate, the Festival would have these fancy dinners in the evening where I would sit around with people who were generally worth a gazillion dollars or some such. They were all nice and everything, but subtly--in ways cash can't explain--very, very different from me. For instance, at dinner, no one finished their plate. Many of them went so far as to decline desert, or if they indulged they'd eat half and sip coffee. We are not talking about large plates, or heaping deserts.
For the first couple of nights, I looked at all these rich white people like they'd lost their mind. To my mind they were being wasteful and unappreciative. I was not out the projects but I had--like most of us--come up in a house where you are told to finish your food. By the third night, I started to feel weird. I began to believe that by finishing my dinner and plowing through dessert I was committing a faux pas. No one said any such thing to me. But I just felt like I was sticking out. The next night I came to dinner and only ate half, I nibbled at dessert. I sipped the coffee. By my final dinner, not only had I joined the culture of withholding, I actually felt full and marveled at the fact that I'd ever been any other way.
This was in the span of a week. It was about then that I started to notice that I may well have been the only overweight person in the entire town.
Culture is a set of practices which people adopt to make sense of their environment. I was raised in a house where the memory of going hungry had not faded. I never went hungry, but I was raised around people who'd grown up with that. Moreover, all of my friends and relatives were raised the same way. Everyone I knew for the formative years of my life was raised in the culture of "Finish Your plate." And given the environment our parents had come up in, it made perfect sense.
