This essay has been produced through a collaborative dialogue between human insight and artificial intelligence. — Aram & the Algorithms
It was a quiet evening all throughout the house. My niece was watching Dancing With The Stars: 20th Birthday Celebration. I paused from doing the dishes to tune in. I love dancing. AND I’m a keen noticer of suss. And there was something suss about this whole show.
Is Dancing With The Stars a subtle—or not so subtle—culture machine for the perpetuation of Eurocentric norms?
The Grand Thesis
DWTS functions as a technology of cultural power that: (1) enshrines European ballroom as neutral technique rather than historically specific cultural practice, (2) extracts the visual signifiers of racial/ethnic diversity while preserving white epistemic authority over what counts as skill, and (3) systematically appropriates and disciplines non-white dance forms by forcing them through ballroom’s aesthetic grammar. The result is not multicultural exchange but colonial mimicry—difference that is permitted only when it performs “almost the same, but not quite” white.
Hiding in Plain Sight: Whiteness as Unmarked Universal
The foundational move: ballroom dance appears on DWTS as technique itself, while other forms appear as styles. The Waltz, Foxtrot, Viennese Waltz aren’t presented as the social dances of 18th-19th century European courts—they’re presented as the foundation, the grammar, the discipline against which salsa’s “musicality” or hip-hop’s “energy” are decorative variations.
This is what Richard Dyer meant when he wrote that whiteness functions as the “invisible norm”—it doesn’t announce itself as a culture but as culture itself. The scoring rubric makes this concrete: judges award points for “frame,” “posture,” “lines,” “extension,” “technique”—all terms that originate in and privilege ballroom’s postural ideals. There are no equivalent scores for what matters in actual salsa: holding clave, responding to montuno breaks, expressing sabor through weight and timing.
Systemic Erasure and Rhythmic Colonization
In 2014, DWTS replaced its live orchestra with pre-recorded tracks. The new tracks are metronomically precise, quantized to the grid—ballroom time: even subdivision, Western harmonic rhythm. The effect on Afro-diasporic and Latinx music is disciplinary. Salsa’s clave gets straightened. Reggaeton’s tresillo gets ironed into sixteenths. Hip-hop loses its swing. This is what Brenda Dixon Gottschild calls the “Africanist aesthetic” being systematically erased: the very qualities that define these forms as distinct knowledge systems—rhythmic complexity, improvisation within polyrhythm—are sanded down for televisual legibility.
Colonial Memory, Not Cultural Exchange
DWTS’s samba has nothing to do with samba de gafieira or samba no pé—the Brazilian social forms where samba lives as Black cultural practice. The show’s version is ballroom samba. Paso doble is a French ballroom teacher’s fantasy of Spanish bullfighting. Even the Rumba follows a box step invented in English studios in the 1930s. The show doesn’t include other dance traditions—it includes ballroom’s colonial memory of them: versions created by white European codifiers who extracted movement vocabularies and reconstituted them for white metropolitan consumption.
Cruel Optimism: When Inclusion Requires Self-Erasure
Normani Kordei’s Season 24 run: viral routines, perfect scores, viewer favorite. Also: subjected to a racist cyberbullying campaign. The show monetized her suffering, converted her resilience into ratings, then scored her highest when she performed Viennese Waltz and Foxtrot—the most explicitly Eurocentric forms. The systemic racism that made her a target was never examined. The show simply harvested her response to it.
Lauren Berlant calls this “cruel optimism”—when the object of your desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. The promise of inclusion is real. The cost of claiming it is self-erasure. Zendaya’s retrospective comments—”highly stressful,” “a little animosity”—now read differently. She got close to the top and realized the view wasn’t liberation. It was assimilation with good lighting.
The Supremacy is in the Syllabus
DWTS has been on for twenty-three years. It’s shaped how millions of Americans understand what “good dancing” means. It doesn’t ban other forms. It doesn’t use slurs. It just includes them on terms that never threaten white aesthetic authority: you can appear, you can win, but you’ll do it by proving you can master our technique.
This is 21st-century racism: not exclusion but conditional inclusion. Not absence but hierarchical presence. Normani scored 10s in a Viennese Waltz while racists flooded her comments. Alfonso hosts while the judges sit. The show rolls on, and every Monday, millions learn whose movement is knowledge and whose is just spice.
The supremacy is in the syllabus.
Originally published on Mettascope Magazine, November 2025.
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