Chubby and ‘The Twist’—Clinging to Racism in the Age of Obama

I turned on my office TV a few minutes ago, intending to flip over to the Olympics, when the Huckabee show came up. I was startled by the relatively young looking black guy singing. Could that actually be Chubby Checker? He had to be older than that. He’s 72, according to Wikipedia. But he sure didn’t look it and he was singing his anthem — “The Twist.”

Suddenly a white woman — she could have been in her sixties or seventies herself — got up out of the studio audience and starting dancing with him. As the audience applauded the dancers, tears started to pour out of my eyes.

This doesn’t happen often, folks. I’m not all that sentimental. But it didn’t take me long to figure out why the tears fell. Chubby Checker recorded “The Twist” in 1960, when he was 18 years old. I was 15 0r 16 at the time, depending on the time of year. Six years later I was in Chubby’s native South Carolina in the civil rights movement.

I don’t know who that white woman dancing with Chubby on the Huckabee show was, whether she was in the civil rights movement too, but I sincerely doubt she was any kind of racist. White people loved to dance to Chubby back then — and eventually with Chubby. Soon enough white people were dancing with black people and Latino people and Asian people. I know I was — and most of my friends were too. I had a Puerto Rican girlfriend, a Chinese-American girlfriend and a Ghanaian girlfriend. (Okay, I had a lot of girlfriends.) Nobody cared. And nobody should.

Does it really? Well, maybe a little. There are racially biased idiots everywhere from here to Chechnya.

Simon came out of Baltimore, where I grew up at approximately the same time. Music united a lot of people when nothing else could.

I appeared twice on the Buddy Dean Show, a dance show in the afternoon for teenagers. Unfortunately, Dean was a southern racist who didn’t believe in race mixing, so he had what was known as “Black Thursday” for the black kids (so that they could appear on his show after some pressure was put on him by the public).

If you see the movie “Hairspray” with Rickie Lake, you will see what this was all about.

While whites and blacks may not have danced with each other, we certainly danced in the same place at high school hops, and there never was any trouble. We knew each other and respected each other, for the most part. Then again, our educational level was a bit higher than at other schools).

In college, there really wasn’t any racism. Again, music/dance united people instead of dividing them.

For his part, Checker did more to promote respect and unity than did a lot of the rabblerousers who wanted division and anger (Jackson and Sharpton, among the leaders today, plus that NAACP leader in No. Carolina).

When Mary Wells came on to sing “My Guy”, there were no racists in the audience. All we saw was a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice in a beautiful white dress.

And if you have ever seen Tina Turner perform, you know damned well that race had nothing to do with it. She was the Queen of Nutbush City and Donna Summers was the Queen of Disco.

It just didn’t get any better than that.

RESPECT! Aretha said it all.

Investigation Discovery channel will be running shows on modern-day "sundown towns" where supposedly blacks had better not be after the sun sets. No doubt they will follow with episodes showing areas of cities where whites best not be after dark...heck, ANY time of day...

ID is going off the rails - first adding a Jerry Springer (yeccch) show called Tabloid, now this. I used to like the channel, it had shows on true crime where tbe bad guys lose, and was mostly apolitical. No more. Sad.

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