Popular Culture is made by Everyday People

In the book “The Games Black Girls Play”, Gaunt makes a convincing argument that the musical games of African American girls is the foundation of African diasporic popular music. In a counter-history, she shows how African American girls who are triply minoritized through race, gender, and age are producing music culture that has profound influences on popular music and the popular imagination.

Gaunt’s insights converge in an impressive discussion of double-dutch. This activity is compellingly positioned as a fifth element of hip-hop, alongside DJ’ing, rapping, break dancing and graffiti. Double-dutch serves to disseminate the embodiment of race and gender, it engages with commercial music, and is subject to both regulation and recovery.

As a reader I truly related to the personal musical and cultural experiences presented by the African American female interviews featured in this book. As a child I can remember playing double-dutch at every opportunity that presented itself; before school, at every recess and after school and if I could find enough people to play, even on the weekends. I also recall that this was not an innate ability, but a learned and studied skill I had to practice to master.

While, my childhood double-dutch interactions were mostly with African American females, my most influential teacher was a Puerto Rican girl about two or three years my senior. Most of what I knew I learned from watching her. In my schoolyard the games that the black girls played was also played by girls of many different races and cultural backgrounds and sometimes the occasional boy. That brings me to question where are the comparisons between the games that black girls play and the games that non-black girls play.