Cameryn:
I started doing step in high school, and I started a step club. I didn’t crump, but I started watching crumping first. I saw it in “Bring it On” or something. I had access to Youtube and started watching crumping videos, and then I moved into watching stepping videos and I found that I vibed more with that. So then I just kept watching performances and watching other high schools, and then I wanted to start doing it myself. I watched tutorials, including Step Afrika, and that’s how I learned.
I went to a predominantly white high school. I liked to dance, and I knew there was a small community of Black students at my high school. So I put 2 and 2 together to start the club, and it was a great time. It actually started because I was taking a dance elective for the first time, during high school. I kept bringing these step moves to class, and the teacher was encouraging, and she became my mentor for the opening of the club.
Asata:
I don’t think I have as distinct a memory of finding step. I always had an interest in dance, and when the opportunity kept presenting itself, I was really interested in step. I started dancing when I was 5 or 6 years old in church for praise dance. When I got to high school, a couple of friends were starting a step team, and I was like, “All right, I’m in.” I don’t remember seeing a lot of step before then. I definitely remember seeing “Step Up,” those were the movies I was hooked on in high school, and doing step just made the obsession worse.
Cameryn:
At NYU, the first two years of undergrad I was in pre-med. So I was just stressed all the time. In my junior year I decided, “I am changing my life. I’m gonna start doing things I like to do.” So I looked for a step team and NYU didn’t have one. So then I was like, “I’ve started a step team before. Hopefully it’ll go as smoothly as it did in high school. Let me just try again…” So we started a little club.
Asata:
I was on a hunt for clubs at Club Fest as a first year, putting my name down for anything that was artistic or anything that was Black. I was on a mission. I met Cameryn and we talked about how we both did step in high school. I don’t remember why, but I remember not being at the very, very first meeting, just seeing all the videos afterwards. From there I started going to all the practices and really loved it.
Cameryn:
I was pretty open when the club started – “Come whenever you want, come and learn, come and watch.” I think I was pretty much open to people if they wanted to drop in. I never turned anyone away. And then, based on that, a core group stayed. Once those core groups started, we started planning performances.
Asata:
Similar to Cameryn, my first 2 years I was very academically focused. Step was one of the only clubs I stayed in. I was really, super focused on school. But I wanted to do a little bit of the artsy things. Before Covid, it was a nice little family. It wasn’t just performances, it was a mix of friends too. One of my closest friends joined, and there were a lot of different people from throughout different schools at NYU. Seeing other people from different schools was really nice. It also gave us a chance to explore the NYU community, especially trying to find a practice room. Finding a place to rehearse and get things done at NYU was so difficult. We needed hardwood floors, and that was not common. We ended up rehearsing most of the time in a dorm practice room. We figured it out.
Cameryn:
I just had a flashback – our first performance, we got to the room and it was carpeted, and we were panicking – “how is the audience going to hear us?!”
One of my bigger regrets with the club is that I didn’t organize any active efforts to specifically recruit Black people. I thought if I made it open and accessible to everybody, the people who related to the community would come. I wouldn’t want to lose that open aspect, because some of the closest friends I’ve made through the club aren’t Black, but joined because of their own interest in step, and I also think it’s important to share that cultural information. There’s a difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. In my grand ideals of things, I was promoting the latter. But I could have made more of an active effort to welcome more Black students. I think if I were to redo it all over, I would do more active recruitment efforts for Black students specifically – because as Asata was saying, it is part of Black culture and traditionally a Black space.
Asata:
Black spaces at NYU, at least during that time, were very limited. The Black Student Union (BSU) was on campus, but they weren’t holding big community events – at least that I was very aware of. Now it’s completely different, but at the time it was more like student government, rather than community events.
It was hard to know how to market for members without making a club seem exclusive. The club had just started, so we needed people. We wanted as many people to come as possible. Whoever’s gonna show up, we’ll take them, and if they’re interested, we’re interested. But it did cause issues. Some people felt that the club wasn’t Black enough, and it wasn’t enough of a Black space. I could understand coming from that standpoint.
From my own perspective, I was just happy to be in step, and I knew the meaning that it had for me, and I knew what step meant at its core, and I felt like the club was upholding that no matter the people that were there. Would it have been really cool to have a female dominated Black woman power club? Yes, that would have been awesome. But I want to find the grace within ourselves to remember we couldn’t be responsible for bonding the entire Black community at NYU. It was hard enough to try figuring out how to start a club and get space to rehearse. We did our best. I did my best, and we tried, and whether or not people showed up, we were showing up, and we are both Black women that were very interested in the club and wanted to keep upholding it.
Cameryn:
Thank you. I think I appreciate that because as a lighter skinned person, I always worried, “Is it me? Am I the one driving people away because I don’t outwardly present that way?” It’s something I always had in the back of my mind. If I had made someone else captain, or recruited harder, would it have been the space people wanted? But I like what you were saying. We showed up, you know, and the club did what it stood for, and I’m happy to have been a part of it.
But the question of Black spaces was always in the back of my head. I don’t know if you feel this too, but when you go to a predominantly white school, you have the pressure of being like 1 of 2 Black people in class, so there’s pressure to be the Black person. Having to do that in step as well felt weird. So it was nice hearing you say you had a good time. That makes me happy.
Asata:
Especially with both of us coming from predominantly white high schools, it was always one of those things, like “Oh, I’m not Black enough to be in the Black spaces.” I don’t think it was on the fault of a colorism thing, in terms of whether the group was Black enough. But I think when people are coming into a space, and they’re expecting a Black space, and they see mostly a mix of other Asian and white kids at NYU, it’s easy to say, “I have this in every other space. This isn’t what I’m coming for,” and I don’t blame them for that. But I also just wonder, how do you expect to create a space if you’re not a part of it?
During Covid, after I came back from being abroad, I was really focused on finding Black community at NYU. That was the utmost priority for me. I was like, “I wanna have fun. And I wanna have fun with people that look like me and understand my experience.” And those were the clubs that I sought after. BSU also started changing and turning into more of a community space, and I saw myself going for that more. But that’s also where I heard a lot of those conversations, with people not knowing that I was in step, who would say, “Oh, it would be really cool if we had a step team, but the other step team had just a bunch of white people.” I heard that so much, and it was really annoying, because I felt like, “Okay, but you could have came, and then it wouldn’t have been that type of space.” So I don’t know. Could we have done better? Probably. Do I feel bad about it? No, because at the end of the day we were there, and we were doing our best. I think that was enough at the time, and we can’t fault our past selves for that.
Cameryn:
I had a little speech that I would give before every performance about what step was, and I would practice at the club, and they would hear me practicing. But beyond that, I was more focused on the performance aspect and the dancing part of it. So everyone had heard my speech about what step is and its importance to the Black community and stuff like that, but I don’t think I ever brought the conversations I heard around campus to the club, aside from the co-captains. We weren’t talking about Black spaces during rehearsal.
Asata:
It very much was like an elephant in the room – “Hmm. Cameryn’s in front of everyone talking about how step is very much something that’s rooted in Black culture. And as she’s saying that, standing behind her is only a handful of Black individuals among the performers.” We were having these conversations privately, with some of our friends on the team, but not as a group. One of my closest friends was in the club, who’s now one of Cameryn’s close friends as well. She’s Asian, and she has absolutely no African heritage whatsoever, but she’s really interested in dance. And that was something that I brought up with her before she came to the group. I think I was very hesitant to invite her into the space. I was like, “I don’t know dude, it’s very much a Black thing, but also… we need members.” And I was very upfront with her about how I felt about it. And she was like, “well, if it’s weird for me to come, or uncomfortable, I won’t. But if it’s an open space, I’m down to come.” So that was a conversation that we would have pretty often in private, just friend to friend. But it wasn’t something that was talked about as a group. It was very much like the fly on the wall, the elephant in the room, and we all knew it was weird. It was a little off.
Looking back at it now, I should have really said something, but it’s also important to give ourselves grace. You live and you learn, and I think we did the best we could. That’s all we could say at the end of the day. But I’m thinking of the person that I was when I was a sophomore in college, and I wouldn’t have brought up those conversations then. For one thing, I wanted so badly to just be in a step team, and I was worried that if someone said something about it, everyone would leave.
Cameryn:
Yeah. Same vibe. I didn’t want to exclude the people who were showing up. Most of the group was not Black, and I didn’t want to be like, “Hey, everyone! This is what’s happening.” I probably should have had a conversation, but with it being so new, I just felt thankful people were coming.
Asata:
Talking about Blackness and potentially making non-Black people uncomfortable in those conversations was something that I wasn’t comfortable in myself doing yet. I’m glad to say that I would definitely, absolutely have no problem doing it now. I’m not good at keeping my mouth shut at all anymore. It used to be the complete opposite. It’s not that long ago! I’m only 22. But when I started being in predominantly Black spaces, being in those kind of spaces taught me to be okay with making people uncomfortable. And it also taught me to be less people-pleasing. Now I think, at what cost? What am I doing this for? I’m just at a point, in terms of entering the professional world, where I have to learn to speak up for myself, or else I’m never going to be heard.
If a future club is formed. I hope that they can market the club better to the Black community at NYU, especially to freshmen and sophomores. Coming into NYU, I didn’t even know where to find the Black people. I didn’t know that there was a BSU until the end of my sophomore year, and I met someone when I was abroad who said I should get involved. My last 2 years on campus, I had completely different experiences. But I feel like my first 2 years, I had to try so hard to actively seek out these spaces, because they were not promoted to me, and I didn’t have an in. I had to seek it out. So at that point, when we were trying to get this club afloat, there wasn’t really a chance to recruit. We were trying to stay a club and just make it to the next performance. So it’s very multi-layered. I could go on and on.
Cameryn:
I agree about the other Black clubs on campus and the lack of community events. It was a very slow start, at least for me. I didn’t know where the clubs were at or where the people were at. You said it started changing within your last 2 years, after I had graduated, so the only one I can think of was WEST (Women of Excellence, Strength, and Tenacity), which I was a part of, and they didn’t start doing things until probably my late junior year as well. So again, there was opportunity for me to recruit for step there, but they were also a new club. I didn’t want to be like, “Hey, everyone also join my other new club.” So I’m hoping now, the new students have better resources and communities.
Asata:
I’m so envious of what they have now! I will say that I’m so happy to see that it’s much different now. BSU is such a big thing on campus now. I saw that happening towards my junior year, and I was in those spaces, and it was awesome.
Now I try really hard to find spaces where I’m not only a mentor for others, but where I feel seen and I feel heard within my Blackness. I’m an elementary school teacher, and my assistant principal and my principal are Black women. So conversations around culturally responsive teaching and race within our professional development are things that we talk about a lot.
Cameryn:
What I’m currently doing is not related specifically to step, or to Black spaces. But I’m doing my PhD in clinical psychology right now. And it’s so annoying and just so prevalent, how much research just doesn’t include Black people. Or if it does, Black people are grouped into just the category of “other” race, which means every other race and ethnicity besides white is just clumped into one. Something I’ve been talking about with my mentor recently is prioritizing research with better representative samples, and stuff like that. We’ve been brainstorming the ways we’re going to recruit participants for our studies, even in spaces that are Black spaces that I don’t participate in. For example, I’m not particularly religious, but I know that is a big part of the community, so I’m trying to recruit at Black churches and places like that in Columbus, where I am now. So that’s my future career path, trying to do this research specifically for Black populations. And that’s what my current thesis is about.
I thought about starting a grad school step team for a brief moment, but I do not have the time.
Asata:
One of the largest reasons I got into education was because I never had a Black female educator until my second year in college – and she was the only Black female educator that I ever had. When I went into teaching, I said, “I want to teach little kids that look like me.” And now I have a very diverse classroom, and I teach at a school that’s about 80 to 90% Black and brown kids. That was something very important to me when I was seeking out schools, especially living in New York City. I think it’s something that I seek out because of my upbringing, and that’s also related to step. So I think everything’s loosely related. I grew up in a school district in an area that was predominantly white. In a classroom of about 25 kids, I was maybe one of 2 Black or brown kids. Going from there to NYU, another predominantly white institution, I had to find the Black spaces. They’re not as obvious – you’ve got to find them. I seek out Black spaces very intentionally, and that’s kind of what brought me to step in the first place.
Cameryn:
We’ve been talking about all these political, intense things, and complicated feelings. But whenever I was in the room, we were just dancing, and I was having a good time. You guys would see me mess up and try to figure out what I’m supposed to be teaching for that day, but it was fun. It’s something I started from infancy, and then it became what it became. So it’s nice, seeing that progression. I still have close friends from it. It was a great time.
Asata:
I had a wonderful time. It was fun. I enjoyed getting to do step, as crazy as it was performing in carpeted situations. We had a good time in terms of just enjoying dance and enjoying the dance form, and getting to share that with people and show it to people was really fun, and it was also a little nostalgic. We both did it in high school, and being able to kind of do that in college was also really fun, meeting new people and kind of having this little small knit community. I really enjoyed it. I would say that would be the biggest success, the joy that came out of it, and the excitement that came out of going to practice each day. It was also nice, because especially from my experience being in different performance clubs, I know they could be very intense, and step was not intense. It was fun. We went, we had fun, we danced, and we went home. That was it. There wasn’t much more to it, and I enjoyed it. It was fun. We had a great time.
If I could go back, there are things that definitely I would like to change, to make it more of that Black space that we both wanted. But that’s not to say that I look at it with regret. When you know better, you do better. And at the time I didn’t know any better. But now I know that I could be confident in myself and enter those spaces and invite people in, knowing that we needed to book Kimmel a month in advance – just knowing better to do better, in every sense. Knowing myself and what I’m capable of, knowing the logistics of running a club, knowing the logistics of maintaining a club. Knowing how to curate a Black space in a predominantly white institution. Knowing that it’s okay to make people uncomfortable. I didn’t know those things. And I wasn’t comfortable in myself in those things. If I would have known how to do all those things – and I feel Cameryn would say the same – if we had known how to do all those things, we would have.
But it was still a really fun time, and I really enjoyed it.
Cameryn:
Yeah, same sentiment. Couldn’t have said it better. I’m happy one random Thursday afternoon brought us together.