The Black history of twerking — and how it taught me self-love

October 1, 2021 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Lizzo | TEDMonterey | August 2021

Twerking is mainstream now … but do you know where it came from? Superstar Lizzo traces booty shaking to a traditional West African dance and tells how Black women across generations kept the rhythm alive, from blues and jazz singers to modern rap and hip-hop performers. With her characteristic energy, she shares how twerking empowered her to love her own body — and explains why understanding its origins helps protect Black culture from erasure and misappropriation. (And, yes, she twerks on stage.)

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Lizzo · Singer, rapper, songwriter, flutistThree-time Grammy-winning superstar Lizzo has become a household name, with more than four billion global streams and a Platinum debut album.

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“[T]herefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.”
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–Luke 18:19 (King James version)

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“You have to fall in love with hanging around words.”
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–Thanissara Mary Weinberg.

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“Truth moves at the speed of now.”
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“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre

“Show up. Dive in. Keep at it.”
– Barack Obama

“Give me some TRUTH!”
–Seen on a bumper sticker in Redondo Beach, CA

“At times I think and at times I am.”
–Paul Valéry

“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth – and truth rewarded me.”
–Simone de Beauvoir

“The Cosmic Intention is to evolve from a thing to a think.”
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“It is so respectful to not get involved in somebody else’s angst.”
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“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
–Leonard Cohen, from his song “Anthem”

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“[B]y man came death. [By God comes life].”
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“It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”
–R.W. Emerson

“We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”
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“Loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude is the richness of self.”
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“Nothing that you lose is real. Nothing that is real can ever be lost.”
–Al Haferkamp, H.W., M.

“Man will not be satisfied until he is everywhere equally present.”
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“Human consciousness is how the universe understands itself.”
–Joe Ciriello, H.W., m

“Gravity is a matter of interest.”
–Brian Wallenstein, H.W., d.

“There is NO gender to art.”
–Brian Wallenstein, H.W., d.

“What was once invention is now convention.”
–Brian Wallenstein, H.W., d.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on, but once it gets its pants on, watch out!!!”
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“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
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“You can’t change your shoes while you’re standing in them.”
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“Translation [and Releasing the Hidden Splendour] is a form of worship.”
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“Occupy Yourself!”
–David Wilcox

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“Curb your God.”
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“When I create art, it’s like holding hands with God.”
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“My heart is like a toilet door! There are names marked all over it.”
–from the French film “Toi and Moi”.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
–Mark Twain

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
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“The mind loves truth and so does the body.”
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“I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”
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“There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart.”
— Chandogya Upanishad

“Love believes all things and yet is never deceived.”
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“My life is not mine.”
–Rumi

“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
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“Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.”
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“Everyone has got some preconceptions, but you have to readjust them in front of reality. Reality has the last word.”
–Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Love? What is it? Most natural pain killer what there is. LOVE.”
–William S. Burrough’s final journal entry

“We acquire the strength we have overcome.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I am all other men.”
–Schopenhauer

“Man is, that he might have joy.”
–Joseph Smith

“To the man who can perfectly practice inaction, all things are possible.”
–Ernest Holmes in Science of Mind

“People will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you make them feel.”
–Tom Asacker

“We have a right to know the truth; no right to ask anything else from God, but the right to know that.”
— J.M. Barrie in Tommy and Grizel

“If you don’t believe in something greater than yourself, you’ll never do anything greater than yourself.”
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“Boredom is the child of self-centeredness.”
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“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.”
–Robert Louis Stevenson

“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that your life could have been any different.”
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“When I was born I was so surprised I didn’t talk for a year and a half.”
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“Don’t look at me like I’ve gotten old or something like that.”
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“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
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“Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away”
–Robert Fulghum

“I REFUSE to participate in a recession.”
–bumper sticker

“We believe . . . different from Wall Street. We believe customer No. 1, employee No. 2, and shareholder No. 3. This is my religion.”
–Jack Ma, Alibaba Group

“Fear is a choice.”
–Kurtis Matthews, San Francisco Comedy College

“Don’t Believe Everything You Think”
–bumper sticker

“One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”
–Joseph Campbell

“When people asked [Jacques Cousteau], ‘Well, Captain, what do you expect to find?’ he always said, ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t go.’”
–Jean-Michel Cousteau, his son

“Let life happen to you. Life is in the right, always.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke

“And, as [Picasso] said, at the end of his life, he was in dialogue with the old masters, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Rubens. He thought he was talking to them and that they were talking back to him through his art.”
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“The world breaks everyone but afterwards many are strong at the broken places.”
–Ernest Hemingway

“Inside every head is a different world.”
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“Thank God our time is now, when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere, never to leave us till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took.”
–Christopher Fry

“If you’re neurotic and you think, I’m not where I deserve to be or my mother didn’t love me, or blah, blah, blah, that lie, that neurotic vision, takes over your life and you’re plagued by it ’til it’s cleansed. In a play, at the end of the play, the lie is revealed. [T]he better the play is, the more surprising and inevitable the lie is, as Aristotle told us. Plays are about lies.”
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“If you want to be a writer, you don’t want to live in a comfortable place.”
–Benjamin Alire Saenz

“And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
–Anais Nin

“Often people think that it’s a question of adrenaline, [that] it’s an adrenaline addiction. I think what they are addicted to essentially is brotherhood. It’s a very healthy impulse that is taking place in a very unhealthy place.”
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“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
–William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Love well, be loved and do something of value.”
–Aristotle

“Tread softly upon the earth because the faces of the unborn look up at you.”
–James Cameron quoting Brazilian tribal saying

“You don’t attract what you want. You attract what you are.”
–Wayne Dyer

“We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in.”
–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

“Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid.”
–J.D. Salinger

“If things don’t seem out of control, you’re not going fast enough.”
— Mario Andretti

“We see things not as they are, but as we are.”
— Anais Nin

“A change in the weather is sufficient to re-create the world and ourselves.”
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“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— George Bernard Shaw

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“Have an open-mind, but don’t let your brains fall out.”
— Jacob Needleman

“When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.”
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“A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.”
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“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only at night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe

“Give thanks to unknown blessings already on their way.”
— Native American proverb at cafe in San Francisco

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
–e.e. cummings

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Bathtub Bulletin

The Black history of twerking — and how it taught me self-love

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Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more