Partying as protection, liberation, and resistance
By: Kathryn Cua
While moderating a panel called “Clubs, Crews, & Houses” at Stony Island Arts Bank in 2019, Duane Powell quoted Dr. Wallace Best: “a Black body in motion is never without consequence.” Best wrote this in an article for the Huffington Post in which he reflected on the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Levar Jones in 2014. According to Best, an irrational fear of Black people is so deeply ingrained into the American national psyche that Black bodies themselves are read as a threat. Powell quoted Best when speaking on the house scene in Chicago because the experiences he had in his youth posed an alternate, antithetical reality to this history. He spoke to the way in which parties offered him and countless other queer Black teens the freedom to move in “a space where nothing is policing you.” He recalled memories of getting dressed to go out, explaining how he and his friends would wear plain clothes on the way to parties and then change into party clothes as they got closer “because our parents were concerned about us looking crazy as hell in the streets and someone getting jumped trying to get to the parties.” He asked panelists Steve McCurry and Tina Howell if they shared this experience, if parties offered them a space in which they were free to let loose. McCurry said in return that being able to dance at venues like the Reactor offered him reprieve from his home life, which “was the opposite of what I was experiencing at the parties.” He said he was full of rage during his teen years, and partying was the only activity that enabled him to get the “animal or demon” out of him.
The house scene from the 1970s to the 2000s shaped the lives of many Black youth by providing opportunities for them to experience their adolescence. Partying, whether that was at the club or a sock hop, enabled Black teens to experience a sense of personal and bodily safety that they might not have had elsewhere. This is significant to note because as Best stated in his biting aphorism, Black people in America have not been guaranteed safety. The freedom to just be is something that has historically been denied—and contemporaneously continues to be denied—of Black individuals. When I finished the first draft of this article in December of 2020, the angle I took focused primarily on the presence of spirituality in house. Seeking to unpack the saying that house is “a body thing, a soul thing, a spiritual thing,” I wanted to examine partying as a sacred act as opposed to a secular one. When I returned to this text at the start of spring 2021, we had experienced yet another succession of police murders of Black and brown youth on a national scale: The Chicago Police Department killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo on March 29; the Minneapolis Police Department killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright on April 11; and the Columbus Police Department killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant on April 20 moments before it was announced that Derek Chauvin was found guilty on all counts for murdering George Floyd. Returning to Powell and McCurry’s stories in the wake of these tragedies made me feel as if I had entered another dimension. The way they described their experiences partying in these spaces where house culture thrived made me feel as if the history of house operated on a completely different plane of existence, one where queer Black life was affirmed and Black bodies in motion were insisted upon and protected.
When news broke about Daunte Wright, I came across a quote on Instagram that author Ijeoma Oluo wrote. She said: “Black and brown kids never get to fuck up. They never get to rebel. They never get to be wild. They never get to be kids. To do so can land them in jail or even the morgue.” The stakes are always higher for Black and brown people because the U.S.’s approach to social control is both punitive and racialized. It disproportionately affects Black and brown people because they are read as a threat to public safety. We don’t only see this play out in our legal system, but also, in our schools. In a study for Villanova University where 294 public schools were sampled, researchers Allison Ann Payne and Kelly Welch found a correlation between the implementation of punitive policies and the perception of racial threat. In other words, their study confirmed that the more Black and brown people there are in any given space, the more susceptible it is to punitive discipline. Their study also found that “schools with a larger percentage of Black students are not only more likely to use punitive disciplinary responses but also more likely to use extremely punitive discipline and to implement zero-tolerance policies.” While these measures are harmful to both Black and brown kids, they are most harmful to Black girls in particular. The Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection conducted a study from 2013 to 2014 that found that “only 20 percent of female preschoolers were Black, but Black girls made up 54 percent of female preschool children with one or more suspensions.” We have seen over and over again how policing has denied Black youth of their adolescence. It must be understood, though, that punitive disciplinary action, in general, does this as well. They force Black kids—especially Black girls—to grow up faster because they are seen as adults sooner, and therefore, deserving of less grace and less leniency if they make mistakes.
Punitive policies are destructive because they seek to control not only people’s actions but more insidiously, their bodies. In doing so, the efficacy of these policies is directly contingent upon identifying who is a threat rather than what is a threat. But what if our safety systems valued creating safe environments instead of identifying certain people as threats to safety? Teen parties in house history provide us with an example of a non-punitive approach to safety. Kirk Townsend in a separate panel spoke about how during his residency DJing at Mendel High School the crime rate dropped 20 percent every Saturday and some Fridays when the school would host sock hops after basketball games. Townsend said, “unequivocally, and historically, there was no other place that was able to do parties the way that Mendel did it,” due in part to the fact that its gym was located on top of the cafeteria with four ways up and down the stairs between the two locations. Having two levels allowed a total capacity of 4,000 people: The gym was able to hold up to 2,500 kids and the cafeteria maxed out at 1,500. With two different DJs on either level—the likes of whom often included big names such as Ron Hardy, Frankie Knuckles, Chip. E, and Jesse Saunders—Townsend said it was a unique situation that lent itself to attracting 3 to 4,000 teens each week. Townsend started DJing at Mendel in 1975 until Mendel closed in 1988, and according to him, there was not one disciplinary incident that occurred during his 13-year residency.
Teen parties in the history of house culture present us with a model of communal safety that affirms the life of Black youth. Examining the role partying has played in enabling Black youth to experience their adolescence encourages us to envision the possibility of non-punitive forms of social control in our present. Even more, it challenges us to believe in the possibility of a future devoid of punishment as a safety measure. The state so desperately wants to strip Black youth of their right to life through policing and punitive policies under the guise of “protection,” but house history exemplifies how partying has effectively protected and enabled Black kids to experience their youth—along with the clumsiness, misjudgment, and mess-ups that come with it—without punishment. In light of this, partying is protective. It’s liberatory. It’s a form of resistance. Understanding that the act of partying holds this power challenges us to believe in and construct a present that allows Black youth to exist fully and authentically in all of the spaces they occupy—without inhibition or fear of consequence.