Olympic Judges Among People Trying To Defend Raygun’s Widely Ridiculed Breaking Performance
B-Girl Raygun of Team Australia competes during the B-Girls Round Robin – Group B on day fourteen of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 at Place de la Concorde on Aug. 9, 2024 in Paris, France. | Source: Ezra Shaw / Getty
There are a lot of words that can be used to describe the performance by so-called B-girl Rachael Gunn aka Raygun at the Paris Olympics. Most people on social media have rightfully called it “cringe,” “embarrassing” and “stupid.” Black people who care about the way something our culture created is presented on the world stage called it a “mockery,” and the “gentrification of Hi Hop,” among other unflattering nouns and adjectives. People who enjoyed laughing at Raygun’s ridiculous Kangaroo Stomp may have called it “amusing” or even “hilarious.” Writing for NewsOne, Dr. Stacey Patton called it a “modern-day minstrel.”
One word that should not be used by anyone to describe Raygun’s routine is “defendable.”
In fact, in my opinion, the only thing more “embarrassing,” “cringe,” “amusing,” “hilarious” and “stupid” than the dance itself are the people who are stretching themselves to defend Raygun’s “mockery” and caucasity-infused “gentrification of Hip-Hop” by way of a “modern-day minstrel. The only people who reach Gunn’s level of pure Caucasian obnoxiousness are the family members, Olympic judges and other assorted white people who are using words like “courage” and “dignity” to describe what it took for this privileged white woman to get on the global stage and embarrass herself, and words like “originality” to describe what she brought to that stage.
According to Fox Sports, Martin Gilian, the head judge in the Breaking competition, said with a straight face that Gunn losing 18-0, 18-0, and 18-0 against the USA, France and Lithuania was not a sign that she didn’t do a good job flopping around on the ground and impersonating either a kangaroo, bunny or velociraptor while hopping around like a toddler trying to get her mother’s attention. Gilian claimed that she only lost because the judges at the Paris Olympics were “looking for a certain style” and that, regardless of how comically bad her performance was, the breaking community “definitely stands behind her”.
“Breaking is all about originality and bringing something new to the table and representing your country or region,” he said. “This is exactly what Raygun was doing. She got inspired by her surroundings, which in this case, for example, was a kangaroo.”
This, my friends, is the power of whiteness.
Source: Ezra Shaw / Getty
First of all, who exactly are the people who make up this “breaking community” that Gilian claimed “stands behind” Gunn? Who is this white man speaking for? He’s certainly not talking about the Black community in the /south Bronx that created the dance style, or the multiple generations of Black Americans in general who developed it, revolutionized it, and set it on its way to becoming the global phenomenon that it is. He isn’t talking about the Hip Hop community—the people responsible for creating and developing the actual culture, which he demonstrates he knows nothing about.
Sure, breaking is a free-form dance where performers are respected for their “originality,” but that doesn’t mean a person can step to a group of real break dancers and just do any old raggedy thing and earn the respect of the “breaking community.” There is no point in Hip Hop history where Gunn could have gone into an urban area, called herself “Raygun” and flapped around on the ground in front of actual break dancers without getting roasted by everyone who witnessed it. Becky With the Rythmless Nation would have been laughed out of the breaking circle and told to hop on the first plane home and challenge an actual kangaroo. (She would still get served, and we all know it.)
But Gunn is white and not of the culture, and the Opymic judges were also white and not of the culture, which means she gets grace extended to her that would never be extended to a Black woman athlete for Forest Gumped her way into an Olympic competition without possessing a modicum of the kind of skill, athleticism, physicality, general ability, hard work and dedication it takes to make it to the Olympics. (We would’ve been hearing the words “DEI hire” incessantly if she were a Black woman at any Olympic event.) Raygun is white and Gilian is equally white, which is why he’s out here saying goofy sh*t like this:
“But again, that doesn’t mean that she did really bad. She did her best. She won the Oceania qualifier. Unfortunately for her, the other B-girls were better.”
Raygun’s family members are also rallying to defend her, which is fine. Family is family, after all. Still, the delusion is real.
From Fox Sports:
In the aftermatch of Raygun’s performance in Paris her father-in-law Andrew Free wrote on Facebook that she had done herself proud and was always going to be “up against it” competing with dancers from other counties.
Responding to a Facebook friend, Free said: “She did not get through the preliminary round to the finals.
“It was a pretty stacked competition and the judges were clearly looking for a certain style of breaking which is not Rachael’s.
“Although they are supposed to mark 5 different aspects with each having the same weighting, in my obviously biased opinion they did not reward originality and musicality so she was up against it.
“The main thing is she represented Australia and breaking at the Olympics with courage and dignity.
“It comes naturally for some of them, not so much for Rachael. It is part of the culture.”
Source: Elsa / Getty
Again, family is family, but to watch your family member do her best impersonation of a 5-year-old going back and forth between throwing a temper tantrum and shouting, “Mommy, look at what I can do” and decided the problem was the judges didn’t score the performance fairly just shows a clear disconnection from reality.
Gunn—who holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and examines the cultural politics of breaking, bringing both academic and artistic perspectives—has also defended herself in a way that indicates she cares nothing about the culture she supposedly studied and was more concerned with the spotlight and what it did for her personally, which, of course, sounds about white.
“What I wanted to do was come out here and do something new and different and creative — that’s my strength, my creativity,” she said. “I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative because how many chances do you get that in a lifetime to do that on an international stage.”
If Gunn really cared about the culture she supposedly studied, she wouldn’t want to be the only thing people would remember about the time breaking came to the Olympics, which will likely not happen again in 2028.
Black people catch a lot of flack when we talk about appropriation and “culture vultures,” but this is a picture-perfect example of how manipulative the power of whiteness is.
We can laugh at Raygun. We can mock her and cringe at her. But no one should be praising her. All that does is reinforce the reality that whiteness can do whatever it wants and it will be normalized while the people who create the culture everyone steals and borrows from continue to be the last people who reap the benefits.
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