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My mind was racing, trying to figure out what she was talking about. Then it clicked.<br />
Hitler had a special dance move called o spana va. It means “where you work” and it was very<br />
sexual: His hips would gyrate and thrust, like he was fucking the air. That was the move he<br />
was doing at the moment the teacher ran out, so clearly the dance was the thing she found so<br />
disgusting. But this was a move that African people do all the time. It’s a part of our culture.<br />
Here we were sharing our culture for a cultural day, and this woman was calling us<br />
disgusting. She was offended, and I was offended by her taking offense.<br />
“Lady,” I said, “I think you need to calm down.”<br />
“I will not calm down! How dare you come here and insult us?!”<br />
“This is not insulting anyone. This is who we are!”<br />
“Get out of here! You people are disgusting.”<br />
And there it was. You people. Now I saw what the deal was: This lady was racist. She<br />
couldn’t see black men dancing suggestively and not get pissed off. As I started packing up my<br />
gear, we kept arguing.<br />
“Listen, lady. We’re free now. We’re gonna do what we’re gonna do. You can’t stop us.”<br />
“I’ll have you know that my people stopped people like you before, and we can stop you<br />
again.”<br />
She was talking, of course, about stopping the Nazis in World War II, but that’s not what<br />
I was hearing. Jews in South Africa are just white people. All I was hearing was some white<br />
lady shouting about how white people beat us before and they’ll beat us again. I said, “You<br />
will never stop us again, lady”—and here’s where I played the trump card—“You’ll never stop<br />
us, because now we have Nelson Mandela on our side! And he told us we can do this!”<br />
“What?!”<br />
She was so confused. I’d had it. I started cussing her out. “Fuck you, lady. Fuck your<br />
program. Fuck your school. Fuck your whole people. Let’s go, guys! We’re out!”<br />
We didn’t walk out of that school. We danced out. We danced down the street pumping<br />
our fists in the air. “Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!” Because Hitler had shut<br />
shit down. Hitler had the most gangster dance moves ever, and those white people didn’t<br />
know what hit them.