When the Pervs Rule the World, There Will Be Justice

In 1933 Lincoln Kirstein wrote a passionate 16-page letter to his friend A. Everett Austin Jr., the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, introducing a man named George Balanchine and a dream: to remake ballet for America. The plan, as Kirstein wrote, was to have “four white girls and four white boys, about 16 years old, and eight of the same, negros.”

What resulted from that letter — the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet, both founded by Kirstein and Balanchine — have endured as major cultural institutions. But Kirstein’s plan for student diversity was never realized, and while other minorities have made inroads in classical ballet, the complicated reality of racial inequality persists, especially for black women.

I've been to the ballet 4 times in my life. I have received nothing in the way of dance training or critical knowledge that would allow me insight into whether or not discrimination exists at the top companies in this country (although the article makes a pretty good case.) But as Justice Stewart so eloquently put it, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know pornography, I mean, talent when I see it." (Of course, I'm paraphrasing.) And if Ms. Ash, pictured above, doesn't have her choice of dancing jobs, there's something horribly amiss.

I'm just happy she doesn't dance for the Pacific Northwest Ballet, because if she did, I have a feeling she'd strung out like a crack whore, in the sense that I'd spend everything I had to see her, end up homeless, and live out the rest of my days blowing sponsors for balcony seats to catch another performance.

I'm just saying.