Project Proposal
I did not give much attention to my skin color until I came to the US. Obviously I got chocolate skin or melanin biologically put, but it never once occurred to me that I was “black” until my first trip to America. Here I was minding my own business listening to music going up stairs to my room while I see a girl one set of stairs ahead of me heading in the same direction take off running; I was startled. While recounting the situation to my friends, they told me the girl ran because she was scared since I was ‘tall, big and black.’ To her, it spelled danger, which did not and still does not make sense to me to this day. But that is the racial, tense system this country is built upon. For instance at Wheaton College, there was a major blackface incident that happened a couple years ago and made a lot of noise within and outside campus grounds. As Alicia Keys put it in her Grammy intro monologue performance, music is a universal language, a language of love. For my project, I decided to look at Wheaton’s own stepping team Stomping Out Loud Everyone or commonly known as S.O.L.E. Stepping is a way of making music without instruments but with body parts and stage of whatever ground one is performing at. It is a creative way of producing musical beats using the human body and the immediate surroundings. The reason I chose S.O.L.E was that it is not only a stepping team that put on entertaining shows on campus, but also a family where Black people and people of color (minority) on campus can have a platform to come together and express themselves in face of discrimination or racism that may be prevalent on a social level; it is a way to be resilient and fight through to a common goal to succeed in life and thrive on every personal level. This is the hypothesis to be looked under the light during this project.
The goal of my research is to articulate how the musical performance of stepping helps build and bring a community of Black people/minority in a racial and tense place with the common goal of success in mind, not only on a college level but in life in general. The plan of the project is to research more about stepping roots and analyzing its influence on Black culture through S.O.L.E and beyond.