Black Boys at the Barre

“But the ascendance of the black male gangbanger in Little Rock’s collective conscious converged in the early ’90s with that of another black adolescent figure, the male Tidwell Dancer, a black boy of similar age, performing classical dance on concert stages across the city. That such disparate types existed in proximity, sometimes in the same body, indicates the elasticity of black masculinity and reveals the constraints that society’s archetypes sometimes impose on black men — who we imagine we’re allowed to be.”