TikTok's white girl dancing is pure joy
There are few activities more freeing than the white girl dance, which is less of a dance and more of a transcendental journey to the highest vibe imaginable.
Regardless of gender or race, white girl dancing is a joy to behold and perform. The trend started on TikTok, where creators tried to emulate the liberating joy that white women seem to embody after a few drinks.
In one of the first white girl dance videos, creator Elijah McWilliams posted a TikTok of himself dancing in a laundry room captioned, "Sometimes you’ve just gotta stop and white girl it out." He paired it with Calvin Harris and Disciples' 2015 song, "How Deep Is Your Love," a club bop made for white girl dancing.
You May Also Like
McWilliams told Mashable that he was inspired to post the video during a 3 a.m. dance session with himself while doing laundry.
"That song played and I started dancing like that just joking around with myself." McWilliams said in a Twitter DM.
He added that white girl dancing is so much fun because "it just feels so freeing and it's easy."
"When I'm doing the white girl dance I don't care who's watching me."
"There's no actual choreography that goes into it so you just get to move," McWilliams continued. "When I'm doing the white girl dance I don't care who's watching me, I'm just having a good time."
Since McWilliams posted his video on May 8, the tag #whitegirldance accrued 61.4 million views. There are roughly 140,000 videos on the platform that use the song "How Deep Is Your Love," and 111,500 that use another uploaded version of it. The white girl dance trend set the mood for the summer.
The white girl dance is an ephemeral, freeform movement that involves zero rhythm and an unabashed lack of self-consciousness. The ultimate white girl dance often involves arms raised over the head, serpentine body rolls that aren't quite on beat, and unadulterated bliss. The white girl dance is one of the highest expressions of joie de vivre, as a dance that's as imprecise as it is jubilant. The white girl dance exists in a liminal space separate from the outside world, and allows the dancer to experience a moment of uninterrupted hedonism.
White girl dancing in pop culture is best exemplified via Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks, or Scarlett Johannson in Marriage Story, or literally every other scene in the seminal 2000 girlboss film Coyote Ugly. Gigi Hadid herself white girl dances in the the music video for "How Deep Is Your Love" — her hair tousling and twirling under neon club lights isn't necessarily confined to any beat in the song, but instead follows the vibes.
The white girl dance's greatest appeal lies in the fact that you don't need to have any sense of rhythm or memorize choreography to pull it off; if you can vibe, you can white girl dance. One Twitter user described white girl dancing as dancing to the lyrics rather than dancing to the beat.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
As someone who is visibly not a white girl, I myself have been guilty of white girl dancing. But the dance's joy is contagious, and like McWilliams said in his TikTok, sometimes you really do have to just white girl it out. Notable white girl dancing in pop culture often occurs after or during a period of extreme tension.
In Marriage Story, the infamous white girl dance scene takes place amid a contentious divorce as the movie's main characters fall out of love. In Grey's Anatomy, accomplished, brilliant, groundbreaking surgeons dance it out like college students on a day drinking stint after exhausting days in the operating room. Skins' Effy Stonem demonstrated the epitome of white girl dancing in every party scene — her volatile home life and substance abuse were peripheral when the music was loud enough.
After spending more than a year in isolation and on the cusp of panic over the global health crisis, the white girl dance is release. White girl dancing was a reprieve during the pandemic, and as the country gradually opens up again, it will carry us into a less lonely summer.
The pandemic is far from over; those living in the United States have the enormous privilege of access to vaccines that most of the world does not. Although 41 percent of the United States is fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and states are beginning to lighten up on social distancing restrictions, a majority of the population shares a collective trauma from spending nearly a year and a half in crisis mode.
A dance will not solve the unprecedented spike in mental health issues, or the economic devastation caused by the pandemic, or the unfathomable loss of human life over the past less-than-two-years. But after a period so isolating and heartbreaking, it's wonderful to finally see an online trend that celebrates joy itself. The white girl dance trend — and the fun TikTok users experience while doing it — is an exuberant reminder that even in the hellscape that is being online, we can still allow ourselves a moment of happiness.
