Relax…today’s ethics quiz has nothing to do with whether Jill Biden’s Christmas video featuring the modern ballet troupe Dorrance Dance is your cup of eggnog.
Rather it is this…
Is it responsible and ethical for the White House to use the holidays to promote a politically radical, anti-police, anti-white, Marxist organization like Dorrance Dance?
For Dorrance Dance is an overtly and outspokenly Marxist dance company that even prominently displays a quote from Angela Davis on its website: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” The group advocates defunding the police across the country, and prominently endorses Black Lives Matters, another Marxist organization.
The group’s radical politics are a bit buried on its website behind standard aspirational artistic blather like “Our goal is to engage with audiences on a musical and emotional level, and to share the complex history and powerful legacy of this American art form throughout the country and the world.” Well, yes, that, and ending capitalism and the United States of America as we know it in order to achieve “racial justice.”
My answer to the quiz is that as long as the group keeps its politics out of its work for the White House, good luck to them. They were engaged—I hope—because of their dance artistry rather than their contempt for the United States. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bidens had no idea what the group advocates.
Yes, it’s annoying that Dorrance Dance will undoubtedly use its White House gig as cognitive dissonance helium to elevate their public image into more positive territory than any organization connected to Angela Davis, Black Lives Matter and Karl Marx deserves. But if we chose our art based on the political sophistication and delusions of artists, we’d just end up with bad art.