I am an American Bellydancer (pt1?)

This was originally intended as a response to a certain article by a certain woman, but it got away from me - and honestly the whole situation was so exhausting and then there are at least two other responses that put everything so much better than I ever could and in the end...
...I'm mostly just really sad that in an opportunity to write a feminist article, she chose to attack other women.
#1 - I'm a white woman and I bellydance. 
#2 - Why I can’t stand neo-segregationists.

                                                           

Just in case you hadn't noticed yet - it's right there is the title.
While I believe my ethnicity has little, if anything, to do with it - I am as far as I know of European descent. Polish and French if it's important to you.
And if that is important to you in the judgmental kind of way, please just exit my life right now.

I first saw bellydance back in 1999. I was seventeen, and stayed late after a Swing Dance class to talk to the instructor. Then the bellydance class walked in, with veils and hip scarves and at the time it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life. I sat there with one shoe off and one shoe on and my jaw slack until the teacher came up to me and asked if I wanted to join in.
I asked when the beginner class was.



I had to lie to my parents to take that class.
Seventeen, no job (it was not allowed) and an allowance that didn't even cover my gas expenditures (oh remember back when gasoline was 99 cents a gallon...) I needed money from my parents to pay for the session; and it was not something they were interested in paying for. If I remember correctly, the phrase I remember most was something along the lines of "prostitutes and whores."

In some kind of weird (or typical?) adolescent desperation, I came back a few days later and rambled about a "World Fusion Dance Class" I'd heard about that explored dance styles from many different cultures(little did I know how accurate that description was), and walked away with 80$ to pay for my six week session. 

I firmly believe that most people who make it through four weeks of bellydance classes are hooked for life. There is something absolutely magical about a safe space where any body of any size, gender, or age can participate as a group in dance. Where you don't need a partner (and consequently don't have to do through the awful process of finding/cajoling/threatening one), and you by Your Self are enough, exactly as you are. And North American White culture doesn't have many places like that - something that even my underweight unaware seventeen year old self could appreciate.
I needed those classes.
And say what you want about a cultural art form not being there to better a foreigners self esteem - I'm fairly certain starting bellydance when I did saved me from a lifetime of eating disorders.

Now, fifteen years later (almost exactly) I've gone through a lot a stages in my bellydance life. There were stage names, awkward cultural mishaps I was too inexperienced to know to sidestep, troupes that didn't last, and dance friends and colleagues that did. I have made my share of mistakes. I have learned a lot - about the cultures this dance originated from, about the foundations of my own style, about my own morals and ethics and where I'm willing to draw a line in the sand.

I did recently very seriously consider quitting this Art forever. I was exhausted - of the politics, of the concerns, from working too much and too hard with very little appreciation for what I was doing and what I was trying to accomplish. But I didn't. In the middle of a lesson with one of my own students I had a moment, very brief, when I started going through the list of all of my own previous students who didn't dance any more - all for their own individual (and valid) reasons - and it made me sad. And then all of the women who have invested time and energy into my own dance education surfaced and it dawned on me how very very important it was to me that I not discard the effort they'd put into my own dance.

I am a Fusion Bellydancer - a term that means less than it has letters. I take influence from a myriad of styles and cultures, western and eastern, to create my own Unique Work.  I don't dance in restaurants, or hookah bars. I seldom dance to traditional Middle Eastern Music. I am not taking food out of the mouths of other dancers of any ethnicity - the people who hire me to dance are looking for Me and no one else.
But that last part could be said of any of the dancers I know and associate with - all respectful culturally aware intelligent individuals. Yes, there will be outliers in any art form - people who don't take it seriously, or even disrespect it's history and origins. Unfortunately that is the nature of art. Art does not exist in a vacuum - it spreads, infiltrates, and reinvents itself.  All artists stand on the shoulders of their predecessors, taking what has been done before - mimicking, creating, reinventing, and fusing it with other influences. And art that does not evolve dies, just as a culture that will not share itself will stagnate and die.

We all have to learn to live with each other.
Spreading messages of hate doesn't help anyone to do that.