At a recent wedding, after the main course is taken away and the desserts come out, the least weighed-down guests slowly make our way to the dance floor. All of a sudden, a group of kids dash out and immediately begin performing Blocboy JB’s Shoot dance, a goofy, energetic strut made famous in the eponymously named music video . As the oldest one kicks his limbs out in the signature style of the dance, he shouts “Fortnite!” to the confused adults looking on.

Many of these insecurities had to do with the jealousy and grudging admiration for black culture white Americans hid behind layers of stereotype and insult. Like the other acts of appropriation being discussed here, minstrelsy sought to capture the “...vital emotionalism, spontaneity, and rhythm unique to black expression,” according to Alfred Pasteur and Ivory Toldson in “The Roots of Soul: The Psychology of Black Expressiveness.” The practice, in games like Fortnite, of mapping dance moves made famous by black artists onto digital facsimiles, in order to add some measure of perceived coolness, reflects a similarly fetishisitic and one-sided form of admiration.

Some of the earliest examples of black cultural appropriation can be found in minstrel shows: vaudeville acts in which white performers would paint their skin tar black and create poor mimicries of the cultural traditions and speech patterns of slaves and free blacks. In his essay, “Soul Thieves: White America and the Appropriation of Hip Hop and Black Culture,” Baruti N. Kopano describes minstrelsy as a marginal fantasy space where whites could “...deflect many of their inhibitions, unfulfilled desires, and insecurities onto a group with relative powerlessness.”

Much of the discussion surrounding Epic’s appropriations is concerned with whether the lawsuits being brought by 2 Milly, Ribeiro, and others, are legally feasible; it centers the letter of the law, asking whether Epic is allowed to lift these dance moves. But this ignores the (at least) equally pertinent question of whether it should. This question cannot be adequately answered without squaring Epic’s behavior within a long history of mainstream white America stealing music and dance from black artists, decontextualizing their work, and repackaging it to make it more palatable (and thus, profitable) to white audiences. From early vaudeville and minstrel shows, to television shows like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, to musicians like Elvis Presley, white America has long maintained a largely unacknowledged extractive relationship with the creative output of its black folk.

The direction that this creativity travels is from those with less... to those with so much more, absorbing whatever they can, erasing the past in the process.

Though no creative feat is achieved without inspiration, the manner in which Fortnite has transplanted the creative output of these men into its brightly colored marionettes, without permission, credit, or compensation feels particularly egregious. After all, the direction that this creativity travels is from those with less, those who spark viral brilliance from nothing, to those with so much more, absorbing whatever they can, erasing the past in the process.

Rappers like Blocboy JB and 2 Milly (whose arm-swinging “Milly rock” dance shows up in the game as the “Swipe It” Emote) have emerged at the forefront of those raising concern about Epic’s blatant appropriation of well-known black dances. The list continues, including other black entertainers like Marlon Webb, Alfonso Ribeiro, and Donald Faison, who all contributed comedic dances to the zeitgeist, with miscomprehension and exploitative cribbing as their reward.

Fortnite, Epic’s ultra-successful free-to-play Battle Royale game, has come under increasing scrutiny for the wide breadth of popular dance routines it has cannibalized to make its Emotes, digitized dance moves which, along with weapon colors, outfits and character designs, can be purchased in-game using real currency. Many of the artists who’ve raised concerns about Epic’s behavior, some even resorting to lawsuits, are black.

To his understanding, he is merely acting out the “Hype,” an iconic and highly prized Fortnite Emote. Reaching the dance’s true terminus would take him to the streets of Memphis, Tennessee; to the assembled young men, as they are captured in the song’s video, leaning on the trunks of cars, throwing dice, holding guns, laughing and dancing with abandon. But for him, and many others, the cultural connotations of the moves he is making begin and end within Fortnite’s shimmering, enclosing walls.

Even as black artists became freer to perform, color barriers keeping them isolated from mainstream culture remained. The label “black music,” was a brand that kept black musicians from getting airtime on national radio networks or billing at most major venues. This didn’t stop white musicians from taking the unique sound that had been generated in the few segregated spaces left to black performers and repackaging it as their own invention. The iconic twang of the electric guitar string, for example, layered into most modern examples of rock and roll, has its origin in the music of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Pentecostal gospel songs she so memorably performed.

Sister Rosetta’s lifelong ties to gospel music and the black church imbued her music with a deep spiritual meaning that was mostly lost when her sound was picked up by bigger, whiter names and personalities, who “...appropriated the euphoric practice of tongue-speaking in their guitar solos. They too made their instruments talk, in the language of a strutting and ebullient masculinity,” as Gayle F. Wald writes in “Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-And-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.”

Social dancing, the kind to be found on dance floors and sidewalks, rather than on stages and in studios, has always been plagued by appropriation and unoriginality. Many of the popular dance routines of the twenties and thirties, usually depicted as the domain of white flappers and swing dancers, originated in black neighborhoods and at black-friendly establishments like The Savoy in Harlem. After witnessing the daring finesse of black dancers at spots like Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, white audiences would replicate them as best they could, to the extent that black performers had to come up with their own old-fashioned DRM. Speaking in the documentary “Dancing, New Worlds, New Forms,” about the Lindy Hop, a dance made popular by the black community in the twenties, former dancer Norma Mailer remarked: “We wanted our tempos fast, and the white dancers didn’t like that. It was always fast because we didn’t want them taking our dance. They had everything else, so we couldn't allow them to take the Lindy hop.”

They “weren’t allowed to say that black people taught us.”

With television came shows like American Bandstand, which relied on de facto segregation methods like specific dress codes and ID cards to prevent black dancers from participating, but was more than happy to allow white performers on air, who then went on to claim the dances they had cribbed as their own inventions. In John A. Jackson’s, “American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Empire,” former Bandstand dancer, Jimmy Peatross, when asked about the origin of their routines, admits they “weren’t allowed to say that black people taught us.”