SeaWorld Momma Twerks Her Way Into Online Notoriety

Twerking is a form of healthy dance expression. But at a San Diego concert, phones were used by anti-twerkers to film a dancer and bully her.

Dancefloor news this week contains yet another example of why cameras should be banned from all dancefloors. A black mother attending an all-ages Ying Yang Twins concert at SeaWorld San Diego on Saturday, June 6, 2026, was spotted twerking while wearing her toddler in a harness. The internet predictably exploded with outrage, many of the critics doing a half-assed job of masking their racism and misogyny behind “concern for the baby’s safety.”

Here are a couple videos of the scene so that we can all get on the same page before we dive into it.

I’ve read thousands of comments on this video, and summarize them as follows:

Baby safety / parenting judgment: the most defensible criticism comes from concern for the child’s hearing, and/or whether the bouncing is too vigorous. I’ve worn babies, in my opinion, the harness looks secure, and the toddler is old enough to have strong head control. The lack of visible hearing protection is the one piece of criticism that lands for me.

Decorum: The online commentariat insist that SeaWorld is a family-oriented venue. Therefore, they say, sexually suggestive dancing is inappropriate there. “There’s a time and place,” they say. These are people who do not know who the Ying Yang Twins are and who are uneducated on the cultural context surrounding this style of music.

Slut-shaming: A lot of the criticism can boiled down to “she’s an immoral woman,” “she’s a whore,” and “she’s not wife material.” These are people who believe women’s sexual expression is bad. Full stop.

Class-coded and race-coded disgust: “trash,” “ghetto,” “ratchet,” “hood rat,” “riff raff,” “Walmart/Spirit Airlines crowd,” and “those people.” Words like these carry strong class and race connotations in America. “No stereotypes were harmed,” wrote one of Reddit’s (many) racists. If these statements don’t clearly read as class-coded racism, or race-coded classism to you, you may be part of the problem. None of my readers, of course, but many of those commenting on Tiktok, Reddit, and elsewhere.

Here’s where I stand on all of this.

Cameras have no place on or around any dancefloor. Any camera can be used as a tool by malevolent actors to rip images out of one context and put them into the contextless online miasma for gain.

Critics of this black mom’s behavior assert that no context makes such behavior OK, but if those critics were to actually understand that this happened at a Ying Yang Twins concert, and if they were to actually listen to or read the lyrics of any Ying Yang Twins song, (go ahead, pick any of their songs) they’d understand that this is some of the most Twerkalicious music ever written in the history of humanity. In the second video, above, for example, the opening couplet of the song we can hear in the background specifically evokes twerking:

She got her hands all on her knees, and then her ‘bows on my thigh
She like to twerk and that’s for certain ‘cause I can tell she fi’e

How is it wrong to twerk to songs about twerking at a concert put on by twerk royalty? How exactly?

I’ve written about how cameras destroy lives, especially in instances where someone’s dancing with freedom and expression and that freedom is misinterpreted by people from outside that specific context to be bad. There were numerous online calls for the US Child Protective Services agency to take this baby away from its mom because she had the audacity to dance with it while it was securely harnessed to her body.

Moms are allowed to dance, and twerking is dancing. The “mother” role becomes a moral purity test. If we believe the commenters on this, once a woman becomes a mother, she’s supposed to put away self expression and sexuality. She’s now a vessel for child rearing and perhaps more child bearing, but certainly mustn’t be allowed to be sexual.

“My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it’s very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.” — Ani DiFranco

Twerking is feminine. For the record, I’ve twerked, but sadly lack adequate booty meat to make my ass clap. The physics just don’t work with my body’s shape and flesh distribution. It’s not a dance made for a man’s body — it’s a uniquely feminine dance, and I think for that reason alone it’s a glorious form of expression. Despite my inability to properly twerk, you don’t see me being all sour grapes about it.

Racists despise twerking. The iconic hip and butt isolations of twerking likely originated in traditional dance forms from West and Central Africa. The Mapouka dance of the Ivory Coast made its way to Haiti and Jamaica and the Americas through the mechanism of the slave trade and the African diaspora. Twerking, perhaps more than any other dance, triggers white moral panic over Black women’s sexuality, inspiring in them a desire to police it, squash it, ridicule it, and turn it into online rage bait.