Barry: Since you asked, I will answer. I hope you're not acting intentionally dense here; I hope you're just too young to understand why your remark "Oh, how Barack could do a Bojangles & dance with both feet" is so offensive. Let me attempt to explain before you make any more posts about it and receive a verbal smack upside the head from Azizi!

Bill Robinson (1878-1949), who was given the nickname "Bojangles" as a child (a href="http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/exploring/harlem/faces/robinson_text.html">according to this article), was a pioneer of dance, a successful vaudeville and nightclub performer and a toast of Broadway on the black theater circuit, but did not dance for white audiences until he was 50. At that time he appeared in Blackbirds of 1928, a revue of black performers produced by a white impresario for white audiences. From that point on, in films and shows that whites would see, his roles were restricted to playing the stereotypical happy-go-lucky, smiling, servile step-and-fetch-it (mainly as an antebellum butler in films that hearkened back to those "happy" days when blacks were slaves). This was a restriction imposed by Hollywood and by the Jim Crow era, and Robinson bowed to these restrictions in an attempt to be a sort of ambassador to the white world while trying to maintain a connection to black show-business through the Hoofers Club. Consequently, the name "Bojangles" came to have a different meaning to whites and to blacks: to whites he was an unthreatening pet, a role which blacks resented.

So, to "do a Bojangles" means more than just to do a stair-dance. It means to become the worst kind of throwback Jim Crow stereotype for the amusement and entertainment of the white man, a happy darkie dancing for the Massa to allay his fears of a slave uprising. To imprint this onto Barack Obama, who is breaking through color barriers and stereotypes to achieve true equality, is to make a mockery of his campaign for change. It is highly offensive. Please stop it.