Buck Dancing gets it's name from a dance a male deer performs during mating season. Blacks, Whites, and Native American's in the south all imitated the buck deer dancing, not necessarily learning it from each other, but it was natural to imitate what they saw in nature. Some of the English, Scots Irish, Irish, and west Africans all had similar types of dancing in their native lands. My biological grandfather, born in 1876, a stone cold white man from the hills of north Georgia, buck danced all the time. The dance wasn't associated with a particular race, but was a south eastern and appalachian regional dance. People only think the name had a racial connotation, because civil rights era blacks would accuse "Uncle Tom's" of "buck dancing" at the white man's command. They specified "buck dancing" instead of just "dancing", because buck dancing was seen as old fashioned, so they used that specific term to emphasise that they thought the "Uncle Tom's" weren't down with the new way of thinking or weren't "with it". It simply wasn't a race specific dance. Bottom line: The buck dance was named and modeled after a buck deer dance. The fact that, at least in the old days, it was mostly performed by men also points toward the fact it was imitating a male animal in a mating ritual. Otherwise, dancing by yourself, might not have been seen as a "manly" endeavor, in a time when, right or wrong, a man was supposed to "act like a man".