I will give Amos the credit for the clever double entendre. Philip Roth's novel, The Human Stain, is on point and recommended to all.

It is not, however, merely a question of shallow "political correctness" to note and be sensitive to the racism that is an extremely important aspect of the history of American popular and folk music and dance.

While Mark Twain plainly wrote, at least in part, with the intention of breaking down racist stereotypes, his characters' uses of phrases like "young buck" hardly demonstrates that the term "buckdancing" is free from a racist origin. Indeed, it might tend to prove my point rather than Sean's depending upon the character and the context.

While it is possible that there is a purely innocent derivation of the term, one should hesitate in being too glib in assuming such innocence. The fact that this term seems to have been first applied to Black male dancers or to white men performing in blackface, all of whom were probably performing in a manner that greatly resembled what would have been called step-dancing if it was performed by a white man to something other than minstrel-style music, would seem to support my admittedly unresearched theory.