Dancing Black, Dancing White explores the highly popular phenomenon of the televised teen dance program. These teen shows were incubators of new styles of social and popular dance and both reflected and shaped pressing social issues of the day. Often referred to as "dance parties," the televised teen dance shows helped cultivate a nascent youth culture in the post-World War II era. The youth culture depicted on the shows, however, was primarily white. Black teenagers certainly had a youth culture of their own, but the injustice was glaring-Black culture and expressivity was not always in evident display on the airwaves as television of the era, like the nation at large, was deeply segregated and appealed to what it perceived as a primarily white, homogenous audience. The crux of the study, then, is twofold: to explore how social and popular dance styles were created and disseminated within the new and burgeoning technology of television and to investigate how the shows both reflected and re-affirmed the racial politics and attitudes of the time.