Why is this gymnastics routine controversial?

I watched this based on a Slate headline — "The Absurd Backlash to Nia Dennis’ Viral Floor Exercise" — but without reading anything about why the routine is viral and what the backlash is:

 

All I thought was she's running out the clock with lots of dance moves and not doing enough gymnastics. I see at YouTube, this is "UCLA gymnast Nia Dennis clinch[ing] the win for the Bruins with a 9.95 on floor exercise against Arizona State on Jan. 23, 2021." I've only watched Olympic-level gymnastics, so I'm assuming 9.95 has to do with college-level scoring.  

I go back to the article and notice the subheadline, "It’s long past time the gymnastics world reckoned with its racism." Racism? It certainly can't be that we aren't used to black female gymnasts. What's the "backlash"?

[T]his routine has everything. Dennis pays tribute to Colin Kaepernick (she kneels!), Tommie Smith and John Carlos (she raises a fist!), and Kamala Harris (like a soror, she strolls and she steps!)....

That relates to my perception that there's too much dance, not enough gymnastics, but I did not notice the paying of "tribute" or any political protest.

Dennis’ routine was, as the savvy UCLA athletics media team tweeted—and ’grammed, and Facebooked—an exemplar of #blackexcellence: a senior sociology major at one of the best public institutions in the country performing what one fan termed an electrifying “Blackity Black Black” floor routine for the second year in a row....

One fan. It's not a term.

              

And if it were a standard term, I would recommend not using it (unless you are black and comedically talented). 

[A]s happens every year when a UCLA routine goes viral, casual viewers slid into the comments with Things to Say. Why does it have to be BLACK excellence? What does her SKIN COLOR have to do with it? What if a white gymnast did this amazing routine? Leave race out of the gym please. 

Oh! The "absurd backlash" isn't to the routine! That headline faked me out. The backlash is to the racialized praise of the routine. The backlash to that backlash is the predictable reaction to anyone who ever invokes the principle of colorblindness. There's nothing absurd here. Just predicatable right/left back-and-forth. 

The Slate writer, Rebecca Schuman, flies into a fluffy huff:

The astounding sensitivity among so many observers to the mere mention of the word Black in the context of praise for a stellar athlete who just debuted an entire exercise celebrating Black culture is a reflection of life in a country where it’s still somehow controversial to opine that Black lives matter. 

Who's astoundingly sensitive? Oh, I don't think anyone is really that sensitive. It's the theater of sensitivity, not anything arising from a deeply feeling human soul. And none of it is at all astounding. It's crushingly, thuddingly dull. Exactly what you would expect. 

Schuman's article does go on to document some actual problems within the recent history of gymnastics competition. Some of this is about discrimination against black gymnasts, which proponents of colorblindness do not support. Some of it is about feminist issues — sexual molestation and pressure to display a traditional feminine look — problems that are not race-specific.

"This article originally misidentified the bloggers Tracy of fanserviced-b and Cat Cactus of Snow White and the Asian Pear as 'self-identified feminist academics and scholars.'"

"Neither blogger self-identifies as a feminist, and Cat Cactus is not an academic. The piece also stated that Tracy and Cat Cactus are among women who 'view the elaborate [K-beauty] routine not as vanity but rather as an act of radical feminist self-care.' Both bloggers disavow this view, and neither of them were contacted for the piece."

That's one hell of a correction on a Slate article that was already whacked out on its own terms — "Radical Self-Care/Meet the feminist academics who love K-beauty," by Rebecca Schuman. I was all you've got to be kidding me long before I got to the correction. Just to give you a taste of what Schuman was dishing up raving about some 10-step Korean beauty products:

... K-beauty is... popular with self-identified feminist academics and scholars... Indeed, Stockton University English and digital humanities professor and Web designer Adeline Koh published an entire blog post on the subject.... "I’ve started to view beauty as a form of self-care, instead of a patriarchal trap. One of my deepest inspirations, the writer and activist Audre Lorde, famously declared that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.'"

Just the phrase "an entire blog post" made me laugh. 

“Self-care, especially for a woman of color, is radical,” [my colleague Dorothy Kim, a professor of medieval literature at Vassar College]  tells me. Korean beauty “is a little breath of relaxing joy and feminist community.”...

Part of why K-beauty in particular seems to have trended in academia is that... [it] can be blended fairly seamlessly with a solitary, writing-intensive profession. More than one scholar I interviewed reported dividing writing or grading goals into mask units. Several plan to incorporate group masking into informal meetings at this weekend’s Modern Languages Association conference (which makes the whole experience sound a tad less odious).

It even intersects with some scholarship—for example, Koh’s current book project, which is “a comparative study of representations of whiteness in different parts of the world.”... For example, “Korean beauty products often sell themselves as ‘whitening,’ which makes people in the U.S. think that they are bleaching their skin....  This makes for some awkward translations, though—such as the Korean brand with a product called White Power Essence....

Boldface mine. Laughter mine.

Slate's education columnist Rebecca Schuman flaunts a series of photographs of herself giving her infant the finger.

"Sometimes, it takes longer to put the little tyrant to sleep than she’ll deign to remain asleep. It is on those days that I celebrate her hard-won unconsciousness by taking a nice little selfie in which she’s conked out, and I’m flipping her the bird. Then I share that selfie on social media, because otherwise it doesn’t exist. We’ve now got quite a little gallery."

The column quotes a number of philosophers — Aristotle, Kant, Mill — and, having absorbed their lessons in ethics, ends:

For now, I can definitively say that creating my baby bird gallery achieves happiness for me. As long as she keeps refusing to sleep... I will continue expressing... my simultaneous victory and frustration.... It remains to be seen whether my daughter will be too sensitive to take that kind of joke, once she learns what it means. And if she is, I’ll consider the experiment a failure, and I’ll gladly stop doing it. On camera, that is.

Did you find that funny... or are you too sensitive? The daughter only arrives at the personhood inherent in getting power to control her own image on the internet after she learns what giving somebody the finger means. The finger means "fuck you" (or "shove it up your ass"or "go fuck yourself"). When is Schuman going to teach that meaning? When she does teach her that and when the girl sees what she did with her way back when she didn't know what it meant, if she gives mother the finger, will Schuman take that joke? Will Schuman take all that will follow on as the girl challenges her and taunts her with too sensitive and can't take a joke? The "little tyrant" who now frustrates Schuman with crying and difficulty getting to sleep will have far more complicated and active challenges in these experiments that lie ahead, including, perhaps, photographs of Schuman, expressing hostility and posted on the internet.

ADDED: I think what's going on here is Mommy Blogging, the late years. I haven't been a Mommy Blog reader, so I don't know what all has gone on in that genre. Edgy stuff becomes the norm, as women cue other women that it's okay and really helpful and funny to show those feelings that otherwise made them feel alone and ashamed. What can a Mommy Blogger do to surprise and excite readers now? Compare porn.

AND: One question is: Is she a good mother? But another is: Is she a good comedian? Clearly, she thinks she's hilarious. She's a prop comic and the prop is her baby.