Politics & Power Quote by Shana Alexander

America loves a spectacle, but it hasn’t always respected the labor that makes one. Shana Alexander’s “ragged Cinderella” jab lands because it borrows a fairy tale built on visibility and erasure: Cinderella is central to the story, yet treated as disposable until the right eyes finally look her way. By calling dance the “ragged” version, Alexander sharpens the insult. This isn’t the glamorous ingénue waiting for a ball; it’s an art form kept in the kitchen, underfunded, under-credited, and expected to smile through it.

The intent is journalistic but pointed: to name a hierarchy of prestige that Americans pretend is merit-based. In the traditional pecking order, literature and painting sit safely in the realm of “serious” culture, while dance gets filed under entertainment, femininity, or mere physicality. Alexander’s metaphor exposes the quiet snobbery beneath that sorting: if an art is embodied, ephemeral, hard to archive, and often associated with women and immigrant communities, institutions treat it as less “intellectual,” less worth grants, reviews, and permanent venues.

“Until quite recently” does sly work, too. It suggests a turning point already underway - the growth of major companies, philanthropic attention, perhaps the broadening of arts criticism itself - while still scolding the late arrival of respect. The subtext isn’t that dance needed a prince; it needed gatekeepers to stop acting like it was lucky to be invited at all. In a country obsessed with movement and reinvention, Alexander implies, it’s almost comic that dance had to fight for legitimacy in its own backyard.