Double Dutch
A story about play, joy, and the women who kept a cultural tradition alive, from the Niche to Meet You podcast.
Get in the ropes:
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Double Dutch is jumping rope with two ropes instead of one.
To really know Double Dutch, though, is to know a lineage of history, culture, and joy, carried by Black girls and women across generations.
From Nashville to New York City, Niche to Meet You—the award-recognized documentary podcast featured by American Public Media and created by Leslie Eiler Thompson—gets in the ropes to understand how Double Dutch became a cultural practice rooted in joy, play, and community—and why the girls who built it were so often left out of the official story.
The episode features voices like Dr. Kyra Gaunt, ethnomusicologist and author of The Games Black Girls Play, and the Fantastic Four—Dolores Brown, De'Shone Adams, Robin Oaks, and Adrian Adams—the groundbreaking Double Dutch team that won the 1980 national championship and toured Europe in the earliest days of hip-hop, only to be written out of its mythology. Leslie watches Double Dutch in action at Nashville’s 40+ Double Dutch club, and gets coached in NYC’s Washington Square Park by coach Shakira “Kira” Lee, whose pop-up sessions through the Washington Square Park Conservancy turn public parks into spaces of communal joy. Then, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gregory Pardlo reflects on watching girls jump Double Dutch as a child, and why writing about that joy still matters.
This is a story about play, celebration, and joy. And about what happens when women step back into the ropes and remember who they were before the world asked them to grow up too fast.
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Double Dutch pop-up at Washington Square Park
Check out some pictures of the event featured heavily in the series. We are grateful for the warm welcome at the event, which was sponsored and hosted by the Washington Square Park Conservancy, a nonprofit that works in partnership with NYC Parks to bolster the park as an invaluable public resource by stewarding its landscapes, promoting safety, and providing free programming and volunteer opportunities for New York’s diverse communities.
Check out more about the WSPC here.
ABOUT NICHE TO MEET YOU
Niche to Meet You is a nationally-recognized documentary podcast that tells human stories through overlooked passions, pastimes, and subcultures. Created and hosted by Leslie Eiler Thompson, the show takes an anthropological approach to hobbies as windows into meaning—asking what people’s deep care for a “thing” reveals about identity, community, joy, and belonging.
Reporting from the project has been called “masterfully written” by Malcolm Gladwell, and featured by NPR, The Guardian, and American Public Media.
Niche to Meet You is about paying attention. The result is journalism that takes joy seriously, honors lived experience, and will re-introduce you to your neighbors in technicolor.
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