My sister teaches at a high school in Virginia and she just sent me this video of their county lieutenant dancing to formation @ a pep rally pic.twitter.com/2jaXnFgYrC
— spooky harry ? (@hereforthe1D_) October 14, 2016
The general consensus is that 2016 has been pretty bad. It seems like time and again this year we’ve seen people analyze facts and come away with the wrong message entirely. We have a candidate for president who encouraged his working-class supporters to look at their very real and bad situation, and to start swinging at folks who were even worse off than them.
We have the All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements erupting around the idea that giving other people of color complete access to their rights as citizens somehow takes away from the rights of people who already have them. But, in this mess of garbled messages and dumpster fire opinions, we found him: The one guy who absolutely gets it.
That Real American Hero in the clip above is Deuntay Diggs, a 2nd Lieutenant in the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office in Stafford, Virginia. And yes, that’s him absolutely slaying the choreography to Beyonce’s “Formation” at a high school pep rally.
https://twitter.com/imxlino/status/786997802341535744?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Of course, the video of Diggs killing it in front of a crowd of rowdy high-schoolers is a great watch even in a vacuum. But the fact that he’s dancing to “Formation” — a song that famously led many police organizations to boycott King Bey due to the video’s reasonable enough request that police “Stop shooting us” — adds just a soupçon of wokeness that makes this video a perfect antidote for the Year Of Hella Bad Vibes.
Diggs told Buzzfeed that he “learned the choreography the night before I performed it for the first time” by watching the video repeatedly on YouTube.
In addition to protecting and serving, the sheriff’s deputy acts as a motivational speaker talking on issues of race, abuse and law enforcement.
“With all the controversy surrounding law enforcement, I can kind of see both sides. I grew up in a very bad environment, where drugs and prostitution were prevalent, and so I was taught to hate the police and that the police were bad,” he told Buzzfeed. “At this time when people look negatively upon law enforcement, that I’m able to change that narrative and open up some conversations and engage with people.”
