This essay, geared toward student reading in undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on the politics of dance, revisits the 1985 film "White Nights," directed by Taylor Hackford and starring ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and tap dancer Gregory Hines. The essay argues that the film's power as a political commentary on race in America is largely neglected and overlooked as audiences and critics focused unfairly upon what appears to be the central conflict, which is the Cold War-era antagonisms between East and West. However, looking back thirty-five years later, if we are able to point to and understand this erasure of race, we can re-animate the stunning parallels between race in America then and now.