To make matter worse, the people of the cultures who originated the dance, dancing it as passed down from the originators of the dance, are often looked down as just "club dancers".
This is extremely bad. Absolutely.
It is, however, an attitude that
competitors take, not
social Ballroomers. Competitive culture contains a lot of toxic elements, affectations of superiority not least among them.
I think where the criticism focuses is when ballroom (especially the Latin / Rhythm side) imports and hyperexaggerates the forms of living dances of people of lower socioeconomic classes while simultaneously separating and erasing the history and culture of the original dances from the study of the ballroomized forms.
I mostly agree with the general sentiment here. Objecting to some of the history of Ballroomization on race/class-conscious lines makes sense to me, which is why I do not immediately condemn the double-standard you mention for Viennese Waltz vs. International Latin. At the most generous, we can say that Ballroom's relationship to other dances is similar to Elvis' relationship with the black rock & rollers of his day: as much as he may have tried to honor and credit his influences, people paid more attention to him than his influences for structurally racist reasons. And his black musical contemporaries had mixed and passionate feelings about that.
Instead, the grounds on which I would challenge this in the current context are narrower. The core of Ballroomization is a desire to
make dance easily learnable. It does not and has never pretended to be reaching for authenticity or historicity. It does not claim to be part of the direct lineage of club/street/folk dances. Ballroom is the dance equivalent of a children's book "based on a true story," and part of the learning of it does include a discussion of "based on
what." If the Ballroom forms had overwhelmed or overshadowed the original lineage of the dances they imitate, as Elvis largely did, I might be on fully board with the objection. But they haven't.
