Last week a sorority from Arkansas won a ‘step’ competition in Atlanta to great controversy. What was so controversial about their win you ask? Well, for one, the sorority was white. Upon seeing the white sorority announced the winners, the mostly Black audience erupted in boos.
Sprite, sponsors of the contest, and in typical spineless corporate fashion, later discovered a ‘scoring discrepancy’, elevating the second place team consisting of Black sorority members to second place.
On one hand, the manner in which the mostly Black audience reacted was completely understandable. ‘Stepping’, a rhythmic clapping / foot stomping dance routine, originated on all Black college campuses in the mid-1900s, and has since then been mostly the domain of all-Black fraternities and sororities. Considering that historically Black colleges and universities in the United States were created because segregationist policies prevented Blacks from getting a college education otherwise, it’s certainly understandable why the Black community would feel this was just another piece of their culture being co-opted by the white majority (even if the step routine performed by the white sorority was objectively better).
On the other hand... this thing was sponsored by Sprite, remember..?
Don’t get me wrong, if a historically Black college wanted to create and promote their own ‘stepping’ competition, and exclude white sororities and frats, I’d be all for it. Minorities do sometimes need to resort to exclusion in order to protect their own culture and traditions. But my problem with the reaction in said video was that the audience wasn’t reacting to a white sorority participating in a ‘stepping’ competition, but a white sorority winning it.
Now imagine this analogous scenario; the NAACP establishes a scholarship for Black students in order to support Black youth pursuing higher education. Great you say? I agree. Only problem is that for some odd reason, they made white students eligible. Now, what happens if a white student happens to win the award..?! Should you be upset at the white student, or the NAACP for not making the scholarship process exclusive to begin with? I know who I’d be upset with.
Again, if you want to create an event where Black students (or any other minority for that matter) celebrate Black culture at the exclusion of others’ involvement, I’m all for it! But if you’re going to go through the pretext of being all-inclusive, allowing those from other races and ethnicities to participate in a supposedly objective competition, than you’ve kind of lost license to boo if and when they actually do win.
Sure, you could argue that Sprite had no business sponsoring a ‘step’ event to begin with, bastardizing the spirit of ‘stepping’ by turning it into some sort of faux-post-racial, MTV-esque, Stomp the Yard like event... but if you truly did believe that, than you should have just boycotted the event, or at least not given it enough credence and credibility to warrant a booing at the result.
In the end, while we may not live in a post-racial society, we do live in a multi-cultural one. It’s become inevitable that traditions and rituals that were once exclusive to one community, bleed into others. Maybe that means minorities have to try harder to protect what was once theirs and theirs alone. But if you’re going to do that, at least do it right.
I think it's good that white teams participate and sometimes win. I like it that a white sorority appreciated this artform so much that they dedicated themselves to it and mastered it. Blacks should be encouraged that our cultural expressions are adopted by the manstream because it shows that we're full and equal members of society.
As for the booing. I think they booers would tell you that they thought the white team wasn't the best team. But there was likely some pro-black bias. I've read on a black website that covered the event that the white sorority did their thing and they deserved the win.
I am definitely not a fan of exclusion either. I think the Internet has sped up the sharing of culture and language (slang) so much that it's only natural that other people would get genuinely interested in facets of black culture. Granted you always run the risk of cultural appropriation (and I'm never going to find blackface routines funny obviously), but if the white sorority participated out of a genuine appreciation of the artform, I think that's great.
BTW Sprite really pussied out by making 'everybody a winner'...
I'm not for exclusion. While it may smack of cultural appropriation to see a white sorority performing a step routine, there's no real way to exclude them or other racial groups from participating in this form of dance. Had Sprite only made the competition open to blacks it would labeled racist (or "reverse racist"). And it wouldn't stop whites from performing a step routine elsewhere either.