Sprite Step Off: In Step With the Times, or Going a Step Too Far?
9th April 2012
White college girls from Arkansas go to a national step dancing competition — a dance form that is a hallmark of black fraternities and sororities — and, gee whiz, win the whole darned thing! Boy, are the black sorority sisters steamed!
But wait!
In the final reel, five days after the results set off a national ruckus, show organizers say they discovered a “scoring discrepancy.” They say the second-place sorority from Indiana University, the pink-and-green Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest black sorority, is also a winner! Each team gets $100,000 in scholarships!
I notice that each of the sorority girls in the photo has ‘white girl hair’. Guess they’re just comfortable bein’ black.
But later, when it was announced that the Zetas won, the feel-good vibe evaporated. Large sections of the crowd starting booing. Then Internet and radio-call-in warfare broke out when the videos were posted on YouTube. There were allegations of cultural theft and reverse racism, not to mention race-based taunting and name-calling.
Late last week, Sprite officials said they discovered the scoring discrepancy. This was odd because the show’s host, rapper Ludacris, assured the crowd that the judges’ scores had been “double-checked.”
God forbid that white people should ever win anything ‘black’. After all, what would happen if some black kid won an Irish dance competition? They’d rig it so a white kid won too, wouldn’t they? (Oh, maybe not….)
“If you take race out of it, it doesn’t matter if the Zetas won,” Ross said. “They were good. They won. It’s reasonable to believe the AKA routine was better, but it’s debatable. That’s it. The only reason people are upset about the winners is because they were white.”
Fancy that. Can’t be racism, of course, ’cause only white folks can be racist. It’s in the rules.
Steve Sailer, of course, has some comments.