Behold the fiasco that arose from sore losers and cry babies at the Sprite Step Off.
Four black judges and an Albanian — Chilli of the group TLC, R&B singer Monica and choreographers Devyne Stephens, Zack Lee and Aris Golemi — awarded the crown to ZTA, the lone white participant.
“Let me reiterate, this is from the judges’ scores,” Ludacris told the nearly all-black crowd inside Atlanta’s Civic Center. “They tallied the judges’ scores up. They double-checked the judges’ scores. So you need to understand that the first-place winner is … Zetas.”
The crowd booed lustily and disgustingly.
Members of Delta Sigma Theta walked off the stage.
In the aftermath, bigots put on the KKK hoods of the new millennium — Internet anonymity — and flooded message boards and YouTube with ridiculous postings about “cultural robbery,” the inferiority of ZTA’s performance and conspiratorial rants.
Last Thursday, Coca-Cola/Sprite buckled — and/or enhanced MTV2’s “Sprite Step Off” TV show — elevating the second-place finisher, Indiana University’s Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, to co-champion.
“Due to the extremely narrow margin between the first- and second-place winning sororities, we conducted a further post-competition review and discovered a scoring discrepancy,” Coca-Cola said in a statement. “There is no conclusive interpretation, nor definitive resolution for the discrepancy.”
via White sorority’s contest win a step away from equality – KansasCity.com.
- For one, the chapter of Deltas that walked off shouldn’t be invited to step anywhere. They should be ashamed of their poor sportsmanship. Sour grapes ladies? Keep walking out in life.
- Two, it’s stepping. Its just a specific kind of stomp/chant/skit competition for gods sakes. It wasn’t like the head of the illuminati the chief knights templar and the man got together and said: well Barack, you and McCain are gonna be co-presidents.
- Three, its disgusting to see members of historically black fraternities and sororities excercise exactly the same type of bigotry that led the founders of our organizations to create their own fraternal organizations. The “cultural robbery” was of a sense of equity that may not be present in all walks of life, to all classes of people, but can at least be expected in a collegiate competition. Everyone thought they could win the cash if they showed up and won. That’s all these teams were due, a chance to compete.
- Four, the ZTA’s rocked that ish and deserve it. The judges were impartial and the rules were agreed to. Ludacris and Chilli are not in cahoots with the ZTAs people. I doubt the ZTAs were hopped up with HGH. Damn. If you lose, next time come harder. Congratulate the winners and realize you lost because you didn’t come hard enough.
- Five, fuck Coca Cola, Sprite and MTV for bitching up. The author of this article I cited above is exactly right: these idiots in the crowd are just like the Tea Partiers. Screaming and crying about a step show so loud that some punk VP of type II diabetes diversity jumped in fear of bad press and decided to rob the ZTA’s of their victory. If a Coke plant was spewing waste into the drinking water around East Atlanta, Coca Cola would lawyer up and flip all of these people the bird.
- Six, stepping is not in any of our fraternity or sorority’s fundamental goals. Its purely an extracurricular, allegedly fun activity inter-mural activity. You go to the show, crack jokes enjoy the good performances, clown the bad performances and enjoy the company of your classmates, fellow collegians, alumni and general public. A step show is no bridge to black prosperity. It should be a bridge to general enjoyment. I watched on episode of this competition and I was disappointed because it seemed to present the students who stepped as students who only stepped. I am more upset they didn’t reflect any of the service or academic endeavors of these undergraduates.
- Seven, the only time I got even close to upset at a step show was when my fraternity’s representatives sucked. And I would take it out on the steppers I knew with some jokes and a threat of even worse ridicule the next time they show up literally half-steppin’. Sorry, it just ain’t that serious.
This whole fiasco seems like an ugly knee jerk outpouring of useless black victim-hood coupled with a corporation’s urban marketing department seeing it prudent to throw angry losers a bone to try and shut them up.
Sometimes, you just lose, and its just that. In cases like these, looking for a boogey-man that specializes in fixing step shows for young white girls says more about the fun house mirror view of reality possessed by the self flagellating victim than it does about any person they may accuse of bigotry or (gasp) step show fixing.
I don’t even know where to end, so I just will. Shameful.
*Disclaimer: I am a brother of Kappa Alpha Psi, by way of the Delta Eta Chapter here in Philadelphia. Its one of the predominately black fraternities and sororities known as the divine 9 that were founded at various universities during the 1900s and 1910s.
