As carried in BOTW:
Bigotry is not dead in America, but it is a lot more diverse than it used to be.
That's the best way we can think of to sum up an interesting kerfuffle reported last week by the Washington Post. It involves step dancing, a performance idiom popular among black fraternities and sororities--"a hybrid of military drills, cheerleading and synchronized dance."
A decade and a half ago, a white sorority at the University of Arkansas was introduced to the world of step dancing:In Fayetteville, Ark., the Epsilon chapter of the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority [has] been stepping for some 16 years. [Alexandra] Kosmitis, who has been stepping with her sorority since she came on campus three years ago, said the chapter had been introduced to the tradition by a black sorority during a "unity night," when white and black Greek organizations swap traditions, in the mid-1990s. Her sorority kept it up each year, competing on campus.This year, the Zetas entered the Sprite Step Off competition in Atlanta, sponsored by the Coca-Cola Co. Trouble erupted when they won:
When the team finished--to wild applause--emcee Ryan Cameron, a local radio personality, rushed onstage: "Whoa! Wow!" Then he playfully admonished the sold-out crowd of 4,600 fans, nearly all of them black, not to be so surprised that the evening's only white contestants were that good."Close your mouth! Close your mouth!" he said with a laugh. "Stepping is for everybody. If you can step, you can step."
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.
Five days after the competition, Coca-Cola officials said they had discovered a "scoring discrepancy" and awarded the first prize, $100,000 in scholarship, to both the Zetas and the team that came in second, Indiana University's chapter of the black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. The Post implies that a little reverse affirmative action was at work, noting that the supposed discrepancy "was odd, because the show's host, rapper Ludacris, assured the crowd that the judges' scores had been 'double-checked.' "
Anthony Antoine, a "a community activist and HIV prevention coordinator in Atlanta" who posted video of the Zeta routine to YouTube, is disheartened:"I watched a grass-roots effort of young people, black and white, play a key role in putting Barack Obama in the White House, and I thought it said so much about the best of this generation of America," Antoine, 40, said in a telephone interview this week. "And then some white girls win a step competition and it exposes the worst of this generation of America."
One might respond that if this is the worst that this generation has to offer, America is doing pretty well. Two or three generations ago, a black man needed military backup to go to school at the University of Mississippi. Even a single generation ago--around the time today's step-dancers were born--we saw race riots on the streets of Los Angeles.
Yet the episode does point to an aspect in which racial progress has been deficient. In this day and age, it is difficult to imagine the step-dancing situation in reverse--i.e., a black person or team excelling in a traditionally white activity and being met with racial hostility from educated young whites. Surely the reason for this has something to do with what young people are taught about race.
Today's rules of racial etiquette are not reciprocal. Whites are taught to respect blacks, but blacks are not taught to respect whites. When one describes it this way and considers it in the context of America's racial history, the lack of reciprocity makes a certain amount of sense. "Black people should respect white people" carries connotations of subservience, whereas "white people should respect black people" is no more than an exhortation to treat others as equals.
But those connotations are vestigial. Today no one other than the occasional kook thinks that blacks should be treated as anything less than full citizens. American race relations are better than they've ever been, but they could still benefit from a revival of the Golden Rule.
One narrow exception still apparently holds: Dan Rather was interviewed by CNBC's Chris Matthews and said of President Obama that he was "articulate...but he couldn't sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic." It is unlikely that a prominent conservative newscaster could say that and the comment be ignored, even if the newscaster were retired.
Bottom Line. Were America still a racist country, Barack Obama could not have won 53 percent of the vote in 2008. He got more white votes (though a lower percentage) than either Bill Clinton or Al Gore. No one denies that racism remains present in American life. As an appalling human belief it will survive here and everywhere else, so long as human beings are imperfect. But America is a vastly different country today than a generation ago, when no minority Presidential candidate had a prayer of winning the nomination, let alone the general election. Shabby treatment of white students reaching out to their African-American counterparts by celebrating a cultural ritual will perpetuate negative racial feelings, to the detriment of the republic. Those who teach such attitudes do America a great disservice.
Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Conservative Politics
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