Sprite Step Off: In step with the times, or going a step too far?

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 4, 2010; C01

It sounds like a cheesy Hollywood movie:

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!

The only problem with this eye-rolling scenario is that . . . it actually happened. And the Feb. 20 national finals of the Sprite Step Off competition in Atlanta, in which the all-white Zeta Tau Alpha team from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville won what sponsors billed as "the largest Greek stepping competition ever," is scheduled to be broadcast at 3 p.m. Sunday on MTV2.

"I was nervous it'd be a train wreck and we'd go too fast," Alexandra Kosmitis, a junior accounting major and a member of the Zeta team, said of its nine-minute, stomp-and-shout "Matrix"-themed routine. "But halfway through, it became more about having fun."

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.

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."

The footage of the Zetas' routine that night has drawn more than 500,000 hits on YouTube. It was shot by Anthony Antoine, a community activist and HIV prevention coordinator in Atlanta who posted it, he said, "just so my girlfriend could see how good those girls really were."

Instead, viewer comments have been so vitriolic that friends have urged him to disable the comments entirely. He declined.

"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."

* * *

Step dancing, a hybrid of military drills, cheerleading and synchronized dance, started gaining popularity among young black Americans some 40 years ago. It has since become a staple activity of many black fraternities and sororities, which, in their 100-year history, have had to overcome hostile receptions on most American campuses.

"Stepping is one of the cultural things that we recognize as keeping us together, as a people," said Lawrence C. Ross Jr., author of "The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities in America."

When Sprite and the National Pan-Hellenic Council, the coordinating agency for the nine international black fraternities and sororities, launched the Sprite Step Off in August, it was to encompass 30 events in 20 cities. Rounds of qualifying events would lead to the national finals in Atlanta. The event's African American roots and appeal were clear; in the advertising and videos promoting the contest, every participant is black.

But way down in Fayetteville, Ark., the Epsilon chapter of the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority had been stepping for some 16 years. 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. When the group saw the Sprite competition, "we thought, well, why not try it?"

The team won the first round. At a second round in Houston, on the campus of Texas Southern University, a traditionally black school, the group won one of seven sorority spots at the finals in Atlanta.

"I grew up taking dance lessons my whole life, and most of the girls in the group had dance or cheerleading experience," Kosmitis said. "I hit myself so hard in these routines, to make the slapping sounds, that I had bruises on my thighs."

Meanwhile, at Indiana University in Bloomington, Jasmine Starks, a junior majoring in African and African American diaspora studies, put together a step team. It was her first time to step, she says, and her group of 10 sorority sisters from the Tau chapter of AKA also won two rounds of competition to get to the finals.

The AKAs came to Atlanta with a routine based on the "Law & Order" television show.

"We agreed to go out there and leave it on the stage," Starks said. "When I came offstage, I actually threw up. That's how much effort we put into it."

She thought they'd won.

Antoine, who shot the video, and Ross, the author, who watched both routines on video, each thought it was close but that the Zetas won.

"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."

Melody M. McDowell, chief information officer for the national AKA office, was there. She thought the AKAs had clearly won.

"I was shocked," she said.

So were a lot of other people, and radio call-in shows and Internet message boards lit up, many with angry black callers and posters. The judges -- R&B diva Monica, Atlanta-based producer Devyne Stephens, Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas of TLC fame, and Atlanta dancer-choreographer Zack Lee -- were getting hammered so hard on one call-in show in Atlanta that Thomas actually called in to defend herself. "The AKAs from Indiana, hands-down in my opinion, should have won," she said. None of the judges returned calls for comment.

* * *

So what happened?

Spokesmen from the Coca-Cola Co. (Sprite's corporate parent) won't say anything beyond a vague official statement: "We conducted a post-competition review and discovered a scoring discrepancy. There is no conclusive interpretation, nor definitive resolution for the discrepancy." Thus, Coca-Cola gave both groups $100,000. (The second-place prize had been $50,000.)

It's also fair to note that contest officials are so tight-lipped about the event that they would not identify the judges they hired for the competition, even though it was filmed for television in front of more than 4,000 people.

Said Warren Lee, chairman of the council of presidents of the National Pan-Hellenic Council: "We were not so much unhappy as we were confused. We were not sure if the rules had been applied as we understood them. So there was some review, and it's my understanding that one person made an honest mistake in the scoring."

Antoine, the videographer, said he left the show that night on an exuberant high. So much positive energy, so many young people volunteering in grass-roots efforts to improve the planet . . . and somehow, the video he posted from that night has drawn nearly 3,000 comments, "85 percent of them negative."

"I would really like to think there actually was a scoring problem, but I just don't think so," he said. "I think there was such a backlash that Sprite looked for a way out of it. They put on a great event. I'm sure they didn't want people mad at them. I would just have to conclude that we have a lot of work to do, racially speaking. I'm glad that video is out there, so that people can see that."