Sometimes you see a trailer for something and think … we are really still doing this?
Now, I’m sure Step Sisters thought it was being cute and there is no telling what the final end product will be. I mean a movie about a black woman teaching white girls how to have rhythm so they can compete in a step competition against her original black step team—all so she can get into Harvard. Yeah … that’s so … fun.
Jamilah Bishop (Megalyn Echikunwoke) seems to excel at everything: She’s president of her sorority, captain of the step dance crew, liaison to the college dean and a star student who is on her way to to Harvard Law School. But when Jamilah is asked to teach a misbehaving, mostly white sorority how to step, success seems impossible. Without telling her own sorority sisters, Jamilah begins training rivals Sigma Beta Beta (SBB) for the “Steptacular” competitive dance competition.
This film was apparently written by one of the writers of Dear White People, a show I very much enjoy, but where were the black women could have been called to work on this project? Like, black women, especially educated black women do not want to spend their time an energy teaching white women to step. Not to mention this whole idea of white women just being rhythmless idiots is always so overblown. We know white women/people can dance; there are enough Nicole Kirkland videos on the internet to show that. This seems like just a collection of really tired race stereotypes that I thought we’d already dealt with in Bring it On.
Bring it On isn’t just about cheerleading, it’s about cultural appropriation. It’s about how a white cheerleading squad stole routines from a black inner-city school and had to eventually get their shit together and win on their own. The film is imperfect, focusing way too much on the white cheerleaders and making them the protagonists and the black cheerleaders seem like a threat to their cheer legacy. Yet Bring it On recognizes the injustice of the situation and knows that the black cheer squad, the Clovers, deserves to win and that their anger is valid. It also isn’t afraid to bring up the issue in the first place.
Step Sisters I’m sure will have to address something, but the amount of time Jamilah says sisterhood to these white girls in the movie just makes me want to sigh deeply. Even when she lectures them about how their fears of being pre-judged are shallow compared to racism people face all the time is just a lot, because this is a step competition.
We will see what the end product looks like on January 19th. I hope I’m wrong because I’d much rather be wrong about this film than right.
(via Deadline, image: Netflix)
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