The Coca-Cola Co. Proves Obama's Post-Racial Agenda is DOA

Living in Atlanta, I’m used to the racial double-standard, but evidently the rest of America isn’t. From the Wapo:

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!

Anthony Antoine, a local Atlanta activist who works in HIV prevention posted his personal video of the University of Arkansas ZTA Team on youtube, to showcase the excellence of the competition.

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.”

Coca-Cola, headquartered in Atlanta, is doing their own step-routine, back-tracking on winners. If the contest was only open to black dance teams, why not say so? Instead of all this malarkey that people can see straight through?

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.”

Honest mistake, my hind-parts. Coke caved to pressure and instead, to avoid “discomfort,” said the groups tied and paid the ransom.

Cowards.

The competition will be rebroadcast this Sunday at 3 p.m. on MTV2. You watch. You decide.