Stepping, Saluting, Cracking, and Freaking: The Cultural Politics of African-American Step Shows

Abstract

Spotlights rake over the dark auditorium as the opening music of 2001 (A Space Odyssey) blares through the loudspeakers. The audience searches for the performers as the music suddenly shifts to a hard, driving beat and a recorded voice repeats, Ladies and Gentlemen. Now the spotlights illuminate the white tuxedos of the Delta sisters as they dance down the aisles toward the stage. In their white suits and gloves, their red cummerbunds, boutonnieres, bow ties, and high-heel shoes, and with red masks over their eyes, the 13 performers make a dramatic and wellrehearsed entrance to the Overton Johnson Step Show Competition. Stepping, or blocking, is a dynamic and popular performance tradition among African-American fraternities and sororities. Approximately 5,000 individual chapters with half a million members throughout the U.S. participate in stepping. This complex performance event and ritual involves various combinations of dancing, singing, chanting, and speaking, and draws on African-American folk traditions and communication patterns as well as material from popular culture, such as advertising jingles, television theme songs, and top-4o hits. Few people outside of black Greek letter societies and black college students have seen step shows.1 No doubt the widest national exposure to stepping has come from Spike Lee's 1988 film School Daze, which contains a step show that embodies interfraternity tensions similar to those described in this article.2 Despite the prevalence of stepping throughout American universities and colleges, it has received little formal study. Yet stepping deserves attention because it is a rich tradition that involves great creativity, intelligence, wit, and physical skill. While the term stepping suggests only physical movement, many step routines incorporate chanting and singing as well. This article explores the cultural politics of step shows as they have developed at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in