Dancing like a “white boy”: Diddy on Making the Band 4

by Racialicious special correspondent Wendi Muse, originally published at Does Race Matter?

If only I had a dollar for every time Diddy said something totally racist against white people, I’d be a millionaire. I was (regrettably) watching the new season of his Making the Band reality show last night and noticed that the entire time, he focused on belittling the white performers that had been picked to compete for band membership. It was a little weird as he constantly commented on how they were “dancing like white boys” and had to stop doing that, equating not dancing well to whiteness. I noticed that he also held the white men to different standards, expecting them to fail in a way, or, at least meaning that via most of his words. Imagine if someone on a show said, “stop failing out of school like a black guy. Get an A this time. Come on, look at all these white boys around you doing well in school. Black guys are stupid!” as motivation for one to do better. I mean, hey, it may work, but by asserting a stereotype about one group, one inadvertently makes a statement about another group, again relying on a stereotype. Ugh.

It also seems to give the white contestants an inferiority complex not because of their talent, but because of their race. They both frequently said things that reiterated Diddy’s statement, “I can’t dance like a white boy. I need to do better,” or by discussing the immense pressure they feel as the only white men in the band. They were clearly good enough to get there, but it’s possible that their minority status coupled with the negative reinforcement from Diddy was bad for their confidence…Sounds awfully close to something that happens to racial minorities on a regular basis, and seeing it so blatantly displayed on tv, despite the role reversal, made me very uncomfortable…