Race and NBC's The Sing Off

Last night I happened to be watching the NBC’s The Sing Off. The show is a reality competition format where acapella groups sing and judges eliminate groups one by one, until the top four, at which point America votes for the winner. As with most reality competition shows involving talent, the show tries to be much more than just about the talent. The Sing Off is two hours long and to fill time intersperses interviews along with clips showing the acapella groups in their “regular routine” to let the audience feel like they know a little more about the personalities of each group. They do this on American Idol, as well and I’ve always kind of wondered just how “real” these activities are versus how much of it is produced by the producers. It became very apparent to me that NBC’s producers for The Sing Off were trying very hard to make it seem like they had a lot more diversity in the competition than they actually did.

One of the groups, Committed, consisting of all African American young males has been promoted on the show as being a group of choirboys. During their video they go to Venice to play basketball, according to the video they do this all the time when they’re not practicing singing. I don’t think a single one of them made a shot during the entire video. I have never seen such bad basketball players. Clearly, none of them had ever touched a basketball before, but NBC saw a black group and decided this is what they should be doing to connect to the viewers, and get voters to call in for them. Race is a very delicate subject when it comes to television because the last thing a network television show wants to do is ruffle anyone’s feathers or offend a certain group of people. This just turns people away from the show, and makes advertisers nervous to advertise during those time slots. Now, I can only imagine how an African American audience received this, but I myself was offended watching how NBC clearly didn’t ask them what they wanted to do, and simply assumed: black people = basketball.

Last night was the only night America gets to vote during the competition so I guess we’ll see next week, if this strategy worked and Committed gets enough votes to win the competition. The whole concept that African American audiences only vote for African American talent on reality shows seems a bit out dated. I guess this claim would assume that we are in a post racial society. Maybe Committed will stay in the competition, maybe it will be because enough African American saw and connected with their basketball video segment, maybe it will be because they were actually talented enough to win. It’s hard to know the answers to any of these questions, but I think it’s clear that none of them will be drafted into the NBA after their performances on The Sing Off.