Fogarty & Evans/Movies, Moves and Music, 5. The School and ‘The Streets’: Race, Class, Sound, and Space in Step Up and Step Up 2

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate relationships between race and social mobility in the early twenty-first-century United States of America, by examining how those two phenomena operate in the cinematic narratives of the popular hip hop dance films Step Up and Step Up 2: The Streets. Within those narratives, we analyse visual, verbal, and aural components of the films—where ‘verbal’ refers to the content of what characters say in monologues and dialogue, while ‘aural’ refers to the sounds of characters’ voices, music, ambient noises, and silence. A careful analysis of those components in tandem reveals how the films instruct audiences about race and social mobility through the discourses of colourblind meritocracy. Colourblind meritocracy refers to the evaluation of individuals on the basis of the quality of their performance and decidedly not on the basis of their race. Colourblind meritocracy’s overwhelming emphasis on performance and aptitude serves to elide the structural workings of privilege, which produce uneven life chances based on social identity across generations. Simultaneously, the notions of quality and aptitude are themselves not objective but rather designed to favour the racially privileged. The discourses of colourblind meritocracy at the heart of the narrative in Step Up and Step Up 2: The Streets, present a fallacious moral lesson about urban cultures of the U.S.A—that performance and aptitude, not race, determine social mobility.