On Monday, VH1 launched its newest reality TV show, Sorority Sisters, a chronicle of the lives of nine black sorority sisters. Within less than four days, Black Twitter judged the show so offensive that it mounted a boycott on Twitter—and advertisers are listening. So far, a dozen companies, ranging from Olive Garden to Honda, have said they would pull their ads from the show.
Leaving aside for the moment the racial elements, Sorority Sisters is not very good. The intro features an excessively choreographed sequence of masked "sorors" facing off against each other. The drama—two sorority sisters operating rival boutiques, or one woman "investigating" if another is a "real Delta"—isn't very dramatic, which makes it hard to care. Then there's the noise. From the beginning, the show is rife with cat fights and inter-sorority dissing. In the 2.5 minutes, the pilot shows six women crying—one heard sobbing from a bathroom stall, “Help me, Jesus, to understand.”
"VH1 has long used a formula where they cast African American women whose outrageous behavior conforms to numerous caricatures of black women," says Lawrence Ross, author of The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities, and one of the organizers behind the social media protesting Sorority Sisters.
VH1 says it has no plans to scrap the show. "We are definitely hearing the conversation around 'Sorority Sisters' and are taking the concerns of our viewers into account. Currently there are no changes planned for the series," a VH1 spokesperson said in an email to Bloomberg Businessweek.
To be fair, reality TV has never had a reputation for actually depicting reality. The Hills, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and Real Housewives of New Jersey thrive on the crying, screeching, and backstabbing of their predominantly female stars. An obvious difference between such shows and Sorority Sisters is that the latter focuses on black women, who are underrepresented in the media to begin with.
What's more, Sorority Sisters, which features quick-to-anger "sorors" like a woman who is ready to "find a real career" five years out of college and a former pageant-queen-turned-burlesque-dancer, doesn't seem to stray far from the tired tropes women have said they're sick of seeing. More than 1,000 black women surveyed by Essence magazine last year said they were tired of most frequently noticing black women portraying "angry black women," "baby mommas," "gold diggers," "uneducated black women," black barbies," and "mean black girls."
Advertisers are listening. The list of companies that have said they’d pull ads from Sorority Sister has swelled in the last week to include AT&T, Carmex, Coca Cola, Country Crock, Crayola, Disaronno, Dominos, Hallmark, Honda, JC Penney, Olive Garden, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Protesters have called out other VH1 advertisers in an "Anti-Xmas Boycott List" on Facebook.
The campaign to #BoycottSororitySisters seems to be working. And the tweeters behind it say they don't plan on stopping until the show is gone—completely gone. Says Ross, "We'll not be satisfied by them moving it to their digital platform. They need to shelve it completely."
