On paper, Bring It On is about the Rancho Carne Toros, a wealthy San Diego cheer squad chasing yet another national title. But the plot thickens when new captain Torrance Shipman (Dunst) realizes their flawless routines weren’t original at all. They’d been stolen from the East Compton Clovers, a mostly Black team led by the poised, no-nonsense Isis (Gabrielle Union). That revelation is the movie’s moral center.
“I guess that was my first introduction to the way colonization happens, and this idea of stealing Black art,” says Naledi Ushe, a design student at FIT and freelance culture reporter. “It has really complex themes in it while still being a fun teen movie. But that was probably my first time truly understanding [that idea] presented in more of like a playful, we're-all-in-this-together type of thing."
For many Black viewers, it was their first time seeing cultural appropriation addressed not in an academic essay or magazine think pieces, but in forest-green uniforms and spicy cheer chants. And it hit before media at large had the vocabulary to call it what it was. Before magazines like Glamour, Vogue, or Marie Claire crowned something a “trend” once a Kardashian-Jenner, a Bieber, or a Hadid picked it up(despite Black and Brown women having done it for years) Bring It On was already spotlighting that cultural tension: the way white women often receive the credit and visibility for ideas originated in Black communities.
“With this movie, you unpack new layers as you get older," Ushe adds. “At first, you're learning stealing is wrong and that's why you should have proper credit. But then, as you get older, you lean into the complexities.”
Few scenes embody this more directly than when the Clovers interrupt a Toros halftime routine. Isis and her squad march into the stands and perform the exact same moves—only cleaner, sharper, better. Not only were the Toros’ cheers stolen, they couldn’t even sell them with the same power.
“It straight up show them in the middle of their cheering like, 'This is ours, and we do it better,” Ushe says. “That’s the biggie, because I think a lot of the times with cultural appropriation, it is never, to me, as good as when Black people do it.”
One of the film’s slyest moves was its refusal to make Isis a villain despite Union reflecting on how some viewers misread her character as the “angry Black woman.”
“There’s no real villain,” Bendinger told Variety in 2020. “The villain is your own ethical moral compass. Like, how are you going to behave in a situation? Are you going to choose well or choose poorly?”
“It’s really about cultural theft,” director Reed added in the same interview. “Kirsten’s character realizes the Toros are direct beneficiaries of this cultural theft. Isis is a determined leader who is going to get to Nationals and prove to everybody that they’re the rightful ones. They have been fighting in obscurity to be the best, and they are the best, and now they’re going to prove it to the world. In no way is she a villain or even an antagonist. That’s a very weird read on the movie.”
That misinterpretation underscores how radical the Clovers’ win was in the end. They triumph not because the Toros don’t cheat at all, but because they’re simply the best.
“There are always going to be people in the audience who aren’t comfortable that the white girls didn’t win," Reed said. "That’s the sad truth of our country. But absolutely, the Clovers deserved to win. It’s almost like a Rocky ending—the protagonist comes in second, but it feels like first.”
