White girl can't rap.

I recently joined a small vocal ensemble and last week was my first performance with the group. The song we performed is Mercy by Duffy and it would be accurate to describe my role in this song as one of the "yeah yeah yeah" girls, with one exception. Halfway through the song there is a vocal percussion breakdown where every member of the group except the soloist and myself repeat different vocal beats, thus denoting the breakdown. My part includes 8 bars of rapping. That's right. Rapping. Having a little experience in the karaoke Gangsta's Paradise realm, I wasn't really nervous or anything until I realized that the audience we were performing for was about 100 students from the Black Student Union at the University, and maybe a handful of others (mostly consisting of our out-of-place ultra-white group)*. So the first stanza of my ridiculously non-sensical rap goes like this:

You look at me and think we're the same kind
'Cause you don't know what I got and
I want a bit more than I'm asking for
but I just don't want to waste my time

Pretty easy right? Theoretically. But for a rowdy theater full of yelling, snapping, clapping, boisterous college kids, they were essentially silent when we got up there. The lights were blinding, the mood was one of full-on skepticism. From them, it was probably skepticism over "who the hell are these kids coming to our show to perform in a format we're not used to", and from us, it was skepticism over whether we would perform well, mess up, be accepted, etc. Most of my group was calm and ready to rock. But something came over me when it was almost time for me to rap. I locked up and I got so worried about forgetting the words that this, to my horror, is what came out of my mouth:

You look at me and think we're the same kind
'Cause you don't know what I got and
I want a bit flim flattadata dat
bada blip blop bee boop dip dap dap

I finished the stupid rap unable to look anyone in the audience in the eyes, which meant, since it was stadium seating, that I had to stare at the floor until the song was over. I would like to think I can rap...but scat-rapping is not something I hope I never have to face doing again.

*Truth be told, one of us is 1/18 Hawaiian. That counts towards diversity, right?