Here She Comes: The Racist Reaction to Miss America

The Miss America pageant may be a bizarre and largely outdated cultural ritual, but it still occupies an iconographic status in a nation obsessed with appearances and the objectification. Even young girls are swept up in pageant culture, as the reality television series Toddlers and Tiaras illustrates, and for older girls and women, the stakes can be huge. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on the pageant industry annually, from its glitz-filled events to the broadcasts bringing it to viewers, even as the overall number of viewers declines from year to year. The dying gasps of the industry, in other words, haven’t stopped it from packing a punch.

In this year’s Miss America pageant, the usual parade of events took place, with women being shepherded across the stage to showcase their largely uniform bodies and demonstrate their talents for the judges. In many ways, the pageant is reminiscent of a county fair, where the crowds have an opportunity to watch prize lambs and heifers being shown in the ring before they’re sold at auction for slaughter. Except in this case, the handlers wait just offstage instead of steering their charges with a collar and lead.

Yet, something unexpected happened this year, something that’s sparked discussion across the internet and forced at least some viewers to examine what it means to be ‘American’ in a world where many people have set ideas about national identity. To many viewers, ‘Americans’ are people like those who have historically won the pageant: they’re tall white women with flowing blonde or brunette locks, slim bodies, quiet voices. Not brown women who perform Bollywood dance on the Miss America stage for the first time in history.

This year’s winner, Nina Davuluri, flies in the face of tradition. This New Yorker of Indian descent is only the second Asian-American to win the title, and predictably, the first question she was asked in her post-win press conference had to do with her race: reporters wanted to know her response to the storm of rage on social media as people complained about a ‘non-American’ winning the pageant. This despite the fact that she has an impressive university resume, a family that moved to the United States 30 years ago, and numerous other interesting biographical facts that would have made for interesting topics at the conference.

During her reign, Davuluri plans to focus on the promotion of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), in keeping with her goal of becoming a doctor. But along the way, she’ll be continually tackling racism, it appears, at least judging from the flood of horrific Twitter commentary last night from users unfamiliar with geography, politics, or common sense. Users variously pegged her as ‘an Arab’ (false), Muslim (false, and not that it matters—Muslimahs can be Miss Americas too), ‘not American’ (false in both the legal and larger social sense), a terrorist (false), an insult to America so close after the anniversary of the 11 September attacks (…), and ‘Miss 7-11’ (hello racism, my old friend).

Even as valid criticisms of the Miss America pageant itself are an important part of structural analysis of the event, so too are criticisms of the reactions from members of the public. Nina Davuluri is challenging many people’s perception of what it means to be ‘American’ in a nation inhabited almost entirely by colonisers and their descendents; there is a certain peculiarity to seeing those of European descent self-righteously crowning another woman of European descent as the ‘real’ Miss America in a nation where indigenous people struggle for justice (though Norma Smallwood, of the Cherokee community, took the Miss America crown in 1926). And there is also something deeply frustrating about seeing those of immigrant descent trash another person of immigrant descent as not being the right kind of ‘American.’

Perhaps the flood of racist responses to the winner of a pageant few people really care about says more about national identity and US culture than who won the pageant itself: the United States is a country rife with racism, with a deep core of hateful attitudes running at its heart. It is perhaps unsurprising to see knee-jerk responses like this because they are becoming a familiar refrain. Every time a nonwhite person or person of colour is recognized for accomplishments of any kind in the US, whites demand to know why this accolade was stolen from them. Cries of ‘reverse racism’ arise from people who wish to undermine the hard-won and legitimate gains of people of colour and nonwhite people in a society very much stacked against them, with all social power and control in the hands of the white community.

There are many who believe that Davuluri ‘stole’ the pageant, has somehow taken something not just from the white contestants but also the white community in general and the ‘America’ they know at large. In a world where people believe that any gain by someone else has made at their expense, tensions and fury always run high with competitions, but doubly so when the winners of competitions are members of marginalised groups.

While Davuluri may have stated firmly for the media that she considers herself American first and foremost—no small wonder for a woman born and raised in the US—there are many people who think otherwise, and aren’t shy about sharing their thoughts. The systemic tolerance for the racism Davuluri’s already encountering, and will continue to witness throughout her reign, speaks poorly of the United States, and eloquently to the nation’s history and current climate.

This is a country where anyone with brown skin is attacked when the news speaks of terrorists, where young men of colour are gunned down in the streets for daring to exist, and where even a sexist, pointless, ridiculous event calcified in tradition isn’t immune from toxic levels of racism. Indeed, the racist responses highlight the close intersections between racism, sexism, and oppression in the United States; these interlocking threads are drawing tight around Nina Davuluri and her tiara, which she may come to regret in the coming year.

Photo by quinn. arya. licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.