Black churches, colleges, social clubs, charitable groups, sororities and fraternal organizations have fashioned beauty competitions for more than a century. Suggesting otherwise is a Eurocentric and distorted view that disregards life and culture when not attached to white people. Similarly, Jackie Robinson’s Major League career does not mark the beginning of Blacks in baseball. Although actress Vanessa Williams’s 1984 Miss America victory is an important moment by which African American participation in beauty contests is often framed, Black people in America have long lauded women of color within their own pageant productions. Historically, pageants organized by African Americans, and heavily supported by the Black press, materialized remedies for American popular culture’s persistent assault on African American women. The history of mainstream American pageants, particularly Miss America and Miss USA, plainly reflects these imaginations with their limited presentations of fitness and loveliness. Conversely, racism requires women of African descent to be marked by labels of promiscuity, ugliness and worthlessness. It has used white women as ornamental benchmarks to underscore the idea of superiority. American racism, both in practice and theory, has always linked human value to twisted notions of physical health and beauty.
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