Beauty pageants typically bring to mind frivolous women, regressive notions of femininity and controversial (and often insipid) answers to interview questions — which isn’t entirely off base. But in the United States, their history is also inherently political and, more specifically, racial. In her book “Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women,” historian Blain Roberts notes that beauty pageants emerged in the South during Jim Crow as a way to assert white superiority. White Southerners created an entire cosmetics industry equating beauty with whiteness and trained a string of winning Miss Americas who embodied their racial ideal in a national representative. The Miss America pageant, which started in 1921, lifted its official rule that contestants be “of the white race” in 1950, but state and local pageant officials continued to enforce it: Miss Black America emerged as a secondary pageant in 1968 to protest the exclusion of black women. (The first black contestant, representing Iowa, competed in the Miss America pageant in 1971.) Later, with an influx of immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of relaxed immigration laws, pageants for other ethnic groups, such as Miss India USA and Miss Chinatown USA, offered foreign-born citizens avenues to recognize within their own communities a beauty ideal that was rejected by the mainstream culture.

As the diversity of national beauty pageant winners has increased in the past three decades, so has resistance to the changing picture of American-ness. Since the crowning of the first black Miss America in 1984, Vanessa Williams (who received death threats after she won), winners of that pageant have included eight African Americans and two Asian Americans, and half of the Miss USA titleholders in the past decade have been women of color. But the first Muslim to win Miss USA in 2010, Lebanese American Rima Fakih, was immediately dubbed “Miss Hezbollah” by conservative news outlets. The first Indian American to win Miss America, Nina Davuluri in 2013, got the unofficial Twitter title of “Miss 7-11” or “Miss 9/11” (depending on the user’s ability to understand the difference between Indians and Arabs) and prompted a racist backlash for not looking “American enough.”

AD

AD

This isn’t an issue only in the United States. When Ariana Miyamoto, who is half Japanese and half black, won the Miss Japan pageant in 2015, immediately followed by a half-Indian, half-Japanese winner in 2016, Priyanka Yoshikawa, the country — which is only 3 percent biracial — entered a heated national debate about what it means to look Japanese.

The United States is at the same crossroads, and the conversation in the courts since Trump took office mirrors the one that has been happening on stage. Although Trump’s travel ban has been dubbed a “Muslim ban,” it is part and parcel of a larger effort to control how the United States looks as well as how it prays. The ban, combined with contemporaneous executive orders to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and aggressive deportation of immigrants, is an attempt to reverse the forces that are changing the country’s racial composition. To wit: With current immigration rates and increasing intermarriage between races, Americans identifying as two or more races are expected to triple in the next five decades, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Racial minorities now make up almost half of children younger than 5, and census numbers predict the percentage of total Americans identifying as a race that is not white to be 56 percent by 2060, making the United States a “majority-minority” country.

The recent Miss USA pageant brought this ongoing transformation into full relief: Seven of the 10 finalists were women of color, with an Indian-born American representing New Jersey and an Italian-born African American representing the District of Columbia ultimately the last two competing for the crown. It’s no surprise that whether by blocking visas or building walls, there are parts of the country desperate to hang on to a vision of the United States that is rapidly disappearing from their TV screens as well as their neighborhoods. The courts are grappling with the legal manifestation of the same backlash.

AD

AD