Pageant Racism

Beauty pageants are not something I usually pay attention to. However, the most recent Miss America results have sparked some discussion that I found interesting. They crowned the first Indian-American winner.

"I'm so proud to be the first Indian Miss America," Nina Davuluri said after she won. CNN

In 2013, one would not expect this to be a news-worthy headline. What makes it a headline is the backlash from racists who decided it was unfit for someone of Indian decent to win. 

Nina won the contest of with the platform of "Celebrating Diversity Through Cultural Competency." How fitting that people took to twitter soon after the announcement and bashed the judges and Nina herself, because of her race. Many tweets called her out for being a Muslim, (she is not) a great representation of intelligence levels of people posting the tweets. 

Another thing this reminded me of was the blog of a fellow classmate who blogged about racism. When I read it the first time, I thought it was satirical with lines such as "Our president is black. If our country is still prejudice towards black people, why would we have voted Obama in?" and "The war for racism is over." This is just blatantly false. Obama won by 51%. A very large amount of people did not vote for him. Many of those did not take race into account, but many did. We still live in a nation where racism is a huge problem. To say that it is over is ignorant and disrespectful to those affected by it.

Do you think racism is "over?" Will it ever be?


Also if the author of that blog reads this, I mean no offense