Beauty Pageants and Racism from Asha Rangappa

As detailed in historian Blain Robert's book, Pageants, Parlors, and Pretty Women, the beauty industry and pageants have a long history of racism.

From the South's pageant queens to the importance of beauty parlors to African American communities, it is easy to see the ways beauty is enmeshed in southern culture. But as Blain Roberts shows in this incisive work, the pursuit of beauty in the South was linked to the tumultuous racial divides of the region, where the Jim Crow-era cosmetics industry came of age selling the idea of makeup that emphasized whiteness, and where, in the 1950s and 1960s, black-owned beauty shops served as crucial sites of resistance for civil rights activists. In these times of strained relations in the South, beauty became a signifier of power and affluence while it reinforced racial strife.

Roberts examines a range of beauty products, practices, and rituals--cosmetics, hairdressing, clothing, and beauty contests--in settings that range from tobacco farms of the Great Depression to 1950s and 1960s college campuses. In so doing, she uncovers the role of female beauty in the economic and cultural modernization of the South. By showing how battles over beauty came to a head during the civil rights movement, Roberts sheds new light on the tactics southerners used to resist and achieve desegregation.

And from Asha Rangappa on this twitter thread:

The pageant had a rule that contestants be “of the white race,” — a rule that was lifted in 1950, but state and local officials continued to enforce it. Secondary pageants, like Miss Black America, emerged in 1968 to protest the exclusion of black women. Vanessa Williams was the first black woman to win the Miss America title...in 1984. (The first black contestant, Miss Iowa, first competed in the Miss America pageant in 1971.)

Some of us from Eurocentric cultures, like India (and I know many of my black and brown sisters will sympathize), had a double-whammy: Even within non-white cultures, “fairness” is a prized commodity. In Indian, culture, for example, I am considered “too dark” (read: ugly).
That’s why, when someone who deviates from the “beauty ideal” wins a pageant, it’s actually meaningful for many communities. I wrote about this when Nina Davaluri became the first Indian-American to win Miss America in 2013. How insane is the quest for “whiteness” in being beautiful? Well, in India, at least, there is this really fun brand called “Fair n’ Lovely.” It’s a beauty product that skin-shames women into being whiter. This ad tells you how to make your mom proud: https://youtu.be/SeePv5TvQEg