Beauty has been equated with skin color as clearly as could be. The wicked queen of the Snow White fable, anticipating her own appointment, asked, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?’ Since Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to the anonymous ‘fair youth,’ the adjective has had multiple meanings, referring to being pretty, being pale, or being deemed pretty for being pale. Snow White herself is renowned for being true to her name, a lively version of what could have been pallid and wan. Color has traditionally been symbolic. White signifies purity, cleanliness, youthfulness, and cold. The message becomes all the more apparent in contrast. The World War II propaganda cartoon Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs was populated by caricatures of Black people who personified the importance of color to character. The original ‘Human Barbie,’ Valeria Lukyanova, the apparently apocryphal ‘Miss Diamond Crown of the World,’ blamed race mixing for the degradation of beauty in an interview that made her even more famous than when she debuted as an internet sensation.
Thus the aesthetic choices which have occasionally surprised observers have not always satisfied them. In 1996, Denny Mendez was selected as Miss Italy. A Caribbean immigrant not of Italian heritage albeit with an Italian stepfather, she triggered opposition even before her victory. Two of the judges were suspended for declaring in advance it was impossible for a Black woman to embody Italy. In 2015, Ariana Miyamoto was designated Miss Japan. Daughter of a Japanese woman and African American man, raised by her mother within her culture, she faced hate immediately. She was succeeded by another hafu (‘half ’) Priyanka Yoshikawa, whose father was Bengali Indian. In Jamaica, Cindy Breakspeare, who was perceived as Caucasian, won in 1976 and was received well, before becoming Miss World. By comparison, Lisa Mahfood, who was Middle Eastern in ancestry, won a decade later and met considerable hostility.
Yet beauty queens sometimes defy expectations. In 1952, the American Mothers Committee conferred its honors upon Toy Len Goon, a Chinese immigrant and widow operating her late husband’s laundry business in Maine while raising eight children. She was cited as an example of the best of democracy. Pacific Grove in Monterey Bay, California, has celebrated an annual Feast of Lanterns with a faux Asian ‘royal court’ of young ladies, virtually none of whom have been actual Asian Americans, and a mythical backstory based on the marketing for a Chinese pattern. In reality, Chinese families established a fishing village nearby in 1851, which was destroyed by arson in 1906, and Japanese Americans from the area were removed during the internment of World War II.
Officials have stripped winners of their crowns for various transgressions. The first Black woman to wear the tiara of Miss America, Vanessa Williams, was compelled to resign the role in 1984, after nude photos from earlier in her career were published without consent in a ‘men’s magazine.’ Thirty-two years later, the organisation apologised to her during the ceremonies, citing her ‘grace and dignity’ throughout the humiliation. In the 1988 California finale, Miss Santa Cruz unfurled a silk scarf denouncing the proceedings for hurting women. She had trained eighteen months for her undercover mission, adopting a false persona as an evangelical Christian; her peers on stage immediately grabbed her banner, and they subsequently complained that she had duped everyone—she too was relieved of her appellation. In 2019, Miss Michigan, who was of Chinese descent, relinquished her title for social media posts criticising Blacks for crime and Muslims for wearing religious garb. Claiming discrimination against conservative opinions, she then joined the re-election campaign of President Donald Trump—himself once the owner-operator of the Miss Universe conglomerate which encompassed Miss USA.
Whiteness bears value. Asian immigrants sought its benefits. If they could demonstrate that they were ‘free white persons,’ then they would be admitted to the fold. Without whiteness, they were not eligible to vote, own land, marry those on the other side of the line, enter the learned professions, and so on; they would be disenfranchised and subservient. In 1922, Takao Ozawa, originally from Japan, lost in his attempt to claim citizenship. His assertion was unavailing, that he was assimilated and advanced, even if he was concededly light, because ‘manifestly the test afford by the mere color of the skin of each individual is impracticable.’ In 1923, Bhagat Singh Thind, identified as a ‘high caste Hindu of full Indian blood, born at Amritsar, Punjab,’ tried his hand and likewise lost. A military veteran of the United States, he was not white as understood by the ordinary man on the street, even if classified as ‘Caucasian’ by the anthropologists of the era. Neither Ozawa nor Thind, nor any resembling them, were eligible to join the body politic. The bar was categorical.
In such a context, the privilege of choosing one’s race has been called out as ‘black fishing.’ The phenomenon was the subject of the 1986 movie, Soul Man, about a white student who tans himself in order to pretend to be a minority, gaining entry to Harvard. The phenomenon became a real-life legal case when the Malone twins, ‘fair-haired’ and ‘fair-complexioned’ were released by the Boston Fire Department for their masquerade. In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, also known as Nkechi Amare Diallo, proclaimed she was ‘transracial,’ born of white parents but identifying as a Black person, even heading the local NAACP chapter. After being outed, she defended herself by saying, ‘it’s not a costume.’ An international version was the 2017 announcement by Daniel Bell, a white academic working in China, to the effect he was Chinese and his dream was to be embraced by ‘fellow Chinese.’ His analogy to Asian Americans was not met with enthusiasm by Asian Americans themselves. Michael Derrick Hudson, a white male, took the name of a classmate from high school, Yi-Fen Chou, an Asian woman, for his poems. His hoax was revealed after his pieces were selected for an anthology of the best American verse.
Perhaps the beauty pageant will be re-appropriated. In 2019, all five of the major international versions had women of color as their representatives. Joining Miss America Nia Franklin; Miss Teen USA Kaliegh Garris; Miss USA Cheslie Kryst; Miss Universe Zozibini Tunzi; was Miss World Toni-Ann Singh of Jamaica, Afro-Asian. Yet the inaugural AI beauty contest, using an ostensibly mathematical algorithm, identified forty-four specimens of attractiveness, almost all of whom were white, with a few Asians and a lone darker-skinned individual.
Beauty queens challenge us: what is it we value, and can it be ranked?