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05-05-2014, 12:00 PM
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On October 22, 1949, The New Yorker published a report by Lillian Ross on that year’s Miss America Pageant. It begins,
There are thirteen million women in the United States between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. All of them were eligible to compete for the title of Miss America in the annual contest staged in Atlantic City last month if they were high-school graduates, were not and had never been married, and were not Negroes.
Ross makes no further comment on the exclusion of more than a million young black women from the pageant, although her allusion to them was provocative for its time. Until 1948, their fathers and brothers had been serving in a segregated military. It was five years before the Supreme Court, in deciding Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ended legal segregation in American schools. And while the Miss America Pageant abolished the ban on black contestants in 1950, none would compete until 1970, and none would win until Vanessa Williams took the crown, in 1984.
Six years later, People magazine launched an annual issue devoted to “The World’s Fifty Most Beautiful People.” The most beautiful of the beautiful gets the cover. (There are currently about seven billion lovely and unlovely humans on the planet; People’s short list, however, is restricted to celebrities.) Last week, the honors for 2014 went to Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar, this year, for her supporting role in “12 Years a Slave.”
Nyong’o, thirty-one, was born in Mexico to Kenyan parents while her father, a college professor, was teaching there. They returned to Kenya when she was three, where they lived, she has said, a comfortable “suburban” life. She was educated in the United States at Hampshire College and at the Yale School of Drama. Her poise, like her chic, is striking, and her beauty is classically African. Two “most beautiful” stars of mixed African ethnicity, Halle Berry and Beyoncé, preceded Nyong’o, in 2003 and 2012, respectively. They are both notably lighter-skinned.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/05/lupita-nyongo-people-most-beautiful.html?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_Daily%20(170)
On October 22, 1949, The New Yorker published a report by Lillian Ross on that year’s Miss America Pageant. It begins,
There are thirteen million women in the United States between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. All of them were eligible to compete for the title of Miss America in the annual contest staged in Atlantic City last month if they were high-school graduates, were not and had never been married, and were not Negroes.
Ross makes no further comment on the exclusion of more than a million young black women from the pageant, although her allusion to them was provocative for its time. Until 1948, their fathers and brothers had been serving in a segregated military. It was five years before the Supreme Court, in deciding Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, ended legal segregation in American schools. And while the Miss America Pageant abolished the ban on black contestants in 1950, none would compete until 1970, and none would win until Vanessa Williams took the crown, in 1984.
Six years later, People magazine launched an annual issue devoted to “The World’s Fifty Most Beautiful People.” The most beautiful of the beautiful gets the cover. (There are currently about seven billion lovely and unlovely humans on the planet; People’s short list, however, is restricted to celebrities.) Last week, the honors for 2014 went to Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar, this year, for her supporting role in “12 Years a Slave.”
Nyong’o, thirty-one, was born in Mexico to Kenyan parents while her father, a college professor, was teaching there. They returned to Kenya when she was three, where they lived, she has said, a comfortable “suburban” life. She was educated in the United States at Hampshire College and at the Yale School of Drama. Her poise, like her chic, is striking, and her beauty is classically African. Two “most beautiful” stars of mixed African ethnicity, Halle Berry and Beyoncé, preceded Nyong’o, in 2003 and 2012, respectively. They are both notably lighter-skinned.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/05/lupita-nyongo-people-most-beautiful.html?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_Daily%20(170)