Miss Black USA, Miss Gorgeous Prince George's and other competitions have been honoring Black beauty and heritage for over half a century.
To hear Hollywood and mainstream media tell it, beauty pageants have always been a white women’s game. For decades, white women and girls have mostly reigned supreme at Miss America and other acclaimed events. They’ve been the protagonists of popular pageant-themed films like “Dumplin’” and “Miss Congeniality.”
Educating Black girls about their own legacy gives them a sense of pride within a space that has only now begun to accept them. Andrea Sledge, the director and chairperson of the Miss Juneteenth pageant, told HuffPost that instilling dignity in the contestants through etiquette, beauty and history workshops is crucial to how they carry themselves in competition and beyond.
Confidence is something that Black pageants particularly nurture because organizers recognize that in real life, girls like Kai are ridiculed for their hair, even within their own community. Sledge said that, unlike in the film, Miss Juneteenth participants only engage in “healthy competition” and consider themselves each other’s “freedom sister.
“I had noticed that the dark-skinned girls weren’t as confident as girls with lighter skin tones,” Jackson said, noting, however, that the modern Black Girl Magic movement has helped boost their self-esteem. “Now, their confidence has increased. With Miss Gorgeous Prince George’s, I want these girls to define what beauty is to them.”
“When I first started Miss Black USA, very few young Black women were getting undergraduate degrees,” she said. “One of the reasons I established it as a scholarship organization was so young Black women could pursue higher education.”
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