Miss America and Construction of the Other in American Culture

Because the “real Miss America” reveals the real you

Last night Miss New York became Miss America. But even more importantly, Nina Davuluri became the first Indian-American Miss America. The New York native brought Bollywood dance to the stage during the talent competition and spoke from her platform of “celebrating diversity through cultural competency.”

Yet, last night was also a time of thorough cultural incompetence. Both Buzzfeed and Jezebel have accounted for the range of racist tweets that went out after Davuluri was crowned. What’s interesting is the multiple levels of wrongness exhibited in the tweets. Some label Davuluri an Arab (she’s Indian-America), some label her a Muslim (her parents are Hindu and it appears she may be too), and some just flat deny that Miss America should look like anything other than this.

America has a long tradition of misidentifying Asian Indians and Hindus. In the nineteenth century Americans lumped all the people of India under the label “Hindoo.” Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man who had a healthy admiration of Asian religions, described the Bhagavad Gita as the greatest Buddhist book he ever read. It’s not Buddhist but Hindu. Up until the last decades of the nineteenth century most Americans believed there were four major types of religion: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and “Heathenism.” The difference between the various heathenisms mattered little. The heathens and the Hindoos represented the opposite of everything American’s believed themselves to be in the nineteenth century. As they saw it, America was white, Protestant, democratic, and progressive. The “Hindoos,” by contrast, were dark, heathen, organized by caste, and socially backwards.

For nineteenth century Americans, “we” were Miss Kansas. Many Americans still tell themselves this story.

So, when an Indian-American with Hindu parents wins Miss America, it reveals two things. On the one hand it reveals how far America has come from the nineteenth century: from “Hindoo heathens” to Miss America. But, on the other hand, the Twitter response shows that the us and them narrative of American identity is still very much alive. The characters have changed slightly, now the them is more Muslim—so Muslim in fact that it makes an Indian-American into an Arab Muslim. But the general structure is the same.

What you think about “the real Miss America” represents how you imagine America and your American identity.