CVK
(Thanks again to dmwiese for this one!) The Washington Post ran an article today about the “ethnic” beauty pageants that are springing up all over the country as a reaction to the Eurocentric beauty pageants that dominate the landscape.

Robertha Budy heard the insult when she was a little girl, and now, even at Georgia State University in Atlanta, she still hears it. “You’re Liberian? Isn’t that in Africa? You don’t look like it. You’re pretty.”

She put the negative thought out of her mind while winning the Miss Liberia USA pageant last year, calming her nerves for the judges the way she did while facing students…

Oh Robertha, we totally hear ya! Check out the top 5 most racist compliments we’ve received that we covered on the latest episode of Addicted to Race.

At immigrant pageants, beauty has a browner, more worldly tinge. Noses are wider and eyes are a gooey chocolate brown, framed in various almond-like contours. Hips sway more in talent segments, such as an adaptation of a Bollywood performance at Miss India or a belly dance at Miss Liberia…

“In Little Tokyo beauty contests in the ’90s, the women who were selected turned out to have more Caucasian features,” said Kyeyoung Park, an associate professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. “They tended to select more mixed-race people.”

The latter concern was addressed in a great article by Mireya Navarro last year in the New York Times, about how the Japanese-American community is redefining itself, in large part due to the growing numbers of mixed people and interracial couples.