Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant

The essay, Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant, addresses many aspects of black culture and racism through a general topic of the Miss America Pageant. Gerald Early is an essayist and critic, and is currently a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Early has won multiple awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994 for a collection of his essays. Primarily using anecdotes about his own family, Gerald Early shows how there is a constant struggle with race pride that has been going on since he and his wife were younger. His wife and daughters both religiously watch the Miss America Pageant every year, and he describes how the program used to be all white, and now his daughters have gotten the chance to see several African American women win.

In the essay, Early addresses how the pageants have a different meaning to his daughters. He examines how they find the women in the pageant “funny,” and it doesn’t faze them to now see an African American woman win, like it does for their parents. The purpose of this essay was to discuss and show how African American women are now a presence in society and how learning to have race pride and live with it as a moral is key to overlooking degradation. This essay is most likely directed to other young African American women considering much of the essay is about them finding their identity in today’s society. Along with many personal anecdotes, Early utilizes other pieces of literature and allusions to prove his point. Overall, at the end of the essay I felt that the purpose of the essay was clear and accurate. The approach Gerald Early took on this essay was very successful with showing how African American women should take pride in their race in today’s society because originality is the root to overall success.

This picture shows the irony of a previous African American pageant winner happily crowning a white winner looking equally as happy.

(Photo By Scott E. Stetzer / The Press of Atlantic City/)