Mickey McElya
speaker
374 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Mickey McElya’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
saying the only thing wrong with Miss America is that she's beautiful and that she is our ideal.
And that sets off a political conversation that also saturates reactions to women's liberation, that this is the moment that the new right and the Christian right are coalescing and coming together around these issues.
And women are using beauty as both their political power
as their currency, and they're challenging the limitations, right?
So beauty isn't just, it isn't just this set of oppressive beauty standards.
It is the terrain of politics itself.
Okay, let's talk about the Black, Miss Black America pageant.
That historic night, 1968, while feminists were at those barricades and the cameras were locked
on Convention Hall.
Another radical thing was happening in Atlantic City just a few blocks away at the Ritz-Carlton, and that one didn't start until midnight.
Tell us what you learned specifically, not just about the Miss Black America pageant, but what it was responding to.
So the Miss America pageant had never had a Black finalist.
by 1968.
It would not have a black finalist walk the stage in the nationally televised pageant until 1970.
And the Miss Black America pageant was directly focused on challenging that exclusion but highlighting that exclusion as the product of white supremacist beauty standards that did not include black women and that that exclusion was both
central to white supremacist power structures, but also central to black people's understandings of their own value in society.
I think one of the things that I learned while doing this research was the tension that's present in the organizers.
It becomes mistakenly called an NAACP pageant.
This is a huge point of controversy within the NAACP and it is something that the national organization disavows the following year.
It makes very clear we are not running a beauty pageant.
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