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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The joke was that Miss America wasn't really Miss America until this man, Burt Parks, said, there she is.
There is your ideal.
That song debuts.
You have a national televisual event that is about look at these white women.
Look at these women in swimsuits.
Look at these representations, all white representations of beauty.
And just before that, you've had a teenage boy who has been tortured and murdered for looking at a white woman, for supposedly whistling at a white woman, for expressing some kind of desire for a white woman.
Mm-hmm.
So take us to 1983.
Probably one of the strangest spectacles yet.
Vanessa Williams, the first black woman crowned Miss America.
And President Ronald Reagan himself dials her up and says what a wonderful thing she is for the nation.
You know, just to take us back to that time, he is the man who invented the welfare queen.
He congratulated this beauty queen.
And what was the significance of her crown beyond her being the first?
What was the crown actually doing for America and specifically having Vanessa Williams be its queen?
When Vanessa Williams wins in 1983, she's in a pageant that has a number of black contestants.
And so partially you have all this talk that like maybe this is the year a black woman will win.
So you have this kind of –
These women being sort of singled out, but also in some ways I feel like that press sort of minimized some of the individual work that these women are doing, right?
Showing 241–260 of 374 · page 13 of 19
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