On Sunday, September 15, Nina Davuluri, Miss New York, became the first ever Indian-American woman to be crowned Miss America. As per usual with any major pop culture event, not long after, the twittersphere absolutely exploded with opinions. Congratulations and praise was profuse, however, more prevalent (in the media anyways) were the insults, racism and downright stupidity.
There were claims that Davuluri was not “American” enough to be Miss America (though she was born in Syracuse, New York and grew up mostly in Michigan) as well as derogatory racial slurs about her Indian heritage. The most offensive and outrageous were those that somehow bafflingly misidentified her as Arab and then accused her of being a terrorist. For any logical person with a working knowledge of geography, this makes zero sense.
Media outlets across the country ranging from Buzzfeed to CNN immediately jumped on the public shaming of the offenders, providing images of the tweets as well as the users’ names.
There backlash was immense. The articles garnered comments and views in the thousands, mostly from those ashamed and horrified at “American racism” and “ignorance in America.”
I admit my first reaction was almost identical. How could anyone think such terrible things, much less state them publicly? To say that she’s not ‘American’ enough because of her skin color? Are we not a country built on immigration? And who said ‘American’ equals ‘white’?
Though it would be inaccurate and insulting to argue that racism does not exist in America today, to assume that the average American holds such extreme beliefs as those above is just laughable.
The United States is a country with more than 300 million people. The twitter posts of a few dozen—or even a few hundred— do not represent the views of the majority. Davuluri herself has said that for every negative tweet she has received, there have been hundreds of positive ones, like the ones pictured below.
The controversial tweets were hateful and awful and clearly written by ignorant bigots, but the entire episode may say more about the state of social media than it does about racism in America.
In today’s insta-sharing world, never before have so many people been able to say so much directly to celebrities. And never before have mass media outlets been able to assemble and publish the statements of people all across the country in mere minutes.
Twitter is wide-reaching and accessible by anyone with a smartphone or Internet access (so, pretty much everyone). Unfortunately, this means that, while it remains a great communication tool for the intelligent and informed, it’s also a place for people to practice their First Amendment right to hate speech.
No matter what is happening in the world—be it a sporting event, political debate, national tragedy or celebrity controversy—rest assured, people are weighing in. As seen with Miley Cyrus’ recent VMA performance: if something big is going down, there will be twitter-supporters and twitter-haters.
The amount of hate regularly rained down on celebrities is astonishing and does expose the seedy, ignorant underbelly of America. Recall when former That’s So Raven star Raven-Symone recently came out as lesbian—the twitter backlash included many homophobic tweets about how this revelation “ruined their childhood.” One very important thing to keep in mind, however, is that the hate is almost always in the minority.
And though Davuluri’s particular group of twitter-haters have gone down the extremely distasteful route of racism (which is both ignorant and alarmingly inaccurate), she has shown remarkable poise and grace in interviews and does not seem particularly bothered by the insults. She has shown herself to be intelligent, beautiful and strong-willed, and I hope the world sees that Miss America represents the United States much more accurately than her random twitter-haters do.