Abstract
In September 1945, Bess Myerson became the first Jewish woman to win the Miss America title. Fifty years later, in September 1995, Heather Whitestone became the first woman with a disability (she is deaf) to win the crown of Miss America. Although the historical contexts of both of these formative moments differ considerably, both demonstrate how the pageant privileges whiteness. For Bess Myerson in 1945, the pageant’s emphasis on whiteness revolved around the discourse of assimilation and Americanization. With World War II providing a nationalist backdrop to the Miss America Pageant, and the complicated terrain of U.S. anti-Semitism and the increasing national realization of the Holocaust operating as political context, the pageant’s cultural politics of whiteness offered a particular kind of logic to the selection of a Jewish woman as Miss America.
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Notes
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1992).
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).
Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images (London: Routledge, 1993); Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness; Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993).
George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47 (September 1995): 383.
Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 27.
See Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 27.
Lauren Berlant describes the National Symbolic as: “the order of discursive practices whose reign within a national space produces, and also refers to, the ‘law’ in which the accident of birth within a geographic/political boundary transforms individuals into subjects of a collectively-held history. Its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives, provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national subjectivity: through the National Symbolic the historical nation aspires to achieve the inevitability of the status of natural law, a birthright.” Berlant, Anatomy of a National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 20.
For more along these lines, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, 18. The beauty pageant constructs and maintains a particular configuration of the female citizen through the imagined promise of citizenship, the fantasy of female agency, and the deferral of inequalities in the public realm to the apparently level playing field of culture. In this sense, the pageant is about the coherence of a national body, but because pageants are about real as well as imagined bodies, about visual and cultural representation, they “erupt in culture,” as Lowe points out. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 3.
Susan Dworkin, Miss America, 1945: Bess Myerson’s Own Story (New York: Newmarket Press, 1987).
I am not arguing that Myerson bore the burden of this kind of displacement alone. On the contrary, at this particular historical moment, as Michael Rogin has argued, many forms of entertainment and popular culture “served the Americanization plot.” Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 62. The Miss America Pageant, with its dual emphasis on respectable femininity and national identity, was one of those forms, and it found a particularly effective representative of its claims in Bess Myerson.
Ibid. See also Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness.
Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 144.
George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
Robert Westbrook, “Fighting for the American Family: Private Interests and Political Obligations in World War II,” in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History by Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 212.
Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch, “Television as a Cultural Forum” in Television: The Critical View, 5th ed., Horace Newcomb, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 506.
Benedict Richard O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
For a discussion of the California propositions, see Lowe, Immigrant Acts, and Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness. For more on the O. J. Simpson trial, see Darnell Hunt, O. J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).
Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism. (New York: Free Press, 1996).
For more on this, see Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Daphne Gray, Yes, You Can, Heather!: The Story of Heather Whitestone, Miss America 1995 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995).
Neil Gotanda, “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution Is Color-Blind,’” Stanford Law Review 44, no. 1 (1991).
Frank Deford, There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America (New York: Penguin Books, 1978).
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© 2004 Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin
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Banet-Weiser, S. (2004). Miss America, National Identity, and the Identity Politics of Whiteness. In: Watson, E., Martin, D. (eds) There She Is, Miss America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981820_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981820_4
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