Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant

The essay explored various aspects of black culture through the Miss America competition, primarily black women and society's ideas on black women. The author explores racial pride, the politics of the competition itself, and racism. The author, Gerald Early, is an essayist and American culture critic. He has written on many different topics, African American culture such as in this essay is just one of those topics. The essay is written in a fairly modern context, having been written in 1990, it is one of the most recent of the essays, and the issues explored in the essay are still relevant to this day, as black women and the black community overall struggles to find their identity, similar to the way women were discussed in the previous essay I read. The purpose of the essay was to explore modern society and the way black people are treated in our society, and describe the struggle for African Americans that persists to this day. He uses many anecdotes throughout the essay, primarily about his daughters and his experiences raising them. The primary audience would probably be other black people, probably young black women, seeing as they are the main subject of the essay, as well as who it seems he is addressing. He definitely achieves his purpose, exploring many different issues throughout the essay and making sure they all relate to the main topic. He uses the example of how his older daughter once wanted long blonde hair, or the story he ended up with, when his daughters were playing dolls, and Rosalind said to him, "We're not racial. That's old-fashioned. Don't you think so, Daddy? Aren't you tired of all that racial stuff?" I think this was definitely something interesting to include in the essay, and how he ended the essay describing his "stiffness and inflexibility", which is interesting because it means that the older generations are stiff and inflexible and the race issues are still relevant to them, but in the children it is made obvious by the story that they are not nearly as concerned with these issues, and would be content to ignore race altogether, rather than perpetuating racism, which is still continuing to this day, as if made evident by the very recent Ferguson riots over the death of an unarmed black teenager.

Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America was mentioned many times throughout the essay.