The annual Miss America pageant produced a surprise this year when it crowned its winner. Nina Davuluri will hold the title for the coming year, and this, it seems, is making many US citizens uncomfortable. This is because Miss Davuluri, who is a young woman of Indian origin, a practising Hindu but a US citizen by birth, has unknowingly aroused misguided fears about her person amongst some sections of the American public. The moment she was crowned, social media went ablaze with Twitter newsfeeds proclaiming her to be, of all things, an Arab and a terrorist! The Twitter accounts of many Americans went haywire with the allegation that she is an al Qaeda agent and that the US has gone mad. All this because these ignoramuses assumed she is a Muslim, ergo she must also be a terrorist! Miss Davuluri has taken the criticism and unnecessary rants with the dignity and poise expected of her title by saying she will rise above the verbal attacks against her on social media.
The whole episode reveals just one thing: some citizens of the US have become increasingly ignorant. If they believe that anyone with brown skin and Asian heritage must be a terrorist then there is something very wrong with their mindset. Their reaction to the Miss America pageant has shown the ugly face of US intolerance for anything that does not conform to their set notions of what an ‘American’ should be. These sections of the American public are showing yet again that racial hatred has travelled down into this generation as well (given that most social media activists tend to be young). Such comments and vitriol might have been expected from previous generations influenced by narrow bigotry in less enlightened times. But now it transpires that a sizeable proportion of the new generation is not just intolerant, it is crass as well. The US was founded on the principles of freedom, liberty and tolerance and, despite the US’s long, dark association with slavery, these are ideas that the country promotes on every forum all over the world. To see therefore these bigots amongst the American public engage in such belittling and prejudiced verbal attacks is to understand that the country’s new generation has a long way to go before it even begins to comprehend the nature of the diversity that the US is so famous for. The Miss America pageant embraced diversity this time around by crowning Nina Davuluri; it is time the American public did too. *