At this year’s Miss America Pageant racial inequality was a topic of discussion during the question and answer portion of the competition. Miss Florida, Myrrhanda Jones, was asked the question by Deidre Downs Gunn, Miss America from 2005. Gunn’s question asked what our country should do about the oppression that minorities are faced with today. The question was “It’s the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, and we have an African American president. Yet minorities still have disproportionately low incomes and disproportionately high unemployment and incarceration rates. What should our nation do to address this issue?”
This question begins by addressing that we are now living in what some people consider to be a “post-racial society”. The Civil Rights Movement occurred many years ago; therefore, African Americans supposedly lead better lives than they did during the time Martin Luther King was committed to his activism. It is obvious that strides have been made because an African American man has been elected to be the president of the United States of America. While improvements have been made, minorities continue to struggle due to race.
When considering Miss Florida’s answer to her question, it appears that she is unaware of the complexity of the issue or just uncomfortable addressing how to eliminate the oppression that minorities encounter. Jones, a woman of a pale skin tone, may have lived her life thus far enjoying, yet being oblivious to, the privileges that come along with being white. While answering the question, she attempted to make the question relevant to her personal experience as she explained that her father is unemployed and that we need more jobs. What Jones said is true; however, she avoided addressing anything having to do with race.
The majority of White Americans would have answered this question about minorities in a similar way to Jones. Due to limited life experiences, many White Americans are unable to see the problems that minorities have to face, which causes the issues to be invisible to them. Some White people continue to remain oblivious to the problems that they are not forced to confront due to their skin color while other Whites are aware but simply don’t take the time to help with the issue. We may be living in what some call a “post-racial society”, but racial problems continue to exist for various reasons, one of which being the ignorance of some who create the majority.