In Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant, Gerald Early describes how discriminatory the ideal beauty standards in America was. Due to heavy prejudice, black girls didn’t have any public cosmetic representation and faced inferiority to whites in the beauty department. For example, the annual Miss America contest consisted of all blond hair, blue eyed girls, giving no leeway to diversity. Contextually, Early is an American culture critic and also the author of many essays on African studies. In the text, he discusses the heartbreak of being a father and watching his two black daughters discover through outside influence how their skin color was considered inferior to white skin. The author’s chief purpose in writing this essay is to call out Western-idolize cosmetic companies due to the fact that they lack African representation. Early argues against white-washed television, such as the Miss America Pageant, and cultural norms such as the African-American child picking a white doll over a black one. Throughout the text, he uses rhetorical devices and strategies such as allusion and antithesis. In the beginning of the text, Early references the well-known Miss America contest and uses it to illustrate to the reader how whitewashed the beauty world was. He uses the allusion to ultimately create an antithesis between black and white standards in the fact that there is no black representation in the cosmetic world. Early shows how life with privilege and life without were very different. Consistent with his purpose, Early shows how white privilege, was representation in nationwide contests such as the Miss America pageant and the ability to be the “ideal face” in America. Black women didn’t have such privilege, as pointed out by Early. By exposing such a social injustice, Early succeeds in achieving his purpose of combating social injustice.
The Beauty of Dye // Harris S.
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