Karlie Hay—aka Miss Texas—was crowned Miss Teen USA on Saturday night. The pageant was, as Chrissy Teigen pointed out on Twitter, remarkably homogeneous, with five similar-looking, blonde-haired and blue-eyed girls in the final five. But, as Teigen also noted, that is not the contestants’ fault.
What is one contestant’s (Karlie Hay’s!) fault, however, is her past propensity for using racial slurs on Twitter.
We now wait to see what, if anything, the Miss USA Organization does, and also whether its higher-ups will consider their own role in perpetuating the limited, limiting, lily-white American beauty standards that contribute in some way to the racist culture that taught a beautiful blonde girl from Texas that it was OK to throw racial slurs around on social media.
