Miss America 2014

 

Nina Davuluri is crowned

 

Nina Davuluri is a 24 year old American of Indian descent. She represented the great state of New York in the 2013 Miss America pageant and won. Nina is the first Indian American to win Miss America as well at the Miss New York title.

 

Nina was attacked on the popular social media website, Tweeter. Although Nina received a lot of support from people around the world, the ignorant comments made on Twitter caused an uproar. Several news stations and talk shows reported the reaction of Americans around the country.

 

After hearing about the reaction on Twitter, I investigated to see why people were so upset. I pulled up a few photos taken during the Miss American show. I found a few photos of Nina during the talent portion of the show. She performed a fusion of classical Bollywood dance and wore at traditional sari. The dance was beautiful, fun and energetic, it was the first appearance of Bollywood in Miss America history. 

 

Nina's Bollywood performance

 

The performance that Nina gave was a mix between traditional Indian dance that she studied every summer in India, and Bollywood. Bollywood dance is a dance the is modeled after tradition Indian dance, mixed with western styles. The sari Nina wears is traditional dress foe women in India. It's patterns and color mean different things in her culture, as well as the jewelry she wears.  When preparing for the competition, Nina was originally going to sing. But later she decided she would like to dance because she had been dancing her whole life. She was advised not to dance but she said it was something she was passionate about and stuck with it.

 

After Nina was crown Miss America 2014, on September 14, 2013, she was attacked on Twitter. A few of the tweets that I came across are listed below.

 



 Nina was attacked on Twitter, for her ethnicity. As you can see people were upset that she was representing our country from the Twitter comments. Nina was born in the United States, so she is an American.

 

The comment about Nina being part of Al-Qaeda, made me do some research. The map below is of the middle east. As you can see the red represented Al-Qaeda influences, the green is Taliban and the yellow dot is where Nina's family is from. Even though India is near Taliban and Al-Qeada activity, they are not active anywhere in India. Indian is not in the Middle East, it is considered to be in South Asia.

 

 

 

So why were American's so quick to associate Nina with these terrible allegations? I can't speak for the people who made the comments, but my own idea behind the matter has to do with the 9/11 anniversary. Nina was crowned 3 days after the 12th anniversary, a day that most American people are still very sensitive about. I'm not making excuses for these tweets as no one should be attacked for their ethnicity, religious practices or sexual orientation. I just want to understand why these people were so quick to judge, besides being ignorant to the facts.

 

 

I believe the 12th anniversary surrounds the back lash that Nina received. Our country is still upset, even after all this time. 9/11/01 was a traumatic day for us all. It's sad to see the way some people handled the situation. It just shows that people need to get the details correct and think before they speak.