A controversy surrounding a beauty pageant is anything but beautiful.
Jakiyah McKoy, 7, who was crowned Little Miss Hispanic Delaware in August, was stripped of her title after some pageant-goers complained that the little girl, who is black and comes from Brooklyn, did not represent Latin beauty and asked the pageant to confirm her Latin heritage.
Children entered in the pageant have to be at least 25% Latin; McKoy’s family contends that her deceased grandmother was from the Dominican Republic, but did not have the documentation to prove it.
According to NBC Latino, a petition in support of McKoy’s title has garnered 400 signatures; Daniel José Older, who started it, commented, “Jakiyah McKoy keep[sic] her rightfully won crown, because her beauty represents us all…Jakiyah McKoy won the Little Miss Hispanic Delaware pageant but the sponsoring organization, Nuestras Raices Delaware, has blocked her win after an outcry from people claiming that, because she is Black, she is ‘not the best representative of Latin beauty.’”
Other supporters noted that other contestants were not having their ethnicity investigated as McKoy is.
However, the president of the sponsoring organization has claimed: “Color has nothing to do with it…We’re all Latinos. That’s why we’re so beautiful because we come in all different colors,” and noted that past winners had been black.