Vanessa Williams

Queen Bey’s doppelgänger. I know I know but you know what I mean.

She looks and sounds fabulous! I’ve always liked her.

Amazing. My brain almost started melting at the part starting at 1:39.

I like her. I hope she made a sex tape with Rick Fox

She had bad luck with men....but good taste in dick!

Kids these days would be shocked that she lost her crown for such a stupid reason.

We've seen Kim Kardashian being penetrated, and she still has her own empire!

R6 Yep those were the social mores of the 80s. I think recently they gave it back to her though and apologized.

I remember when she used to visit her grandmother in the summer during the 70s and 80s - her grandmother (who was Cape Verdean) used to live in my neighborhood, as well as other relatives of VW. VW used to hang around with all of us during summer vacation, and went to our church. She was always pretty and always knew it - she was also a great singer, and used to sing in the church choir during the summer (her relatives were so proud).

Anyhow, back then she never identified as black - nor did her family. She would correct those who called her black and said she was 'Portuguese' or 'Cape Verdean' - never black. She was highly insulted if you called her or her family 'black'. Once she graduated from high school, she didn't spend summers with her grandma any more (she was winning beauty pageants and in modelling school, I believe), and only visited on holidays. Imagine everyone's surprise to see she was crowned as the first Black Miss America, when she spent her whole life denying she was black.

BTW, I have many other friends from the old neighborhood who you would consider black - very dark skinned black - who always identify as Portuguese or Cape Verdean, and deny they are black. They want nothing to do with black people nor black culture.

Incidentally, many people don't realize, but the 1st runner up (Suzette Charles from New Jersey) was also black.

Thus, Miss America was determined to have a first black winner that year.

After Vanessa resigned, the crown then went to Suzette.

Fatso!

R8 I bet the elders in Williams family behaved like that but not Vanessa herself. My Cuban grandparents were like that but they weren’t colorists. It’s just that after assimilating into American culture they realized they were not culturally black. They identified more with Jamaicans and Puerto Ricans.

[quote]Kids these days would be shocked that she lost her crown for such a stupid reason.

[quote]We've seen Kim Kardashian being penetrated, and she still has her own empire!

It will be interesting to see how the early 21st century will be viewed by the 2090s.

No doubt, the pendulum would have swung back by then.

There could be a lot of censorship regarding sex. The Kardashians and the like could be ridiculed by the new moral majority, if they're remembered at all by century's end.

I, for one, believe that the 21st century will be the inverse of the 20th century. The latter went from extreme conservatism to extreme liberalism. The former will go from extreme liberalism to extreme conservatism.

R11 Vanessa was definitely 'taught that' and grew up that way the first 18 years of her life. She adamantly corrected anyone who had called her or categorized her as 'black' (back then it wasn't African-American, which I could see her taking issue with since her roots were in Cape Verde).

She turned black when it benefited her for the Miss America Pageant.

meant to add "could be ridiculed and condemned by the new moral majority."

[quote]It’s just that after assimilating into American culture they realized they were not culturally black. They identified more with Jamaicans and Puerto Ricans.

Agreed, this is exactly what happened in her case as well. It's a cultural thing, not uncommon among the immigrants from the Caribbean and the sub-Saharan Africa. There's nothing malicious behind it, it's just a sense of belonging to a separate community and not wanting to be lumped together with another one that is associated with so much historical baggage.

[quote]I, for one, believe that the 21st century will be the inverse of the 20th century. The latter went from extreme conservatism to extreme liberalism. The former will go from extreme liberalism to extreme conservatism.

You believe incorrectly. Society, being a living breathing organism, is way messier than physics with it's pendulum swinging cleanly back and forth. Everything is trending towards greater liberty when you take a broader view and don't fixate on anomalies like the recent anti-gay law in Kenya or the book bans in Florida.

The very fact that religion is on its way out in the West should tell you we very much aren't doing pre-20th century conservatism anymore.

I've always liked her, never seen a bad word about how she treats people. As I get older that becomes more important in my estimation of "stars". And she deserved better storylines on Desperate Housewives.

Great acting in this scene with Marcia, from the otherwise awful final season

She was on our Atlantis cruise and was such blast to be around. We've lost icons like her to influencers who are here today gone tomorrow.

R7 I had a crown once. It was my baby's head. Coming out of my pussy. During my abortion!

R19 What?

Vanessa is ethnically African-American/ADOS and her father descended from free people of color in the Northeast. Her ancestry is documented. You can see her family were the elitist "Our Kind Of The People" paper-bag test followers who purposely wanted to maintain a fair-skinned phenotype. Brian Stokes Mitchell, Tina Knowles, Steph Curry and Corey Booker come from similar families.

VW's family weren't wealthy, they were middle-class fair-skinned folk who wanted to assimilate into a white neighborhood for better opportunities and also felt a duty to black people to "better the black image." I do believe Vanessa was raised to be a colorist (all her husbands were fair-skinned/mixed and one of them white, she had white boyfriends too) though she is classy enough to be outspoken (unlike trash like Chris Brown). Vanessa always gets mad when you bring up her light skin privilege and deflects to the racism she faced (no one is saying light skin folk don't face racism but that they are still given social advantages over dark skin folk). Anyway, I do think the Miss America backlash (the initial racist threats, before the nudes leaked and got her dethrowned) definitely woke her up. NY is a bubble of sorts and she didn't estimate how much white Americans especially Southerners and Midwesterners didn't care about how light and bright she was, she was still a n**** to them. So maybe that made her ID as black and she embraced the black community for helping her career when whites hated her.

R17 She's the first celebrity I got to interview, while Ugly Betty was on the air, and she was really lovely. She was on the board of Special Olympics and knew everything about the organization and a lot about intellectual disabilities. Talking about Ugly Betty, all she could do was gush about Michael Urie, who she called a 'genius,' and she gave him credit for her comic performances. She was beyond gracious.

I wonder if she still fools around with women. She had that marriage with Jim Skrip annulled apparently but didn't care to update the world about it. Her Miss America pictures were way more graphic than you'd expect them to be. Her hairy vag and her tongue on a white girl's ass.

While she is hard worker, polite and humble. Her first husband, Ramon Hervey who she met after her white fiance dumped her after those nude leaks, took her under his wing and became her manager and came up with the brilliant idea to market her as a dance-pop star. Many Janet clones were on the scene. Marrying a black man also helped her image because prior, she was considered "snobby" and "elitist" by black people who knew she had an advantage because of her phenotype and blamed her for that. She clearly always wanted to do Broadway and showtunes but her husband made her do more urban stuff because he knew she needed the black community to support her first before trying to go mainstream. He was right and her first two records were successful and she moved to acting and stage seamlessly.

Here he is talking about how Pebbles' sneaky ass stole "Girlfriend" from Vanessa. Pebbles was fucking LA Reid and didn't want another light, bright chick to be a competitor for her.