The Real Miss America – Miss Equality

By Rebecca Ruiz From Mashable

It’s time to stop judging a woman’s beauty and body when we celebrate her accomplishments. With our Real Miss America series, Mashable honors diverse role models — without asking them to slip into a swimsuit.
Women fight for something every day. It might be for a raise at work or to help a stranger in need. They may spend their spare time encouraging a crestfallen friend or devoting themselves to an important cause.

Women can quickly become champions for themselves and others — sometimes by force and often without even realizing it.

We want to celebrate seven women whose lives are guided by principles of equality and fairness. Some are expanding the rigid definitions of sexuality and womanhood by demanding respect for all, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. Others are refusing to let economic and racial injustice define our collective destiny.

They by no means represent a definitive list, but instead offer a glimpse into what’s possible when you listen to your convictions. Some of these women have dedicated years of their lives to a cause, while others are just learning their own strengths. Either way, they will inspire you.

Meet the women we’ve selected as Real Miss America for their commitment to equality and fairness. Learn more about the Real Miss America series.

Every family has a universal need: someone to care for their home and loved ones.

When that vital work becomes paid work, Ai-jen Poo wants to ensure whoever does it is valued.

As executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a nonprofit organization based in New York, Poo oversees 48 affiliate organizations that advocate for millions of women who work as nannies, housekeepers and caregivers across the country. The majority are women who make less than $13 per hour and work for employers that do not offer health insurance, retirement benefits or Social Security payments.

These are paltry incentives for the hard work that makes it possible for other families to thrive. Poo, 41, has spent nearly two decades trying to change that. Alongside 50 women from around the country, she helped to found the NDWA in 2007, and worked for years to pass the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York, which became law in 2010 and established basic labor protections for domestic workers, including protection from discrimination and harassment, paid days off and a minimum day of rest per week. Five other states have passed similar laws.

Last year, Poo was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant for her organizing work.

A first-generation American, Poo says her Taiwanese mother and Chinese grandmother are formidable women who inspired her as a child — and she is drawn to that same sense of purpose today.

“I’m really motivated by the dreams of domestic workers and caregivers,” Poo says. “They have incredibly inspiring visions for their own families, children and the future of this country.”

Poo knows that the families who hire domestic workers and caregivers are often themselves under pressure to balance the demands of work and home; doing the right thing isn’t always obvious or easy. NDWA creates resources to help independent employers draft fair contracts and negotiate benefits.

All of this comes amidst a larger cultural debate over how work is valued, with workers demanding fairer practices that help women and families prosper.

“This is the moment where our policies…are being shaped,” says Poo. “If we want to address economic opportunity for women across the economy, from wherever you stand, you can make a contribution to that.”
BAMBY SALCEDO — FINDING TRUE SELF

IMAGE: BAMBY SALCEDO
Years ago, you might have found Bamby Salcedo on the streets of Los Angeles, mixed up with drugs, crime and gangs. Today, she describes herself as a “community investment” — someone who others believed in and took risks to help.

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Salcedo, 45, escaped a violent household as a teenager and moved to California to live with her father. She came out as transgender at 19, but felt connected to her true identity as an indigenous warrior woman long before then.

“Even though I knew…who I was, I couldn’t really be myself because of society’s [gender] constructs, because of my family, because of the different things we encounter as individuals.”
Even though I am not…what people perceive to be a woman, I am a woman.
She has since served the transgender community with characteristic passion. Salcedo helped organize the TransLivesMatter National Day of Action, created a leadership program for transgender youth at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and recently become CEO of the TransLatin@ Coalition, an advocacy group based in Los Angeles.

In June, she publicly shaved her long blond locks as a message to others to “hold their own power” no matter how their appearance might invite scrutiny. And her bold move may have done just that: Salcedo says she was verbally attacked and spat on while shopping recently.

For Salcedo, it is worth the chance to change the way we think about gender. “Even though I am not a typical woman, per se, or what people perceive to be a woman, I am a woman,” she says. “It’s [a person’s] spirit, the soul, the heart, the mind, their essence. I live as my true self.”
AMELIA MEMAN — CAMPUS CONTROVERSY

IMAGE: AMELIA MEMAN
There are plenty of ways to educate college students about racial and ethnic stereotypes, but few involve a photo booth.

That’s how a group of creative students at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, decided to tackle one of the most difficult subjects — on campus or off.

Inspired by educational campaigns at other campuses, they constructed a photo “booth” using a sheet and camera, invited women of color to sit for portraits, and then transformed them into vivid posters that challenged common stereotypes. A woman in a headscarf, for example, appears alongside text that reads: “My name is Fama and I’m not a terrorist.”

UMBC WOMEN’S CENTER
A Tumblr post featuring some of the images went viral in March 2015, and the campus debate got intense. “We had some people who felt they were being called out in a way that made them uncomfortable, which in the end was really productive,” senior Amelia Meman says.

Meman, 22, who is half-Filipino, thought about taking her own photograph but felt nervous becoming the face of a campaign about discrimination and stereotyping when she typically “passes” as white. Instead she helped bring the “Telling Our Stories” campaign to life, working on the logistics to produce the posters and create a conversation about their content.

She graduated in May and just finished an internship at the Maryland State Archives. She spent the summer researching the state’s notable women, and further learned that focusing on a woman’s appearance distracts from her character and accomplishments.

“It’s an utterly unfair double standard,” she says. “You’re losing a lot of really important people who could do really important things by equating their power with their outward look.”
DEB CUNY — #BORNPERFECT

IMAGE: LAUREN COLEMAN
“I am grateful that I was born a queer person.”

These are words Deb Cuny never thought she’d write or say. Raised an evangelical Christian in a small Southern town, Cuny spent years suffering as her faith and sexuality clashed.

As a child, Cuny idolized fictional, gender-fluid and nonconforming Southern characters like Idgie Threadgoode from Fried Green Tomatoes and Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. She also knew embracing her true identity would threaten her most treasured relationship: a connection to family, church and God.

When Cuny, 35, eventually came out as a teenager, she was indeed rejected by those she loved. Her family members sought guidance from an ex-gay ministry, and Cuny underwent conversion therapy in an attempt to remain in their lives. Youth group leaders stopped talking to her, and church members, she says, came to cleanse her room of its “demons” once she moved out.

“Losing my church community was the equivalent of losing my own soul and what made me thrive,” Cuny says.
I am grateful that I was born a queer person.
For many years, Cuny felt adrift, lost in depression and alcohol, but eventually found a path to healing and back to God. She became an Episcopalian chaplain in Berkeley, California, and now works as a dance and physical education teacher as well as restorative justice facilitator in the Oakland school district.

In 2014, she joined the #BornPerfect campaign, launched by the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Cuny describes the campaign as “compassionately holding the church, society and individuals accountable for the abuse done in the name of God.”

Meeting other survivors and helping Christians understand the trauma of conversion therapy has transformed Cuny’s life.

“My life is no mistake,” she says. “In fact, I have lived an extraordinary life and some of my best experiences are tied to being gay. For me, healing means seeing how much God has used me to generate change and growth in my own community, and in my own family.”
SOPHIA MIYOSHI — WORKING FOR TIPS

IMAGE: EDWIN DIAZ
Sophia Miyoshi, 21, loves the camaraderie of the restaurant industry. She enjoys meeting new people and rising to the challenge of serving them well — improvising when things get chaotic. She learned this art as a teenager in Honolulu, where her father owns a casual Japanese restaurant. Miyoshi bussed, waited tables, and earned tips and a minimum wage of $7 per hour.

But when she moved to Washington, D.C., to attend college, Miyoshi found that tipped jobs paid only $2.77 an hour. While employers are now required by the city to pay a minimum wage of $10.50, the lower tipped rate is based on a federal standard of $2.13 that hasn’t budged since the 1990s.

That makes hustling for tips the hallmark of restaurant work, and it can be particularly grueling for women who work in the industry. More than 70% of servers are women, according to Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United.
Most of her customers expect a female server to act like a ‘sweet caretaker.’
If a male customer makes an inappropriate remark or gesture, Miyoshi is likely to respond with a smile or nervous laughter rather than sacrifice a tip. She knows most of her customers expect a female server to act like a “sweet caretaker,” a role that can be exhausting — and choosing to play it is a financial decision.

Miyoshi wants to end this stomach-turning tradeoff. She envisions a restaurant industry that offers workers a lifelong career and a workplace that can address sexism and discrimination by training staff like professionals. She joined ROC this year to help organize her fellow restaurant workers for a higher tipped minimum wage, at least $15 an hour.

“Women in particular would not be relying on the customers’ tips and not feel so much pressure to please the customer’s every desire — especially when the desire turns out to be the workers themselves.”
ZOEY LUNA — TRANS ACCEPTANCE

IMAGE: ZOEY LUNA
In many ways, Zoey Luna is a typical high school student. She finds math tedious, likes Nicki Minaj and loves horror films. But Luna also did something remarkable for a 14-year-old: She became a champion for transgender rights.

Her advocacy, she insists, is really her mom’s doing. In 2011, Ofelia Barba sought help from the ACLU of Southern California because students and staff verbally harassed Luna, who is trans, at school. Barba ultimately filed a complaint with the Department of Education on her daughter’s behalf and the school district agreed in October 2014 to adopt new policies so that gender nonconforming and transgender students could fully and safely participate in school.
Trans people are different in our own ways but not because we’re trans.
Luna is focused on helping families and parents accept transgender children. She credits her mom for that, too. “It meant so much to me that she really cared and that she was on my side,” she says. “I felt like I was a person.”

Luna wants other transgender kids to experience the same unconditional love. She has shared her story widely and has appeared on I Am Cait, The T Word, and Dr. Drew on Call. She is one of several transgender youth featured in “Truth,” a storytelling campaign led by the Transgender Law Center.

It’s not always easy. Bullies at school still chant her former name. Like many teenage girls, Luna wants to resist the “cookie cutter mold” and instead embrace “weirdly unique people,” but the pressure to act traditionally feminine is ever present. She urges transgender teens to “stay strong,” consider counseling for support and reach out to the transgender community.

“I want to help the world to understand that trans people are different in our own ways but not because we’re trans,” says Luna. “What I’m fighting for is acceptance.”
ALICIA GARZA — #BLACKLIVESMATTER

IMAGE: TKTK
Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.

That is how Alicia Garza, 34, ended a mournful Facebook post she wrote in July 2013, upon learning George Zimmerman had been acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

Soon, Garza, a labor organizer in San Francisco, was in touch with Patrisse Cullors, a friend and activist who had hashtagged her own Facebook post with #blacklivesmatter, and later, Opal Tometi, another fellow activist.

Garza, Tometi and Cullors founded Black Lives Matter as an organization, and the broader Black Lives Matter movement has since gripped the country, igniting a fierce discussion and debate over the nature of racism in 21st century America.
Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.
Garza and her cofounders have focused on “state-sanctioned violence” against all black people, and have called attention to the harassment and and discrimination that black women and queer and transgender people face.

The fight for racial and gender equality has historically championed some groups of women over others, but Garza, who identifies as queer, says these disappointments and betrayals hold an important lesson: “We can learn that none of us are free until all of us are free. When we leave people behind, we miss an opportunity to transform the dynamics we are fighting against.”

For Garza, who works by day as a special projects director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, being a leader in this movement means at some point encountering people who forget that you’re not just a visible activist but also a human being.

“All of us are holding a lot all the time,” Garza says. “At the same time, I’m humbled each and every day by how many people have been impacted, touched or affected by #BlackLivesMatter. Those stories keep me going, inspire me to show up better and be better every single day.”
THE REAL MISS AMERICA
Meet more women here.

Author Rebecca Ruiz
Editor Stephanie Buck
Video producer Lindsey Ferrier
Cinematography Emily Rhyne, Mark Andrew Boyer
Video editing Emily Rhyne, Mark Andrew Boyer
Illustration Vicky Leta

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