Deal with yourself as a individual, worthy of respect, and make everyone else deal with you the same way. -Nikki Giovanni It was 1984, and Vanessa
Deal with yourself as a individual, worthy of respect, and make everyone else deal with you the same way. -Nikki Giovanni
It was 1984, and Vanessa Williams was surrounded.
Only months earlier, she had made history as the first Black woman crowned Miss America. Even that victory had not been universally celebrated. She received racist hate mail and death threats, while some criticism also came from within the Black community.
Then came the photographs.
Years before Miss America, while Vanessa was a young college student, she had posed for nude photographs. She later said she had been told the photographs would remain private. Penthouse acquired and published them without her consent.
The scandal exploded. And this was 1984. I can’t adequately put into words how huge of a scandal it was. We did not even need social media for the flames to spread rapidly.
1984. Women were divided very neatly into categories.
“Good” girl. “Bad” girl. “Respectable” woman. “That” kind of woman.
A sexually provocative photograph could follow a woman for the rest of her life. There was no social media where she could speak directly to millions of people. No language of “revenge porn” widely circulating in ordinary conversation. No modern public conversation about image-based sexual abuse and consent.
And Vanessa Williams was not simply a woman caught in that machinery. She was the first Black Miss America.
There were people waiting to decide what her mistake said about Black women. The photographs gave them ammunition and saved them the trouble of making it up.
Everybody Had Something to Say About Vanessa
Suddenly, the young woman who had made history became a national punchline. Vanessa Williams was condemned for having taken the photographs.
Meanwhile, grown men could publish them, purchase them, pass them around, stare at them, discuss them, and turn her humiliation into entertainment.
Somehow the woman whose naked body was exposed was expected to carry nearly all the shame. Everybody else got to have a good time.
Women are often assigned responsibility not only for our own choices but also for what other people choose to do with them.
Vanessa eventually resigned her Miss America title under tremendous pressure. And watching all of this as a girl, I thought her story was over. I suspect millions of people did.
I remembered the night she won. My mother and I had jumped up and down with excitement as Vanessa Williams won, with another Black woman, Suzette Charles, standing as first runner-up.
It felt enormous. Then everything came crashing down.
I assumed Vanessa Williams would disappear.
What I didn’t understand was this:
We had absolutely no idea who Vanessa Williams was or what she was made of.
Four Years Later
Then came 1988.
“The Right Stuff.”
Excuse me?
Who was THIS?
Because this was not pageant Vanessa. During Miss America, Vanessa Williams had performed “Happy Days Are Here Again,” displaying the formal vocal and theatrical training that had been there all along.
But “The Right Stuff” introduced us to another Vanessa.
The song bounced. The choreography hit. She danced. She sang.She gave attitude.She even slipped into a little rap.
And most importantly, she did not appear before us begging to be forgiven for existing. It struck me that she did not choose to use a “pearls, gloves, and everything covered” approach. I remember watching the video, not sure how it would go but definitely recognizing that this was bold. I was not ready.
There was no sense that we were watching a woman asking America, “May I come back now?” She just came back.
The Talent Had Been There the Whole Time
This is the part of Vanessa Williams’ story that stays with me.She did not magically become talented after the scandal.
The talent was already there. The training was already there. The voice was there. The dancing was there. The acting ability was there. The discipline was there. The intelligence was there. The stage presence was there.
A decision she made when she was young had become so enormous in the public imagination that people temporarily stopped seeing everything else.
Vanessa had to live long enough, work hard enough, and keep walking far enough for people to encounter the rest of her.
That is a Survivor lesson worth keeping.
Sometimes people learn one thing about you and decide they have learned you. They haven’t. It is up to YOU to remember that.
You Are Allowed to Be a Whole Human Being
Vanessa Williams came of age in a culture that offered women very little room for sexual contradiction.
You could be wholesome or provocative. Respectable or scandalous. Marriage material or somebody’s entertainment.
And for Black women, those categories carried the additional weight of old racial stereotypes about Black female sexuality.
Vanessa Williams complicated all of it simply by continuing to live.
She became a Grammy-nominated recording artist. Then an actress. Then a Broadway performer. Then a television star. Then she kept going. And going. And going.
Eventually, there was simply too much Vanessa Williams for that old scandal to contain.
She didn’t erase 1984. She outgrew its ability to define her.
You Don’t Have to Spend Your Life Arguing With Your Worst Day
There are decisions we make that we would not make again.
Sometimes we were young.
Sometimes we needed money.
Sometimes we trusted the wrong person.
Sometimes we wanted adventure.
Sometimes we were impulsive.
Sometimes there isn’t a grand explanation at all.
We just made a decision.
There are consequences to decisions. Self-compassion doesn’t require us to pretend otherwise.
But consequences and identity are not the same thing. That distinction can save a life.
You can say:
I did that.
without saying:
That is all I am.
You can regret something without building your permanent address inside the regret.
You can learn from an experience without accepting everybody else’s interpretation of what that experience says about your character.
You can even have something in your past that other people know about.
Yes. They know.
Now what? You still have a life to live.
Make Them Deal With the Rest of You
Vanessa Williams did something extraordinary.
She made the world deal with the rest of Vanessa Williams.
You thought you knew her from the photographs?
Here comes the singer.
You thought Miss America was the whole story?
Here comes the actress.
You thought she was simply beautiful?
Here comes the Broadway performer.
You thought 1984 was going to be the sentence at the end of her story?
Baby, she was still writing.
Eventually the résumé became too long, the talent too obvious and the body of work too substantial to squeeze the woman back into that little box.
That doesn’t mean everybody changed their minds.
That’s another Survivor lesson.
You cannot make everybody update their opinion of you.
Some people enjoy the old version of your story because it gives them somewhere comfortable to place you.
Leave them there. Keep going.
You Have No Idea
Years later, Vanessa Williams and her mother, Helen Williams, chose a perfect title for their memoir:
You Have No Idea.
Indeed. We had no idea.
The book reveals considerably more than the polished public image. Vanessa writes about racism, family, sexual abuse, relationships, difficult decisions, ambition and the complicated road through an extraordinary life.
Vanessa.
Human.
And perhaps that is why her story remains so powerful to me.
She didn’t prove that good women can overcome being mistakenly perceived as bad women.
I don’t want that lesson. She demonstrated something much more liberating.
Women are human beings.
We can be brilliant and make questionable decisions.
Disciplined and impulsive.
Wise about one thing and terribly naive about another.
We can know better tomorrow than we knew yesterday.
And we remain entitled to our humanity through all of it.
Your Life Is Larger Than the Evidence Against You
There will always be people who prefer a single photograph.
A single mistake.
A single relationship.
A single bad year.
A single decision.
A single story somebody tells about you.
Something neat enough to hold in their hands and say:
See? This is who she is.
No.
That is something that happened.
Your life is still happening.
Vanessa Williams went through a man-made storm designed to reduce an extraordinarily gifted young woman to one decision and one set of photographs. And meanwhile she kept building. Four decades later, those photographs are a chapter in the Vanessa Williams story.
They are not THE story. And maybe that is the affirmation we keep.
You do not have to become the worst thing somebody knows about you.
Learn.
Repair what needs repairing.
Grow.
Keep your dignity.
Use your gifts.
And when somebody insists upon defining you by a chapter you have already finished, you do not have to wrestle the book out of their hands.
Let them keep reading the same old page.
You keep writing.
