Texas Crowned Their First Asian American Miss Texas

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From North Texas to the Miss America stage, the newly crowned Miss Texas is making history.

“My name is Averie Bishop. I am the 85th anniversary Miss Texas and the first Asian American woman to represent our state,” she said.

Bishop is also a first-generation SMU graduate and SMU law school graduate.
She’s the daughter of a Filipino-immigrant mother and fourth-generation Texan father.

“It’s such an emotional feeling because when I was a kid, I never dreamed of becoming Miss Texas because I didn’t think that anyone looked like me as Miss Texas,” she said.

Bishop has already been active in the community. As Miss Dallas last year, she formed part of the 14-member Dallas mayor’s anti-hate and discrimination council.

The group is able to provide recommendations to improve diversity across North Texas.

Her mission is rooted in a sometimes-painful childhood in Prosper where she says she was confronted with bullies and hateful language.

“From the way I spoke, the shape of my eyes, my flat nose, my upbringing. The financial circumstances I grew up in and sometimes the way that my mom spoke,” she recalled. “A lot of times people are racist or say rude things because they just don’t understand what they don’t know. We fear what we don’t know and my mission as Miss Texas and as a person, in general, is to truly teach everyone in our state that a Texan can look like me and a Texan can look like you.”

Bishop is also dedicated to focusing on her mental health in the year ahead.

Averie Bishop is a first-generation law school graduate, a content creator, a nonprofit founder, a member of the Dallas Anti-Hate Advisory Council, and a proud owner of a green bell pepper she calls "Big Daddy."

Now, add pageant queen to that list.

Bishop, the newly-crowned "Miss Texas America," is the first Asian American woman to represent "The Lone Star State" in the Miss America organization pageant. 

"I kept thinking in the back of my head, Texas would never crown someone like me," Bishop told Insider.

The three-time Miss America Texas contestant clinched her victory after years of documenting her law school journey at Southern Methodist University on TikTok, where she has amassed over 850K followers talking about everything from her courtroom outfit-of-the-day to breaking down the process behind a Supreme Court nomination.

Across Miss Texas America's 85-year history, only three Black women have taken the first place title. In 2019, Chandler Foreman was the first woman to wear natural hair on the Miss Texas stage.

Miss America has welcomed state titleholders to its stage for over 100 years. But women of color were barred from competition for decades. 

Up until 1940, the 7th rule of the early Miss America rulebook read, "contestants must be of good health and of the white race." Contestants were required to trace and list their ancestry on a biological data sheet. It would be another 30 years before the pageant saw a Black contestant.

 

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/first-asian-american-woman-crowned-as-miss-texas/3002766/

 

https://www.insider.com/miss-texas-first-asian-american-winner-pageant-averie-bishop-2022-7?amp

 

Considering the history mentioned above, this is quite a big deal, y'all!

Congrats to her! Hope there will much more POC winners in the next years!

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Wild how our society keeps moving forward while our government continues sliding back to the dark ages.

Congrats to her