As you probably guessed, I have some thoughts about the Miss USA controversy and they are rooted in what happened to Vanessa L. Williams.
I realize this is The Donald's pageant. As the owner of it he can make whatever decision he chooses to make concerning the status of Tara Conner. But I still have to wonder what would have happened if it was Tamiko Nash running buck wild in New York. Based on what happened to Vanessa Williams, my highly skeptical answer would have been no.
Let's flip da script for a moment. Let's assume that Tamiko Nash is wearing the MIss USA crown instead of Tara Conner. If Tamiko Nash had been hanging out with gangsta rappers, caught drinking while underage, running around with various Manhattan playa-playas and was headed to rehab for an alleged coke addiction, I have to question whether US public opinion or the media would have allowed a sistah to screw up on that massive scale with little or no media attention when there was a Caucasian first runner-up available to replace her.
Now let's take our alternate history scenario further and assume that The Donald did cut his wayward African-American queen some slack and offered her the same deal that he gave Tara Conner. I can see the right wingers screaming on Faux News and right-wing talk radio that he was caving in to the Black community. They'd be railing about his 'keeping a woman of questionable morals' in that spot to represent the USA at the Miss Universe Pageant and taking every opportunity to use the incident to attack African-Americans in general.
Let's exit our alternate universe and slide back to reality. In terms of how most African-Americans perceive our culture, young White people get multiple chances to screw up, young Blacks and other minorities do not.
Whether that's an accurate perception or not, the differing results as to what happened to Vanessa Williams in 1984 and Tara Conner in 2006 only confirm the suspicions of African-Americans that there IS one.