Little Miss Hispanic Delaware controversy
A 7-year-old pageant winner is reeling today after being stripped of her crown amid racial concerns. Jakiya McKoy is no longer Little Miss Hispanic Delaware after organizers said her family did not provide proof that she was at least 25 percent Hispanic.
According to Delaware Online, McKoy’s family was asked to verify her lineage before the pageant’s Aug. 31 deadline and failed to do so. Despite her not having documentation, she was allowed to participate and won. Her family contends however, that her grandmother was an illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic and did not have a birth certificate verifying her ethnicity.
Participants were required to prove that at least one grandparent in their family was from Latin America or Spain. Furthermore, since Hispanic is considered an ethnicity and not a race, officials ruled that the girls could be black, white or Asian.
Little Jakiya was forced to relinquish her crown to the second-place winner, Meriana Ayala.
Meriana’s mother, Tiffany Ayala, has since told Delaware Online that she often heard McKoy tell the other children that she was black, not Hispanic.
“When we used to go to pageant [practice], that would always be the thing,” Ayala said. “We would literally have to sit there and tell the little girl [Jakiya], ‘You have to say you’re from the Dominican Republic, OK honey?’”
A Change.org petition has been launched in McKoy’s honor demanding that she be given back her title. The petition has over 2,000 signatures so far.
-danielle canada
