Pageant Winner Defends Herself After Being Ousted Over Tweets About Muslims and Black People
Just one day after being crowned Miss Michigan, Kathy Zhu was stripped of her title by the Miss World America organization.
In a series of tweets on July 18, the 20-year-old pageant winner and University of Michigan senior, revealed emails and text messages sent between herself and the pageant’s state director, Laurie DeJack, after some of her former social media posts were brought to the organization’s attention.
“It has been brought to the attention of Miss World America ‘MWA’ that your social media accounts contain offensive, insensitive and inappropriate content,” DeJack wrote to Zhu, who is a conservative activist and the social media director for the national group Chinese Americans for Trump, in an email, according to The New York Times.
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These are the text message exchanges between the state director and me. pic.twitter.com/HtHS1gns6X
— Kathy Zhu (@PoliticalKathy) July 19, 2019
DeJack added that due to the content, Zhu no longer met the organization’s requirement of “being in good character,” leaving the MWA to denounce her as “participant of any sort or in any capacity as it relates to any and all events of MWA.”
The MWA did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
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The social media posts in question were in regards to the Black Lives Matter Movement and a World Hijab Day event on her campus.
In one tweet from October 2017, brought forward by DeJack to Zhu over text, Zhu wrote, “Did you know the majority of black deaths are caused by other blacks? Fix problems within your own community first before blaming others.”
The 20-year-old’s tweet was in response to criticism over police officers’ treatment of African Americans.
A post shared by Kathy Zhu (@katzhux) on Mar 29, 2019 at 9:42pm PDT
Then in February 2018, in a since deleted tweet, the former Miss Michigan claimed that hijab’s were a form of oppression under Islam, according to the Orlando Sentinal, who obtained screengrabs of the tweets at the time.
“There’s a ‘try a hijab on’ booth at my college campus. So you’re telling me that it’s now just a fashion accessory and not a religious thing? Or are you just trying to get women used to being oppressed under Islam?” the then University of Central Florida student wrote.
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Zhu defended her tweets as “statistics and facts,” and called the organization’s actions “disgusting” in her email response to the MWA. In an interview with The New York Times, the Michigan student said the organization should have let her explain herself before taking action against her.
“They just immediately assumed that I was a racist,” Zhu, who is also vice president of the College Republicans at the University of Michigan, told the outlet. “They should have let me explain myself.”
She later wrote on Twitter that she was “glad this story came to light because this is more than just some beauty pageant, this is about the prejudice views against people with ‘different opinions'” — continuing to defent her tweets.
According to CBS News, Zhu will no longer be able to represent Michigan in the upcoming Miss World America pageant in Las Vegas, which is separate from the more widely-known Miss America contest.
