New Haven Native Sherdell Baker Eyes the Miss Black USA Crown

By Lauren Caggiano
for Fort Wayne Ink Spot

As a teenager, Sherdell Baker dreamed of being in the debutante and pageantry scenes, though it wasn’t in the cards at the time. Now, at age 20 she’s living her childhood dream and setting an example for the younger generation on what it means to show up fully as a young Black woman.

Newly-crowned Miss Black Indiana 2022, the New Haven High School graduate and junior at Hampton University is competing for the Miss Black USA crown this summer. I sat down with her to learn more about her about this pursuit and how her life’s trajectory has brought her here.

1) Beyond the pomp and circumstance of this honor, what does the title mean to you?

I’m a Black woman of smaller stature. Being as though the stereotype of black women’s body is a little more curvaceous— more sexualized — I’m trying to kind of redefine Black beauty.

I think it's great that you have beauty enhancers such as makeup, hair, wardrobe, things like that (in that pageant world). But when somebody is genuinely beautiful, you can see that radiate aside from all those superficial enhancers.

2) How did you get here? To what do you attribute your success?

My college has a pageant called Miss Black and Gold that's hosted through one of the fraternities here called Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. And basically, what that entails is pretty similar to a regular pageant. We go through all the steps of a regular pageant, as far as introduction, questions, etc. They choose three winners. Unfortunately, I did not win but it really motivated me to want to pursue pageantry even more.

So here I am over a year later, competing in a national pageant, which I would have never expected especially because my first ever pageant was virtual. So now, everything's new. I'll be on a national stage, and this will be my first in-person pageant. This is a little bit of higher stakes for me and definitely out of my comfort zone, but I'm definitely ready to take it on.

3) So, there’s a talent portion of the pageant. Have you considered what that might look like for you?

I've been debating between doing spoken word poetry and singing, both of which I have not done in a fair amount of time. So I would need to brush up on my skills or even consider combining the two just to make myself stand out to the judges.

I've been doing my research on other talents as well, to see if I want to pick up something new to learn. But the advice I've been given is just to stick to what you're most comfortable with and what can be best performed on stage.

4) Being a pageant contestant requires being multidimensional. To that end, I understand you founded an organization, King’s Mindset, to address youth mental health (ages 15-25) in the Black community. What drew you to that cause?

I don't have any personal experience with Black mental health per se — but from what I’ve seen — not a whole lot of organizations just cater to strictly men. There's a lot that are for women. And there's a lot that are unisex. But I think there's just certain things when it comes to men and women that you must deal with separately, versus together.

And I think that even though men don't talk about their mental health, that doesn't mean that they don't have some issues or things that they go through, even though society constantly pushes them to not speak up out of fear of being perceived as weak but that’s necessarily the case.

For more information about Miss Black USA, visit www.missblackusa.org.