Former Olympian figure skater Tonya Harding has been known to be undeniably talented and full of intense competitive spirit, yet her drive to become the best may have gone too far due to striking against her opponent Nancy Kerrigan. Both Nancy and Tonya have searched for similar aspiring dreams to reach the top within figure skating, but both women grew up in very different environments. Tonya was forced by her aggressive mother to begin skating at the young age of 4, while Kerrigan’s family took a more “modest” approach to things and had her learn to skate at age 6. Although Tonya Harding may not have exactly been seen as a role model, she still had a consistent drive-in hopes for fame, success, and wealth, like most Americans in terms of seeking the American Dream. 

Additionally, the media exploited stereotypes of Tonya’s white trashiness. “Nationalism, Whiteness and Tonya Harding” states, “Marking Tonya as flawed, as “trashy,” placed her outside the bounds of proper whiteness. It distanced Tonya from respectable working-class, pull yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps “folk” hero(in)-es like Nancy. The effect was to reaffirm the superiority of whites as a “Race.” This unfortunate truth is a display of the twisting of control in terms of power over the media that can influence one’s view of an individual- regardless of if true or not.  The article continues to express the slurs directed at Harding and the mistreatment of her character. “The marking and racializing of Tonya Harding (e.g., being called a “trailer nigger”) in talk and media representations illustrates how the unmarked category of “whiteness” is very much imbued with class ideology…” The difference in work class between Tonya and Nancy is an example of how Tonya’s American Dream was threatened. Harding’s media was portrayed as “…virtue flows from a fitness to consume certain products in certain ways.” 

Sources-

https://escholarship.org/content/qt86m9b9qr/qt86m9b9qr.pdf?t=nn260n

https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/the-tonya-harding-and-nancy-kerrigan-scandal

https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1338&context=anthro_faculty_pubs