Flashback
Ugly Betty’s Wilhelmina Slater Was a Beacon for Workplace Strength in the Fashion World
She was not Miranda Priestly: She was ours, and we recognized her struggles to get ahead
FLASHBACK is a retrospective look at some of the most impactful pop cultural moments, characters, and bodies of work that centered women of color.
In 2006, ABC premiered Ugly Betty, a drama/comedy about an aspiring writer from Queens named Betty Saurez who ends up at Mode, a high fashion magazine based out of Manhattan. Betty doesn’t quite fit in at Mode: she’s not sample size, she’s slightly naive, and her sense of style is a bit unconventional. (This may all sound eerily similar to a certain Academy Award-nominated film starring Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep, but we’ll get to that later.)
Ugly Betty can be deemed “momentous” for many reasons: its diverse cast featuring America Ferrera as the lead, progressive plotline, and overall camp nature kept fans hooked for years; and for many, one character in particular offered Black viewers an incredibly special gift in the form of something practically unheard of.
Played by the powerhouse that is Vanessa Williams, Wilhelmina Slater became something we had never seen before: a Black woman in…
