BU law student Taylor Moore-Willis on her road to Miss Black Massachusetts 2015

The words “beauty pageant” carry a lot of baggage.

Thanks in part to shows like “Toddlers & Tiaras” and “Little Miss Perfect,” public discussion of the pageant world often comes wrapped up in tales of bruised self-esteem and visions of unrealistic body expectations. Those who choose to participate in pageants are often labeled unintelligent or otherwise insubstantial, and the entire medium tends to be stereotyped with notable broad strokes.

Taylor Moore-Willis, a first-year law student at the Boston University School of Law, with a background in jazz performance, is taking it upon herself to quietly and comfortably shatter those stereotypes as Miss Black Massachusetts 2015.

Growing up in Southfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, Moore-Willis spent her self-described “rough and rumble, sporty” childhood far removed from the pageant circuit. She said the possibility of traversing a brightly lit stage in an evening gown never so much as crossed her mind.

“I would never have foreseen myself participating in pageants. But when I think about it, I have always been a performer. When I got into it, I realized how good a fit it was. I got to be competitive,” Moore-Willis said. “I got to play violin. I got to speak on stage. This is everything that I already know how to do well. Dealing with the stigma and negativity that surrounded pageants turned out to be the most challenging part.”

In the fifth grade, Moore-Willis began playing the violin as part of an elementary school curriculum that required students to learn a musical instrument of their choice. From this blossomed a love of jazz music that translated over to a Bachelor of Musical Arts in jazz studies — with a minor in Spanish — from the University of Michigan.

It was during Moore-Willis’s junior year at UM that she was introduced to the pageant world. Following a series of what she refers to as “fortunate unfortunate events,” she found herself in the midst of an identity crisis after leaving the university track team to focus on her studies.

“Being a student athlete was a really, really big part of my identity,” she said. “Now I’m just a student. I have all this free time I’ve never had before. What am I supposed to do?”

She took her sudden wealth of free time and used it to begin working with the educational grant program GEAR UP, which helps middle school-aged students become aware of the benefits of higher education. The experience, she said, broadened her social horizons beyond the confines of her athletic peers. It was in this period of expansion that an acquaintance introduced her to Miss Black and Gold, a scholarship-based pageant for college women of color.

Moore-Willis found herself drawn to Miss Black and Gold, in part due to its emphasis on academics — contestants’ GPAs are assessed for 30 points of their total score, equaling the competition’s talent and interview portions in overall weight. And the swimsuit portion, which was the most off-putting to Moore-Willis from the start, is a mere formality, accounting for 10 points in the cumulative score.

She decided to enter the pageant on a friend’s recommendation, violin in tow. And to her surprise, she won. In the process, she met Janae George, a now-good friend who steered Moore-Willis toward a stint with the Miss America Organization.

For Moore-Willis, pageantry has been in large part about personal connections and meeting different types of women who brought “so much wisdom to the table.”

“It was a really cool melting pot of these varying women of color throughout different communities within the university,” she said. “My first MAO pageant, I competed with a biracial girl who expressed her struggle of playing to both sides of her identity, which isn’t something I’ve ever struggled with before.”

Additionally, she said her success with pageantry was partially attributed to good timing because she “engaged in pageantry at a stage in my life when I was very certain of the person that I was and the beauty that I had.”

“I think maybe for young women who engage earlier and feel that they have to conform to Western beauty standards, it can be very challenging developmentally,” she said. “But I think if you’re certain of who you are going into it, it’s a very different experience.”

After a number of pageant successes, Taylor heard about Miss Black USA, a pageant in the vein of Miss USA specifically for African American women. Upon inquiring about local beauty pageants in Fall 2014, she found out she had not been living in Massachusetts long enough to compete in an MAO pageant, so she decided to pursue Miss Black USA instead, though she wasn’t always enthralled with the idea of being involved with such an organization.

“There was definitely a lot of uncertainty going into it at first, for various reasons,” she said. “I didn’t know how I felt about the fact that it was just for black women. I had to narrow down what my intentions were. Why am I doing pageants in the first place? And I decided that it didn’t matter what pageant I was working in. I could still be a role model for younger girls of color.”

After a change of heart and a lengthy application process, Moore-Willis was crowned Miss Black Massachusetts in October. A significant portion of the application involved a three-tier national education approach she created that will focus on culture through engagement with the arts, living a healthy lifestyle and educational empowerment. She will be working to implement the education approach until the national pageant in August 2015.

In the meantime, she’s been considering the ultimate value of her work and the potential that lies in her position.

“It’s valuable in the sense that you have a titleholder who has to take a stance on an issue,” she said. “You become a spokesperson for that issue, and you’re expected to be well-versed on that set of issues. That’s something that’s overlooked when you get caught up in the celebrity aspect and forget that these women are social advocates.”