BLACK GIRLS DON’T HAVE EATING DISORDERS
I had an eating disorder in high school. I was always skinny, and I genuinely think my weight loss wasn’t really noticeable at first, especially because I had mastered all of the seemingly healthy eating tricks that make people comfortable. Occasionally, when some shrewd person would notice that I hadn’t taken much, they’d pile more food on my plate or ask ever so carefully if I had eaten already because there was so little on my plate. I talked about having a big lunch or saving room for dessert or whatever else. Sometimes I did go back for seconds. People really don’t notice when you eat more fruit than anything else; they don’t see that you pile on the zero-calorie foods that will fill up a plate quick. And even if they do, the narratives that position the curviness of Black girls’ bodies as a warning sign of future obesity will lead them to congratulating you on watching your weight instead of grasping that there is a problem playing out in full view. We are a culture that will accept eating disorders in plain sight; we’ll call them clean eating or some other cute fad name, or we’ll just plain pretend a disordered relationship with food is normal, as long as the person with it looks the way we expect. Our mental health is rarely anyone else’s priority, courtesy of harmful myths about the strength of Black women.
Stress still makes me break up with food. It’s easier now because I’ve put on enough weight that a skipped meal doesn’t make anyone blink. And I have it largely under control, at least in the sense that I manage to eat twice a day even when food feels like a chore and not a joy. And I know that really means I still have an eating disorder. It’s a thing I talk about in therapy with a lovely doctor who is content with my self-imposed rule. I’m not entirely certain she has a better plan for me. Black girls don’t have eating disorders, you see, except when they do. There are a lot of things Black girls don’t have. Safety, security, the kind of magic that erases colorism and racism and a dozen other -isms. We develop coping skills major and minor in the absence of better options. Sometimes those coping skills are good ones, like a daily walk or yoga; sometimes they are deeply unhealthy, whether that be disordered eating or some form of addiction.
Girls in marginalized communities have all of the same mental and emotional health issues as girls in wealthier communities (well, except affluenza, which is less a mental health condition in my opinion and more a convenient way to excuse horrible behavior), but they are less likely to have the resources or the language to address them. Yet they experience significant amounts of trauma and the attendant consequences.
Eating disorders are not really about eating habits, even though that is the most obvious symptom of the problem. In fact, eating disorders are rarely even about food. They are more likely to be about other issues in the home or around it. Whether it is divorce, poverty, abuse, or a mix of all of the above, an ED is the outward expression of other issues. They’re also depressingly easy to hide in plain sight until the problem reaches a critical mass of ill health and blatant physical signs.
Not only do we reward thinness in general, we specifically reward any beauty aesthetic that prioritizes assimilation. For young people of color who are developing bodies that can never actually assimilate into the mythical monochrome of middle America, there’s very little validation available in media or anywhere else.
Add in the deluge of imagery that associates beauty with whiteness, and for girls of color who are already struggling to love themselves in a world that tells them they are worth less than white girls, there is greater-than-average risk not only of them developing an eating disorder but also of it going unrecognized and untreated. And for the lucky few who do receive treatment, whether their program will address the impact of racism or be a source of yet more trauma is difficult to predict.
Although we’re conditioned to think that most eating disorders develop at the onset of puberty, the truth is the seeds for them are laid much earlier. Children of color enter into prepubescent life with the painful awareness that no matter how many changes our bodies are going through, there’s nothing about puberty that can meet standards set by white-centric, unreasonable standards of beauty. Nor is there any part of adolescent development that can counter the anti-Blackness, the stereotypes, the hypersexualization, and other issues facing marginalized communities. Puberty might be a primary trigger for people who aren’t from otherwise marginalized communities, but for people of color, disabled people, nonbinary, and trans people, eating disorders are rooted in part in the structural factors that have been impacting their view of themselves for most if not all of their lives. We understand, for instance, that colorism impacts children as early as infancy, with people positioning the “prettiness” of babies based on hair texture and eye color as a reason that they want mixed-race children.
When we characterize eating disorders as the province of well-off white girls, we ignore the impact of daily prejudice, the many ways that having no safe spaces might make young people of color feel powerless. Add in the constraints imposed by the wealth gap, which impacts not only access to essential things like a home, transportation, and safety but also the kinds of extracurriculars that validate their cultural context and self-image, and there is a recipe for disaster. When you control nothing in your environment and are constantly bombarded with media messages that tell you that your body is simply wrong, it can make you feel that your body is the only thing you can control. Unfortunately, these kinds of socioeconomic variables go ignored by health-care providers because of institutional bias.
You don’t develop healthy eating habits when food is yet another battle against racism or poverty or both. You can’t have a healthy relationship with your body when your body is treated as criminal simply for existing.
And when we bring in the kinds of foods that are held up as healthy, cultural differences can leave marginalized people feeling alienated. Pretty pictures on Instagram, on food blogs, and in magazines of the latest healthier diets and meal plans valorized as quick fixes can increase anxiety. The messaging is inescapable; even if you don’t look at the magazines that are in every waiting room, there are the ads on Facebook, there are commercials on TV, there’s a never-ending stream of celebrity meal plans being discussed. Not only are the bodies in those images overwhelmingly slim, white, abled, and cis, the food isn’t necessarily appealing or familiar. Someone living in a food desert wouldn’t even be able to afford the ingredients the articles tout, and even for someone who might be able to get most of the ingredients, the flavor profiles might not be palatable. For that matter, after decades of ethnic cuisines being blamed for poor health outcomes, the reality is that many of these “elevated” recipes are blander and more expensive versions packaged in ways that are offensive.
Eating healthier is hard if the options available within your budget aren’t like anything you might experience in your community. It stays in the magazines or the cutesy Facebook videos and doesn’t look or feel like real life because it is so distant and unattainable that it might as well be elf bread. It becomes easier to not eat or to fall into a cycle of bingeing and purging than to try to figure out how to attain this unattainable body in any way that might be healthy. Meanwhile even though we know that body mass index isn’t really useful or healthy, and we are increasingly aware that diets don’t work, we still as a society hold up thin white bodies as the standard of healthy. You might expect the medical industry to be better than to feed into a disordered relationship with food. But doctors are more likely to ignore all available research that shows that being overweight doesn’t increase mortality in favor of their own fatphobia.