color of anorexia, The

girls and grrrls

It's hard to deny that anorexia is a white girls' disease. This is not to say that only white people or only females develop eating disorders. But anorexics tend to be of the fairskinned female persuasion. As a white girl, I know what it is like to consciously purge and deny myself food, take sleeping pills in lieu of eating, exercise furiously until I could feel the fat dripping from my brow in tiny beads of sweat. I also know what it is like to be black.

I am white skinned, I am blonde haired, I listen to punk rock. I am white? But I have another side of me-one with a black father, one who attended family reunions with watermelons and fried chicken, one who has southern cousins with names like Bo and Punkin. I face my race every day. Sitting in my school cafeteria and watching the races and nationalities gradually divide into specific cliques I am often left grappling with the question: Where do I belong? When I sit with a certain group of friends who are entirely white, I notice. They may not, but I do.. I have to make sure that I am "staying true to my race," whatever that is, because

I am still black when I am at a punk show, and lam still white when I go to a black girls' conference.

It's hard. It sometimes feels like I am always struggling to catch up, because I wasn't born with that label to settle in to; for better or for worse. I have to create my own label. I haven't done it yet. I am still jumping between them, wondering when I can just be me.

Although the walls of hatred are crumbling a little more each year, we still live in an extremely racist society. It starts when you look at someone and see first the color of their skin. This is racism because it immediately establishes the wall of separation-this person is now identifiable as a person by their skin tone. So it is assumed that, should you both be of different races, you are already approaching life from two different angles, and perhaps, if you are white, you are coming from the angle of abuser. I don't want to be an abuser-or a victim, for that matter. The struggle to believe in myself as a woman or a teenager is great enough. Those things are real, and physical. Race is not. In all my attempts to be identified as what I am-not what I look like, which sexual organs I have, or how nappy my hair is-I became confused and lost sight of who I wanted to be. I concluded that I had been born into misinterpretation, and that I would only ever be accepted if I made it painfully obvious who it was I wanted to be accepted as. When someone is starving, it is very hard to ignore.

So when I say that anorexia is a white girls' disease I mean that in the broadest sense. It is very hard always struggling to stay true to your "black roots" or "white heritage" or what have you, and then realizing you have a "white girls' disease."

What does that mean? Does that mean I copped out?

That I betrayed my black sisterhood and decided to become an AllAmerican white girl? Or that I was never "black enough" to begin with? Was my anorexia just a disturbing reminder of how white I really am?

People, it seems, will always understand you by the way you took, and my eating disorder was no more direct than my race. I was open to interpretation (and misinterpretation) either as sickly and white, or confused and black.

Anorexia, and eating disorders in general, affect you physically and psychologically. In fact, it is your very psychology and socialization that causes it in the first place. A disease is a disease, but some diseases come tagged with certain expectations. When you disregard those expectations of an eating disorder, you are breaking the rules of race. What is a biracial girl to do when she finds out her lack of homogeneity even influences her disorders?

I can't, as much as I would like to, ignore my race, whatever that is. And I also don't want to hold myself to some statistical standard that says black folk are immune to selfstarvation. But it is very hard, when you are so aware of the whiteness of your skin and the flatness of your nose, to disregard the color of your disorder.

by anna whitehead

Copyright Off Our Backs, Inc. May/Jun 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved