Black & Thinner Than Ever

What We Never Learned About Black Women & Disordered Eating

In today’s post:

• Q (not) A Beauty & Pop Culture Questions

• The Full Beat Black & Thinner Than Ever: What We Never Learned About Black Women & Disordered Eating

---

1. Are the girls finally realizing that Ballerina Farm content isn’t harmless homestead content, but right-wing mollification? Yes, thank goodness. In Jessica’s comment section, some women are shocked by the link between Evie magazine (a far-right recruitment tool disguised as a women’s publication) and its white extremist agenda. I am hopeful that Neelman’s supporters, who were unable to glean that something sour simmered below their perfectly “traditional” online lives realize it now.

2. Would a ban on beauty filters improve children’s and teens’ self-esteem? New rollouts from TikTok may help us find out. According to this Elle piece, filters that make users “eyes bigger, nose slimmer, skin lighter or smoother, lips bigger, and just generally affect the shape and appearance of your natural features, will be banned.” I’m not sure how body image experts will track the hopefully positive impact of this change on children, but I’m optimistic. I’m a Pisces ya’ll :/

3. Are you also over the endless beauty and wellness gift guides? I am, but only because they’re so uninteresting this year. There hasn’t been a single item that needed to be added to my wishlists. Most of the lists seem to be promoting the same products, and I’m determined to evade Big Beauty’s influence this year.

---

**This piece discusses sensitive topics and data about eating disorders. Please consider visiting Project HEAL to learn more about treatment and resource support.**

Black & Thinner Than Ever: What We Never Learned About Black Women & Disordered Eating

For the past two weeks, there has been robust discussion about fatphobia, thinness, and beauty dominating Black women’s TikTok timelines. A rage-baiting creator said that her favorite thing about herself was that she is skinny. How sad. Her statement led to discussions about fatphobia, thinness, and right-wing ideology. While I’ve had this particular creator blocked since last year, a slew of responses crowded my timeline ranging from excellent to downright awful.

One of my favorite creators, Imani aka @crutches_and_spice, drew a link between this kind of language and rising far-right content. Others noted that thinness, for the initial creator, was an attempt to foster proximity to whiteness. She’d alluded to this desire in other videos, but I cannot confirm or deny it as I have her b-l-o-c-k-e-d. While these topics were all interesting, the calls to quickly wrap this conversation up came just as quickly.

Admittedly, I was worried about it wrapping so quickly. While I didn’t agree with all of the videos I saw, I was eager to learn more about how Black women thought about our bodies and the systems that determine whether or not they are beautiful (see: valuable). I’ve also seen an uptick in Black “thinspo” content, including eating as little as possible to define your waist.¹ There is still so much left to say and learn. I realized that this is one of the most diverse and lengthy discussions about Black women, weight, fatphobia, and our unhealthy preoccupation with it, that I’ve ever experienced.

Like most millennials who grew up engaged with pop culture, I can vividly recall the unhealthy and frankly diabolical ways major media outlets disparaged women and girls’ bodies. While I was never especially interested in white women as ideal beauty, I was keenly aware that stars like Paris Hilton had bodies that were rarely criticized in major outlets. Growing up chubby, or “husky” according to my JCPenny jeans, meant that adults in my life had a preoccupation with my weight and body, and it was their duty to ensure that I was just as obsessed with changing it.

Michelle Konstantinovsky describes some of our adolescence as such:

For millennials, our formative years were a perfect storm of body-shaming forces: the so-called heroin-chic fashion era that gave way to low-rise jeans and baby tees and the advent of sites like Tumblr that allowed “thinspo” content to spread like wildfire.

Notably, this was also the height of the video vixen era. Thick Black women dominated our screens and presented an oppositional beauty ideal to white celebrities. While the Black people I knew rejected Hilton-esque thinness as ideal, the vixens whose curves were celebrated were also small. The acceptable body type for Black female celebrities was thick, but only in her butt, thighs, and lips.

I complained about this episode of ANTM and Tocarra’s treatment as a plus-size model.

There have been countless discussions about the body image issues that millennials are likely scarred with. As we come into adulthood, major news outlets regularly publish the dark side of our nostalgia and the resulting eating disorders that so many of struggle with. So, why does this TikTok conversation feel like a first to me? The perspective of many of these essays are white millennial women. They have the space to explore these topics now and have had an opportunity to investigate these difficult questions and topics on major platforms, with experts, since we were teens.

I can recall Lifetime movies about disordered eating and the deadly consequences of chasing an unrealistic thinness. I learned the definitions of major disorders like anorexia and bulimia, in magazines, movies, and on sites like gurl.com, but never saw other Black girls as its subjects.

The rest of this piece explores the failure of major media, clinicians, and public health experts to consider Black girls as part of their efforts to support and heal our nation’s dangerous weight obsession.

In this article from 2000, Marian Stolley notes that the studies on eating disorders among minorities were in the “infancy” stages. Stolley notes,

A primary reason why eating disorders appeared to be restricted to white women seems to be that white women were the only people with these problems who underwent study. Specialists conducted most of the early research in this area on college campuses or in hospital clinics. For reasons related to economics, access to care, and cultural attitudes toward psychological treatment, middle-class white females were the ones seeking treatment and thus the ones who became the subjects of research.

A decade later the authors of “Prevalence of Eating Disorders among Blacks in the National Survey of American Life” argued that there had been few studies that examined eating disorders among Black people. And, despite the limited purview of these studies (college students, women, regions, U.S.-based), clinicians still argued that EDs were “rare” in Black populations. There were certainly more progressive pieces that emphasized the significance of discussing the differences between healthy and unhealthy weight management with Black girls in mind. Essence shared a 2,000-participant survey that revealed more than 50% of those who took it were at risk of some disordered eating. But the pieces are largely sporadic and lack a cohesive and long-term investigation, even in major Black publications reflected no long-term plans to educate readers about these issues.

By the 2000s Black clinicians were fighting for our inclusion in studies that had never considered us. Meanwhile, studies like this one from 1998, argue that there is at least a 25-year-old history of girls having an unhealthy preoccupation with “feeling fat, worrying about weight, and developing ambivalent feelings towards food.” Using these numbers as a baseline, this means that since at least 1973 there have been studies that seek to understand girls’ concerns about fatness, thinness, and eating that did not largely consider Black women until the 2000s. That’s a nearly three-decade gap between our experiences being seriously considered in the context of these studies, that may exist.

Recall my frustration about Black women not being considered last month.

In the case of these conversations about weight, health, and fatphobia, the consequences of this kind of erasure is deadly. White women have had years to explore these topics with one another, across class, education, sexual orientation, and even regional backgrounds for about 30 more years than us.²

In my adolescent search for a “cure” for my fatness, I came across books warning girls against overly restrictive eating and how it was an attempt to meet beauty standards in middle school. This information was useful and engaging. It was also targeted to the white girls I didn’t realize were being held to similarly oppressive standards. I recall hearing adults I knew wave these conversations away as “white people's problems.” The same women who obsessively weighed themselves and forced me on and off diets and weight loss programs my entire childhood. There were not a lot of models available to interrogate our unhealthy obsessions with weight, fatphobia, or disordered eating.

We’ve never really had such immediate access to one another’s thoughts about these topics. But is it a good thing that we had such an unfiltered and unwieldy conversation about these disparate topics? Yes actually. The chaos of this conversation and the many questions it dredged up, such as:

1. Do fat people experience life that much differently than thin people?

2. Do Black people struggle with EDs?

3. Can people who love “thickness” truly be fatphobic?

4. Is there a difference between being skinny and thin?

As I saw these questions populate the comment sections of different videos, I was taken aback because the answers seemed so obvious. But, culturally we are behind the curve of large-scale conversations about these subjects because of systemic exclusion from the studies and treatment opportunities our white counterparts have had access to for decades longer.

There is still so much to learn.³

Please consider visiting Project HEAL to learn more about treatment and resource support. Even if you don’t need the info, know what resources are available, so that you can help someone else.

1. I’m uncomfortable linking to these posts and boosting their engagement, as I see them as unhealthy and dangerous.

2. These numbers are nowhere near exact, they are just a loose representation of the difference in the rate of discussion among Black and white women.

3. I am aware that many of these discussions have changed and I want to assure you, gentle reader, that I don’t think we’ve been stagnant since the 90s.