_______ Put you on one fad diet after another, telling you children were starving in Biafra, China, down the street, so you had better clean off your plate?
_______ Said repeatedly, “The world will screw you, just as soon as look at you”?
_______ Doled out diet pills like communion wafers, teaching you that hunger was a sin and absolution could only be found in self-denial and starvation diets, long before you entered junior high school?
It was easier to count calories than the number of times your mother said, “You don’t want to wind up some fat slob with your nose stuck in a book.”_______ True _______ False
Being “Daddy’s little girl” was a privilege that came with a price._______ True _______ False
Throughout your childhood:Your father kept a gym bag filled with Playboy and Penthouse magazines and taught you that women were expected to look a certain way.
You watched your father flirt with pretty women with peaches and cream complexions and tiny waists at the cosmetics counter at Eaton’s Department Store.
Your father had affairs. You know this because your mother treated you as a confidant; her shoulder to lean on; her cross to bear, because if it were not for you, they wouldn’t have had to marry in the first place.
All of the above.
One evening, a woman across from you in Group said, “Women of colour have it so much easier. They’re okay with their bodies—with having bigger bodies. They don’t have the same pressure to look a certain way—to be thin. It’s harder for white women, all this pressure to be thin.” Which best describes your response?You couldn’t believe the words that had fallen out of her mouth.
You pretended not to hear, not to feel the sting of her remarks.
You avoided eye contact; watched the clock tick away until it was break time and you could escape.
You counted snack-box raisins as if they were rosary beads and silently catalogued your faults; your body’s numerous imperfections.
You sucked in your stomach, tried to erase the trace of Africa from your big gal thighs by squeezing them together, prevent your flesh from spilling over the sides of the chair.
You looked at her and wished you were that thin.
You thought she didn’t have a damn clue.
You felt like a failure, a fraud, an outsider; apparently a restrictive eating disorder was not one size fits all.
You wanted to say something but didn’t want to be mistaken as the spokesperson for all women of colour.
You didn’t want to become someone’s teachable moment.
You didn’t want to become a target by speaking up, be perceived as a rabble-rouser, the embodiment of the angry Black woman stereotype.
You felt like a disappointment; that on behalf of women of colour, experiencing an eating disorder or not, you should have said something.
You wondered how a statement of erasure and privilege could have gone unchallenged by the rest of the group.
You thought: What must it be like to speak from that level of privilege? To simultaneously presume that she could speak for all women of colour—discounting the historical traumas inflicted on Black women’s bodies since the slave trade—while she garnered sympathy for herself.
You wondered: Why is the pain of women of colour so easily dismissed and ignored?
You went completely still, desperate to fade into the background. You wanted to disappear—which, given your prior history and the nature of your eating disorder, seemed rather ironic.
You swore you were done with the program; that it was no longer a safe space.
All of the above.
Growing up, playing the tent game with your father had nothing to do with the circus._______ True _______ False
Growing up, you were “Daddy’s little girl,” and your mother worked hard to keep you looking that way._______ True _______ False
You cursed the sadist who designed your junior high gym uniform—the infamous Greenie—the one-piece, bloomer-bottomed bane of your middle school existence that exaggerated your round ass, burgeoning breasts, and child-bearing hips. On a scale of zero to ten, with zero representing no pain, and ten representing the worst pain imaginable, please quantify the awkwardness and discomfort experienced during your participation in gym class.
Check all that apply._______ At twenty-three you were expecting your second baby. You met your father for lunch to share the exciting news. After you told him, he suggested that you have an abortion. He said, “You don’t want to wind up some fat slob pumping out babies on welfare.”
_______ The day after you had your C-section, your father came to visit you in the hospital. The first words out of his mouth were, “Now what? I know a woman who was back at the gym a couple of days after having her caesarean.”
At twenty-four, your mother looked at you in disgust and said, “You’ve lost so much weight that your arms are all flabby.” You responded by:Thanking her for the concern.
Joining a gym and working out two hours every day—on top of going to university, raising two small children, and working part-time.
Smiling at her from across the dining room as you pushed food around on your plate, feeling this rush of power because no one could force you, no one could make you eat.
Some of the above.
Why did you wage war on your body?You’re not sure. This is what you were trying to figure out.
Your body was under constant critique and criticism by your family. Appearance mattered above all else. Being the product of a mixed-race marriage at a time when that was unheard of, you were expected to bolster the family’s image. Good enough wasn’t good enough. A perfect family required perfect children.
You were taught to fear fat like a frightened child feared monsters under the bed.
Before 1963’s March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, your parents took you to have your portrait done. You sat on a stage, while the artist captured your image in oil pastels. Women in cotton dresses, high-heel shoes, bouffant hair tamed by hairspray, commented on your appearance, your stellar “children should be seen and not heard” performance as they stood next to men wearing summer suits and neckties, crew cuts covered by fedoras. You sat there afraid and in silence; body and character up for critique by strangers, while your parents stood off to the side, basking in the warm reception. It was on this day, shortly after your fifth birthday, when you realized how it felt to be an object.
Throughout childhood, you spent your entire allowance on comic books and junk food. While your parents held screaming matches at home, you held story time and tea parties in the attic with your younger brothers. You sought solace in cans of rice pudding, Old Dutch potato chips, and Grimm’s fairy tales.
You saw no reflection of you or your family in your childhood reader, only sandy-haired twins, John and Janet, and their blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby sister, Anne. You didn’t see yourself reflected in Miss Roma’s Magic Mirror on Romper Room. Pudgy Black girls were not fairy-tale princesses.
As a child, Saturday morning cartoons characterized women of colour as either thick-waisted, thick-headed ‘mammies’ or hot-blooded, lustful ‘Jezebels’—stereotypes meant to inspire shame. In print media and television, Black women played the role of happy domestics for white middle-class families. Our bodies were either bloated, corpulent caricatures used to sell everything from rice and pancake syrup, to kitchen memo pads and laundry detergent, or presented as half-naked, sex-starved and subservient ‘jungle bunnies’ for the benefit of the male gaze.
Systemic marginalization and erasure are exhausting. Maybe you thought if you can’t beat them, join them. Make yourself literally disappear.
During Sunday dinners, your grandmother spoke of life in Nova Scotia. Between idle pleasantries and “pass the potatoes,” she talked about Truro, how it was far worse than any place in the Deep South. She said, “People like to think that it’s bad only in the States. But up here it’s just
as prejudiced. Worse.” She spoke of race riots and segregation, as we piled our plates high with second helpings and sides of injustice.
You lived what you learned.
Family day at the beach. While you built sandcastles, a woman strolled by in a bathing suit. Your father laughed and said, “Just look at that beached whale.”_______ True _______ False
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt you._______ True _______ False
But names will never hurt you? Who came up with that phrase? You’re confident whoever it was had never been on the receiving end of hate speech and called:Nigger
Nigger-baby
Watermelon bum
Half-breed
Mooolatto
Slut
All of the above.
Why did you try to make yourself invisible? Why did you want to disappear?Invisibility was safety. Unseen you couldn’t be a target for racism.
Invisibility was safety. Unseen you couldn’t be mistaken for some hypersexualized, exotic other.
Invisibility was safety. You learned early the vulnerability of Black and brown bodies. As a child, you witnessed unfiltered hatred on the playground, in the nightly news on television. The trauma of understanding that you were not safe in this world—simply because of pigment—is a fear that doesn’t leave you. It became a burden that couldn’t be shed, unlike weight.
Invisibility was safety. No one could touch you if you were invisible.
Things you wished that woman from Group had understood before speaking out of turn and out of privilege:Your family worshipped the same impossible Eurocentric standard of beauty.
The intersection between race and gender. Your body was under constant critique and criticism. The texture of your hair mattered. The pigment of your skin mattered. The size and shape of your nose, your lips, your body mattered. You felt pressured by the weight of familial and societal expectations.
Eating disorders do not discriminate. For years you binged, starved, and purged.
Your family’s fear that you would become “some fat slob” weighed heavier than any extra pounds you may have carried. They had swallowed the Kool-Aid without complaint; bought into “fat slob” as a reworking of the racial stereotype: Black women as “welfare queens,” lazy and licentious, incapable of controlling their appetites, sexual or otherwise.
You were considered exotic, developed a body that men noticed whether you wanted them to or not.
Your first lover called you his Tahiti sweetie. He would go down on you while stroking your belly. He affectionately called it “your little anorexic stomach.” He might as well have been saying, “I love you”._______ True _______ False
You kept a photograph in your wallet. You were twenty-five; your eating disorder was completely out of control. In the picture your collarbone protrudes, your cheeks are hollow, eyes cloaked with sadness you were too blind to see. You called it your concentration camp photograph, and for some reason, to this day, you can’t let it go. _______ True _______ False
This is a long answer question. You may use additional paper, take as many breaks as necessary, in providing your response. How much did a history of sexual abuse in childhood contribute to your development of an eating disorder?___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
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After the incident in Group you decided to:Quit the program and never return.
Take time to process what had happened; deal with your hurt, anger, fear, sadness. Group no longer felt like a safe space and you’d spent the majority of your life feeling unsafe in this world.
Speak with your counsellor in the program and explain what those comments meant to you regarding personal experience, the myths surrounding women of colour and eating disorders.
Address your feelings of being minimized, marginalized, erased.
Speak with the woman who made the comments.
Some of the above.
Circle all that apply. When your mother passed away, you inherited the portrait, the one of yourself at age five and fashioned in oil pastel. You are wearing a party dress—an impressionist pattern of soft teal, cream, and blue, with peephole cut-outs at the shoulders. Within that gilded frame, you are not smiling. The portrait hung in your parents’ dining room for years, held you hostage to an ideal that did nothing but harm you. Once in your possession, you:Displayed the portrait in a place of prominence in your living room.
Celebrated the feeling that you had rescued some essential part of yourself, that little girl who had no one to protect and care for her.
Wrestled with the memories of vulnerability that the portrait raised.
Struggled with disappointment—reclaiming the portrait didn’t translate into the feel-good moment of triumph you’d long imagined.
Hid the portrait at the back of your bedroom closet until you were able to accept the harm that was done to you in childhood.
Talked about your grief in Group and with your counsellor.
Reached out for help because Black girls do get eating disorders, and baby girl, you couldn’t tame that beast on your own.
Becoming a Shark
Reflections on Blackness in Canadian Wilderness
— Phillip Dwight Morgan —
wilderness | ‘wildenis |
noun[usu. in sing]
an uncultivated, uninhabited, or inhospitable region
Little Black boys don’t make compelling sharks, or at least that’s what I thought growing up in Scarborough. We don’t have gill slits or multiple rows of replacement teeth, and the proportions from our heads to our trunks to our tails are all wrong. I suspect that’s why I failed ‘Shark Level’ in swimming lessons. It simply wasn’t in the cards. Prior to that moment, I’d successfully convinced people that I was pollywog, tadpole, sunfish, and even dolphin. Becoming a shark, however, was far more difficult.
I recall standing on the white-tiled deck of the pool at L’Amoreaux Collegiate, shivering, as my wet blue and orange bathing trunks clung to my adolescent thighs like saran wrap and my matching blue goggles sat perched atop my head. Water dripped, then pooled, around my feet as I nervously awaited my report card from the swim instructor. As she handed it to me, my eyes zeroed in on two red Xs set apart from a column of green check marks. Apparently my whip kick was lopsided and I was eighteen seconds short of the two-minute treading requirement. Dejected, I slowly walked back to the changing room. If I wanted to continue swimming, I would have to repeat Shark Level.
Three months later, when I failed to become a shark for a second time, I decided once and for all to retire from swimming at the age of eleven and avoid pools whenever possible. Despite my best efforts, no amount of practice could secure my predatory acumen.
I hid from the pool at L’Amoreaux, located a mere two-minute walk from my house, and with each passing year its presence felt increasingly strange, even otherworldly; its acrid chlorine fumes serving as a constant reminder of the peculiarity of these places.
I desperately wanted to be a good swimmer but struggled with the coordination. I didn’t see many other Black children at the pool and I recall feeling embarrassed when some of my classmates commented on my round tummy. In short, the pool was a space of alienation for me. In hindsight, I’m fair
ly confident that my fraught relationship with wilderness began here, in the pool, as an insecure Black boy.
As I grew older and saw other children exploring the outdoors with their families or attending overnight camps, I felt the all-too-familiar feelings of apprehension, fear, and alienation. I saw the uncertainty of the deep end of the pool mirrored in Canada’s vast lakes and forests. The dense brush and thickets, much like the bodies of water they contained, could swallow children whole and steal them from their families, forever. The easiest and safest way to avoid this fate, I concluded, was to simply avoid such places.
It’s not hard to see why I came to this conclusion. In addition to my own discomfort with water, there were larger societal forces at work—in film, television, literature, and visual art. Black people have been—and remain—curiously absent from the amalgam of snow-capped mountains, rivers, forests, and animals often labelled “nature” here in Canada. Similarly, Black people are rarely depicted in film, television, or books as adventurers, explorers, park rangers, or zoologists—people with a deep knowledge of their surrounding environment. Instead, we are passers-by, transients, vagrants—people who may be present in this vision of nature but clearly do not belong there. More often than not, we are depicted as gangsters and slaves, never managing to exist either comfortably or competently in nature. Our knowledge, much like the clothing we are shown wearing, is unapologetically urban and, therefore, alien to this particular vision of nature. There’s a subtle but clear message here, the messaging of absence, working in tandem with these stereotypes to tell us that we are not only gangsters but gangsters unwelcome in Canadian wilderness.
Black Writers Matter Page 4