When the author was in high school, she suffered from an eating disorder, which she used all the usual strategies to conceal, filling up her plate with zero-calorie foods or pretending to have eaten already. However, these tricks were not really necessary, since everyone accepts unhealthy relationships with food as long as the person in question still looks as they are expected to look. Black girls are not supposed to have eating disorders or any of the other mental and emotional problems that afflict their wealthier white counterparts. What they really lack is not the disorders but the language to describe them and the resources to tackle them.

Eating disorders are not primarily about food but are brought on by psychological insecurity, which is often caused or exacerbated, in Black children and teens, by racist stereotypes. Black people quickly learn that their appearance will never conform perfectly to a white aesthetic but try to come as close as they can by focusing obsessively on what they eat. Instagram and Facebook pictures of meals for which they cannot even afford the ingredients reinforce the problem. It is easier to starve yourself or to binge eat than it is to try to work out how to make these complicated “healthy” meals. Meanwhile, both society and the medical profession reinforce the message that the most important value is to be thin, regardless of how this thinness is achieved.

Academic research on eating disorders focuses almost exclusively on white women, and very little has been written about marginalized communities or the impact of marginalization on the development of these disorders. For a marginalized person, conforming to white beauty standards is not only a matter of being attractive to potential partners; it could determine whether they have access to employment or housing, or how they are treated by the justice system.

Marginalized people also lack access to resources that might help them to cope with trauma. The mental health system is “weighted heavily toward Eurocentric values and cultural norms,” and there is a sense of shame in seeking such help in the first place, with many people being religiously conditioned to see prayer as a superior solution to Prozac. The author suggests that there may be a link between eating disorders and PTSD. She herself has suffered from both and experienced a reduction in symptoms when she had access to therapy.

White supremacy infests spaces that claim to be body-positive. Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as Black, is one of the most extreme examples of someone who has appropriated a racial identity without any concern for the impact on those who were born with that identity. Racism and colorism are too pervasive to be absent even from the most inclusive communities, and marginalized women are pushed further to the margins by the white aesthetic that serves as the default. Feminists must advocate for the mental health needs of marginalized women, ensuring that issues of trauma such as eating disorders do not “stop at the boundaries of whiteness.”

Analysis

By this point in the collection, the author has established a pattern of delineating a social problem, supported by her own experience, and then explaining the relationship between this problem and the legacy of white supremacy in America. Although she cites academic sources (with references given in a brief appendix to the book), Kendall’s main strategy is to connect the anecdotes about her life with the wider public sphere by demonstrating in practical terms how completely the ideology of white supremacy pervades American society. Even when she attacks individuals, she does so principally on the...