I was dogged in my determination to evolve outside the narrow margins of the small white world of my beginning and into another more racially familiar oneI spent the first 20 years of my life internalizing white beauty standards,mental values and cultural sensibilities. By the time I was a freshman in tall school I had, like many of my white female peers, or embarked upon an ongoing war with my body. I was never diagnosed as anorexic or bulimic,but I intermittently starved myself and took laxatives in an effort to be skinny and hipless without any sense whatsoever that my curves might be considered a thing of beauty in black culture. I abandoned my 11-year-old-fashioned crush on Michael Jackson (with whom I became almost preternaturally smitten after seeing him in The Wiz) in favor of the young white male stars that adorned the covers of Tiger Beat – Rick Springfield, Lief Garrett, or Rob Lowe. I was guided by college counselors to consider recent England state schools and maybe long-shot universities – historically black colleges and universities were not on anyone’s radar. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com