ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about a story that the author made up. He thought of it one day when he was trying to explain to a little brown girl where the babies lived before they were born, so she told her they lived in this world of loving darkness. Traditionally, black folks have had to do a lot of creative thinking and dreaming to raise black children free of internalized racism in a white-supremacist society, a society that is everywhere every day of our lives urging us to hate blackness and ourselves. Overeating the wrong type of food is one of the major ways black women abuse our bodies. Feminist books on the issue of fat say very little about black women's bodies, though Shadow on a Tightrope addresses some aspects of black female social reality. It is difficult to feel good about one's body when most of the clothes that are available to women are created without the bodies of black women in mind.
