ABSTRACT
If your images of girls and women with eating and body image problems have been shaped by People magazine and Lifetime movies, she's probably white, heterosexual, North American, and economically secure. If you're familiar with the classic psychological literature on eating disorders, you may also have read that she's an extreme `perfectionist' with a hyperdemanding mother, and that she suffers from `body-image distortion syndrome' and other severe perceptual and cognitive problems that `normal' girls don't share. You probably don't picture her as Black, Asian, or Latina. Consider, then, Tenisha Williamson. Tenisha is black, suffers from anorexia, and has described her struggle on `Colors of Ana,' a website speci®cally devoted to the stories of non-white women dealing with eating and body image problems. Tenisha, who was raised believing that it was a mark of racial superiority that Black women are comfortable with larger bodies, feels like a traitor to her race. `From an African-American standpoint,' she writes, `we as a people are encouraged to ``embrace our big, voluptuous bodies.'' This makes me feel terrible because I don't want a big, voluptuous body! I would rather die from starvation than gain a single pound' (Colors of Ana, http:colorsofana.com//ss8.asp).
