Racism and Anorexia

During the much-covered hunger strike, the New York Post printed an article about the end of one striker’s fast that was both factually inaccurate and telling in its treatment of the issues at hand. As someone who dealt with press during the strike, I was appalled (although I should not have been surprised) to see that the two reporters, John Mazor and Cynthia R. Fagen, had honed in on the striker’s previous struggle with anorexia.

The headline of the article read, “Fasting Columbia Protestor Collapses” (the first glaring error: the striker did not collapse). The first line of the story labeled her “an anorexic college student,” and the reporters proceeded to quote an interview that the striker gave to Audrey magazine last spring. It is worth noting that this very same magazine article states that the striker is now recovered, a fact overlooked by the Post reporters. Despite a statement from Victoria Ruiz saying that her fellow striker’s specific medical history had “nothing to do with this” hunger strike, the Post spent the rest of the article reconstructing her particular struggle with fitting the standard western ideal of beauty.

The Post article is an exercise in sensationalist reporting with little, if any, merit as good journalism, especially as it fails to make a salient connection: the context of one struggle is a personal example of what the strikers and supporters are fighting against.
While the demands of the strikers and supporters may at first appear to be a disparate wish list, there is an underlying thread tying together the four areas of concern. Each demand addressed what we saw as ways in which the University failed to engage adequately with issues of race and marginalization, and each demand was born out of a long-standing struggle with the administration.

But what does this have to do with anorexia? For an answer, I suggest we turn to the magazine article that the Post quoted two weeks ago.

The Audrey article, which ran in the April/May 2007 edition, spoke of three main categories of pressure faced by the Asian American interviewees, all of whom had eating disorders at some point in their lives. The striker’s interview fit into the first subsection, the “White standard,” as she discussed “being thin” as the next best thing to embodying the popular image of beauty.

The striker’s particular struggle did not occur in a vacuum, just as none of our interactions with the world—whether with other people or with our self-image—are independent of past and present influences. In the interview, she explains her own recognition of the dominant standard of beauty and her inability to fulfill this ideal because, after all, she is not European American, but Asian.

We may be tempted to approach the situation with our imaginary color-blind glasses on, but let’s be honest—ignoring race does not make it disappear, especially with so many decades of interaction so defined by race in this country. If one takes a cursory glance at the history of Asian Americans in the United States, one would see constant assertions, via laws and court cases, that those of Asian descent cannot be assimilated into American society, are unworthy of citizenship, and are unable to naturalize. This affected the lives of thousands of people living in the U.S. at the time and is revealing of how America envisioned its ideal citizen. When one considers the similar treatment of blacks and Mexicans and an opposing view of European immigrants, the ideal citizen, the embodiment of American values, is undoubtedly white.

One may argue that that was in the past (the not-so-far-away past—the right to naturalize was not given to Asians living in the U.S until World War II), and that we have been sufficiently steeped in the doctrine of diversity to combat such backward views of other peoples. But it will take a lot more than just understanding the value of diversity to dismantle racial prejudice established not only through common culture but through the very laws of this land. And then the striker’s situation hits home in unexpected ways.

In a country where the standard identity and ideal has more often than not been white, it comes as no surprise that minority teenagers feel pressured to conform to a standard of whiteness. Rather than ignoring racial implications as the reporters did in the case of the hunger striker, it is necessary to engage these issues in order to move into a world where color truly does not matter. After all, we can see that we are often personally implicated in maintaining racial hierarchies or privileges even in the way we view ourselves and others.

Deep examination is often necessary to map out the complex ways that race, racism, and racial formation have brought society to its current point. What the strikers and supporters were reacting to was our disconcerting belief that the administrative and curricular status quo had failed to highlight the importance of such study.

There should be spaces in the University to examine and challenge how race can determine cultural ideals, especially when this process affects students personally. Psychology classes no doubt address the relationship between eating disorders and cultural norms, but a study of how existing racial hierarchies privilege certain groups of people or cultural ideals would enrich our understanding of our interaction with culture and our perceptions of the world and of ourselves. Deconstructing racial privilege falls not just on our shoulders as college students mulling over theory, but as human beings struggling with our interactions with ourselves and the world.

The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in history.