"Families matter, of course, and so do racial and ethnic traditions. But families exist in cultural time and space-and so do racial groups. Thus, no one lives in a bubble of self-generated dysfunction” or permanent immunity-especially today, as mass media culture increasingly has provided the dominant “public education” in our children’s lives. The “profile” of girls with eating problems is dynamic, not static; heterogenous, nut uniform. Therapists now report treating the anorexic daughters of anorexics, and are coming to realize the role parents play, not just in being “over-controlling” or overly demanding of their children, but in modeling and obedience to cultural norms. And the old generalizations about race and “fat acceptance” while perhaps valid for older generations of Black Americans, do not begin to adequately describe the complex and often conflicted attitudes of younger people, many of whom are aware of traditional values but constantly feel the pull of contemporary demands. While working on Unbearable Weight”, I called up organizations devoted to Black women’s health issues, asking for statistics and clinical anecdotes, and was told: “That’s a white girl’s thing. African American women are comfortable with their bodies.” For twenty-something Tenisha Williamson, who suffers from anorexia, such notions are almost as oppressive as her eating disorder: “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 don’t ever want to be fat-ever, and I don’t ever want to gain weight. I would rather die from starvation than gain a single pound. [This makes me feel like] the proverbial Judas of my race. . . and so incredibly shallow.” In fact, the starving white girls were just the forward guard, the miners’ canaries warning of how poisonous the air was becoming for everyone. I could see it in the magazines the videos, and in my students’ journals. I could see it, as I write in “Material Girl,” in the transformations of Madonna and other performers of Italian, Jewish, and African American descent who seemed at the start of their careers, to represent resistance to the waifs and willows but who just couldn't hold out against what, indeed, had begun to look like a tsunami, a cultural tidal wave of obsession with achieving a disciplined, normalized body."