TOKEN BLACK GIRL

A Black fashion reporter describes how White supremacy led to her crippling perfectionism and subsequent eating disorder.

Growing up in Connecticut, from a young age, Prescod assumed the role of the “token Black girl” in her mostly White group of friends. Sometimes she was forced to play the role of Scary Spice, the only Black Spice Girl, during pretend play. Other times she discovered her classmates’ racist attitudes on three-way phone calls. Years of being teased about her alleged tendency to act White made her jumpy around her Black peers, eliminating the possibility of a safe haven away from her school friends. Due to this isolation, she “became manipulative, calculating, and mean. I was desperate to gain some modicum of control, and to do that, I constantly doled out criticisms, gossiped, and stirred up petty drama. I developed a haughty affect that I employed for both passing judgment and my own protection.” Her sharpness turned out to be an invaluable weapon not only for hiding her internalized racism from her peers, but also for her professional success in the fashion industry. Eventually, though, her ambition and self-hatred morphed into debilitating depression and an eating disorder. “I was in dogged pursuit of an imagined sense of power,” she writes, “and was very mean in doing so….But I wonder now if I was always meanest to myself.” Prescod left the fashion industry for a job at the TV network BET, a move she now sees as the first step on her long, slow recovery. Throughout the text, the author exhibits an impeccable clarity of thought, drawing thoughtful and original connections between institutionalized racism and her personal experience. Her voice is frank, vulnerable, and witty, and she has a talent for using humor to poke fun at her past self while simultaneously underscoring the depth of the systemic violence she was forced to endure.

A trenchant, honest, and unique memoir about body image, fashion, and Blackness.