By Donnie Moreland
I was standing outside of the gymnasium in step with the rest of my high school wrestling team after having just lost my first, or second match, in a sport I wanted nothing to do with (co-dependency can be hell on the anxieties of a teenager). Jokes, of which I cannot recall, were flying and then one of the senior competitors stopped and offered up an opinion that has remained even upon composing this essay. He said, “I think Donnie would be a beast at 175 pounds.”
I remember an emotion. Something between embarrassment and seenness, when he followed up with, “If you can cut to that—you’d be a monster.” Such a public humiliation. There was nothing special about the number. 175 pounds. It was more so that he felt it in his right to speculate, and imagine my perfect physique. Not for me, but for my performance. For what might be defined as my duty to the team—to be the most efficiently mechanical on the mat.
I did not exist, and that’s a terrifying suggestion about any interaction between human beings. And yet, it couldn’t be more explicitly clear by the jeering of my other teammates, none of them Black, that they were all imagining their body of mine at work. They played it as complimentary, as though to suggest something about my potential, but they hurt me that day. It harmed parts of me I hadn’t named yet, because I had no vocabulary to affirm the history playing out between us.
I only felt the anger. I only felt the sadness. I felt my mouth make concessions antithetical to what turned in my chest. But as quickly as the moment took shape—it was over. But I was left with a parting gift of sorts: 175 pounds. More so, 175 pounds as an exclamation mark on the suggestion that my body was it’s least operable. Least optimal. Least competent. A burden to progress. 175 pounds. I wore the number like a tattoo. It’s even the number I told my partner my ideal weight was at the turn of this year. I didn’t know why. Just that it had always been in the orbit of my vision of possibility—even long after I had forgotten that white boy’s name.
What happened between me and that boy is a microcosm of a wide enveloping web of stories so many Black boys can share. Stories about feeling like our bodies were both invisible, and grossly eroticized—it begins early. As Steven Underwood writes in his article Black boys and Bird Chests, or the racialized legacy of Body Dysmorphia in African American men, the beginnings of our dissociation with our bodies as our own occurs in the infancy of a child’s self making.
According to Underwood, “….it’s rooted in a traumatizing experience that many Black men go through in their youth that not only pressures Black boys, but also dictates Black identity only as an extension of our bodies’ physical worth—and more specifically, only when we abuse it.” As children it’s easy for us to find our living most affirmed when we perform, and especially when such value assessments are made by the first men we are groomed to seek approval from—our fathers, uncles, preachers, coaches, etc. Before 175 pounds was a figment of a phrase, I had already been berated by my father for not possessing the attrition needed to catch his football passes for hours on end. I had witnessed, at family gatherings, cousins praised by their fathers for their athletic potential—while their siblings endured the envy of playing second fiddle.
I’m familiar with the very moment: A boy’s arm is snatched by an elder. “Look at this boy! You better start hitting the gym like him if you tryna do anything on the field,” the man shouts in the direction of other boys. He squeezes the child’s bicep tighter. All the children can do is look past one another, force a smile and hope attention is drawn away from their bodies. This is only one example of many insults tossed at children who only wish to make the men they envision as their models of the masculine (the Black masculine) offer up some recognition of their visibility.
My accounts are not my own. They belong to a spectrum of memories that have caused many of us to see the reflection in our mirror as a cause of trouble. As something in the way of the compassion withheld by men whose words have the power to both annihilate, or amplify our self esteem. And out of these encounters, we play with one another, the games our father’s play with us. Offering one another visions of ourselves reliant on how high we can jump, how much we can squat or how fast we can run. The size of our chests and assumptions of our sex. Boys are brutal with boys and this was my experience. A short, portly Black child. On any playground I was both targeted, and isolated, due to my lack of athletic ability. When I finally saw what it was, the difference between me and the other black boys who were adorned for their physical prowess, it confirmed my beliefs of the shame my father must have at the sight of me.
But personal histories only explain so much of Black folks. By thirteen I begged my father to buy me a weight lifting set. I craved the social affections available to other boys. I could not be persuaded that the culprit for my disadvantages was anything other than the fat that my childhood confirmed was my enemy. But those episodes were drops in a bucket as compared to how I was conditioned to envision properness in the form of the Black masculine. Football players, professional wrestlers, body builders, rappers, actors, and eventually pornographic performers, these Black men shaped the body I conjured as appropriate for both visibility and use. The only caveat being rappers but they carried a kind of cool, as bell hooks has described, akin to their aesthetic ancestors in the popularly cultural manifestation of the Black pimp. Which in itself still suggested something about a confidence in sexual domination which was something, as long as I looked as I did, I would be incapable of accessing.
In truth, as I have come to learn these men—and without their own consent—belonged to a web of fungible performances offered to the American public to satiate the expectedness of Black masculine sexual utility in white—often white cis hetero male—imaginations. Thus is the reason why that white boy targeted me, and none of my white teammates—of similar ability—with such excitement and certainty in his right to make such a determination of my body’s desirability. But I couldn’t have known this then and so I suffered my disgust. For the majority of my teenage years I worked to meet the demand of the world of my body. I hoarded bodybuilding magazines and wasted nights diagramming routines which earned me more injuries than benefit. In the gym, I exercised to nausea, vomited and despised myself for being ill equipped for exercise regimens designed to market magazines. But no matter the result, muscle gained or weight lost, I continued to curse my body for what it could not achieve. For existing in the minds of others as something they should not have had to endure the sight of. I was hard on me.
Upon graduating high school, some ten years ago, life events eroded the frequency by which I attended to my obsession with exercise, though the residue of my disgust still made residence in my interior. But in September of 2020, I began therapy for reasons related to the stress of a global pandemic. I was fortunate enough to have located a Black counselor who has, for more than six months, tended to my needs with a kindness that softened me enough to begin to reveal my experience with body dysmorphia. Together we’ve been able to name the roots of such displeasure with a vocabulary that informs even these words. My relationship with my father, cultural trauma and the violence of capitalism are just some of what he has helped me connect to the sensations very present in my body when I look in the mirror. It was with this work of excavation that I began to see the scale—no pun intended—of what 175 pounds means to so many parts of me.
The other day for the first time in 28 years of life, I said I love you to my stomach, my stretch marks, my chest and it was one of the heaviest moments I’ve endured with only me as company. I could feel the 15 year old, in my memory, hurt. Even writing these words, my tear ducts swell some. I am writing because my fortune, in therapy and support, is not the fortune of others. But my 175 pounds is not mine alone. It is 200 pounds for someone else, or bigger biceps for another. Our bodies deserve better of our intentions. Collectively we ought to want to participate in the work of undoing—to come to a consensus about the possibilities of joy composed by the implications of compassion, mourning, self critique and grace. Much as others of this Black family have been deducing the costs of their trauma —to include that which we are to blame — and discovering group healing modalities, we deserve to also partake in such communion.
I was bamboozled because my father was—and his father before him. Such is the tale for many of my kin, and the kin of others who thought of their bodies as something that it most certainly would have never been. But I can verbalize that. So many children cannot. Though they are still suffering from the stamp of a tattoo—one drawn on them in moments of fear and humiliation —much as I was with the number, 175. Those boys deserve to know we as elders can be here to wash their bodies of such oppression, because we’ve come to perform such a duty of care for ourselves. The objective being to remind them of what I was not by so many who should have been equipped with the capacity for the phrase, “you are beautiful, regardless.”
