Column: Do these genes make my butt look fat?

"Good God almighty, you got a badoonka donk girl, don't hurt nobody!" As the rapper Keith Murray so eloquently states, phatty girls, a title particularly ascribed to black females, are blessed with rather sought-after plump behinds. I on the other hand, am one of the unfortunate women suffering from the persistent and quite surprisingly common disease often dubbed, "Nassatall."

The sad, yet omnipresent truth is that there is no cure for this disease. Daddy's behind is flat, his mother's is flat, his mother's mother had a deflated behind and, well, you get the picture. Alas, I inherited a rear end that an anorexic chick would die for-literally. My less than gargantuan tail is often the butt (no pun intended) of many cruel and, might I add, very monotonous jokes. Twenty years and going strong, I have managed to ward off the intimidating psychological side effects of this disease.

Dangerously short skirts, short shorts and jeans made with spandex can often fool the untrained eye of the opposite sex into believing that a "Nassatall" sufferer is in fact rather thick. G-strings, thongs and any remotely similar form of undergarment is strictly forbidden for the "Nassatall" sufferer; in our case, these usually sexy forms of lingerie lose all appeal because they tend to sit oddly on our lower backs - not sexy at all.

It pains me to hear the continuously perpetuated stereotype of the black chick with the fat ass. The mere mention of the buttocks sends me careening into a morass of shame and guilt, because what comes next is an often-erroneous assumption that I, being an African American female, must in fact be toting around a thick backside - that is, until I walk past with a medium-sized Asian-girl booty. I had a simple request for Christmas, that my behind would swell to J. Lo status - apparently no one heard my prayers. Squats merely harden what little butt I already have, there is no increase in circumference. What is a girl to do? I've witnessed many a non-black female walking around Main West with phatty girl status.

Now one cannot confuse phatty girl with fat girl, because females tend to be in a state of denial about this matter. If you have a big booty and big bosoms with a corpulent stomach region and some back jiggle to go with all that, then you are simply dubbed fat girl not phatty girl.

The reality of the matter is that my derriere would not stand out as being so flat if I were not a black woman. Stereotypes tend to create a warped and quite inaccurate measure by which to compare and contrast people. Had I been born a white woman, my butt would never be considered an anomaly, yet because I am classified into a specific race, I am ascribed a set of mandatory phenotypic traits. It is too simple to say that whites are guilty of this crime; the more aggressive perpetuators seem to be blacks themselves. Obviously, not all black females have fat booties; similarly, not all white females have flat ones.

Many of my white counterparts cannot seem to empathize for me. They revel in their flat butted-ness. Big backsides are not at all desired; in fact, it seems the smaller the booty the better.

Gyrating butts in hip hop videos seem to tease and taunt me, as I look on with envy and disgust vainly squeezing my little butt cheeks together in repetitions of 12. If only I could parade around campus on a warm spring day with two big brown butt cheeks hanging out of itty bitty shorts.

Each step I took in my Manolo Blahnik Timberland Boots (hey, this is a dream sequence) would send my ample behind wiggling and jiggling, almost as though it had a mind of its own, unrestricted and free to move about! But, alas my butt does not move at all. In fact, I often forget that I have one until some selfless onlooker reminds me that yes, Nikki, you do have one, and it happens to be rather flat.

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