MAKEDA Knight, a black Muslim, says she isn’t enticed by the ideal marketed by mainstream media.

photo: Heart & Soul magazine

Heart & Soul Magazine held a contest that chose a cover model a size above the rest.

Knight, 19, says she has never worried about her weight, partly because she has always been slim, but mostly because she’s Muslim. At age 12, she started wearing a khimar, a scarf that covers a woman’s hair and neck in accordance with the Muslim philosophy of modesty.

She cites Brooklyn's West Indian parade as an example of the "leeway for shape" in black American culture. She describes a shapely woman who waved proudly from atop a parade float as "beautiful to herself and to others."

"If you look at carnival in Trinidad, there’s women, they got everything hanging out – they don’t got no flat stomach. It’s variety," Knight says.