We are Witnessing The CDC’s Violent Eugenicist History in Real-Time

To this day, the CDC continues to refer to “obesity” as an epidemic, and has even gone as far as to say that fat people are at “higher risk” of contracting and dying from COVID-19. CW: This essay explores anti-fatness and

Apr 8, 2020

Body Politics

Fat People Deserve To Glorify Our Bodies

A fat body deserves good things, all the things the world told you it never did. Yes, even promotion and glory. Follow Da'Shaun I love fat bodies and fat people. I love their softness and warmth, their hills and valleys. The

Sep 19, 2019

To The Left

Fat People Must Become a Priority to the Left

May 1, 2019

Body Politics

Everything That We Know About Obesity Is An Indictment Of White Supremacy

Everything we know about obesity is wrong, and everything about who we listen to on the subject of fatness and fatphobia is bullshit.

By Hess Love I can't blame Michael Hobbes for writing “Everything you know about obesity is wrong” or for writing what seems to be meant as a compassionate piece. It was well written, factual, and even my fat Black ass learned something. It is not necessarily Hobbes who is the problem when it comes to thin white people writing these articles. It's the people who value to voices of thin white people who write about fatness over the voices of actual fat people. Those that rely heavy on “Ally Culture” to introduce them to perspectives outside of their own experiences—the Jane Elliott or Tim Wise effect. It's a phenomenon where those who have the most privilege exercise that privilege in a way that ironically continues to elevate them and sideline the voices of the marginalized people they attempt to speak on behalf of. I cannot count the number of people who bypass my fat Black ass and my social media posts about fatness and fatphobia, bypass me and my physical and rhetorical loudness, but shared Hobbes’ article with glee. A performance of acceptance and progression that they themselves do not possess. I, and many other fat Black women, have been saying the very same things that Hobbes writes in his article for years, but they don't listen to us. Our society sees Blackness, fatness, and oftentimes even “womanness” as unhealthy, disqualifications, and ultimately as sins. Many people believe Blackness is the mark of Cain, that fatness is the mark of gluttony, that untamed womanhood is the mark of disobedience and chaos. A walking embodiment of the Pandora's Box, “apple-shaped” bodies symbolize the forbidden fruit that caused the world to fall. To embody all of those things in a Judeo-Christian society, and then to have the audacity to talk about our right to happiness, leaves us being unheard. Happiness, in the form that people feel it is, is supposed to be, and the way that they have been programmed to believe it is, is not a right of ours. We are a living and breathing sin in a world where people hate both the sinner and the sin, no matter how much they tell themselves that they can separate the phenomenon from its actualizer. But fatness is not a sin, and fat people do not need visiting pastors to proselytize on our humanity despite our conditions. Fat people do not need translations of how we move in the world. The language that we use to talk about our experiences are not foreign, however our bodies are seen as alien and intrusive. To exist as a fat person is to be seen as a societal burden, so to talk about that existence, especially in a way that indicts society, is seen as a nuisance.