People taking obesity drugs and the health industry are you guessed it

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Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s recent book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness is a call for revolution. “Out there is a reality where fat Black folks are experiencing the harms of anti-Blackness as anti-fatness,” they write; “Black liberation is the end goal, and for it to happen, fat liberation must also be part of that goal. Not ‘body positivity,’ but freedom” (3). To achieve such freedom, Harrison writes, we need to begin to reckon with the fact that racism and fatphobia are not only systemic issues, but are manifestations of the same corrosive belief: that of the Black body’s inferiority.

In their book, Harrison traces how fatness and Blackness refract through our ideas about desire, health, policing, and gender. These standards, they write, are not just “something the Black fat body has been removed from but rather [are] something created precisely for fat Black people, or the Black fat, to never have access to” (2). Because of this, Harrison argues, individually-oriented movements like the body positivity movement aren’t enough. Instead, we need to look further: to the systems created to devalue the Black body and, ultimately, to the assumptions on which those systems were built. As part of our series Fat Talk, Harrison corresponded with me about their new book and the entangled relationship between fatness and the Black body.

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Eileen: You argue throughout the book that anti-Blackness and anti-fatness are not intersecting attitudes, but part of the same ideology—that they exist inside one another. Could you tell me more about that? How does that distinction affect the way we can start to address these issues?

Da’Shaun: Anti-fatness is anti-Blackness. It is the condition under which the Black fat is held captive to and by the World. Anti-Blackness creates the World and gives meaning to everything in it. So in other words, anti-fatness is the framework by which the (Black) fat subject is forced to be inhuman: an object, the Beast. It is the global structure that determines how we are engaged in life and death, as well as who lives and who dies. In this way, fatness — like Blackness — is always and already criminalized, penalized, objectified, marginalized, and defined by the libidinal economy [or the collective unconscious (or by society" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noreferrer">.

This distinction is an important one because it makes clear that these ideologies do not and cannot exist independent of one another. To destroy one requires the destruction of the other. “Intersect” implies that they exist on their own and meet at a point; I’m suggesting that they have the same origin and, therefore, must have the same end.

Eileen: You make some brilliant connections between the War on Drugs and the War on Obesity. How have these movements asked Americans to orient fatness and Blackness in the public consciousness?

Da’Shaun: These wars have been the foundation for the propagandization of the public with the institutional backing of the U.S. government, government-funded science organizations, and the media. They’ve helped to cement centuries-old ideas about fatness as a killer, and Black people as killers (which is to say, both fatness and blackness are seen as criminal). The idea is that fatness, blackness, and black fatness are immoral, unjust, sinful, and unrighteous. How we are positioned in modern society must be explained, in large part, through these two wars.

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"The diet industry reflects this logic. It operates through what I once defined as formal and informal relationships among major food corporations, the medical-industrial complex, and individual wealthy benefactors to sustain a social order in which fat people are monitored, restricted, guilted, stolen from, and punished. Diet culture has always linked food to morality, framing restraint as virtue and pleasure as danger through language like 'guilty pleasure,'" Harrison said.

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"As governments retreat from care, and health increasingly becomes a signifier of discipline—rather than provision—fitness, disability, fatness, illness, Blackness, impairment, and bodily capacity are mobilized into measures of moral worth and political belonging. This panel examines how health, disability, body size, and race are instrumentalized by the state and being reorganized under health fascism," according to an event description.

In the session, Harrison argued that diet culture conditions "obedience," "self-denial," and "discipline" before framing those concepts as central components of "body fascism."

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alongside them. If you’re happy, then your happiness is racist, sexist, misogynistic, shows your whiteness, and most importantly shows how much privilege you have. Got it?

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If blacks wanna be fat, let them be fat

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