In response to Alice Randall’s recent New York Times article, “Black Women and Fat,” Jenn Leyva discusses her own experience with race, class, and being fat.
A little over a week ago, Alice Randall published an article entitled “Black Women and Fat” in The New York Times. Randall argues that Black women have different experiences with fatness, in particular, there are certain ways in which Black women are encouraged to be fat. Randall argues that this encouragement is dangerous and contributing to larger health and economic problems for Black women and society in general.
Friends and acquaintances have asked my thoughts on this article. Despite my loud dedication to radical body politics, I didn’t even read the article until a few days ago. It’s hard to for me to read arguments against fatness because I have spent the majority of my life hating my body. I spent years never buying clothes over an arbitrary size no matter how limiting my selection, crying in dressing rooms, and worrying about how many calories were in Chapstick. Reading the same arguments that drove me to such disordered thinking and actions brings back the painful ways in which I used to hurt myself.
I have since found the truth and the way and the light: fat acceptance. The premise is simple and profound: There is nothing wrong with being fat. Being fat doesn’t mean I’m lazy, stupid, or ugly. Being fat doesn’t make me diseased. Being fat doesn’t make me unworthy. Being fat doesn’t make my body revolting. Being fat doesn’t make me a bad person. Being fat isn’t causing untold economic destruction. In short, Randall is wrong.
So, in response to Randall, I can firmly say there is nothing wrong with being fat, but being fat has a huge impact on my life (and that goes beyond my gleeful use of fat puns). My fatness doesn’t bother me—really. My body and I are on great terms. It’s the ways in which I feel that nearly everyone is set to undermine this acceptance. We’re all in the throes of diet culture—the dominant culture where weight loss through dieting is a nearly compulsory goal. The most obvious consequences of diet culture are clinical eating disorders and body dysmorphia, but it’s more than what the women’s magazine articles cover in their annual “body image” articles.
Fatness has a huge impact on social order, especially race and class dynamics. And this is where Randall is onto something. Fatness means different things for different people and different bodies (if we’re separating people and bodies, that’s another topic entirely). My experience with fatness is inextricably linked with my race, class experiences, and identities. I’m white, but not. My dad is Cuban, and I have been aware that I’m not white for as long as it matters. But just about everyone assumes I’m white. My experiences with fat are informed by my dad’s experiences. He has achieved the American Dream, from poor immigrant to the quintessential middle class suburban family, and he is firmly invested in maintaining this status. In elementary school, I remember trying to go to school in clothes that were wrinkled, and my dad forbade it. He wouldn’t let me because I would look “poor.” Having his daughter go to school looking sloppy is not part of the picket-fenced ideal.
This is but one example from my childhood, but it sticks out in my memory because it shows how tied my dad’s identity was to my appearance. It’s striking because it’s still relevant. I’m fat, and my fatness affects the ways in which people read my class status and, by extension, the class status of my family. Regardless of what I’m wearing, fatness can always be seen as sloppy because fat is read as downwardly mobile. I’m Ivy League educated, shop at Trader Joe’s, and vote liberal—I ought be upwardly mobile! But diet culture has constructed fatness as a problem with poor people. (The subject of why poor people are fat is worthy of inquiry far beyond the scope of this article.)
This has been part of my experiences with race, class and fatness, but it’s different for Black women. It’s also different for white men, trans folks, disabled people, and just about every identity. Intersectionality is a thing, not just a theory. It’s important that the voices of people who experience these lived realities are heard. For responses from fat Black women, I recommend this one by Cassandra Jones-McBryde and this one by Jamilah Lemieux published on Ebony magazine. There are many, many more books, articles, and blogs addressing other intersectional identities. I recommend following links—the fat-o-sphere is a rich and thoughtful place.
Fatness means different things for different bodies and different people. It’s tempting to let these differences divide us, but we can’t eviscerate diet culture by asking it to morph into different shapes. It already does that; it’s insidious and relentless, like a nightmarish never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole. We have to do this work together, to listen to the stories of those who experience fatness differently, and to respect differences. Body liberation is for everybody.
When Jenn Leyva was 16, her dad told her that he’d buy her a car if she lost weight. She cried, finished her calculus homework, and is now a New York based fat activist and a senior at Columbia studying biochemistry. She authors Fat and the Ivy, a fat blog about social justice, feminism, science, health, and fa(t)shion.
Photo by Gary Barnes
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