Everyday life for fat kids is like a fat camp. Even for those who have never been to one. Mistreated for having bodies that take up more room than humans are allotted. Harmed for showing up in a world where Thinness is the universal norm. This is a very targeted form of abuse. There is no other way to put it. Forcing exercise and diets, especially onto children, is an attempt to punish them for their fatness and that is abuse.
The blame rests on the medical industrial complex, which thrives off harming fat people. It rests on the diet industrial complex, which seeks to steal from fat people. And most yet, the blame rests on the collective and societal commitment to making exercise and fitness about weight loss and punishment rather than feeling good in one’s body and in motion. Through this commitment, whole industries have been developed with the intent to warp the minds of fat people—and people attempting to avoid becoming fat. We know them best as weight loss programs.
In September 2018, Weight Watchers published a press release that revealed the company’s new name, new tagline, and its overall “new” focus.5 The focus, according to the release, was “no longer weight loss” but rather “all around health and wellness.” The reality, however, is that a rebrand in name only does not shift the material reality that WW, as they are now known, is just another result of a two-hundred-plus-year phenomena: diet culture and the diet industrial complex—which I define as the written and unwritten pact between food, medical, and health care industries and billionaires with a vested interest in building and sustaining a socioeconomic system under which fat people are stolen from and harmed through dieting.
The diet industrial complex—and multibillion-dollar weight loss industries like WW—is a project that thrives only on the (societal) commitment to the subjugation of the Black, and moreover, the Black as the fat. Dieting, or yo-yo dieting as it’s more accurately referred to, is but a temporary food plan with only temporary solutions to something that is not inherently a problem. By this, I mean that diet culture was never intended to successfully produce results for anyone who invested in these programs, and the overall commitment to weight loss is inherently anti-fat. On diet culture, Virgie Tovar once wrote:
Diet culture does one thing very successfully: it alienates us from our natural relationship to food and movement, things that we as human beings have had a relationship to since the beginning of time, and which we cannot live without, and it sells them back to us as “diet” and “exercise” with the promise that with hard work and self-denial we can achieve a state worthy of love, respect, and admiration.6
But neither diet culture nor diets are needed to do this. Of people who diet, 95 to 97 percent tend to “fail.”7 Not because they aren’t committed, not because they are following them incorrectly, but because dieting demands that you do whatever it takes to shed pounds—even if what it takes requires you to harm yourself—instead of encouraging one to do what makes them feel good in their body. Especially if whatever that is does not require them to lose weight. Because the capital is in teaching people to hate their bodies; it’s in how much we value thinner bodies and how much guilt we associate with foods we enjoy.
Diet culture creates language like “guilty pleasure” and “cheat day,” which teaches one to associate foods that they love, that make them feel good, and that they actually find enjoyable, with harm. And while it is taught that diets are necessary for one’s survival, many of these short-term diets can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and more. In fact, one study found that men with a fluctuating weight were at an 80 percent higher risk of dying than men who were “overweight.”8 Another study found that women who were yo-yo dieters were about 82 percent less likely to reach and maintain their ideal weight.9
Revisiting Tovar’s quote, what one can find at the core of diet culture are two very specific forms of structural violence that already plague our society: patriarchy and purity culture.
As mentioned earlier in the book, bell hooks defines patriarchy as “a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”10 Purity culture emphasizes the evangelical Christian teachings that girls are supposed to be abstinent until marriage and that queer people are supposed to be “freed from all sexual immorality.”
These two things matter in the conversation of diet culture because at the crux of this industrial complex is the idea that dieting is for the weak to become strong—associating weakness with femininity, hence diets being marketed mostly to women, and strength with muscularity and masculinity—and for fat people to deny our appetite. In a literal sense, it is psychological terrorism. From its origins, diet culture was intended to force fat people to deny their desires, and the concept was introduced by Sylvester Graham, who insisted sex was immoral and food could control morality.11 In this way, diet culture and the diet industrial complex is a prison—the same prison that keeps people caged in the proverbial “closet” and locked behind the bars of purity.
In “Flaunting Fat: Sex with the Lights On,” Jenny Lee talks about “the closet” as it relates to fat queer people’s bodies. It is important not only to this conversation, but for abolitionists altogether. In the essay, Lee talks about how fat people are often forced into a “closet” through diet culture, specifically, in the same way that people who are deemed—or self-identify as—sexually deviant often are. Diet culture imprisons fat bodies, by which I mean that diet culture is the closet; it confines them to a cell—one that is inescapable—with the intention to keep fatness hidden/unseen/behind bars. As Strings stated, it is not about health but rather the repulsiveness assigned to fatness by others. For this reason, fat liberation is an abolitionist affair, abolition is a queer affair, queerness is a fat affair. Liberation for each of them is linked.
What can be added to this, though, is just as the closet is a room that many feminine gay men and butch lesbian women can rarely take rest in for safety, it is also a room that many fat people cannot fit in. What this means is that the closet is always already deadly and antagonistic, whether you are in it or outside of it. No one can sit comfortably inside of diet culture. It is the prison. It is the closet. It’s fixed and designed, specifically, to be uncomfortable. Its sole purpose is to incarcerate, to make sure that no fat person has the freedom to just be—whether they are dieting or not. In this way, the closet is not a place of refuge. It endangers many people by keeping them bound and doesn’t offer safety to people who exist too far outside of the borders of the identities it’s projected to keep safe. If you are “too fat,” or “too gay”—and, really, “too Black”—the closet can’t offer safety. But irrespective of whether one is in or outside the closet, what is always being demanded of the Black fat and the Black queer, in particular, is that they commit themselves to repressing or doing away with their queerness and their fatness. The promised safety can only be found in Thinness and heteronormativity, which is to say, safety is only offered to white people through whiteness.
A company like WW capitalizing off the fear and hate-mongering of the “Obesity Epidemic”—which does not exist—is anti-fat and capitalistic. Billions of dollars are spent on these weight loss programs to maintain diet culture, but the majority of Americans are fat. Not only does this mean that intentional weight loss is a scam, but it also means that diet culture is a scam—especially when considering that more and more studies are finding that weight loss does not improve health biomarkers.
Anyone who still has a vested interest in diet culture, intentional weight loss, and/or these types of programs is making the active decision to invest in systemic anti-fatness, anti-Blackness, ableism, misogyny/-noir, and capitalism.
Weight loss does not have to be something worth celebrating. Said d
ifferently, “lost” weight is celebrated because modern society teaches that the weightiness of fat peoples’ bodies is inherently burdensome, cross-bearing, backbreaking, onerous. Not on fat people, but on the people who surround them. Therefore, there’s no regard for whether a person is well when they “lose” weight because the societal desire is to not have to be concerned with the Ugliness of fatness—by which this means the Ugliness of the Black. How the fat is misplaced or “lost” does not matter, just as long as it is gone.
However, fatness—both as an identity and as the literal tissue—has value. Which means that the celebration of “lost” weight is much more of a celebration of thievery. It is the theft of a fat person’s ability to see themselves as someone who matters, theft of a person’s right to see their body as neutral rather than inherently bad, a breach of consent on how a person enters into a relationship with their fat body. It is a war on the body, particularly and especially for the Black, and it is one that has been introduced and reintroduced since the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
4
Black, Fat, and Policed
Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Samuel DuBose, Alton Sterling, George Floyd. These are just a few of the people who made headlines, national news coverage, and whose hashtagged names took over social media timelines after they were each murdered between 2014 and 2020.
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner stood on the streets of Staten Island, as he so often did, selling untaxed cigarettes. It was the second time that month he’d been approached by police, and it would have been his third arrest that year.1 Onlookers recorded the encounter that would soon be seen by millions. As he lay on the ground, surrounded by a swarm of New York police, Eric Garner was placed in an illegal chokehold by Daniel Pantaleo. Garner offered eleven pleas for breath with the words “I can’t breathe.” Pantaleo never let up. Soon after, coverage on Garner’s murder began to home in on his body. The US representative for New York’s second congressional district, Pete King, urged a grand jury to not indict Pantaleo because, as he tells it, the police were only doing their job to take down a “350-pound person who was resisting arrest.”2 According to King, Eric Garner’s cause of death was not the illegal chokehold but rather his asthma, his heart condition, and his “obesity.”
During a disciplinary trial, which did not happen until five years after the murder of Eric Garner, the medical examiner who conducted Garner’s autopsy—Dr. Floriana Persechino—claimed that while she did find that the chokehold “set off a lethal sequence of events,” that “even a bear hug” could have killed him due to his “fragile health.”3 Pantaleo’s attorney, Stuart London, homed in on Garner’s health too. During his cross-examination, he pointed to a report from NYPD’s doctor, Eli Kleinman—who had not personally examined Garner—wherein he stated that Garner was “predisposed to morbidity and mortality” and that his death was brought on by a “heated argument followed by a physical struggle.”4
The disciplinary hearing was supposed to answer one question: Did Pantaleo use an illegal chokehold? Instead, it centered on whether Garner could withstand or could have avoided experiencing an illegal chokehold . . . or a bear hug.
It is true; Eric Garner was a six-foot-two, 395-pound man with asthma, diabetes, and a heart condition.5 However, before his interaction with Pantaleo and the other police officers that swarmed around him, what he was not was dead. This means that, no matter how much of an untamable Beast he was made out to be by the lawyers over the case, the grand jury, the medical examiner and other doctors, and the media, what led him to his dying breath was a police officer’s arm around his neck.6
As Black communities around the United States mourned the death of Eric Garner, Mike Brown was murdered.
On August 9, 2014, Mike Brown’s name became an international hashtag in a matter of minutes. The world watched as his body lay flat in the streets of Ferguson with no medical care, forced to soak in his own blood for four hours before being hauled away. Weeks after murdering Brown, Darren Wilson gave his account of what transpired that day. In his testimony, Wilson described Brown as “aggressive” and “eager to fight.”7 To illustrate how powerful Brown was, Wilson described him as “Hulk Hogan,” and claimed that as he shot Brown, he “bulked up to run through the shots.”8 He called Brown “crazy”; he called him a “demon”; he claimed that Brown was “looking through him” and that he made Wilson feel like a “5-year-old” in comparison.9 At the time of the shooting, Darren Wilson was six feet, four inches tall and 210 pounds. Mike Brown was six feet, five inches tall and 290 pounds.10
Wilson made himself the perfect victim. Though he and Brown were built similarly, and only one of them had a weapon in their possession, Wilson knew that for him to evade any consequences, the only “weapons” Brown needed to possess were his fatness and his Blackness. What Wilson described was not another human being. He described a Beast, a Monster, something otherworldly. From that moment forward, we witnessed countless murders of Black men and masculine people, and what most of these people had in common—alongside Blackness—was fatness or an otherwise larger body.
Three months went by, and as Ferguson protestors were still rallying in the streets, there was another life lost. Tamir Rice.
On November 22, 2014, Tamir Rice was playing in a park in his neighborhood in Cleveland. He was spotted by a neighbor who called the police to report “a guy pointing a gun at people”11 in the park. On this call, the neighbor also warned that the “guy” was “probably a juvenile” and that the gun was “probably fake.”12 As police arrived, in under two seconds, Timothy Loehmann jumped out of his car and shot at Rice twice—hitting him once—from four feet away. Following the shooting, Detective James Mackey asked the FBI agent who had arrived on the scene if he’d assumed, as he walked up to aid Rice, that the boy was older. The agent responded, claiming he assumed Rice was “at least 18,” and explained that Rice was “big” and was “the size of a full-grown man.” From the moment he died, the blame for his murder was the size of his body—not the officer who shot him.
Investigators also claimed that they thought Rice was much older because of his size. This was a claim they were so deeply committed to that they conducted interviews specifically to search for photos of Rice holding a gun or photos where Rice appeared to be older compared with the photos being shown on the news. Three months after the shooting, the investigators conducted a follow-up interview with the neighbor who called the police. In that interview, he claimed that Rice looked to be “around 20-years-old”13—a much different claim than the initial one he made saying that Rice was probably a juvenile. As with Garner and Brown, the police officers and investigators were attempting to write Rice as the Beast in their story. Their intent was to make him the monster that had to be killed; a tale as old as time about the hero who kills the villain for “the greater good.” At twelve years old, Rice stood at five feet, seven inches and weighed two hundred pounds. He was indeed larger than the average twelve-year-old—a fact that only matters if one believes police have a right to murder Black people, or that police should exist at all. Nevertheless, prosecutors Tim McGinty and Matthew Meyer leaned into that fact. They also argued that Rice was “big for his age” and “could have easily passed for someone much older.”
Just over four months later, Walter Scott was gunned down.
Scott’s story, and the others that follow—barring George Floyd’s—are very important to include here, not only because of how high profile they were but also to showcase that anti-fatness and the inherent anti-Blackness within these cases is not always something that is explicit. Walter Scott, Samuel DuBose, and Alton Sterling were never specifically engaged like Garner, Brown, Rice, or Floyd, and yet their stories matter in this context, too, because anti-fatness is always already a factor in determining who/what lives and who/what must always die.
On April 4, 2015, Walter Scott was stopped by
ex-officer Michael Slager for a broken taillight as he pulled into the parking lot of an Advance Auto Parts store in Charleston, South Carolina. Slager approached Scott’s vehicle, and when he returned to his car, Scott bolted from his vehicle into a vacant lot. Slager followed him on foot and shot his taser at him. Once they were both in the lot, they had a physical altercation where Slager shot his taser at Scott once more. Scott was able to escape, and as he started to run away again, Slager shot at him eight times. Five of those rounds hit Scott in the back, killing him almost instantly. In the initial report, Slager claimed that he feared for his life because Scott took his taser during their altercation. To solidify this claim, Slager staged the scene.14 As Scott lay in his own blood, Slager grabbed the taser he alleged Scott took away from him and placed it near Scott’s body to make his story appear true. That story would later be proven untrue with the release of a video that showed not only the shooting but Slager planting evidence as well.
Just three months later, there was another shooting: Samuel DuBose.
On July 19, 2015, Samuel DuBose was pulled over by Ray Tensing—former officer of the University of Cincinnati Police—for a missing front license plate. When DuBose could not produce his driver’s license, Tensing demanded that he remove his seatbelt as Tensing attempted to open DuBose’s front door. In protest, DuBose yelled “I didn’t even do nothing” and held his door shut while turning the key in the ignition. Tensing yelled at him to stop, and in a matter of seconds, grabbed his firearm and set off one round into DuBose’s car—killing him instantly. As Tensing told the story, he fired his weapon only after DuBose started to drag him with his car. His body camera, however, showed that the car was not in motion before he fired his gun. The county prosecutor claimed that the shooting was “asinine,” and that Tensing “lost his temper” because DuBose “wouldn’t get out of his car quick enough.”15
Belly of the Beast Page 5
