Belly of the Beast
Page 7
Mike Brown and Tamir Rice were both depicted and literally described as massive men—not boys. Despite being just eighteen years old and twelve years old respectively, their boyhood was killed alongside them in cold blood. Media and society alike compared Brown to an ape and a gorilla while the officer by whom he was murdered likened him to Hulk Hogan and described him with the ability to run through bullets.23 It didn’t matter that Brown had just graduated from high school. It didn’t matter that Rice was only in the sixth grade. What mattered was that before the officers that murdered them both stood two giants, massive and uncontrollable animals, beings for whom “innocence” and childhood were never an afforded luxury. Anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, the Bellies of the Beasts.
Their murders were intentional. A study published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2014 titled “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children” sought to determine how much Black children were treated differently from white children based entirely on their race. This study found that “black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.” This study tested over 170 police officers—most of whom were white—in predominantly Black areas. The study, in which officers were tasked with pairing Black and white children to either large cats, like lions, or to apes, found that most of the officers paired Black children with apes. Those same officers, according to this study, were also more likely to use excessive force against a Black child in custody. Use of force was described as “takedown or wrist lock; kicking or punching; striking with a blunt object; using a police dog, restraints or hobbling; or using tear gas, electric shock or killing.”
Walter Scott was running away when he was murdered, and in many ways this is reminiscent of the birth of policing. Scott’s murder came as the result of a Black fat seeking safety—something that, much like with health, is inaccessible to the Black fat. As with enslaved people from literal plantations who sought freedom by fleeing the fields, or many “criminals” and refugees who cross borders seeking asylum, Scott ran away from what he recognized as danger in search of an imagined safety. Policing has a legacy, and that legacy is about much more than the continued criminalization, apprehension, and murder of the Black fat—its legacy is the formation of a World in which one is always the criminal, always the Slave, always the Black fat, and is therefore always running away from danger even as and because safety’s locale is always unreachable.
This is all true, too, for Samuel DuBose, Alton Sterling, and George Floyd. Anti-Blackness, specifically as it relates to police brutality, cannot be divorced from anti-fatness. As such, the Belly cannot be separated from the Beast—which is to say that there is no Beast without the Belly, and there is no Belly without the Beast. Fat Black people—specifically men—experience police brutality at disproportionate rates because their “largeness” coupled with their Blackness is read as dangerous, destructive, and inherently violent.
It is for this reason that many of the men that crossed television screens and made national headlines after being murdered by police were both fat and Black. The years 2014 through 2020 made clear the inherent violence of policing for many. What those years and the many cases and hashtags that came along with them should also make very clear is that this type of violence works to silo the Black fat and is therefore only made possible through the Black fat’s continued subjugation. Mike Brown, Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, George Floyd, Samuel DuBose, Tamir Rice, and so many others are testaments to this fact.
The focus on Black cisgender men here is not intended to suggest that it’s them, and them only, who are in danger of experiencing the weight of police violence. Black cisgender women, Black trans women, and other Black trans people are also directly and indirectly harmed by police violence because of the ways that anti-Blackness and gender work together to create the conditions that endanger them. This is, instead, intended to provide a point of clarity for why so many, if not most, of the people who crossed television screens as victims of police murder were both Black and fat.
This war on fat people and Black people didn’t start with slavery and jump immediately to the Black Lives Matter era. In many ways, wars waged on Black communities and fat communities between the 1980s and the early 2000s, through the War on Drugs and the subsequent War on Obesity, bound these structures together in ways that must be interrogated more intently.
5
The War on Drugs and the War on Obesity
In March 2004, during a news conference with widespread coverage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report that claimed that obesity was “killing 400,000 Americans a year,” and that it was becoming America’s “number one preventable death”—surpassing tobacco. The CDC defines obesity as “weight that is higher than what is considered as a healthy weight for a given height.”1 Body mass index (BMI) is used as a “screening tool” to determine who is and is not obese. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which, at least at the time, was the most prestigious medical journal in the nation. Since Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC at the time, and other top CDC scientists co-authored this report, it had the credibility it needed for waves of reporters and news outlets to publish it. It would soon lead to egregious and violent headlines across the nation about fat people, fat bodies, and the alarming rate at which they were allegedly dying from obesity. It would also be cited repeatedly by officials including then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, several members of Congress, and creators of weight loss drugs seeking to draw attention and funding to anti-obesity efforts. From that moment forward, throughout the rest of that year, public officials and other media platforms used that report as evidence that obesity was the greatest threat facing the American people, and as justification for what would eventually become a forceful and strapping diet industrial complex. This was the start of the “Obesity Epidemic.”
There were a few public indictments of the JAMA report, starting with Science magazine in May 2004. In a report of their own, they wrote: “Some researchers, including a few at the CDC, dismiss this prediction, saying the underlying data are weak. They argue that the paper’s compatibility with a new anti-obesity theme in government public health pronouncements—rather than sound analysis—propelled it into print.”2 This became, at least on record, the first acknowledgment of an emerging anti-fat theme within government, health, and science institutions. Soon after Science magazine’s report, the Wall Street Journal published a story of their own that covered the errors in the study published in JAMA. On November 23, 2004, they opened their story with “America’s obesity epidemic may not be as deadly as the government has claimed.” Continuing, they wrote that the study “inflated the impact of obesity on the annual death toll by tens of thousands due to statistical errors.”3 On April 30, just a month after the later-disputed report was published, Dr. Terry Pechacek, who was the associate director for science in the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, wrote in an email to his colleagues that he was “worried that the scientific credibility of the CDC likely could be damaged by the manner in which this paper and valid, credible, and repeated scientific questions about its methodology have been handled.” After stating that he had warned two of the report’s authors along with another senior scientist, Pechacek wrote, “I would never clear this paper if I had been given the opportunity to provide a formal review.”4
According to J. Eric Oliver in his book Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic, Dr. Pechacek was right to worry. A more intentional look at the method the CDC used to produce these calculations indicated that the numbers were far from accurate. In his book, Oliver says:
The CDC researchers did not calculate the 400,000 deaths by checking to see if the weight of each person was a factor in his or her [
or their] death. Rather, they estimated a figure by comparing the death rates of thin and heavy people using data that were nearly thirty years old. Although heavier people tend to die more frequently than people in mid-range weights, it is by no means clear that their weight is the cause of their higher death rates. It is far more likely that their weight is simply a proxy for other, more important factors such as their diet, exercise, or family medical history. The researchers, however, simply assumed that obesity was the primary cause of death, even though there was no clear scientific rationale for this supposition.
In other words, the CDC contrived this number from an estimation after reviewing data that was thirty years old. It was never a calculated number concluded from their own intense research; it was a scientific guess made with the hope to punish fat people for their bodies. And it worked. The damage had already been done. The people and institutions who would stand to benefit from that report had already won, and it was the start of the modern genocide of fatness and fat people. As Oliver states, fat people do tend to die at higher rates than their thin counterparts, but it isn’t because of their weight. Fat people tend to die at higher rates than thin people because doctors misdiagnose them, or refuse to treat them, due to their fatness.5
In January 2005, the CDC admitted that their 400,000 deaths number was a result of a “mathematical error,”6 and in February of that same year—just after the CDC published a summation of the internal investigation that was launched following the initial report’s release—the Los Angeles Times published a response to the investigation. Their report opened with this firm statement: “A controversial government study that may have sharply overstated America’s death toll from obesity was inappropriately released as a result of miscommunication, bureaucratic snafus and acquiescence from dissenting scientists.”7 This would become the second public acknowledgment of governmental disarray that was leading the nation in one of the most violent pseudoepidemics in the nation’s history.
In April 2005, just a year after the initial report was published, the CDC released another report—also through JAMA—wherein they not only offered a much smaller number of deaths per year due to obesity, but also claimed that “moderately overweight people” live longer than people at a “normal weight.” The new report in JAMA cut the death toll to 112,000,8 which was well under half of what was initially reported, but the damage had already been done. Around the world, people were using the CDC’s original numbers as fuel for the war waged on fat people. The government allocated more money to scientists for research on the “harmful effects” of obesity; the number of plastic surgeries, particularly abdominoplasty—best known as a tummy tuck—and liposuction doubled in number from the start of the decade to the end of it; gyms became anecdotally known as “clubs of the 2000s,” as gym memberships skyrocketed that decade; major diet industry companies, like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, changed their marketing schemes, which resulted in them raking in millions of more dollars for the diet industry.
The diet industry, at the time, was already well over a century old. Americans had been dieting and trying to lose weight for decades. But with this war waged on obesity, the early to mid-2000s are a pivotal moment in history for the creation of this modern diet industrial complex. The CDC’s report cemented a growing belief: fat people were dying rapidly and the only solution was to kill them quicker—either through forcing them to transform their bodies or to die trying. Despite how theatrical that reads, that is what was being demanded of fat people. The goal was, and continues to be, to eradicate fatness. To do that, one was to either overinvest in dieting—which has proven to be ineffective—or die trying to reach an ideal weight defined by organizations like the CDC and WHO, either on an operating table or in a gym.
What is happening to fat people, the societal and systemic bias and marginalization they have to navigate, is in large part due to the one CDC report heard around the world. And to this day, the CDC continues to be at the forefront of selling “obesity” as an epidemic.
But this was not the first time in America’s history that a genocide would be declared on an entire community at the behest of this country’s leadership. Just three decades before the start of the War on Obesity there was the genesis of the War on Drugs.
In the 1960s, drugs were a prominent part of the sociopolitical climate of the times. They became associated with juvenile uprisings, and in many ways, they became emblematic of the political and ideological contestation over harmful policies and practices by the United States government—arguments led mostly by Black and other marginalized people. As such, the government ceased all research on the safety of these drugs and, in 1971, former president Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs.9 Nixon substantially increased the amount and power of federal drug control agencies in the country and bulldozed mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants into the forefront of the legislation being passed at that time. Though it passed during his tenure as president, the legislation picked up momentum under Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. By the early 1980s, local police had used over 1,500 no-knock warrants, according to Peter Kraska, a professor with the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University.10 By the year 2000, that number had increased to 40,000 per year. In 2010, it increased to 70,000 per year. Of these searches, over 40 percent impacted, and continue to impact, Black homes11—including the home of Breonna Taylor who was killed in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2020.
Soon after that legislation was passed, Nixon placed marijuana in the most restrictive category of drugs, schedule one, where it would stay until it was reviewed by a commission led by then-Governor Raymond Shafer—a commission appointed by Nixon. Despite the concordant recommendation from the commission in 1972 to decriminalize the possession and distribution of marijuana—for personal use—Nixon ignored the report and did not adhere to the proposed recommendation.12 Irrespective of this, eleven states around the country decriminalized marijuana possession between the years 1973 and 1977—a year in which former president Jimmy Carter ran and was elected on a platform inclusive of the decriminalization of marijuana. And in that same year, the Senate Judiciary Committee motioned to decriminalize the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use. But soon after, these efforts were left behind as former president Ronald Reagan ushered in what would become known as “mass incarceration” through his expansion of Nixon’s war on drugs. The incarceration of people charged with nonviolent drug offenses grew from 50,000 in Reagan’s first year in office to 400,000 by the end of 1997.13 Stress levels and concerns induced by the fearmongering of the Reagan administration were high, forcing upon mostly Black communities a proliferation of arrests. By the end of 1999, over half a million Black people were held in state or federal prisons. In 1980, the overall federal prison population was 24,000. By 1996, the number had grown to 106,000—the majority of which were arrested for drug offenses. According to Kenneth B. Nunn in “Race, Crime and the Pool of Surplus Criminality: Or Why the ‘War on Drugs’ Was a ‘War on Blacks,’” from 1979 to 1989, the percentage of Black people arrested on drug charges doubled from 22 percent to 42 percent of the overall number of drug-related arrests. Also during that time, the amount of Black arrests for drug use violations grew exponentially from 112,748 to 452,574—an increase of over 300 percent.
First Lady Nancy Reagan began campaigning against the use, possession, and distribution of drugs, most notably crack—a form of cocaine that can be smoked—and coined the now infamous slogan “Just Say No.” What followed was disastrous and still wreaks havoc in Black communities throughout the country. Ronald Reagan introduced zero-tolerance policies in the mid-80s and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates—who according to the Drug Policy Alliance once stated that “casual drug users should be taken out and shot”—founded the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E) program that would soon be implemented in schools across the country despite there being no evidence stating that it w
as useful. This also meant, however, that there was no widespread evidence that it was ineffective—an unsurprising failing of the United States’ medical industry. The Drug Policy Alliance also states that “the increasingly harsh drug policies also blocked the expansion of syringe access programs and other harm reduction policies to reduce the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS,”14 making the War on Drugs not only a war on recreational use of drugs but also on medicinal use. They continue:
In the late 1980s, a political hysteria about drugs led to the passage of draconian penalties in Congress and state legislatures that rapidly increased the prison population. In 1985, the proportion of Americans polled who saw drug abuse as the nation’s “number one problem” was just 2–6 percent. The figure grew through the remainder of the 1980s until, in September 1989, it reached a remarkable 64 percent—one of the most intense fixations by the American public on any issue in polling history. Within less than a year, however, the figure plummeted to less than 10 percent, as the media lost interest. The draconian policies enacted during the hysteria remained, however, and continued to result in escalating levels of arrests and incarceration.