What the Left Is Missing About Fat Politics

Da’Shaun Harrison, a writer and editor for the intersectional feminist magazine Wear Your Voice, has organized in Atlanta for more than a decade around issues such as police violence and gentrification.

But it wasn’t until 2018 that they found fat politics – a way to better understand their experience in the world as a fat, Black, disabled and nonbinary trans person. It’s a movement that advocates for the rights and dignity of, and end of discrimination against, fat people, and is tied to a broader project of liberation.

Last month, I spoke with Harrison about their forthcoming book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness As Anti-Blackness, and how fat politics is marginalized in otherwise progressive circles.

“People will separate fatness from conversations on gender or sexuality or race because they say, ‘We're born a particular race, or gender, or sexuality,’” while saying fatness is a choice, but “all of these things are constructed,” Harrison told me. Once we see that, they argue, we can fight for collective liberation. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity)

You talk about how being “anti-Black” and “anti-fat” are connected in your book. Say more about that.

There is no way to separate anti-Blackness from anti-fatness because one produces the other.

Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body talks specifically about the way that anti-fatness became a coherent ideology through the slave trade. [According to Strings, full-figured body types, popular among 18th century “Renaissance women,” came to be associated with Africans during the slave trade, along with other racist attitudes about eating, sensuality and self-control.]

Therefore, there is no way to work through anti-fatness without also talking about anti-Blackness, and being mindful of the fact that even white people who are superfat – a term we would use in fat spaces – are not experiencing the brunt of anti-fatness because it's not coinciding with Blackness.

How do you discuss the ideas of health and what is “healthy” in your book?

There are Black folks who can never be “healthy” because the foundations of the medical industry are anti-Black, and always push us out. There’s the the body mass index (BMI), for example, and the way that it disproportionately harms Black folks because it was designed to only look at white cis men.

I quote the definition of health from the World Health Organization at the top of this chapter on health: “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

But by this WHO definition of health, there is no way for Black folks to be socially, mentally well when we’re living in a world where police violence is as present as it is, where Black women and other folks who have children are being killed every day in labor, when Black folks are having to suffer through redlining and gentrification, and therefore the harms of existing in neighborhoods that are by factories that give us asthma, and other illnesses.

What are your thoughts about the way that people are trying to reframe health and exercise away from their racist origins?

I want people to have the free will and the agency to want to move their bodies, and gyms, the language [around gyms], and exercise as a culture are so deeply connected to anti-fat bias and keeping fat folks out of spaces where movement is something that we can enjoy, and not something that we do to punish our bodies. I'm also in favor of people not moving their bodies because they don't want to do it, and that would be completely OK.

Sure, I dance around my apartment and I'll go outside and walk around, but I don't call that exercise, precisely because I think exercise is about punishment and not about enjoyment. And I'm not invested in punishing my body … or want[ing] to fit an ideal look and ideal weight.

You’ve written that a person’s size and fatness affects how police treat Black masculine people. How so?

Fatness plays a significant role in who is being murdered. That’s why I chose to [write] this chapter, to map out the amount of men who were murdered by police because of their size – most of them have had their size used in court as justification for their murder.

Eric Garner was taken down by a gang of cops, and one of them choked him to death because he felt that Eric Garner could survive it. Mike Brown was described by Darren Wilson as the Hulk, capable of running through bullets, even though Mike Brown was only a couple inches taller and a few pounds heavier than Darren Wilson.

With George Floyd and Eric Garner, medical practitioners and examiners were corroborating the police's stories by saying that it wasn’t the violence caused the deaths, but that their own “health issues” caused them.

Why do you think that conversations about anti-fatness aren’t present in left spaces? And why does fat organizing seem not as prevalent as organizing around other issues on the left?

Fat folks are organizing. I've been organizing for upwards of a decade, and in my experience, many of the people who are leading organizing efforts are fat people, fat Black people in particular.

[Fatness is] seen as, “Well, your fatness can be changed,” or, “Your fatness, your body can shift, so we'll talk about body image.” Left spaces will reduce violence against fat people to insecurities and body image issues, which are absolutely issues, but not the only issues. We don't take it further to say that the issues that you have with your bodies are rooted in anti-fatness, because so much about how people talk about desire is rooted in anti-fatness.

Movements that give language to queerness, transness, Black struggle, AAPI struggle, Latinx struggle [have been around for longer than] the fatness movement – it’s really just a two-decade-old movement, as a mainstream concept – so it's a lot harder to see this as an identity.