You’re only as sick as your secrets.

I am fat, Black, and female. And it was at the intersection of these identities that I learned about fat and the body—what would become my fat body and the bodies of others. Latina women, Black women, white women, and other women of color comprised the chorus of voices that sang me into awareness of the danger and the stigma of being fat. Later I would seek out soloists who sang of fat liberation, but the mass choir of the society always sang backup, a toxic ode to thinness and diet culture, harmonizing in a minor key.

I have always experienced the conversation about fatphobia and fat liberation among women. Which makes sense, because women’s worth in our culture is nearly completely tied to appearance. And a cultural prescription for thinness is a wonderful weapon with which to keep us all preoccupied in an unwinnable war against our bodies’ natural state of diversity.

Fatphobia affects all women, but it doesn’t affect all of us equally. Currently, my body is designated by the medical industry as “overweight,” but in the past, I have been designated as “obese – class 1.” I spent much of my teen and young adult life teetering between the top of “normal” and “overweight.” As I’ve gotten older and had a baby, I’ve become what Roxane Gay calls “Lane Bryant fat.” I can’t buy clothes in “standard” sizes, like at a department store, but a slew of plus-sized chains will sell me some of the same clothes for a 50-75% markup. In contrast, bigger fat women, who are the most brutally targeted and societally marginalized, have been left behind even by capitalism. Women who can’t fit into “Lane Bryant fat” sizes bear the brunt of the oppression. As many have pointed out recently, including Evette Dionne, the new and mainstream body acceptance movement has been a co-optation of a movement originally intended to free fat women from a vicious oppression. Instead, it has become an assimilation project to invite commercially attractive women, even those of us who are “plus sized,” into the mainstream, while leaving the oppression intact to continue attacking fat women who don’t fit the new standard.

The story of women’s bodies is also a story of trauma. Sometimes early trauma makes us eat compulsively: whether undereating, bingeing, purging, or otherwise. But the fat liberationists have always pushed the radical notion that a key trauma for fat people that deserved focus was the trauma of fatphobia itself. That daily living in a body that was despised and targeted in a society was a culturally sanctioned trauma that continued to brutalize fat women with impunity. Sometimes under the pretext of “health concerns” and “for their own good.” Or sometimes just because a seat or bed or other spaces that are supposed to fit humans were created in dimensions that exclude bigger bodies or put them at risk. In addition, some scholars have argued (with data to back them up) that part of the “health problems” that fat people face may well be caused by the impact of fatphobia, social stigma, and the ravages of chronic dieting, more than any actual harm of being fat.

So this is how I have always understood fat politics, as a conversation about women, women’s bodies, women’s worth, and a possible site of women’s resistance to patriarchy. Which is why Kiese Laymon’s book, Heavy: An American Memoir is so profoundly radical. He tells the story of his growing up as a boy and young man at the intersection of blackness, fatness, and poverty. And suddenly, for the first time, I am able to get a perspective on fatphobia that is untangled from femaleness. As a boy, Laymon’s growing Black body increases his vulnerability as a target for state-sanctioned violence. As a poor Black boy, he internalizes the messages of fatphobia and they fully impact how he feels about himself, and how he moves in the world. There are moments in his story where he takes on some of the patterns that are traditionally female in this society, but the overall story doesn’t fit into traditionally female narratives. He empathizes a great deal with his mother, and the entire book is a letter to his mother. The narrative is utterly revolutionary in the way he breaks the Black male code of silence and speaks on sexual trauma, family trauma, and bystander trauma of witnessing male sexual violence toward women. He paints with lyrical clarity how fatphobia, white supremacy, poverty, and intergenerational family trauma were intertwined in his early life. And also how male domination and male violence impacted the women in his family, the women and girls around him, and his own body.

Class is such a key piece of the book. Laymon is a Southern Black man, and I think it’s worth mentioning that “poverty” in his family’s case is really about “wage theft.” The theft of wealth from Black families during slavery and after. The legacy of this theft continued into the 20th century, and continues today. According to Laymon, “New Deal provisions, especially the Social Security provision, eliminated agricultural workers and domestics. My grandmother grew up on her grandparents’ 80-acre farm and worked as a domestic for about a decade. So, for one-third of her work life, she was robbed of social security benefits…My grandparents were not recipients of any federal relief aid…Those efforts were not linear and thus the rural poor—North and South—suffered intergenerational wage and educational insults—legacies of indifference, violence—all  amid some progress.” So even when the country was supposedly banding together in hard times, racism meant that Black people were often left out. His uncle was able to buy a house on the GI bill (part of the New Deal), but only after serving in Viet Nam. The economic playing field never got leveled. And a Southern fat Black boy would come of age in a world of violence, both intimate and state-sanctioned.

Although fatness is associated with excess, the experience of being fat is paradoxically connected to some kind of lack: lack of acceptance, lack of protection, lack of food and money, lack of safety, lack of love. And the fatphobia—both internalized and external—zeroes in on us precisely because of the vulnerability we bring through other identities where we’re targeted. In the hyperexposed world of the female body, women have been speaking out for decades about how the brutality of fatphobia. But men’s bodies aren’t scrutinized in the same way. For men, however, including men of color, poor men, and other men for whom fatphobia can be brutal, there is an option to hide out. I am certain that other men in large bodies, particularly black men, have shared some of Kiese Laymon’s experiences. However, until now, no black male writer has had the courage and the skill to bring those experiences to voice in this way. Laymon’s articulation about his life has illuminated deeply hidden truths about racism, classism, and fatphobia. As well as the impact on black men of male domination, male violence and intergenerational family trauma and addiction.

For many years, I worked in the alcohol/drug and harm reduction field. During that time, I learned an AA saying: “you’re only as sick as your secrets.” Kiese Laymon’s powerful words are joining a new chorus of voices. Black people releasing the unspoken, telling all the intersectional dimensions of truth and chanting us whole.

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“Everybody loves a fat guy,” Donald Tr*mp

Looking at fatphobia through the lens of Kiese’s book and the historical perspective of our times, I had a revelation. Fatphobia is an oppression that doesn’t have much power on its own. Look at the man in the White House. He’s fat. But he’s also rich, white, and male. Being fat has not stopped him from getting laid, from getting married to a series of commercially attractive women, from becoming president, from being seen as a success in business—even when he has actually been a colossal business failure. He is safe from state-sanctioned violence, from being valued for his appearance, from being marginalized, silenced, attacked, denied. Yet he criticizes women for being fat with total impunity, even women who are statistically smaller than average in size. It’s really kind of unbelievable. While fat women or people of color (and particularly women of color) need to be ten times as good to get anywhere, this man can be both mediocre and incompetent (as well as fat) and still rise to the top of his game.

A fellow poet—Pablo Paredes—pointed out that wealth is sufficient to de-weaponize fatness for men of color, as well.

He offered examples of heterosexual male rap artists—Fat Joe, Big Pun, The Notorious BIG, Heavy D. Unlike Tr*mp, however, these men were talented and had to work hard in order to succeed. But once they succeeded (and sometimes even before) they were considered very desirable. Most of them were married, and none of them lacked female company. Class, it would seem, trumps fat for men in our society.

There have always been successful (and sexy) fat Black women. I think of Big Mama Thornton as an early pioneer. Until recently, however, they were never able to cross over to mainstream (white) audiences. Black communities have traditionally had much more generous ideas about what types of bodies can be attractive. While modern white European cultural norms have emphasized restriction, African traditions have celebrated abundance. Black women are definitely affected by fatphobia, but–as a group–we have consistently been the ones i US society to model an unassimilated confidence outside of white beauty norms. Our leadership, in combination with decades of activists fighting against fatphobia, has made room for a contemporary artist like the amazing Lizzo, to have a crossover career. And any successful fat Black woman has had to work ten times as good to get half as far.

I am utterly fascinated by Tr*mp as a fat person, because he literally fits all the fatphobic stereotypes. Fat people are supposed to be lazy, undesirable failures. In actuality, Tr*mp is all of these. But not because he’s fat, rather because he’s a narcissistic bully, and an entitled pathological liar. He is so lazy that he was literally golfing while it was time for him to president during the pandemic. Yet his association with wealth means that he cannot be perceived as lazy. Our classist society denies the uneven playing field and dictates that people’s class position are a reasonable outcome of their choices and actions. Therefore, those with wealth are considered smarter, more industrious, without any evidence. And those who are poor are considered lazy or stupid. The bootstrappy presumption is that anyone poor and deserving will easily lift themselves out of poverty, and if they don’t, it simply validates that they weren’t deserving after all. Tr*mp’s is so lazy that he is giving out medical advice without bothering to educate himself about grade school information on chemistry or biology. His lazy advice has already killed one man and may cause even more deaths. His general lack of morals is criminal.

His lack of morals with women is even worse. Even if Tr*mp’s wealth didn’t make him attractive to women, that doesn’t matter. Because he just “grabs them by the pussy.” And then his privilege insulates him from any consequences of sexual assault. Therefore, to be so utterly dominant in race, gender, and class is make the issue of desire irrelevant. Society is completely organized around giving you what you desire, and you needn’t be desirable, because you are in a position to enforce your desires, all the way up to the White House.

In 2016, a naked statue of Tr*mp was unveiled, and there were many fatphobic public comments. Many pushed back against the body shaming, and I agree that body shaming is profoundly oppressive. But there was something back then that I couldn’t name. Having read Kiese’s memoir, and having untangled fatness from other oppressions, I can find the words now. The body shaming of Tr*mp operated so differently from the body shaming of most fat people. It didn’t make the practice okay, but Tr*mp himself was not vulnerable at the level of his body, in the same way women, people of color, or ordinary people are vulnerable. I don’t support publicly body-shaming Tr*mp. But not because it has the potential to harm him as a fat person. Rather, because it has the potential to harm the rest of us.

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You can never be too rich or too thin.

This is decidedly untrue. Deaths from anorexia show us that people can literally die if they are too thin. And these days, as Jeff Bezos makes billions off the coronavirus pandemic, we are seeing that you can also be too rich. That is to say, obscene levels of wealth are threatening our health, our lives, our economy, and our democracy. Not to mention the habitability of our planet.

Gluttony is supposed to be a sin. Part of what animates fatphobia in our Christian dominated society is the underlying shame and hatred of the body in European Christianity. The notion of the body—as all things in nature—needing to be tightly controlled, something over which we need to have “dominion.” Gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins, is often associated with food or overeating. But in reality, the ultra-rich are the true gluttons. Their insatiable greed for money and power is the most dangerous force on earth. Greed is also a sin, but is so enshrined in capitalism that it isn’t really seen as a problem in our culture–unlike the idea of gluttony. Fat shaming only works because people have an internal sense of shame to trigger. Tr*mp is so shameless that he is using the coronavirus pandemic to loot our nation as people die. Shameless GOP lawmakers have suggested that maybe our elders should die to protect the economy. Jeff Bezos can let his workers die from lack of protection and lack of sick pay, when he makes nine million dollars an hour. Nine million. Although I do not believe in sin, I do believe that this gluttony of the wealthy, this greed, is the one of the closest things we have to it.

In the US, we say “dieting.” In England they say “reducing.” It’s time for corporations and billionaires to go on the British diet: “reducing.” They need to reduce the amount of money they make, the amount they keep after taxes (some of them need to start paying taxes). They need to reduce (eliminate, really) the bailouts and subsidies they expect to get from the government. They need to reduce their influence in politics and their expectations of influence in our society. In particular, the fossil fuel industry needs to be reduced or eliminated so that we can reduce and then eliminate our carbon emissions that are warming the planet.

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The Green New Deal

There are fat Black boys growing up today in poverty in the South. They may aspire to grow up to be rappers who can have all the food and the big gas-guzzling cars and women they want. But such visions of celebrity and material success are mostly unattainable fantasies. Furthermore, they’re individualistic solutions to what are ultimately collective and institutional problems. What those young boys really need–what we all need–is The Green New Deal. Unlike its predecessor, the New Deal, no one is left behind. Not agricultural workers. Not domestic workers. Not anyone. It would lift people out of poverty. It would address the climate crisis at scale. It would address some of the economic vulnerability of women and people of color to gendered and state-sanctioned violence. The Green New Deal doesn’t explicitly address fatphobia. But it does have provisions to address the gluttony of the rich, particularly the fossil fuel industries. Because if anything weighs too much right now, it’s the heaviness of the climate crisis. And in that case, reducing really is the answer.