S2 E1: Fatphobia (& Foodphobia) is Anti-Blackness with Da’Shaun Harrison
Virgie and Da'Shaun trace the roots of diet culture all the way back to slavery, talk about navigating the health care system as fat people of color, and explore what it looks like to find love and community.
Journal with us! How does understanding that fatphobia and diet culture are anti-Blackness affect how you think about your relationship to food and eating?
Virgie Tovar: [00:00:00] Do you remember the first time you felt the fizzy crackle of pop rocks on your molars? The triumph of getting a full size Snickers bar in your trick or treat bag? The mind-blowing moment when your friend levels you up by teaching you how to mix peanut butter m&ms into buttery popcorn at the movies?
Then, just when you think things couldn't get any better, you meet a fancy dark chocolate bar sprinkled with salt crystals at a tiny bougie grocery store. And there it is again. Pure, unadulterated, joy. We begin this season with something epic, tantalizing, and almost mythological: candy. Unfortunately, candy isn't all sweet. And later in the episode, we're going to get into the history of candy and I have to warn you, it's a little dark. But for now, let's keep the candy positivity going. Let me introduce you to Da’Shaun Harrison.
Da’Shaun Harrison: [00:01:22] So, yes, I am Da’Shaun Harrison. I am Black, fat, queer, and trans, poor, disabled. I'm based out of Atlanta, Georgia. And I wear a lot of hats.
VT: [00:01:35] They are a brilliant writer, activist and public intellectual par excellence. And their candy crush...is Reese’s.
DH: [00:01:44] The velvety feel of the chocolate, along with like the gritty, but very smooth peanut butter fill. It just feels like me. I feel like I'm very, like a very velvety, smooth, rich, chocolate type of person, but I also have like this grainy type of like, inside, I've had to like, kind of develop as like a defense mechanism, but also as, um, who I am and a part of the environments I've lived in and I've been in.
VT: [00:02:12] So, is there a ceremony to eating the Re– I mean, I just want to know how you do it.
DH: [00:02:17] There is no ceremony for me. I just– I mean, I've never actually seen a bear, but what I imagine, what I imagine a bear looks like... what I imagine a bear looks like when it's like super hungry, um, and it, like, goes into the water to, like, collect the fish.
VT: [00:02:39] Okay. I love it. So let's, I'm going to try and emulate this bear thing... and I'm just like ripping it open and I'm just imagining that I'm in the wild.
DH: [00:02:49] In the wild.
VT: [00:02:51] Should we do the bite together
DH: [00:02:53]I put it in my mouth already, so...
VT: [00:02:55] Let's just do it. I’m gonna eat it. Uh, mm.
DH: [00:02:59] I love Reese’s.
VT: [00:03:05] It’s nice. Woah.
DH: [00:03:07] It’s my favorite. If I can just get my hands on a Reese's cup or two, um, I'm good to go. Like, I’m set, and it just feels like fat glory.
VT: [00:03:23] Yes. I mean, do you remember when it became a comfort thing?
DH: [00:03:29] It became a co– you're going to like, make me open up already.
VT: I’m ready. I want it
DH: You’re ready for it. Um, I had a kind of rough childhood. So, dealt with like a lot of like, abandonment things with my dad, and bullying of course. I've always been fat, so I was like a fat kid. And so I got bullied for being a fat kid. So Reese’s became, I guess just at an early age, just became, like, something that I gravitated towards because I think that, like, Reese’s has just in a way, has inadvertently been like a representative of who I am.
VT: [00:04:06] The first time I heard Da’Shaun on a panel, I was like, who is that? I could feel their urgency and enthusiasm for connecting all the dots between race, fatphobia, gender, eating, and health.
DH: [00:04:25] We are socialized in an anti-fat culture. One where we are taught that that sugar is always already bad. And I think, I think we have to really sit with what it means to choose pleasure over falsified myths, um, around health, right?
VT: YES!
DH: Like, like what does it mean to, to actively make the decision, like, so I'm going to choose to eat three of these Reese's instead of one, and I'm going to enjoy it, right?
Like, like what does it mean to engage in that? And also, what does it mean to divest from the health industrial complex, the diet industrial complex, that's built off of the teachings of an anti-fat science and an anti-fat government that has always only existed to harass, berate, and criminalize fat people?
VT: [00:05:17] Whoa, the mic has been dropped. I promise we are going to get into everything Da’Shaun just said, but let's start at the beginning of Da’Shaun's food story.
DH: [00:05:32] I am non-binary, but I of course grew up socialized as, and perceived as, a little Black boy. Um, and for as long as I can remember, from kindergarten to 12th grade, I avoided eating in cafeterias.
I only felt comfortable eating around my best, my childhood best friend. People would ask me, well, are you hungry? And my answer was always, no, I'm not hungry. That I was actively denying myself food. And I was actively denying myself, my desires, the things that did pleasure me, the things that did make me feel good and the things that I needed to survive, right?
And so I was not the stereotypical person who would, who would be diagnosed with an eating disorder. I was never engaged as someone who could have an eating disorder. And in fact, I was told by one of my doctors that, because I am an African-American boy, and because I'm obese is what he called me, it was very unlikely that I had an eating disorder and that they weren't going to engage me in that way at all. I was clearly, like, struggling with some disordered eating, um, in that I wasn't eating, right? Um, and I remember very vividly talking to my, um, pediatrician, maybe somewhere between eight and 10 years old.
And I remember going into her and just talking about how much I hated my body. I was like, um, I'm so fat and I don't want to eat when I'm around people. People talk, they talk about my weight and they, and they say these things. And so, she said to me, well, you know, I hear you saying that you don't like your weight, but if you don't eat your body's going to think that you're starving yourself and you're going to store more fat and then you will become more fat.
And there was no, there was no comfort offered to me as an eight to 10 year old. The things she had to offer me to reckon with and, and to sit with around my weight was, was not that well, you should eat because you have to nourish yourself and it's okay to nourish yourself and it's okay to survive. It’s okay to live.
VT: [00:07:32] Da’Shaun's story is really relatable. Hidden meals, fat shaming pediatricians, feeling invisible, and not having our needs met. This is stuff that people go through every day. I remember going to the doctor as a kid and hearing the kind of weight loss advice and fear tactics that Da’Shaun is talking about.
I took everything my doctor said as gospel, because I didn't know anything different, and neither did my family. I mean, you're supposed to listen to someone in a lab coat, right? And in my twenties, even after I learned the doctors, actually, weren't all-knowing God humans and I could set boundaries with them, deep down, I still believed that I was never going to have a positive relationship with a doctor
At 38, I finally decided I wanted to be an empowered and engaged patient. That meant listening to my gut, that my doctor was not treating me with respect. I started to research and interview new potential doctors. I was really clear about what I do and don't want.
Rule number one: no more weigh-ins unless they are necessary for surgery or correct dosing. Rule number two: no weight loss advice. Rule number three: don't treat my weight as an illness. I'm a proud fat person. And rule number four: I live in a racist, fatphobic and sexist culture as a fat woman of color, which means I have chronically high levels of stress that negatively impact my heart health and immune system.
I told him, please make sure that whatever advice you give me takes into account the fact that I can only do so much to counteract the stress of injustice. But I'm an adult, not a ten-year-old kid, like Da’Shaun was when they were getting blamed instead of care. Their doctor failed them when they were at their most vulnerable.
That's a common scenario for many fat people and many Black people. So Da’Shaun created a support system they could trust. They built a community that could give them the tailor-made love they wanted.
DH: [00:10:10] It was college for me that introduced me to people, to ideas, to thoughts that I'd never had before. Around gender, around sexuality, around fatness, around Blackness, around all of my identities that allow for me to stand a lot more firm in who I am. And became more confident in myself because I became more confident in the people around me who loved me truly unconditionally, who loved me for exactly who I am and who were committed to learning about what it meant to loving me as a fat person.
So many people don't know what it really necessarily means to love a fat person, right? Because we grow up learning to hate them. And so finding community with people who all were committed to learning how to love me in my fatness, and learning how to offer me a fat love, right? With a fat politics.
VT: [00:11:01] Yes! I mean, so what does it mean to give you, Da’Shaun, fat love?
DH: [00:11:08] Yes. I love that. I love that. And I honestly just came up with fat love on the spot. So I'm just embracing it.
VT: I love it! TM. Fat love TM.
DH: Exactly. Um, but fat love– it literally means being committed to seeing me in my fullness and my full self and not asking me to shrink myself, right? So I know my body takes up more room and you should allow it to. Um, one of my closest friends who is also fat, Hunter Shackleford– before we ever even go out to a place to eat, we're looking online to see what the seating looks like. And that to me is a fat love, because it says that you want me to enjoy eating so much that you're making sure that I can sit in the seats enough to be comfortable with the food that I'm eating. That's a commitment to pleasure. That's a commitment to desire and a commitment to seeing me being pleasured and being desired in a way that matters most to me, right?
Um, and so like those type of small things is what it means to provide someone with fat love. It means, you know, like, and not just on a, on a level of like, well, yeah, I think you're fuckable, but like on a level of, I think you and your fatness are so beautiful and are so deserving of desire that I want to love you, be it platonic, romantic or otherwise, right? I want to commit myself to showing you the type of love that you need and the care that you need to make sure that how I'm showing up for you in the world is exactly how you need to feel affirmed in your body and your being.
VT: [00:12:38] Yes. I want to get into, you talked about desire, you talked about pleasure. What is your relationship to pleasure? What's your history with pleasure and desire? I know that's a big question, but do you have thoughts?
DH: [00:12:53] Whew. Okay. How much time do I have? No, I think it definitely is a big question. Um, I have had such a horrible relationship to desire and desirability and desirability politics and, um, all the things my friends would always talk about, you know, how many ex-partners they have and sex partners they have and, and all the things. I'm like, well, I don't have this experience. Um, I've had a lot of sex with a lot of people and most of those instances have been one night stands and they've always been private, and I've never had conversations with a lot of these people beyond that moment.
I oftentimes talk about how these days, I'm very explicit with people about what it is that I want. Because otherwise people, thin or fat, will literally coerce you into a friendship that you never asked for. I don't want more friends. Um, I don't desire more friends and I've always been made a friend.
And they'll do that because they feel like, well, it's not coercive to make this fat person nurturing to you. And it's not coercive to make this fat person the mammy for you. And it's not coercive to make this person the fat Albert in your life, because that's what your role is in life, right?
That is to say that my relationship to desire has not been a great one. Since I've been a kid, it's a thing where people have oftentimes, again, you know, made me feel silly or foolish for desiring love, and sex, and romance. In the same ways that they've made me feel foolish and silly for desiring food, right?
VT: [00:14:36] Yes. I mean, there's so many things you said that were, I mean, illuminating, resonating, but like the other thing that I really wanted to ask you was, this actually goes back to the beginning, with your snack choice of Reese's peanut butter cups. Um, and you know, when I was thinking about this snack, I was thinking about how candy, sweet things, right, like they are a symbol of how extraordinary the body's capacity for pleasure and fun really is. And I'm curious– very large question– um, why is this embodied form of pleasure, like, you know, enjoying candy so terrifying to our culture?
DH: [00:15:23] I think it's just, I think it's terrifying because we are socialized in a diet culture. We're socialized in an anti-fat culture. Um, one where we are taught that sugar is always already bad. We're talking about it as something that we shouldn't have, that we shouldn't engage, um, because it's quote unquote bad for you. And I think, I think we have to really sit with what it means to, um, choose pleasure over falsified myths, um, around, around health, right?
Like, like what does it mean to, to actively make the decision like, okay. I actually don't give a fuck about whether or not this does or does not like, do a bad thing to my quote-unquote health, because I already don't believe in the idea of health itself. So I'm going to choose to eat three of these Reese’s instead of one, and I'm going to enjoy it, right?
Like, like what does it mean to engage in that? And also, what does it mean to divest from the health industrial complex, the diet industrial complex as a whole, the medical industrial complex that's built off of the teachings of an anti-fat science and an anti-fat government that has always only existed to harass, berate, and criminalized fat people.
And I think that people internalize that that sugar is bad and therefore candy is bad and it's so hard to hear. But the reality is that, it’s that if we reach fatness, if we reach obesity, then we are dead, right? There is no life in a fat person. There is no life in an obese person. I hate that term, but I'm using it intentionally.
And so what does it mean for me to actively avoid, actively work against, actively war against fatness so that I'd never have to see that?
VT: [00:17:12] Let's take a second to let what Da’Shaun said sink in, and maybe take a breath.
[breath]
Da’Shaun's words are reminding me of something troubling I've noticed in movies and even on the news. That when a thin person dies, their cause of death is always explained. There's surprise, condolences and grief. But when a fat person dies, it's not always explained. As if it's obvious that it was their size that doomed them.
And usually it comes along with a joke. An I told you so, or an expression of resentment that the person “didn't take better care of themselves.” Can you hear the side-eye?
And this doesn't just happen in the movies. Our culture is eager to see a fat person become a cautionary tale. Someone who proves that if you don't follow the rules, like if you aren't thin, bad things will happen to you.
Those bad things are, as Da’Shaun points out, different kinds of death. First you're seen as a failure, you become an outcast– a social death. Once you're an outcast, you become dehumanized. You have less access to friendship, income, and romantic relationships. It's a kind of spiritual death. And then, if you're fat and you die before you're 100-friggin-eight years old? Your physical death becomes the moral to a bullshit story. Another way for other people to feel relief and comfort that the world works exactly the way they've been told it does.
People who are bad, or fat, get punished. People who are good, or thin, get rewarded. Let's take a quick break.
[midroll]
We're back. When we talk about what fatness symbolizes in our society, I think of a book called Fearing the Black Body by the sociologist Sabrina Strings. Professor Strings is a major influence for Da’Shaun.
DH: [00:19:33] Yeah. The opening chapter is her talking about exactly how anti-fatness becomes a coherent ideology. And it becomes a coherent ideology through the subjugation of Black people.
Europeans saw Africans and were like, I thought I was okay with fatness, but then it looks like this. And I don't think I actually really enjoy what these beasts look like right? What these animals look like. Um, and so, you know, through colonialism and Christianity and the construction of, of anti-Blackness came the very construction of anti-fatness. And so when, when I say anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, I mean, exactly that, because one does not exist without the other. We've gotten so comfortable with using language, like, well, yes, anti-fatness intersects with anti-Blackness and it's like, well, no, it doesn't. If you abolish anti-fatness today, and not anti-Blackness, you don't abolish anti-fatness. They exist, and they come online into a coherent ideology through the exact same mechanisms.
VT: [00:20:35] Yes, totally. I mean, I think a lot of people, you know, this, a lot of people understand fatphobia diet culture, body image, body dysmorphia…They understand it as fundamentally, um, not only a gender issue, but they kind of consider it really a, I don't know, I mean, a body image issue? Um, or something like that, which I'm just like, that's not it. That's, I mean, you have to have a structure beneath that. That's you can't just point to the secondary symptom of a secondary symptom and say, that's the thing. And I just kind of, and I kept thinking about the, you know, the old white dudes who really brought us clean eating and diet culture, and they were anti-sex advocates, as you know, um, and they were anti-masturbation advocates and they were also, you know, they were also people who were highly influenced by colonialism and colonial ways of thinking. Um, and this idea that you construct an other, and you dump every part of your shadow self into that other, and then you hate that other, I think that that is what you're talking about.
DH: [00:21:52] Yes, yes, no, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
VT: [00:21:57] Okay. You know that in my opinion, everything ties back to colonialism. Because, well, it actually does. With that in mind, I wanted to share some things I found while I was doing research for this episode. The first is a poem, written sometime in the 1820s by an abolitionist named Elizabeth Margaret Chandler.
She starts out writing about sugar plum candies.
“No, no pretty sugar plums stay where you are. Though my grandmother sent you to me from so far. You look very nice. You would taste very sweet. Though I love you so dearly. I choose not to eat even what you have sent me by slavery made sweet.”
The poem got me thinking about the connection between candy, where my conversation with Da’Shaun began, and slavery, the place where our conversation has landed. It turns out you can't tell the story of candy without telling them the story of sugar. And sugar is the story of slavery.
Sugar planters were some of the wealthiest people in the Americas. But before all that, in the Western world, sugar was just a rare delicacy reserved only for the fanciest people in Europe. Queen Elizabeth I had a legendary sweet tooth. A fact I can really relate to. She loved sugar so much that her teeth turned black. It even became fashionable for poor folks to blacken their teeth. As a status symbol. I’d try it.
There were two major reasons that sugar was expensive. First, it only grew in tropical climates. So it had to be imported from the Caribbean or Asia. By the 1800s, everyone was putting sugar in their tea, and some shady ass people figured there was a lot of money to be made if you could make sugar more cheaply. And this brings us to the second reason sugar costs so much: labor.
Planters cut the cost of this labor-intensive crop with slavery. Almost all of the slaves brought to the Caribbean colonies were sent to sugar plantations. These plantations were deadly. People working on them were 50% more likely to die than people working on other types of plantations. The work was more labor-intensive, the machinery more dangerous. And the plantation owners tended to be more cruel. There was even a saying among Cuban sugar planters: “con sangre se hace azucar.” Sugar is made with blood.
Fast forward to today. Sugar has fallen a long way from being a symbol of wealth and power. Now, sugar is looked down upon. It is associated with the quote unquote bad decision-making our culture connects to poverty, fat people and communities of color. The message is clear. Sugar leads to disease and death.
In the so-called food deserts of big cities, people get food from independently-owned convenience stores. And these are the sites of where Alton Sterling, George Floyd, and Eric Garner were killed. Whether it's the history of sugar and slavery, or the reality that going to a convenience store could lead to a police officer ending a person's life, it is no accident that food and death are blatantly linked when we're talking about Black people in America.
Da’Shaun is paying close attention to those connections. I asked them what they'd learned, doing research for their forthcoming book Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness.
DH: [00:26:15] Yes, this is going to be my favorite part of the book. Um, I can just already tell. What made me think about this in the first place was, I just one day was thinking about how everyone that I've seen on my TV screen, who had been murdered by police were fat, were fat men or fat masc folks. You think back to Mike Brown, who in a lot of ways is what ignited this movement, this wave of current activism, and then you start naming more people and it's Walter Scott and Alton Sterling, and Samuel Dubose and George Floyd, who is not fat, but is large, and Tony McDade, who is not a cis man, but who was a trans man and who is fat, right? And so you start thinking about all these names, all these Black folks, and you start reading headlines where you see Washington Post called Mike Brown a beast, and you see Fox News call Eric Garner obese, right? And you see, um, other news outlets called Walter Scott animalistic.
Um, and you see them call Samuel Dubose aggressive, even though he was in his, in his car, right? And Walter Scott was running away, and Mike Brown was 18 and Eric Garner was on the ground being choked, right? But this is the language that they use for these men who are being murdered by police, right? Who were being slain by police.
So you start looking at, well, surely there is, like, you know, at least the autopsy reports are giving us the sound judgment we need to hear, that these men are being murdered and it's not their fault. But then you read autopsy reports, and that's not at all what they're saying, actually. It's well, they already had hypertension and they already were obese. And they already had high cholesterol and they already were at risk of a heart attack.
VT: [00:28:20] This is exactly what day Sean was talking about earlier when they said fat bodies are already dead. Police officers who are murdering people are literally getting exonerated because an untimely death is what society expects for a fat person.
DH: [00:28:42] Fat Black masc folks, especially those who are dark skin and or poor, are engaged as always already animalistic, as beasts, as things that must be put down, right? As animals that have to be euthanized because our bodies are inherently aggressive. Our bodies are inherently murderous. Our bodies are inherently weapons and it's especially true for the men and the masc folks who we often see on our screens for being murdered, because of the continued idea that if you are fat and Black and masc, you are inherently violent and you are inherently aggressive and you are inherently murderous. And therefore you must be euthanized because you are a rabid dog who can not be contained, who can not be trained, who can not be put in his place.
VT: [00:29:55] In the end, it was the abolition of slavery that also ended sugar plantations. By then, Napoleon (yes, that Napoleon) was mass producing these things called sugar beets. Just beats with more sucrose. In the US, abolitionists and Black-led organizations started growing them and using collective buying power to purchase sugar made with paid labor.
Listen, I'm not trying to make you feel even worse about sugar. As always, Rebel Eaters Club is 100% committed to being 100% anti food-shaming. I'm telling you this story because I want to show you that this history shapes our beliefs.
This history is bitter, for sure. It's fraught. It's violent. And it's trapped a lot of people in hurtful ideas. But we work through this history every single day, not by choice, but because we've had to. We find joy, we find redemption. And like Da’Shaun, we find that the tiny moment of delight when a Reese's melts on our tongues, can unlock the road back to our pleasure, back to our humanity, and forward, to the history we want to leave for others. This is the world Da’Shaun wants to see.
DH: [00:31:29] It would look like another place where I'm able to exist as a being who is engaged, um, as something that, that someone wants or that people want, or that the world wants to live. I would live, I think, off in a cabin somewhere, with a partner who loves me well and who I love well.
And I write for fun and I read for fun. I don't read a lot of nonfiction, I read fiction and not fiction that makes me think, but fiction that just makes me enjoy, um, where I'm not trying to escape the world by building different realities because the new reality is already here. Where I am, you know, like excited about all the food that I'm going to eat and all that I'm going to take part in that is going to pleasure me. And that's going to be enjoyable for me. Without any guilt or shame because I don't know guilt or shame. And what does it mean for us to not know shame and not, not guilt, but only to know pleasure, harmless pleasure, right? I think that is what my ultimate desire is, if I have to use that language for it.
VT: [00:32:46] This was amazing. And I can't wait for your book to come out. I'm so glad that we get to be on the planet at the same time.
DH: [00:32:54] Oh, wow. That means so much to me. Thank you. I'm a Cancer, so I am so emotional. Thank you so much. That means a lot. Thank you.
VT: [00:33:11] Just like we did in season one. We're giving you journal prompts, but this time you can find them online. You'll find one journal prompt per episode at rebeleatersclub.com.
Rebel Eaters Club is produced by Transmitter Media. Our lead producer is Jordan Bailey, and her favorite candy is peach rings. Lacy Roberts is our managing producer and she loves a good Twix. Sara Nics edits the show and can't live without peanut M&Ms. And our Executive Producer Gretta Cohn loves black licorice, but not the salty kind. And I'm your host, Virgie Tovar. And I love caramel patties from See's Candy. Ben Chenault is our mix engineer. Special kudos to James T. Green and Jessica Glazer for the production assist and Taka Yasuzawa who wrote some of the music we use in the show. If you love Rebel Eaters Club, tell your friends and share the love by writing a review on your favorite podcast app. See you next week.