Here at Def-Con News we often make fun of Micheal Moore’s weight, not because we’re fat-phobic but rather because he’s a liberal douche and that’s the low-hanging fruit. Even though Michael Moore is white, we’ve just learned that any jokes about his considerable girth are terribly racist. According to liberals, who are experts on this type of thing, fat-shaming is a form of racism deeply-rooted in white supremacy. It would seem that Moore getting a pass for being a bounce house full of flubber is cultural appropriation and white privilege, but the liberals have spoken on the matter.
Hey, check out what CBS News thinks is news:
The racial origins of fat stigma
Perched on a couch, Sabrina Strings relates the story of a conversation she had with her grandmother.
“My grandmother is a Black woman from the South, grew up during Jim Crow, and for her, being able to eat regularly was a triumph. One time she told me that she got a basket of oranges one Christmas and it was one of her happiest memories,” she recalled. “But when she decided to move to California in 1960, as a lot of Black people were doing at the time … she encountered for the first time a lot of White women in her integrated community who were on diets, and she was like, ‘What? Why are White women on diets?’ This was something that she puzzled over for years, because no one could really provide her a satisfactory answer.”
It was her grandmother’s stories like this one that inspired Strings, who is now a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue research on the history of fat-phobia — the fear of fatness due to the stigmatization of weight — in the Western world.
So how exactly is fat-shaming racist? I’m glad you asked…
“With the dawn of the slave trade, skin color was the original sorting mechanism to determine who was slave and who was free. But as you might imagine, with slavery progressing through the century, skin color became a less reliable source of sorting various populations,” Strings said.
“Therefore, they decided to re-articulate racial categories, adding new characteristics, and one of the things that the colonists believed was that Black people were inherently more sensuous, that people love sex and they love food, and so the idea was that Black people had more venereal diseases, and that Black people were inherently obese, because they lack self-control,” she continued.
So far her theory is that sometime in the late 1600’s white European colonists lost the ability to identify black people by the color of their skin so they started noticing them because they were fat. Huge, if true.
Equally as huge, if true, is that it was those damn Protestants behind the whole thing:
Strings found that these ideas about Blackness were “synergistic” with Protestant and Christian ideals. The “Protestant ethic,” initially coined by sociologist Max Weber in 1904-1905, describes the concept of hard work and self-discipline as highly valued traits that would lead to eternal salvation. The “mortification of the flesh,” or the act of putting sins related to the body to death by abstaining from certain pleasures, is a concept common to all Christian denominations, reflected in practices like fasting or abstinence. Strings says that many of these ideas were taken up by Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the U.S. in the 19th century.
“What they wanted to do was show that they were both morally upright and racially proper, in the way in which they ate and how they maintained their figures and so, they were very clear that to be of the elite race and to be a Christian peoples means that you need to show what they would call temperance in the face of food — or restraint is the way we might think of today — because if you did not show temperance, that was evidence that you were one of the savages, and also, that you were un-Christian,” Strings said.
And finally, get ready for the craziest thing anyone has ever said in the history of the spoken word:
“We cannot deny the fact that fat-phobia is rooted in anti-Blackness. That’s simply an historical reality. Today, when people talk about it, they often claim that they don’t intend to be anti-Black … they don’t intend all of these negative associations, and yet they exist already, so whenever people start trafficking in fat-phobia, they are inherently picking up on these historical forms of oppression,” said Strings.
Oh, I can deny it but that’s because I’m not a liberal nutcase.
And here’s the actual funniest part about this. CBS News thinks this nutter is on to something here:
While the medical community and public health officials continue to study the serious health risks associated with obesity, Strings’ research provides context around the social and cultural issues related to weight — and the legacy of racist and outdated ideals embedded in many of our common assumptions.
I’m sorry, what is the context she’s adding here? That making fun of fat people is historically racist? No, that’s not a thing no matter how hard the liberal media tries to make it.
