Fatphobia (& Foodphobia) is Anti-Blackness with Da'Shaun Harrison

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 Dayshawn Harrison. So yes, I am

Dashawn Harrison. I am black, fat, queer, trans, poor, disabled, I'm based out of Atlanta, Georgia, and I wear a lot of hats. They are a brilliant writer, activist, and public intellectual par excellence and their candy crush is Reese's velvety feel of the chocolate along with like the gritty but very smooth peanut butter feel. 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 kind of develop as like a defense mechanism but also as a who I am and a part of the environments I've I've lived in and I've been in. So is there a ceremony to eating the real I mean, I just want to know how you do it? There is

no ceremony for me. I just I mean, I've never actually seen a bear, but what I imagine a bear, 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. Okay, I love it. So what I'm gonna like try and emulate this bear thing that you've fun and I'm just like ripping it open and I'm just

imagining that I'm in the wild, in the wild. Should we do the bit together or I don't know what we are put it in my let's just do it. I want to eat it. M that's night. Whoa, that's my favorite. If I can just get my hands on a Reese's cup or ten, I'm good to go. Like I was set, and it just feels like fat glory. And do you remember when it became a comfort thing? It became a you're gonna like make me open up already,

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 like 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. The first time I heard Dashaun in the panel, I was like, who is that? I could feel their urgency and enthusiasm for connecting all the dots between race, fat phobia, gender eating,

and health. 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 around around around health, right, Like, like what does it mean to actively make the decision? Like so I'm gonna choose to eat three of these reasons 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 and dust your complex? The diety dust your 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 the rate and criminalized fat people. Whoa the mic has been dropped. I promise we are going to get into everything Dashawn just said. But let's start at

the beginning of Deshawn's food story. I am a non binary, but I of course grew up socialized as and perceived as a little black boy, And for as long as I can remember, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, I avoid it eating in cafeterias. I only felt comfortable eating around my best my childhood best friend. People would ask me, why are you hungry? And my antio was always no,

I'm not hungry. That 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 OBEs is what he called me, it was very unlikely that I had an eaven disorder and that they weren't going to engage me in that way at all. I was clearly like struggling with some disordered eating and

that I wasn't eating right. And I remember very vividly talking to my pediatrician, maybe somewhere between eight and ten years old, and I remember going into her and just talking about how much I hated my body. I was like, I'm I'm so fat and I don't want to eat.

When I'm around people, people 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 gonna think that you're starving yourself and you're gonna 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 ten year old. The things she had to offer me to reckon with and to sit with around my weight 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. Deshawn'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 Deshaun is talking about. I took everything my doctor said as a gool because I didn't know anything different. I 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 believe that I was never going to have a positive relationship with a doctor. At thirty eight, 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 way ends 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, fat phobic, and sexist culture as a fat woman of color, which means I have chronically high levels of stress that

negatively impact my heart, help 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 day 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 Dashaun created a support system they could trust. They built a community that could give them the tailor made love they wanted. It was college for me that introduced me to people, to ideas, to thoughts that I've never had before around gender, around sexuality, around fatness, around blackness,

around all of my identities. That allowed for me to stand a lot more firm and 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 the fat politike, Yes, I mean, so what does it mean to give you, Shaun fat love? Yes? I love that, m I love that and I honestly just came up with fat love on the spot, so I'm just embracing

it TM exactly. But fat love it literally means being committed to seeing me in my fullness and my full self and not asking me to strink myself. Right, So I know my body takes more room and you should allow it to. I love that one of my closest friends, who was 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 desires and into seeing me being pleasured and being desired in a way that matters most to me. Right, And so like those type of small things, it is what it means to

provide someone with fat love. It means, you know, like and not just 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 a 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 throwing up for you in the world is exactly how you need to feel affirmed in

your body and your being. 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? And that's a big question, But thought, Okay, how much time do I have? No, I think it

definitely is a big question. I have had such a horrible relationship to desire and desirability and desirability politics and all the things my friends will always talk about, you know, how many ex partners they have and sex partners they have, and all the things. I'm like, well, I don't have

this experience. 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, I don't desire more friends, and I've always been made a friend, right, And they'll do that because they feel like, well, it's not called ursa to to make this fat person nurturing to you, and it's not called erso to make this fat person the mammy for you, and it's not col ersio 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 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. 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 recent's peed of archistic delicious. 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 and I'm curious, very large question, why is this embodied form of pleasure, like you know, enjoying candy of so terrifying to our culture. I think it's just I think it's terrifying because we are we like we are socialized in in a diet culture. We're socialized in an anti fat culture, one where we

are taught that that sugar is always already bad. We're talking about it as something that we shouldn't have, that we shouldn't engage because it's quote unquote bad for you.

And I think I think we have to really sit with what it means to choose pleasure over falsified myths around around around health, right like, like what does it mean 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 reasons 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 criminalize fat people. And I think that people internalize 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 obest 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 never had to see that. Let's take a second to let what DeShawn saying sink in and maybe take a breath. Deshawn'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 and 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 Deshaun 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 one hundred 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. 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 Dayshon. Yeah, the opening chapter is her talking about exactly how anti fatness becomes a coherent ideology, and it becomes a coherent audiology through the subjugation of black people, Europeans saw Africans, and we're like, I thought I was okay with fatness, but then it looks like this, and I don't think I actually really enjoyed what these

beasts look like, right, what these animals look like. And so, you know, through colonialism and Christianity and the construction 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 don't abolish anti blackness today, you don't abolish anti fatness. They exist and they come online into a coherent ideology through the through the exact same mechanisms. Yes, totally. I mean I think a lot of people, you know this, A lot of people understand fat phobia, diet culture, body image,

body dysmorphia. They understand it as fundamentally not only a gendered issue, but they kind of consider it, really, I don't know, I mean, a body image issue or something like that, which I'm just like, that's not it, it right, I'm like that 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. Um and so, 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 the by colonialism and colonial ways of thinking um and this idea that you that you construct another 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 what you're talking about. Yes, yes, no, that's exactly what I'm talking about. 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 eighteen twenties 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 Dashawn began,

and slavery, the place where our conversation has landed. It turns out you can't tell the story of candy without telling 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 the First had 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 black in their teeth as a status symbol. I'd try it. There were two major reasons sugar was expensive. First, it only grew in tropical climate, so it had to be imported from the Caribbean or Asia. By the eighteen hundreds, everyone was putting sugar in their tea, and some shady yes 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 fifty percent 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 gonsangre Sasasuka, 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. DeShawn 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. Yes, this is gonna be my favorite part of the book. 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 on my TV screen who had been murdered by police, we're fat.

We're fat men are fat mask 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 Watches Guy and Alton Sterling and Samuel de Boles and George Floyd who is not fat but is large, and Tony McDade, who is not assist man but who is 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 posts called Mike Brown beast, and you see Fox News called Eric Garner um obese right, and you see um other news outlets called Walter Scott animalistic um and you see them called Samuel de Bose aggressive even though he was in his in his car, right, and Walter Scott was running away, um and and Mike Brown was eighteen 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's 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

autopsic reports and then that's not an all what they're saying. Actually, it's well, they already had high pertension, and they already were OBEs, and they already had high cholesterol, and they already were at risk of a heart attack. This is exactly what day Shaun 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. Fat black mask folks, especially those who are dark skinned and or poor, are engaged as always already animalistic as beasts, as 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 mask folks who we often see on our screens for being murdered because of the continued idea that if you are fat and black and mask, you are inherently violent, and you are inherently aggressive, and you are inherently murderous, and therefore you must be euthanized because you are a rabbit dog who cannot be contained, who cannot be trained, who cannot be put in his place. 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 supros. In the US, abolitionists and blacklead 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 one hundred percent committed to being one hundred percent anti food chaining. 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 and 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 Dyshawn, 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 Dayshaun wants to see. 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 um 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 UM 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 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's going to pleasure me, and that's going to be enjoyable for me without any 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 know guilt but only to no pleasure, harmless pleasure? Right? I think that is what my ultimate desire is if I had to use that language for it. This was amazing and I can't wait for your book to come out. I'm so glad that you get to be on the planet. At the same time. Oh wow, all that means so much for me. Thank you. I'm a cancer so I am so so thank you so much. That means a lot.

Thank you. 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 Rubbel Eatersclub dot com. Rubbel Eaters Club is produced by Transmitter Media. Our lead producer is Jordan Bailey and her favorite candy is Pete Rings. Lacy Roberts is our managing

producer and she loves a good TwixT. Sarah nix edits the show and can't live without Peanut m and M's. And our executive producer Gretta Cohen loves black licorice, but not the salty kind. And I'm your host Virgie Tobar and I love Carmel patties from CS Candy. Ben Shano is our mix engineer. Special kudos to James T. Green and Jessica Glazer for the production assist and do Haakka yes Uzawa, 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.