The body positivity movement has served as a fun culture war skirmish over the last decade, a relatively low-stakes deployment for people who wish to avoid active combat in the theatres of race or gender identity.
It’s been pretty successful in sweeping away the casual cruelty toward overweight people of the Noughties, to the extent that it’s hard to believe just over a decade ago it was acceptable to broadcast a TV dieting program that liberally featured the expression “massive fatties”.
With two-thirds of American adults now overweight or obese the body positivity movement was pushing against an open door in this regard, but still, credit where credit’s due.
The more contentious strand of the body positivity movement is Fat Acceptance, particularly its false assertions that people can be “Fat but Fit” or “Healthy at any size”.
In reality whether you can be fat and healthy is strongly influenced by your race.1 A study of half a million middle aged brits found “Nonwhite participants were two- to fourfold more likely to have diabetes. For the equivalent prevalence of diabetes at 30 kg/m(2) in white participants, BMI equated to the following: South Asians, 22.0 kg/m(2); black, 26.0 kg/m(2); Chinese women, 24.0 kg/m(2); and Chinese men, 26.0 kg/m(2). Among women, a waist circumference of 88 cm in the white subgroup equated to the following: South Asians, 70 cm; black, 79 cm; and Chinese, 74 cm. Among men, a waist circumference of 102 cm equated to 79, 88, and 88 cm for South Asian, black, and Chinese participants, respectively.”
In other words, a South Asian with a BMI of 22 (well within the “healthy” range for a white person) or a black person with a BMI of 26 (just over the healthy/ overweight borderline for a white person) face the same diabetes risk as a very fat white person (a BMI of 30 is the cut off between overweight and obese). This is not a small difference, it means a six foot white man can be over twenty kilos heavier than a six foot South Asian man before facing the same risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Fat acceptance is therefore a real-world example of White Privilege. Rotund white feminists are encouraging the cultivation of levels of adiposity that would kill or maim People of Colour. They aren’t doing it deliberately, after all, most white Americans still think of themselves as “default humans” rather than as members of a race2:
White feminists are inadvertently adopting the tactics of the Japanese Honey Bee, a species which kills invading hornets by surrounding them and warming them up to a temperature the bees can survive, but the hornets cannot:
Now that doesn’t seem like the behaviour of an ally to me, and because white silence is violence I’ve had to write about it here.
All the best, Ab workout guy
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24974975/
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/