Fat Black & Ugly

(I posted this on my tumblr, http://hiphopcheerleader.tumblr.com/)

Let me start this off by saying that I'm not very familiar with Tumblr. I've been active on here for a couple of months but I'm not Tumblr famous or anything. I still can't figure out how to reply to people's replies and I don't really do any serious writing on here. The times that I do write, my posts never get as many notes as I feel they deserve. Lol.

But I'm writing here today to address something that I've noticed. The lack of blackness in the Tumblr fat community.

Now, I should also say. I'm coming from a place of thin privilege over here. Therefore, I use the word fat, not as a reclamation but as the word that is usually meant to mean overweight, obese, and/or overall "thick." Also, I want to make it clear that I am not in the position to speak for anyone, I know the fat, black community is in a perfectly capable position to speak for themselves. I am speaking (in solidarity, I hope) as a black woman who is permanently outside of white standards of beauty. That said, direct me, if you please, to any posts on this subject made by fat black womyn.

First, I want to make this clear for anyone whose forgotten.: White people who are fat, still have white privilege. I'm not sure why this is so difficult to understand but intersectionality folks. Intersectionality. Just because you are oppressed in some ways in your life, doesn't erase your position as a privileged white individual. For example, I am able bodied, meaning I have privilege over a black-disabled person. The fact that I'm black doesn't mean I can disregard the fact that I am able bodied.

What I've noticed is that the fat, white community on Tumblr has a problem with this fact. Why am I not surprised? Because its typical white people shit. Mu'fuckas just don't want to acknowledge their privilege. Following a few fat blogs, I see about 20 times the number of posts on the beauty of white fat womyn than I do for fat black womyn. I guess these fat white womyn feel they are rejecting the beauty myth but by leaving out womyn of color they are only reinforcing it. Remember the time a fat white woman compared her being fat to the struggle of a black woman goes through? Only one fail from the white, fat tumblr community. Another fail was when the woman who creates "ugly" graphics used a black woman in one with a banner across it stating "ugly don't care." Or the gif with the white woman from glee singing TLC's Unpretty, she wasn't fat & neither are TLC but still showed that y'all don't get it. Or the picture with all the white womyn with "real" bodies trying to show bodily diversity but didn't think to include any womyn of color. this is all just another reason & facet to why white feminists fail at developing full analyses, they stop at where their privilege meets & leave womyn of color out for the 5011th time. your whiteness doesn't erase shit. you're still white. fat white womyn are concerned by how well they fit into the perfect white beauty myth & black womyn are concerned that we are constantly judged by how well we fit into that myth, no matter how hard we try to fit in, our attempts are futile.

Here's where I get into the difference between being a fat black woman & a fat white woman: a fat black woman could so much more accurately talk about this than I can but here goes: fat tumblr has a white face. why am i not surprised? because its typical white shit. to exclude womyn of color voices & in the case of beauty politics, particularly, black womyn. the rhetoric still exists: black womyn are not really womyn & we're not even really human. our beauty politics don't matter because we're so far gone from ever being beautiful, trying to include us is a worthless, waste of time. white fat womyn on tumblr seem to be reclaiming their fatness in an effort to say "I am still a white woman! i am still apart of the beautiful people club! stop thinking my body is ugly! accept me!" they seem to be trying to (i don't want to assume anyone's motives) reclaim their stake in beautiful white womanhood because its been taken away from them due to their fatness. But black womyn don't have that privilege. Fat is seen as something that can be changed. This is why people tell fat people to lose weight. they just tell black womyn to die. The belief is that if fat white womyn just lose weight, then they can go back to being in the beautiful club. White womyn are still within the realm of attainable beauty. Black womyn are not. Skin color cannot be changed, its permanent. beauty is constructed. & its constructed against black womyn. black fat womyn get treated harsher (a fat black woman would do better in coming up with specific examples) than white fat womyn because of their ugly, permanent, unfortunate blackness. race compounds the fat plight. its seen as a continual, permanent ugliness. white womyn are seen as just being temporary deviants. if you lose weight you can come back to our exclusive white woman pretty club. but you black fat bitches are out forever because then we'd have nothing to measure ourselves up against.

the end.

*drops mic*

Black Womyn Hate as Manifestations of Heteropatriarchy

This hate of black women is not new, but it still fucking burns. I'm tired of this shit. I'm tired of black men who act like their dick is the second coming of Jesus Christ telling black women that we are not good enough to be with them. Rhetoric like this, based on what is wrong with black womyn, why we are not desirable, what we need to do to get a man, is rooted in heteropatriarchy and by extension, capitalism and homophobia. In "Heteropatriarchy and The Three Pillars of White Supremacy", Andrea Smith draws out the link between heteropatriachy and this type of conversation around relationships.

Andrea Smith quotes Charles Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, "If we fail to enact a Federal Marriage Amendment, we can expect not just more family breakdown, but also more criminals behind bars and more chaos in our streets." We can see from this quote that in the eyes of right-wing, Christian, mainstream society, marriage between two heterosexual adults of extreme genders is a process of crime prevention. The assumption is, which is an assumption held by black men also, that when you invest in this traditional familial dynamic the you prevent delinquent little boys and sexually promiscuous girls, with no critical analysis to the criminalization of black youth and the high rate of black womyn experiencing sexual victimization. Smith then goes on to quote Lift High the Cross author Ann Burlien, "the investment in the private family makes it difficult for people to invest in more public forms of social connection. In addition, the investment in the suburban private family serves to mask the public disinvestment in the urban areas that makes the suburban life possible." Subscribing to the belief that one man should be with one woman and that men should be the ones we aspire to be with promotes patriarchal domination and homophobia. It promotes the myth of the American dream, which ultimately benefits a small sector of society.

Immigration and Race Relations

Most people assume that all Raza people are illegal immigrants. However, the majority of Raza persons in the US are legal citizens. Because of this, for the most part all Raza people get treated like illegal immigrants, as taking advantage of the system, as dirty, and as stupid. Being an undocumented person is racialized as being Raza. However, there are many more immigrant populations that are not apart of La Raza; mainly European and African. However, La Raza is targeted for the racism that comes along with discussion about immigration issues.

This also means that other races get left out of the immigration conversation. Anti-immigration rhetoric relies on the slaveability of Blackness and also as seeing La Raza as a threat to US empire building. Privileged persons who have high paying jobs and are able to successfully navigate the job world know that blacks will still be here to do the slave labor. They and anti-immigrant blacks are ignorant of the fact that undocumented persons do necessary labor for this country. With documented labor out of this country, all those people with jobs will see an decrease in the lure and viability of their position. In fact, Blacks have benefited largely and gained privilege in the job market because of mass immigration. Blacks, in the long run, are largely in a better economic position. We hold better jobs and live in more affluent areas than ever before.

Immigration can also be seen as threatening to an individual's personal privilege of being a legal citizen. Undocumented persons are seen as taking advantage of healthcare, welfare, and public educational services. This logic also seeps into the conversation when anti-immigrantion people accuse undocumented persons of taking American jobs. There is especially tension between Black Americans and La Raza. Black Americans have typically been situated as slaves in the American labor force, however, now more undocumented workers hold lower level positions; which can be interpreted as "taking jobs." However, when we complicate the notion of capitalism and white supremacy, we see that immigrants are not to blame for this. La Raza also has issues with unemployment. However, corporate entities will take cheaper labor, which is immigrant labor not black labor, because undocumented workers do not possess the means to fairly negotiate the workforce because they are without legal citizenship status. They are also pawns in a capitalist state, they take what labor is available to them out of necessity to feed their families.

Unity?

When I was young, I was all for unity. I remember often having conversations about what Black people needed to do in order to be viable citizens within this country; to stop being ignorant, to stop being poor, etc. I was right along with everyone else when they answered that the solution to the “Black problem” was unity, unity among all Black people. In those years, I said a lot of things that I didn’t know the meaning of. This was one of them. I can’t even tell you what I felt unity meant during that time and I definitely couldn’t have told you then what it meant in the context of the Black community. Now I have different ideas about what unity means, if its even possible among entire populations/communities, and if it is necessary for the Black community to acquire full rights in this society. Recently, I have taken on the task of reading the speeches of some great leaders. So far, I’ve only read Malcolm X’s “After the Bombing” speech. Specifically, this is the speech where he speaks a lot about unity. “So we saw that the first thing to do was to unite our people, not only unite us internally, but we have to be united with our brothers and sisters abroad.” I have to disagree with X on the subject, but not conclusively. Is it possible for an entire community containing millions of people with different belief systems, economic statuses, worldviews, backgrounds, etc. to be united? All that we can assume that really have in common is a history with specific oppressive system. What would unity look like within the Black community? How important is unity in the Black situation? If you ask 10 different people who the problem is with Black people, you will get 10 different responses, each tailored to the individual person’s experiences, education,  and belief system. All of our answers are biased. The same goes if you ask about any other underprivileged community. Very rarely do you hear discussions on how people with power in this country can become better citizens or how they can help those who suffer under their oppression. I don’t believe the betterment of any community depends on that community solely. If we as people of color, or womyn, or poor people want to talk about the betterment of our communities and how to make our lives better then we first need to, in my opinion, find out ways to successfully interrogate white and accompanying privileges. Nothing that we can do on our own as a community can free us from oppression, we have to fight against the core of oppression. To tell the black community that their freedom lies in the hands on unity or education, without regard to what has made this community uneducated or excessively divided in the first place is to blame us for our own marginalization.