heavyweightheart:

if there’s one thing ppl should understand about fatphobia and the countercultural movement that is fat acceptance (fearing the black body has me even more fired up about this than usual), it’s that fatphobia is inextricable from racism, misogyny, and capitalism. it cannot be completely folded into any of those categories, but it wouldn’t exist without them… it’s an outgrowth of them. fatphobia as we know it is a product of 16-18th century europe, a way to reinforce class hierarchy and race-based domination (race was also an invention of that period). if you’re going to do violence to half the world, you need an ideology to buttress it, and fatphobia is one of many pieces of that ideology which was extremely successful not only in being propagated by institutions but also internalized by citizens.

so when you have an Other successfully targeting that bullshit, reactionaries are very threatened. they understand on some deeply programmed level that the stigmatizion of fatness targets women and especially black people with a kind of social control. if we start to honor all bodies and persons, the hierarchy starts to appear as it is: not natural or inevitable but created, and for specific purpose, to concentrate power and wealth among a few.

to dismiss fatphobia as trivial is not only to miss the material oppression and marginalization of fat people (and the fattest people in the global north are poor women of color), but to permit an ideology which has served for centuries to hold vulnerable people down and the ruling class up

(via lavenderfables)