Fat People are NOT the Problem!
COVID-19 has impacted everyone around the world, and still continues to impact us to this day. Not only did it affect our physical health, but it affected people’s mindsets as well. It exposed how individualized US society is as well as the frightening lack of community care. It also continues to reinforce the fact that Black communities are not prioritized in the face of a national emergency. Specifically, fat Black people are thrown under the bus due to the ongoing dehumanization that stems from white supremacy, slavery, and colonization.
The effects of slavery carry into the present: the majority of Black communities are underserved since our society’s institutions are racist and favor white people. Systemic racism has kept Black people from having safe and sustainable communities with proper access to nourishing foods, safe drinking water, safe working conditions, safe housing, anti-racist and accessible medical treatment, and many more. Due to these social inequities, Black communities are impacted by COVID-19 at a disproportionate rate.
Many of our institutions insist on pushing the blame to the Black community for not taking COVID-19 “seriously” enough (which is bullshit). In reality, these institutions do not want to delve into the history of how systemic issues persist in affecting Black people’s health. The medical field itself is rooted in racism, which has broken the belief that it could be trustworthy.
For instance, the Tuskegee experiment. This experiment began in 1932 and ended in 1972, conducted by the U.S Public Health Service (USPHS) and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The goal was to find treatments for syphilis. They recruited 600 Black men from Macon County, Alabama. These men were from low-income backgrounds, enticed to enter the study with offerings such as free meals, healthcare, and burial stipends. However, they were never informed that they were test subjects and only received placebos for their infection, so they were never able to give their proper consent and never received proper care. In 1947, penicillin became the better treatment for syphilis, but these men were never told this fact because the government believed it could affect the results of the study. Black men were only seen as a means to an end, a test subject stripped of their humanity. Because of the dehumanization of Black people, an estimated 100 men died of late-stage syphilis, while others went blind or insane, or experienced other health problems due to their untreated syphilis.
Going back even further, enslaved Black people were treated as test subjects when it came to medical examinations. It was concluded from these racist experiments that Black people feel less pain than white people, and this belief is still held by many to this day. These are the reasons why many in the Black community don’t feel like they can trust the medical community with the COVID-19 vaccine since our medical institutions continue to hurt them.
Knowing this, the fact that COVID-19 disproportionately affects the Black community is not a coincidence. According to this study, approximately 98 out of every 100,000 Black people have died from COVID-19, a mortality rate that is higher than that for Latinx people and significantly higher than that for white people and Asian people.
According to some of our institutions, they immediately came to the conclusion that “obesity” is an explanation as to why Black communities are experiencing the highest rates of complications and deaths. Yet, anti-fatness and anti-Blackness are ingrained in every aspect of society, especially our medical systems. In order to draw these correlations, they use the ongoing stereotype that fat Black people are lazy and unhealthy, and for that reason, they are prone to getting severe complications from COVID-19. Yet, this is not the case. This quote from Sabrina Strings’ New York Times article It’s Not Obesity. It’s Slavery sums it up pretty well: “The cultural narrative that Black people’s weight is a harbinger of disease and death has long served as a dangerous distraction from the real sources of inequality, and it’s happening again.”
Additionally, from this same article, Strings shows up with the facts. She writes that according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the rates of obesity between Black and white populations are 49.7% and 42.2% respectively. So this is only a 7-percent point difference in rates of obesity. On the other hand, when it comes to COVID-19, Black people are dying at rates ranging from 2.4 to 7 times that of white populations which is a huge disparity that medical institutions have yet to explain.
Strings suggests that doctors may use fatness as a factor to deny the eligibility to lifesaving COVID-19 treatments, believing that fat Black people don’t “deserve” to have these treatments since they brought it upon themselves for not looking after their health. This sentiment is accepted throughout our culture due to the stereotype that fat people don’t exercise or have a supportive diet. This is obviously a myth: fat people can be what is deemed as “healthy” in our society and still have a fat body. Thinness doesn’t equate to good health. Actually, fat people often die from being undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. Doctors tend to conclude that complications in their health stems from their weight and dismiss serious concerns from their fat patients, overlooking the actual issue which leads to fat people dying at higher rates. Most of the time, these root causes of death aren’t because they’re fat, but because of the egregious mishandling from doctors due to anti-fat bias.
As previously mentioned, social inequities in Black communities ties into why Black people, especially fat Black people, are highly impacted by COVID-19. These communities may not have access to soap and clean water, hand sanitizer, or nourishing foods. They may be essential workers who aren’t allowed to have paid leave or sick days. They also may be workers who can’t afford to isolate themselves if they want to pay for housing or buy the necessities to take care of their children. The ability to socially distance or to shelter in place may be difficult because of their location, if they’re houseless, or if they’re incarcerated. The pandemic continues to worsen the existing social inequities for Black communities. Fatness, and other lifestyle choices, should not be the first go-to explanation when it comes to understanding how the pandemic affects Black communities. Our institutions, our systems, and our social structures continue to fail us. In order to create a society filled with safe and sustainable communities, there needs to be a change, and that starts with Black Liberation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/25/opinion/coronavirus-race-obesity.html
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/893006538
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7762908/
https://www.history.com/news/the-infamous-40-year-tuskegee-study