I
felt like when people talked about people who looked
like me, they were talking about villains. They were
talking about criminals. They were talking about bur-
dens and deadweight. They were talking about deviants.
After a certain point, I got confused if people were talking
about my Blackness or my fatness. They started to blur.
Growing up being Black at a primarily white school,
I navigated the associations, stereotypes and deeply
ingrained biases and ignorance of my classmates, my
instructors, the media, society and myself. I had been
taught from an early age that to be successful meant to be
different (read: not ‘Black’). I was taught to be ‘Black’ in
white spaces was unprofessional and unbecoming. I need-
ed to have more respect for myself and that being ‘Black’
meant that you didn’t.
Despite the reality of being Black, I was constantly nav-
igating how to present myself in white spaces. This meant
regulating my linguistic capabilities, dampening my cul-
tural connections and distinguishing myself as the ‘other’
with the ‘other’ in terms of my Blackness. It meant that in
my efforts to assimilate to whiteness, whether conscious
or unconscious, it had a direct impact on my place with-
in the Black community and influenced my authenticity
within Blackness. While at the same time, the realness of
being Black was on my mind as I constantly examined the
ways it contrasted to whiteness and worked to erase them.
My Blackness was doubted by everyone and without my
Blackness, I was left to cling to the only thing I knew: that
success meant being as white as I could.
They know that my body is not my own, but theirs.
Every moment of everyday, people stare, they gawk. They
clutch their purses. They cross the street. They leave me
alone my bus seat. [COPY: on my bus seat?] They avoid my
gaze. I am under their surveillance. They pretend I don’t
exist. They make me smaller, erase me, erase my Black-
ness, even as I erase, lose pieces…pounds of myself.
The message was simple: Hate yourself.
In a society that does its best to capitalize on fat bod-
ies and Black bodies, why are Black skin and fat figures
thought to be so worthless?
Fatness is the thing we love to hate, but hate to love. It
is the imagined vessel of indulgence, and shame. It is the
canvas where the thin erase their insecurities and paint
blame and ridicule. Being fat meant constantly doubting
my abilities because fatness is seen solely as a burden. A
burden, most often, carried in silence by those who bear it.
Don’t have fat friends, fat partners or fat children because
they only make you look worse. Growing up, I was taught
not to love my body, but instead, I was met with militant,
cruel, and insistent ridicule. And those who do love peo-
ple who are fat, often, use their love as a means of convey-
ing the same message, because they were taught that to
unconditionally love someone in their fatness, was not to
love them at all, but to let them suffer. Fatness is thought
to be a physical, social and moral disease. Fat people aren’t
people at all, they simply the manifestation of a ‘problem’.
You don’t get access to your full humanity and autonomy
when you are fat. You become the recipient of everyone’s
expectations and their criticism. You lost control of your-
self, because you realized that you were never meant to
have it.
LOSE IT. YOU CAN DO IT. LOSE THE WEIGHT.
LOSE YOUR HUMANITY. YOU ARE NOTHING. YOUR
BODY IS EVERYTHING. YOUR FATNESS IS A LIMI-
TATION. YOUR BlackNESS IS A LIMITATION.
All you need to do is:
Hurt.
Be articulate.
Worry.
Count Your Calories.
Doubt Yourself.
Be Silent.
Hide yourself.
Black is Slimming.
Watch what you eat.
Watch what you say.
Watch how you dress.
Trying to figure out how to value my body for just exist-
ing.
Needing to figure out how to value my body for just
existing.
Being fat means feeling unjustified.
Being Black means feeling unjustified.
Being fat means feeling unworthy
Being Black means feeling unworthy
Of investment. Of love. Of life.
Being Black means constantly having to navigate being
unwanted and erased in spaces
Being fat means constantly having to navigate being
unwanted and erased in spaces
Being Black means being in the way. Occupying space.
Unnecessary. An excess.
Being fat means being in the way. All the time.
I was taught from a young age that my body was bad
and that I needed to change to be better.
I was taught from a young age that my race was bad and
I needed to change to be better.
I was taught that my body was a reflection of the person
I was.
I was taught that my race was a reflection of the person
I was.
I was responsible for being fat.
I was responsible for being Black.
To be fat is to be guilty.
To be Black is to be guilty.
My mind frequently wanders to Eric Garner.
Fatness tied as a noose for the destruction of Blackness.
“If I ever get that fat, please kill me”- A random strang-
er in conversation with her friend as they walk passed me
“You are killing yourself”- My grandfather once said,
encouraging me to lose weight.
“Black-on-Black” crime.
To be fat is to die.
To be Black is to die.
You start to internalize these messages. They become a
part of you until you wake up one day and realize that you
have to actively fight against your own thoughts to love
yourself. You have to redefine and reshape the definition
of love and worth to face the world. You realize that you
have to re-focus the gazes, the stares, the condemnations
to messages of ignorance, the result of a system of oppres-
sion that was never meant to value your existence. You
realize that to exist unapologetically is revolution (Thank
you Lorde).
Fatness and Blackness.
Fat Blackness.
Black Fatness.
They are frameworks for the world. They are filters and
pigments creating a kaleidoscope of experiences. Fatness
and Blackness make us challenge the way we were taught
to value and love life. My experiences as both Black per-
son and a fat person continue to shape the way I see the
world. They have given me a capacity to love that is more
than a finite measure of the color of my skin or the cir-
cumference of a waistline. They have made me aware of
the ways in which we continue to marginalize and wound
those around us. Wound ourselves.
How do you justify violence?
In the name of health?
In the name of love?
In the name of respectability?
Who determines the value of life?
What authority do you have?
Who gave it to you?
Because I didn’t.
I won’t.
Wednesday, March 9 2016 // The Statement
6B
I Can’t Breathe:
To be Fat and Black
by Demario Longmire,
Michigan in Color Editor