black women — Pod Archive

Click here for a transcript of this episode!

In this episode, we’re re-visiting a tried and true topic of discussion: fat travels! We’re joined today by Natalie Robinson and Ashley Wall of fatgirlstraveltoo.

PATREON DRIVE!

Join Team Paisley Mumu in the next month to be part of our BABYSITTERS CLUB. That means weekly lives with Sophie giggling at a chapter, special shoutout next episode, group crafts, and maybe even something special in the mail ;)

BOOKCLUB:

Fearing the Black Body / Black Owned Bookstores

From Yeli:
- One of the things that really stood out to me about this chapter was how many writers and poets were out here being at the forefront of these fatphobic and racist movements! I never studied Ralph Waldo Emerson in university, but I know for a fact that his name is tossed around constantly. I can’t say I’m surprised that he was so vile, but it really goes to prove how much (again) learning institutions uphold white supremacy! For anybody that’s ever been in a literature major or course, or even simply in high school, you KNOW how white the course reading and theory is! The fact that Shakespeare is crammed down our throats every single year of our education, yet books written by a Black author are cornered into “multicultural studies” is absolute white supremacy! AH!!!
- Another thing that really stood out to be was how many WOMEN were out here propagating the ideas that fatness was immoral, and how that was tied to Blackness! It reminded me of how the birth control movement is seen in present-day as some sort of revolutionarily feminist movement from the beginning, when in reality its roots were actually racist - lots of the ways that reproductive control were marketed and justified were actually in order to minimize the amount of non-white people being brought into the world. Have you ever heard somebody say that the reason the world is overpopulated is because families in other places in the world have millions of children? Because I was TAUGHT THAT in high school, and it was only a couple of years ago that I was able to educate myself and unlearn it! Anyways, goes to show how white women have historically always been NOT intersectional. If anyone wants to learn more about the rise of reproductive “rights”, there’s a really great documentary up on Youtube called “No Más Bebés.”
From Laila:
- In this chapter, we can spot so many ways the editorial world upheld fatphobia and racism. Namely, Harpers Bazaar editor Margaret Elizabeth Sangster promulgating theories of Anglo-Saxon superiority by featuring writers such as Edith Bigelow, author of “The Sorrows of Being Fat”, in which she described fatness as “the most undesirable state”. In one magazine article, Bigelow went as far as to say a fat society lady “will not be a social success unless she burnt-cork herself” and go to live in Africa where they value fat women (for those unfamiliar, the term “burnt-corking” refers to donning a form of blackface in which literal cork is burned to ash and then used as cheap blackface makeup.). If you were white and fat, you were not considered white at all as fatness was explicitly associated with Blackness and Africa. In other words, Harpers Bazaar was promoting a zero tolerance zone for fatness in America. Let us not forget, the requirement to be truly American has always been, first and foremost, to be white.
- Something to note was the historical exclusion of the Celts from elite white Christian life on the basis that they were not white. The writing of British Ethnologist James Cowles Pritchard purported the Celts, on the basis of their looks back then (short, tan) were Asiatic aka Arab or North African, Semitic, and therefore “African Kin”. Pritchard said “Whatever else they may be, the Semitic languages are first, African”. What truly caught me off guard was the eventual absorption of the Celts into the American mainstream during the 1880's through 1920’s better known as “racial rehabilitation”. Being finally granted white privilege meant the lens of discrimination could now be shifted from their backs onto a new target.
- Exercise: Can you spot the pattern of colonial mentality and oppression that makes up the basis of our country? Who do you think wears the target on their backs in the present day? In 2020, who gets to be white in America? Also, can you spot examples in editorial (print and digital) that go against the grain of promoting fatphobic and racist norms? I challenge you to explore the ways you can divest your dollars from fatphobic and racist companies. Begin to intrrogate the ways in which your complicity helps contribute to the continued oppression of fat non-white bodies.
From Lynn:
- Podcast episode rec: Codeswitch: Is Beauty in the Eyes of the Colonizer?
From Sophie:
- Sabrina Strings Interview on NPR!

For next week, read Chapter 6!

The Meat of It:

Natalie Robinson / Ashley Wall / Fat Girls Travel Too / on Insta / Resource on Election Laws by State / @hownottotravellikeabasicbitch

Fat Girls Travel Too wants SAF listeners to use code SAF100 to get $100 any travel experience with the fat girls travel squad (whenever traveling becomes safe again!!)

CALL TO ACTION: Center Black and Indigenous voices in your life.

We can’t pick your friend group, but we can pick your new social follows. Here are 10 activists, artists, and writers to follow. + SEND US your fave BIPOC x fat x queer follows so we can share them with the fatmily — and if that’s you, DM us so we can hype you up!

Follow: Junglechimera / Dashaunlh / Thethicknutritionist / Amapoundcake / Embrace_mess / Nalgonapositivitypride / Sassy_latte / Ihartericka / Shaneebenjamin / iamjarijones

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Click here for a transcript of this episode.

In this episode, we’re talking with Sophie Williams, AKA OfficialMillennialBlack on Insta, about her upcoming book, not centering whiteness, and the love triangle between fatphobia, racism, and misogyny.

Bookclub: Fearing the Black Body / Black Owned Bookstores

Here are some more questions and thoughts to guide your reading and reflection of the first two chapters of Sabrina String's Fearing the Black Body:

First of all, I wanted to give you some thoughts on how to approach a more academic book, if you're new to or unfamiliar with this kind of reading! 1. If you run across words you don't know, feel free to look them up! Approaching a more academic text like this is a balance of looking things up and using context clues to noodle out what's going on and accepting you might not understand every sentence exactly. 2. Make sure you read the intro! It's a little dense, but it's a great layout of the overall argument the book will make and the plan for that argument, which helps me situate my reading and helps with those context clues. 3. Look at endnotes! They can be both fun, interesting, and helpful in exploring a text like this. Note 20, for example, gives you a handy list of other books about fatness to read. Endnotes can also give you more rich detail that the author wanted to share but doesn't quite fit in the sequential steps of the argument being made. 4. Don't hesitate to make notes of things, concepts, sentences you don't understand or don't remember and might be interested in further reading or googling of! I spent a little time looking at some of the artists mentioned in Chapter 1 on wikipedia and google images, for example. Okay, now questions - send us your answers to these, if you'd like to be featured!
1. Have you ever noticed a focus on "concerns over ascetics, not aesthetics" (p.63) in portrayals of the fatness or thinness of men? How might our modern imaginings of a lean, lanky academic/intellectual character play into this? (I hope this idea is tracked more throughout the book, it's a super interesting one!)
2. If you've ever wandered through a museum from art of this time period, or looked at it in books, have you ever been presented with this kind of lens? What are the general ways you've been taught to look at artworks that are missing a lens of racial analysis?
3. Can you sum up the arguments being made in chapters one and two in a few sentences?
4. How does it feel to view cultural attitudes towards fatness as having changed over time, instead of from within the current cultural moment which seeks to impose a universality on our fatphobia?
Take a further look into the types of Renaissance paintings that Dr. Strings analyzes in Chapter 1. Then, take out a paper and draw yourself. Think about what you focus on, and why.
Journal about how art and storytelling play a role in perpetuating anti-Black racism in the Chapter 2. How has this changed from then till now? How has it remained the same? In what ways are we complicit?

Resources on “Womxn” vs “Women”: this twitter thread / this video on the origin of the phrase “women of color” / the body is not an apology article /

The Meat of It: Sophie Williams / Millennial Black / Insta post that started it all / Slay in Your Lane / All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave / Candice Brathwaite / Bizarre & Racist History of the bmi / How we fail black patients’ pain / Nonwhite patients get less pain relief in US emergency rooms / post: how black people in the UK are disproportionately being affected by COVID / BAME Britains twice as likely to die from COVID / Govt Censorship on BAME report / how to cope if you're a black woman and feeling exhausted / the trevor project / pre-order millennial black
Sophie’s picks: anti-racist ally / keeping up the momentum / for black women who are exhausted

Call to Action: Read “What, to Black Lives, is the 4th of July?” by Antwan Herron.

Read, reflect, and share this piece over this weekend — the 4th. Remember that when we call July 4th “Independence Day,” who that Independence included.

“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems [is] inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.” - Frederick Douglass