Yeah. I’m still here, folks. Sorry about the inadvertent hiatus. I had a job interview last week (it went great; yay!) and I was helping my mom ring in her 45th year (Happy Birthday, Mom!), so I got a bit sidetracked.
But y’all know I’ve been keeping up with the Fatosphere.
So, I (as I’m sure many other people have) read Aunt Fattie’s column yesterday. Outside of the various insightful comments, one term kept popping up frequently: privilege.
It’s something I think a lot about, this privilege, because it’s something that, in my self-acceptance journey, I have become more conscious of. And it extends way beyond fat privilege for me, because I’m also Black.
See, what folks don’t realize is that there’s a hierarchy in the Black community when it comes to fat AND when it comes to skin color.
Now, it seems to be the general idea that the Black community is more accepting of fat folks (if you want my view on that as it pertains to dating Black men, click here.) It really isn’t true, we just tend to describe it a bit differently. You have skinny, then thick, then fat (and many different words to describe what comes between). In my experience, it’s been the “thick” that’s most coveted, but that’s strictly what I see (YMMV). Now, a thick girl may not understand the issues I face as a fat woman, but she’s not as privileged as say, the skinny woman. However, the skinny woman might say that the thick woman has it better because she has more curves (yes folks, I’ve witnessed this discussion.) and so on. All this to say, there’s issues at every size.
But now, I never really thought about the color hierarchy until I focused on the fat hierarchy. For example: my freshman year of high school, my best friend was a fat, dark-skinned girl. She was awesome, and we got along so well. I looked smaller than she, but that’s because I was taller. We both wore the same size.
One day, I overheard a group of boys talking about she and I, and one guy pipes up “Wait, who’s T.?”
Other dude: “Oh, that’s the big, fat crispy (in reference to skin tone) girl that hangs around FashionableNerd.”
First dude: “Oh, hell, that chick is ugly! So I know FN has to be fucked up in the face to hang around her.”
Other dude: “Nah, man, she’s a light-skinned chick. Long hair and stuff. She ain’t all that skinny, but she’s alright.”
Notice how my skin color trumped my fat? I didn’t think about it then, as I was too busy laying a sound barrage of foul language on the boys for speaking of my friend in such a manner (if y’all think I have a filthy mouth NOW…let me tell you, this is a kinder, gentler me compared to then, yo). But when I started reading more discussions about White privilege and fat privilege and so on, I realized that racial and size privilege runs so much deeper than folks realized. T and I were the SAME SIZE, but they saw her dark skin AND fat. Me? Just my skin color. Which amazes me, because, what–you can be fat and lighter skinned, and that’s cool, but a pox on your house if you have nerve enough to be both fat AND darker skinned? Boggles the mind, y’all.
The older and more militant I became, the more I noticed the color privilege I had. I would always get compliments on my “beautiful, light brown skin”, when I’d have an equally gorgeous cocoa-colored friend sitting right next to me being ignored. Coupled with the long hair I had then, I’d get random IGNORANT questions about “what I was mixed with” because clearly, my Blackness ain’t enough to garner beauty. I have to fit some European ideal, and so my mom or dad has to be White, right? {This isn’t a shot at White people, just the beauty ideal. End disclaimer.}
But besides the shunning I noticed, I found that some of my darker-skinned friends were ashamed of their skin color, much as some fat people are conditioned to be ashamed of their fat. For example, my friend A. and I wanted to go out one weekend and have some fun. When I suggested the beach (I was living in Florida at the time), she said, “Girl, no! I can’t afford to get any darker than I already am!”
Me: “What the—wait, WHAT?”
A.: “Come on now. YOU can get darker, you’re already light. I can’t get any darker, men won’t want me.”
A. is this gorgeous modelesque woman with long dark hair and coffee colored skin. Her body wasn’t keeping her from the beach, her skin tone was, and I was just amazed at that. In fact, I figured I’d be having a hard time cause, whoa, fat chick in bathing suit! But like most folks with privilege, I never even thought skin color would be an issue. It shouldn’t be an issue at all, but the more we as a society lean more towards the European beauty ideal, the more prevalent the issue will become.
But don’t think that the lighter skinned Black woman has it easier, now. IntellectualFeminist and I had a convo awhile back about skin tone and how it affected us when we were younger. She is much fairer than myself with jewel-green eyes. Where I’d get questions about what I was “mixed with”, she’d get questions asking “what ARE you”, as if she was some newly discovered creature. But then, it’s often I would see some of the fairer Blacks be discounted in some conversations surrounding racism and the Black experience, because they weren’t “Black enough” to count. I’d find myself telling her, oh, but I know EXACTLY how you feel, but seriously? I don’t, and she called me out on that, as she should have. See how messy and tangled the world of privilege is?
I think, that in the quest of understanding one another, both inter-racially and intra-racially (did I invent words here? if so, sorry, but I think y’all get my drift) we have to look at the various levels of privilege that we may have. It isn’t a perfect solution, if one would even call it a solution at all. But it is a tactic, and one folks would do well to try out sometime.
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