An activist at a recent Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago slammed the “diet industry” for policing “Black fat flesh,” characterising modern health standards & weight management as forms of “body fascism” – drawing on “eugenic, anti-Black, anti-fat, ableist, racist, productivist traditions…” Where’s my paper bag and tin-foil hat?
Transcript:
Body Facism, Anti-Fatness & Racial Control. What, what?
Well, you probably don’t need to look too hard at my school photos, in fact, any of my old photos to see that I have always enjoyed my relationship with food. I’ve always thought I need to lose weight. And it’s not because I’m white. (and you’ll soon understand why I made that ridiculous statement). No – I just want to live a long healthy life as much as is possible.
And there are clear risk factors to my health if I’m carrying too much weight.
We all know that. Don’t ask me about my cholesterol at the moment. I‘m a work in progress.
And yes, we should oppose any forms of body shaming or teasing or ridiculing. It’s an area that many people struggle in – but that doesn’t mean we should talk about it.
However, according to a FOX News report
An activist at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago slammed the “diet industry” for policing “Black fat flesh,” characterizing modern health standards and weight management as forms of “body fascism”.
It was during a session on “Health Fascism” by author Da’Shaun L. Harrison
…The four-day Socialism 2026 conference… brought together activists, organizers, and communities from across the country and around the world, featuring over a hundred participatory discussions, lectures, and workshops, according to the event’s website.
The session was titled “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State”.
In the session, Harrison argued that diet culture conditions “obedience,” “self-denial,” and “discipline” before framing those concepts as central components of “body fascism.”
….Harrison also criticized GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, contending that efforts to treat fatness as a public-health issue are intrinsically connected to racial control.
Well, I think we should have a watch of the presentation. It’s quite the hoot.
Even from the introduction by the host of the session, it’s all downhill. Including masks. Because no socialist actually wants to be recognised in public for their barmy views eh
So first I’m gonna read the announcements. Uh, reminder, all Socialism Conference attendees are required to wear masks fully covering the nose and mouth while indoors in conference spaces, including hallways and meeting rooms. Speakers from the front of sessions may remove their masks in order to deliver their presentations, but only while actively speaking. I’m not going to. Audience members are still required to wear masks even while asking questions or making comments. And again, the discussion portion is not gonna be live-streamed, so just the talks are. Um, COVID is currently surging, and the mask policy’s in place to protect all of us, especially the immunocompromised, from the risk of contracting COVID-19 and other illnesses.
And then the special author is introduced – a dude – who is described as a queer, trans theorist, anarcho-communist, Afro-pessimist abolitionist. And identified as non-binary and transgender. (how can you be transgender but also not believe in the binary?)
But he’s still a dude.
my name is Beatrice Adler-Bolton. I’m the co-host and co-founder of the Death Panel podcast, um, and co-author of Health Communism with Artie Vierkant, and I’m honored to be joined today by my comrade, Daeshawn L. Harrison. Daeshawn is a queer and trans theorist, anarcho-communist, Afro-pessimist, and Southern born and bred abolitionist based in Atlanta, Georgia. They’re an author, lecturer, researcher, editor, and a movement, media, and narrative strategist. Their award-winning first book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, pick it up in the bookstore, is a path-breaking intervention and the key text in Black fat studies.
They’re an author. But there’s just one of them.
Here’s the book
A best seller like Nikky Hagar’s book I’m sure. With the same lack of fact checks.
So he gets into his presentation – and apparently health and fitness are eugenic, anti-Black, anti-fat, ableist, racist. Who knew that white people are never ever fat or old or disabled.
health fascism doesn’t just refer to, like, bad or harsh health policies, right? It’s a descriptive term for a political logic that pervades the current state of things and shapes the way that the US is being governed right now. The idea is that health, fitness, productivity, and bodily normalcy are measures of moral worth and political belonging. Things like fatness, illness, disability, racialized difference, perceived dependency or perceived degeneracy, um, are interpreted as evidence of social rot in need of excising. The Make America Healthy Again project makes this quite explicit, but it didn’t invent these dynamics by any means. MAHA draws on this much older eugenic, anti-Black, anti-fat, ableist, racist, productivist traditions that have long organized the abandonment of certain populations and the flourishing of others.
But its not just the racism, ableism or anti-fat. If you’re going to do critical theory intersectionality, you’ve got to bring in gender confusion and sexuality eh. Nasty heterosexuals – who are white – who may have muscles – and are in the military!!!
The term body fascism names the promotion of thin or muscular, productive, cisgender and heterosexual, white, militarizable bodies as a national and patriotic symbol. This body is projected through social institutions such as education, media, religion, medicine, and the government so that it stands out as the standard.
I never realised the US military were all white. No Asian or Black or anything else. Never knew that.
Apparently, the Western world and its colonial afterlives have a long history of waging war on fat flesh, with diet culture as a primary weapon. It’s about population control!
Once the ideal body becomes a national symbol, it settles into collective consciousness as both legible and untouchable. Desire, by way of body fascism, organizes the unequal distribution of care and violence. It necessitates the body as an aspiration, determines whose bodies are worth aspiring to, whose are correctable, and whose are rendered killable through neglect, as well as whose never become recognized as having a body at all.
This distribution depends on a deeper distinction between body and flesh. History shows that after mass disabling events, pandemics, wars, or economic catastrophe, there is a rise in body fascist ideology and diet culture. We see this after World Wars I and II, in the development of fascist movements in Britain and Nazi Germany, and later during the Cold War with the creation of the US President’s Council on Youth Fitness.
We see in the political response to the HIV and AIDS crisis, in the so-called obesity epidemic of the 2000s, and in the US Task Force on Childhood Obesity, as well as in the Is- as well as in Israel’s blockade of food into Gaza. To this point, RFK Jr.’s MAHA crusade is no surprise, as it’s functionally a symptom of a capital crisis seeking resolution via moral panics and monetizing desire.
The Western world and its colonial afterlives have a long history of waging war on fat flesh, with diet culture as a primary weapon. Through body fascism, diet culture functions as a disciplinary technology used by imperial powers to punish, to regulate, and to control populations in the service of military strength and national image.
So here’s the theory. If we can just get rid of the BMI and any recognition of obesity, and guilty pleasures, everything will be perfect.
Without a population to discipline, there would be no BMI, no obesity epidemic, and no medical or scientific institutions organized around managing fatness. The diet industry reflects this logic. It operates through what I once defined as formal and informal relationships among major food corporations, the medical industrial complex, and individual wealthy benefactors to sustain a social order in which fat people are monitored, restricted, guilted, stolen from, and punished.
Diet culture has always linked food to morality, framing restraint as virtue and pleasure as danger through language like guilty pleasure. Abstaining from pleasure becomes a way to train obedience, to train self-denial, and to train discipline in service of a broader political order Body fascism is not some relic of the past.
But this is where our activist gets himself in trouble. Because he is saying that anti-fatness is anti-blackness, but then he highlights all the black celebrities who have made the connection between health and fitness – and that obesity is actually not good for your health. Ooops.
Since 2020, the growing popularity of GLP-1s has been reflected in the public discourse surrounding Black celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg, Lizzo, Serena Williams, Tracy Morgan, and Oprah, who have either been accused of using these drugs or have publicly discussed or advocated for their use across media platforms… In the years following COVID-19, drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and Mounjaro moved from endocrinology clinics into mainstream conversation and were praised as breakthroughs that could finally solve what other medicine, policy, and culture have long understood to be an intractable problem, fatness. I mean that fatness has always been marked precisely because of its inability to be divorced from Blackness.
Fatness has always been marked precisely because of its inability to be divorced from Blackness. Um… nope. Fatness is about the person – whatever their background, race, nationality, marital status, age….
Here’s a recent article about 10 Black celebrities who’ve opened up about their weight loss journeys
Conversations about weight loss tend to be really complicated, even more so for those whose work involves performing for thousands, being on social media, or simply existing under the spotlight. Some of the world’s greatest entertainers — Lizzo, Oprah Winfrey, and SZA, just to name a few — have all faced criticism for their weight. Thankfully, many of them have openly shared their experiences and the ways they’ve approached weight loss. Gunna and Timbaland hit the gym, Anthony Anderson and Jennifer Hudson focused on eating smarter, and others have turned to medications like Ozempic to help manage their health.
Whoopi Goldberg has spoken openly about using a weight-loss drug to improve her health.
She’s not opposed to weight loss drug use, however. In fact, Goldberg revealed she used Mounjaro to help her lose weight. Ahead, read everything she’s shared. Goldberg has spoken openly about using a weight-loss drug to improve her health.
In 2015, Winfrey partnered with WeightWatchers, ultimately losing over 40 pounds through the program.
Tennis star Serena Williams linked weight and health. Serena is black, by the way.
Roughly a year after starting a weight loss drug, tennis champion Serena Williams says the medication has made her the healthiest she has ever been. Williams, 44, announced her exit from professional tennis in 2022 after a 27-year career, 23 Grand Slams and four Olympic gold medals. Even during the peak of that career, she told NBC News, she struggled to lose weight from diet and exercise. Williams also worried about the risk of diabetes, which runs in her family and is diagnosed at higher rates among Black people compared with the general population.
In 2018, Mo’Nique celebrated weighing under 200 pounds for the first time since she was 17. “I wanted to let y’all know it’s possible, we can do it, and we can get there,” she said in a video shared on Instagram.
So that’s all awkward eh
Anyway, back to our dude who’s desperately trying to be relevant – who talks about the “libidinous economy”. Bet you’ve never heard of that one!
The libidinous economy names how pleasure, safety, coherence, and belonging are secured through the degradation of Blackness. Through the libidinous economy, anti-Blackness is not an anomaly or a deviation. It’s instead foundational to the stabilization and intelligibility of the world. As such, desire becomes the organizing principle of the world, not despite its violence, but because of it. And fascist regimes have always been clear about this. To indoctrinate the masses, they must first leverage propaganda with the intent to manipulate emotions, specifically fear, anger, and pride, thus ensuring the public seeks the very power that is looking to control them.
Finally
So an analysis of health fascism and body fascism shows us where the revolution already is. The revolution does not happen the day that we can all pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and finally get fit and healthy. The right already knows that health politics is mass politics. Mm-hmm. They have already recognized that and are exploiting it. Mm-hmm. The right understands that people experience capitalism through their bodies. They understand [00:49:00] that sickness, exhaustion, debt, alienation, fear, and suffering are some of the primary ways that people measure whether life is going better or worse. What health fascism does is organize those experiences into resentment, selfishness, and defeat.
From the FOX News article, to push back on the nuttiness and narrative…
Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist and author of “Therapy Nation,” told Fox News Digital that Harrison’s comments are a byproduct of ideology infiltrating everything.
“There are fair criticisms of BMI and how it’s used. But calling it ‘body fascism’ is what happens when ideology gets inserted into almost every part of life,” Alpert said.
“We’re seeing more and more ordinary issues viewed through the same lens: Who has power? Who’s oppressed? How does race factor into it? Now even a conversation with your doctor about weight or diet can be framed as a form of oppression,” he added.
“That fits neatly into the worldview being promoted at a conference like this. Instead of seeing people primarily as individuals who make choices and have some responsibility for their lives, everything gets explained through systems, identity and power,” Alpert said.
“Socialism may be an economic philosophy, but the culture surrounding this version of it goes much further. Personal problems become political problems, and individual responsibility gets pushed aside in favor of identifying the system or group supposedly responsible,” he explained further.
“As a psychotherapist, I think there’s a psychological cost to that. If you teach people to interpret uncomfortable information as an attack, they become less willing to hear things they may need to hear. Sometimes a doctor telling you that you need to lose weight or change your diet isn’t racism, oppression or an attempt to control your body. It’s medical advice,” Alpert added.
When you think that wokeness, intersectionality and bonkers is on the decline – be careful.
It’s still around. It’s just that more and more people are realising it for how radical it is.
Right – I’m off for a run. And no – it’s not because I’m a eugenic, anti-Black, anti-fat, ableist, racist who’s carrying a bit too much weight.
I just wanna be healthy.
Oh – and I also love food.
