Straddling the Line of My Own Privilege

I’ve been reading about and listening to a lot of conversations lately about the intersection of racism, fat phobia, body positivity, and diet and wellness culture. With it has come criticism of white women for their continued focus on body positivity, intuitive eating, and diet and wellness culture rather than working to dismantle the larger structures and systems that contribute to weight discrimination for those in bodies outside of the accepted norm.

I think some of the argument is that by continuing to focus on the physical, even if the goal is body neutrality or body acceptance or even body positivity, we remain trapped in a system of measuring our worth by size, and by extension, the worth of others by size too. If instead, we were focused on dismantling the structures that taught us this messed up way of thinking in the first place, our size would be a non-issue, and this type of discrimination would be too. As a white woman who is still very early in my quest to heal my relationship with food, I bristle at the headlines because they seem to be taking aim right at me (The Whiteness of Not Wanting to Diet Anymore and “White Supremacy, That’s the Culprit. Our Bodies Are Not the Problem”), but I also want to understand, so I read and I listen, knowing that it might get uncomfortable.

For a few weeks now, I’ve been aware that I’m straddling a line in my journey—a boundary, actually. It’s the boundary of thin (white) privilege. Until now, my body size has allowed me to enjoy the merits of this privilege. Some days, I feel I have tipped over the edge. Other days, I say a prayer of relief that I’m not yet fully in this space, because for the first time in my life, I’m aware that I have benefited from this privilege even when I didn’t know it and sure as hell didn’t feel like I was benefiting from anything.

To be clear, I have not experienced routine, systemic harassment or discrimination because of anything about me, including the size of my body. It’s a shame that it took giving up dieting and diet culture—and, let’s be real—gaining enough weight for me to see that I might no longer fit into society’s mold of acceptable. And I’ve had discomfort, and at times feelings of panic about this. The truth is, I don’t know how I will handle having routine discrimination being in a larger body. And the other truth is that I have a choice not to. I could begin taking magic pills again tomorrow and frustratingly start this form of torture all over, but also be in an acceptable size that would allow me to not only appear more attractive but escape discrimination. And that is also part of my privilege. When I began to see myself as someone who might face routine discrimination, it opened my eyes. It also allowed me to see some of my own biases.

Something that really hit home for me a few weeks ago was hearing Dacy Gillespie, a personal stylist for all body types, say that to really stop judging yourself, you first have to stop judging others. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. I didn’t think at the core of my self-bashing was an implicit bashing of others, but I have judged others…made assumptions when I didn’t know their truth…judged books by their covers. It’s hard to hear, because it’s true, and because, to some extent, we all do it naturally. But also what we think of as our own judgment sometimes isn’t ours at all. It’s societal conditioning, and we can do something about that. 

A week ago, I would have told you that when we’re trying to heal our relationship with our body, we have to start somewhere, and it makes sense that we’d start with ourselves before we turn our thoughts to others. But the more I thought about it from this wider lens, I wondered if that wasn’t looking at the problem from inside out rather than outside in. If we didn’t have societal pressure to fit a certain size, we wouldn’t have to change our relationship with our bodies. If I had not been born into a society that glorified thin over all else, I wouldn’t have spent nearly my entire existence focused on it. Maybe we need to do a little of both—working on us and working on society? Collectively, we have the power to change, and even our individual journeys have the power to change the whole, but we make the most impact when we take a stand, speak up, and advocate for ourselves and especially for those who can’t.

I’m not going to begrudge someone else’s journey. I started mine focused on my body, and I am still largely working through my issues with my body while gaining awareness of the larger societal and systemic forces that contribute to them and also continue to cause widespread discrimination and oppression that I am not yet and may never fully experience. It’s a complex set of problems, and I certainly don’t have all the answers.

I had been so focused on my body and what’s going to happen to it and then I added on a new set of worries: What’s going to happen to me if I permanently choose to live in a body that’s discriminated against and, worse, how do I live with myself if I decide I can’t live in a body that will be discriminated against knowing many people don’t get to choose? I was swimming in my own crazy-making.

And then a few days ago, I had a thought…What if I just dropped the rope? What if instead of debating what’s going to happen to my body, whether I will ever accept it, whether I really want to go all in on this, I stopped focusing on my body at all and just focused on living and accepting others—all others—regardless of their body size, and advocating for those who don’t benefit from the same privileges as myself? It feels like the right answer.