The Patient. Files

No one (at least not me) really delves into how it feels to be a girl who doesn’t have the ideal black body. How you begin to believe you’re not good enough for black men because your waist isn’t tiny and your hips don’t spread wide. For me personally, I’m one of the only women in my family with bigger breast and smaller hips; I’ve spent my whole life being told things like:

“You’re built like a man” “You gone have to find somebody who really like you” “Where did you get that body from? Surely not our family.” “Maybe if you lose weight/that stomach you’ll look better.” “I can’t believe how bad built you are” “Ugh you dark and fat” “Why can’t you stop eating??” “It’s your fault you’re so big. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.” “No you don’t need that, you’re big enough already.” “Just don’t eat” “You’re big as a house” “You ain’t ever had a butt, maybe you should look into surgery” “Have you ever heard of a balanced diet” (a doctor on our initial visit, proceeds to draw a plate and what needs to be on it… Even though I explained that i knew what balanced meant). “Thank god you’re pretty with makeup, makes you look smaller” and the reverse “you can’t fool men with makeup” “Maybe if you lost weight you could love yourself” “Fat guys like fat girls right??” (Ignores that I have a very real fear of only being attractive to fat men because I’ve been conditioned to believe that fat isn’t beautiful and now rarely ever find fat men sexually attractive… A fact that I am severely ashamed of).

These are a small number of things said to me personally from childhood til yesterday. So when I venture into a public platform and all I see is women who look like my mother always dreamed I would look…it’s like a small stab each time through a deep wound. It’s a work in progress to get over the shame and sadness, but I’ve never spoken about it before. I try with my friends but I’m accosted with:

“You’re not fat; you’re pretty” “You carry your weight well” “I mean women with hips are still considered fat (PHAT) too” “You look nothing like her” (as I point out a woman with a similar body shape as me) “But you’ve lost weight” (have weighed the same since I was 17 years old without gaining or losing a pound).

To be fat and plain in this world is to live in constant silence and invisibility, fear and anxiety, loneliness and shame.

Modern fat phobia emerged in America during the 1800s in response to industrialization and globalization, but its broad cultural appeal rested largely on racism and white supremacy. 

White, western “scientists” in the 1800s categorized people into social hierarchies on the basis of their distinguishing physical characteristics, including relative fatness. Unsurprisingly, they places white Europeans at the top of this social hierarchy, and their distinguishing physical characteristics – including relative thinness – were deemed to be signs of civilization, and cultural, moral, and intellectual supremacy. 

In contrast, Black people, the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia, and many other non-Black peoples of color were placed at the bottom of this hierarchy, and the physical characteristics attributed to these groups – including fatness – were deemed to be signs of primitivity, and cultural, moral, and intellectual inferiority.

Thus, it became essential for white people to maintain a thin physique to distinguish themselves from other “primitive” races, and to physically embody their own racial supremacy. 

Furthermore, because fatness distinguished non-European immigrants and poor people of color from rich white people, any discussion of the social, economic, moral, and medical harms of fatness became coded language for discussing the “problem” of the “uncivilized” races. This coded language is still in use today. Case and point: The “obesity epidemic” is used to blame mostly poor people of color for social ills ranging from global warming to economic depression, and weight-loss is prescribed to solve health problems more logically attributed to poverty and systematic oppression.      

Fat phobia was born of racism, classism, and white supremacy, and continues to service these oppressive systems today. Never forget that.

Really. You should read this.

For Just $100 a Day, This Crisis Could’ve Been Prevented. Federal law requires that water systems which are sent through lead pipes must contain an additive that seals the lead into the pipe and prevents it from leaching into the water. Someone at the beginning suggested to the Governor that they add this anti-corrosive element to the water coming out of the Flint River. “How much would that cost?” came the question. “$100 a day for three months,” was the answer. I guess that was too much, so, in order to save $9,000, the state government said f*** it — and as a result the State may now end up having to pay upwards of $1.5 billion to fix the mess.

There’s More Than the Lead in Flint’s Water. In addition to exposing every child in the city of Flint to lead poisoning on a daily basis, there appears to be a number of other diseases we may be hearing about in the months ahead. The number of cases in Flint of Legionnaires Disease has increased tenfold since the switch to the river water. Eighty-seven people have come down with it, and at least ten have died. In the five years before the river water, not a single person in Flint had died of Legionnaires Disease. Doctors are now discovering that another half-dozen toxins are being found in the blood of Flint’s citizens, causing concern that there are other health catastrophes which may soon come to light.

People’s Homes in Flint Are Now Worth Nothing Because They Cant Be Sold. Would you buy a house in Flint right now? Who would? So every homeowner in Flint is stuck with a house that’s now worth nothing. That’s a total home value of $2.4 billion down the economic drain. People in Flint, one of the poorest cities in the U.S., don’t have much to their name, and for many their only asset is their home. So, in addition to being poisoned, they have now a net worth of zero. (And as for employment, who is going to move jobs or start a company in Flint under these conditions? No one.) Has Flint’s future just been flushed down that river?

While They Were Being Poisoned, They Were Also Being Bombed. Here’s a story which has received little or no coverage outside of Flint. During these two years of water contamination, residents in Flint have had to contend with a decision made by the Pentagon to use Flint for target practice. Literally. Actual unannounced military exercises – complete with live ammo and explosives – were conducted last year inside the city of Flint. The army decided to practice urban warfare on Flint, making use of the thousands of abandoned homes which they could drop bombs on. Streets with dilapidated homes had rocket-propelled grenades fired upon them. For weeks, an undisclosed number of army troops pretended Flint was Baghdad or Damascus and basically had at it. It sounded as if the city was under attack from an invading army or from terrorists. People were shocked this could be going on in their neighborhoods. Wait – did I say “people?” I meant, Flint people. As with the Governor, it was OK to abuse a community that held no political power or money to fight back. BOOM!

The Wife of the Governor’s Chief of Staff Is a Spokeswoman for Nestle, Michigan’s Largest Owner of Private Water Reserves. As Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein: “Follow the money.” Snyder’s chief of staff throughout the two years of Flint’s poisoning, Dennis Muchmore, was intimately involved in all the decisions regarding Flint. His wife is Deb Muchmore, who just happens to be the spokesperson in Michigan for the Nestle Company – the largest owner of private water sources in the State of Michigan. Nestle has been repeatedly sued in northern Michigan for the 200 gallons of fresh water per minute it sucks from out of the ground and bottles for sale as their Ice Mountain brand of bottled spring water. The Muchmores have a personal interest in seeing to it that Nestles grabs as much of Michigan’s clean water was possible – especially when cities like Flint in the future are going to need that Ice Mountain.

In Michigan, from Flint water, to Crime and Murder, to GM Ignition Switches, It’s a Culture of Death. It’s not just the water that was recklessly used to put people’s lives in jeopardy. There are many things that happen in Flint that would give one the impression that there is a low value placed on human life. Flint has one of the worst murder and crime rates in the country. Just for context, if New York City had the same murder rate as Flint, Michigan, the number of people murdered last year in New York would have been almost 4,000 people – instead of the actual 340 who were killed in NYC in 2015. But it’s not just street crime that makes one wonder about what is going on in Michigan. Last year, it was revealed that, once again, one of Detroit’s automakers had put profit ahead of people’s lives. General Motors learned that it had installed faulty ignition switches in many of its cars. Instead of simply fixing the problem, mid-management staff covered it up from the public. The auto industry has a history of weighing the costs of whether it’s cheaper to spend the money to fix the defect in millions of cars or to simply pay off a bunch of lawsuits filed by the victims surviving family members. Does a cynical, arrogant culture like this make it easy for a former corporate CEO, now Governor, turn a blind eye to the lead that is discovered in a municipality’s drinking water?

Don’t Call It “Detroit Water” — It’s the Largest Source of Fresh Drinking Water in the World. The media keeps saying Flint was using “Detroit’s water.” It is only filtered and treated at the Detroit Water Plant. The water itself comes from Lake Huron, the third largest body of fresh water in the world. It is a glacial lake formed over 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age and it is still fed by pure underground springs. Flint is geographically the last place on Earth where one should be drinking poisoned water.

ALL the Children Have Been Exposed, As Have All the Adults, Including Me. That’s just a fact. If you have been in Flint anytime from April 2014 to today, and you’ve drank the water, eaten food cooked with it, washed your clothes in it, taken a shower, brushed your teeth or eaten vegetables from someone’s garden, you’ve been exposed to and ingested its toxins. When the media says “9,000 children under 6 have been exposed,” that means ALL the children have been exposed because the total number of people under the age of 6 in Flint is… 9,000! The media should just say, “all.” When they say “47 children have tested positive”, that’s just those who’ve drank the water in the last week or so. Lead enters the body and does it’s damage to the brain immediately. It doesn’t stay in the blood stream for longer than a few days and you can’t detect it after a month. So when you hear “47 children”, that’s just those with an exposure in the last 48 hours. It’s really everyone.

This Was Done, Like So Many Things These Days, So the Rich Could Get a Big Tax Break. When Governor Snyder took office in 2011, one of the first things he did was to get a multi-billion dollar tax break passed by the Republican legislature for the wealthy and for corporations. But with less tax revenues, that meant he had to start cutting costs. So, many things – schools, pensions, welfare, safe drinking water – were slashed. Then he invoked an executive privilege to take over cities (all of them majority black) by firing the mayors and city councils whom the local people had elected, and installing his cronies to act as “dictators” over these cities. Their mission? Cut services to save money so he could give the rich even more breaks. That’s where the idea of switching Flint to river water came from. To save $15 million! It was easy. Suspend democracy. Cut taxes for the rich. Make the poor drink toxic river water. And everybody’s happy.

Thank you for sticking it out with me this past anniversary month of PATIENT. it has been an incredible year. Thank you for sharing your stories, telling people about the book, and coming out to events. Thank you for inviting me into your living rooms, sister circles, community centers and classrooms. Thank you for reading, for hearing me out, for finding this work to be important. It means the world to me. Tell your story.

With Love, Bettina