Malcolm and Martin

Yes, I find it very insightful and very true, too.

Great post. But, I don't think it's just a matter of egos. The "safety" issue is a big one. Some people feel threatened and excluded by the existence of other viewpoints within the movement. I don't think that the issue of defensiveness necessarily has anything to do with being egotistical. If anything, it's the opposite.

I agree that it's a great post. But who are the Malcolms of the fat acceptance movement? I can't recall ever hearing anything particularly radical from fat acceptance advocates either here at BFB or elsewhere. Frankly, I think it might help our cause if we did seem a little angrier.

I don't think we on the inside "see" how radical Paul Campos, Marilynn Wann and Pattie Thomas come off to outsiders. To us, their statements make perfect sense. Malcolm's followers felt the same way -- he made perfect sense. Some of the black panthers found Malcolm a little too sedate. If we have fat panthers, perhaps they are those women on the west coast who do performance art, or that author chick from the UK who Paul connected us to about two months ago. (Paul, I traveled a little deeper into her website than I should have and had my Mary Jane shoes scorched. Frankly, I was shocked that you connected us to her and yet shut down the waxing chat in the Forums.) Can someone help me out here. Who am I envisioning?

(Remember, issues specific to BFB policies/etc. should be in the Forums, not here.)

Interesting post, considering that the X-Men III movie just came out. The X-Men were originally an analogy for the Civil Rights movement. Charles Xavier = Martin; Magneto = Malcolm. For anyone who has no idea what the X-Men are, it's about mutants who are people born with super powers who are hated and feared by normal people, much in the same way other minority groups have been over the years. They are fighting for the right to be accepted into society and treated equally. Anyway, I've yet to see a "Malcolm" for the size acceptance movement.

Hope this doesn't stray TOO far OT, but Emily mentions the X-Men and she's dead on. The whole topic of the latest movie is whether being a mutant is an "illness" or "disease" that should be "cured" or whether it's just the way some people are and doesn't need to be treated. The parallels had me shaking my head for the first 1/2 hour of the movie. Freaky. I agree with Debra that there are probably more Malcolms in the fat acceptance movement than we realize, because what they say sounds perfectly reasonable to us. It's how what they say sounds to other people ... and whether they try to refute the arguments they get, or just dismiss them as meaningless ... that make them more like Malcolm X than Martin Luther King. I'd actually argue that what the fat acceptance movement hasn't found is a Martin. The beauty of Dr. King's rhetoric is that he was able to frame the issue of racism in a way that no reasonable, thinking person could justify it. He was able to reach the core human in each of us, make us realize that the color of our skin has nothing to do with our value or worth. No one in the fat acceptance movement has been able to touch that same place. And until we do, we're still going to be having the same old arguments: we choose to be fat, and could be thin if we made different choices; it is unhealthy to be fat; fat people cost society too much money; blah, blah, blah. Until someone finds a way to carry the message about size that Dr. King carried about race, I think we're going to have a hard time making our point.

Excellent point, jmars. I was reading your post, and do you know what popped into my head? Music. Music is one of the few things that has the power to touch everyone. It's been used for every cause under the sun that I can think of *except* size acceptance. Why shouldn't we have music? I wish I could sing, but my talents lie in other directions.

I agree that the ideas of fat acceptance advocates sound much more radical to those outside the FA community than those within it. I also agree that the FA movement has not yet found its MLK. But what I meant when I asked about an FA Malcolm was this: is there someone in FA who gives voice to the anger of people mistreated because they're fat, who is capable of making society at large feel that for the sake of its own self-interest it cannot afford to ignore the feelings of fat people indefinitely? After all, the main effect of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers on the majority of Americans was to make them nervous; many of them were readier to embrace the healing message of King because they feared the angrier side of the civil rights movement, the side that said, "by any means necessary." I hasten to say that I don't think we should resort to violence or the threat of violence in the name of FA. But I think it's worth exploring the question, does anger have any useful place in this movement? Let's face it -- being fat makes many of us invisible, makes many people instantly judge us as weak and not to be taken seriously. Showing society how fed up we are would cut against the prevalent stereotype of the fat person as feckless and passive. My parents, for instance, didn't drop their incessant attacks on my weight until I let them see how angry they were making me. I'm not trying to advocate anything. I'm just trying to think about this question. Do we need to be more vocal about the intensity of our discontents?