During week 8 of this course, we read Baynton’s piece “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” and had a class discussion about what it means to be human and where social perceptions of disability come from. I brought up something about how the religious, specifically Christian and Catholic, concept of purity and having a spirit seem to play a role in how disability is perceived. We talked about the idea that humans are made in “God’s own image” and how impairments have historically been understood as “monstrous” and ungodly. Ever since that class, I’ve been meaning to spend some more time thinking about that idea. Recently my family was listening to Christmas music and the song “Mary Did You Know” came on, which is a song about the birth of Jesus Christ and all the things he’d do for the world that Mary wasn’t aware of when she became pregnant with him. There’s a part in the song that immediately reminded me of our week 8 discussion that goes: 

Mary did you know

The blind will see

The deaf will hear

The dead will live again

The lame will leap

The dumb will speak

The praises of The Lamb

Mary, did you know

That your Baby Boy

Is Lord of all creation?

I was listening and I was also reminded about how one of the most special powers Jesus had was the ability to “heal” and “cure” people with what we now understand to be disabilities. I think there’s something very significant about this idea that what convinced skeptics that Jesus was the son of God was that he can cure impairments like blindness, deafness, and walking and speech impairments. It seems to imply that although all humans are made in God’s image, there is something about disabled people that needs to be “fixed” by Jesus who is an extension of God. This further implies that there is something non-human about being disabled and that disabled people do not become human or God-like until their impairments are cured. I think these are really powerful connections that contribute to the historical oppression and cruel treatment of disabled people. Similar to how racists used the Bible to interpret the mark of Cain as dark skin, Bible stories about Jesus’ healing powers seems to have given justification for believing that disability is a physical manifestation of impurity that makes disabled people subhuman and separate from God. 

Since that class discussion, I’ve also become more aware and uncomfortable with the way some Christians tend to speak about the “blessing of good health and a sound mind”. This was something I’ve heard countless times growing up in a Christian household. I think there is probably some critical analysis that can be done about the concept of being blessed in general, but in relation to disability, I find it interesting that being non-disabled is seen as the result of having God’s favor in your life. It again reinforces the notion that disability is an ungodly curse. 

I think that moving forward with disability rights and justice, like many other social justice movements, requires people who subscribe to Christianity to dig deep and really think critically about what they learn from the Bible and how it informs their beliefs about other people. When praising Jesus as the savior of humanity, I think it’s important to question what exactly Jesus is saving us from. Maybe part of his mission was to save human kind from disability. Maybe Jesus was a eugenicist even though he was also someone who taught love and acceptance of all people. I don’t know. But as someone who is non-religious and is always very critical of Christianity in general, I would be interested to hear how disabled Christians understand these kinds of Bible stories and if/how they think about the impact of the praise Jesus received for curing disabilities.

Last week we witnessed the race for the election of the 46th President of the United States between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Ultimately, and despite what Trump and his supporters are still denying, Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris were announced the projected winners. For this blog post, I wanted to focus on Kamala Harris whose Vice Presidential win has been celebrated as a historic victory given she is the first woman, first Black person, first Asian person, and first Jamaican person to serve as the Vice President of the United States. She is also being celebrated as an HBCU grad, specifically from Howard University which is considered the mecca of higher education in the Black community. At the end of the race we also saw a historic moment in Georgia which flipped from red to blue as they began counting mail-in ballots. This flip has been accredited to the dedicated work of Stacey Abrams, a Black woman politician and voting rights activist in Georgia who helped over 800,000 Georgia residents register to vote in the last two years in preparation for this election.

At the beginning of Biden’s campaign, there were discussions about who he would pick as his VP, especially since he stated it would be a woman. The possibility of Stacey Abrams being selected was discussed, but as we saw, Joe Biden decided to go with Kamala Harris. What is interesting to me is the juxtaposition of Harris’ and Abrams’ bodies/appearance and how they may have impacted Biden’s choice to go with Harris. In a class where we talk about phenomenology and unruly bodies, we can’t ignore the ways in which Kamala Harris’ “look” contributed to her win as Vice President alongside Joe Biden, especially when compared to who I would consider a much more worthy running mate, Stacey Abrams. Kamala is mixed race, light skinned, and thin with straight hair and racially ambiguous facial features. Stacey Abrams is dark skinned and plus sized with short kinky hair and clearly Black facial features. What do these different body types communicate to Democratic voters? Kamala is the physical embodiment of what many white liberals and democrats perceive as racial progress in America. The racially ambiguous person is almost always cast as the diversity character in TV and film. They check the inclusivity box of non-white without making white viewers uncomfortable. Kamala Harris makes white people feel like they are progressive supporters of Black women, while also avoiding making them feel too uncomfortable about having a Black woman leading alongside the President of the United States. It was very interesting to see white liberals put #BlackLivesMatter and #ACAB in their social media bios and then turn around and post cute pictures and videos of Kamala Harris who has a long career of jailing poor Black and brown people. If Stacey Abrams had that record, would she have even been considered for VP at all? Kamala’s win and the reaction to her win makes me wonder how desirability functions in a way that makes democrats completely disregard her violent anti-Black past in favor of being able to say they helped put a very conventionally attractive, light skin, Jamaican/Asian woman in office. Stacey Abrams dedicated her career to grassroots organizing, fighting against voter suppression, and even running for governor of Georgia, yet she’s not good enough to be Vice President and Kamala, who supports giving more money to the police that antagonize Black and Brown communities, is? Is it Stacey’s skin color, body shape, hair type that make her unfit to be Vice President? Because it can’t possibly be a flaw in her politics or her commitment to serving marginalized communities? My mind immediately sets up the situation like an audition for the role of Vice President alongside Joe Biden in the movie that is the American presidential election. In the casting call, they state that they are looking for a woman of color democrat. After several auditions, Joe Biden and his team narrow it down to Stacey and Kamala. Stacey’s resume is great. She’s talented, maybe even over-qualified and would do amazing in the role, but they question whether their target audience (young progressives) would like her. Is she hip enough for the role? Can they market the gap in her teeth and her kinky fro in a way that will make her everyone’s favorite character? Maybe not. Then there’s Kamala who has the education and formal training, but not much relevant experience. But she’s cool. She has swag. She’s a nice mix of Black and Asian, but you can’t really tell by looking at her. She’s can rock a pants suit but also hops of the plane in her timbs because she’s hip and will look good standing next to Joe in his shades. Fans will love her. So they choose Kamala…

We clearly see over and over again in entertainment, in politics, in interpersonal interactions, etc. how aesthetic proximity to whiteness can give one access to the privilege of being mediocre at the expense of those who are far from the white standard’s lives. Not only is Kamala undeserving of her position in my opinion, along with Joe Biden, but her being there contributes to the continuation of anti-Black violence and oppression. But we’re supposed to celebrate because she’s the first woman of color who gets that power to do so. Another point I’ve seen discussed since Kamala’s win is the fact that she is not a descendent of people enslaved in North America. While her Jamaican ancestors may have likely been subject to colonialism and violent white supremacy, her history does not include the specific trauma of being an enslaved Black person in America. It’s interesting to consider that fact when she is being upheld as the symbol of Black American progress. To sum up, Kamala Harris is a perfect example of just how powerful colorism, fatphobia, featurism, and desirability are even in a decision to choose who is the best vice presidential candidate of the United States. Maybe we just can’t expect truly radical change to happen within the systems we are trying to eradicate.

Content Warning: dieting, disordered eating, fatphobia

My mother started a new Weight Watchers program recently and it’s been bringing up a lot of feelings for me. To start, it’s always weird when you see exactly where some of your problem behaviors come from. My mother has been dieting, cleansing, counting calories for the ultimate goal of losing weight my whole life. Naturally I picked up on these behaviors and attitudes towards fatness as a child and carried them with me only until I started learning about fatphobia and toxic diet culture on social media in the past few years. Watching my mother never be satisfied or proud of her body instilled in me deep beliefs that gaining weight and being fat are the worst things that can happen to you and you should avoid it at all costs. Throughout middle and high school, I also was obsessed with dieting and would feel guilty when I ate “too much” food or food that was “unhealthy”. I congratulated myself for making it through the day only eating two meals. If I ever did lose weight, my mother would tell me I looked good. She always told me about her diets and asked if I wanted to do them with her. She would never ask my younger sisters who have always been thin. To this day, I struggle with feeling embarrassed about being the only non-thin sibling. I wonder if my family ever feels ashamed of me or if other people notice when they see us all together and wonder what went wrong with me. 

Even though I’m used to my mother dieting and obsessing over losing weight, it’s been especially triggering for me to hear her talk about Weight Watchers now that I’m educated about fatphobia/diet culture and while I’m working on unlearning my disordered eating behaviors. It makes me sad to see her at 46 years old still thinking she needs to fix her weight. It’s hard to hear her decide between “one point” and “two point” foods. It makes me extremely uncomfortable when she praises herself for restricting her eating. Throughout my journey of learning to accept my body at all sizes, I’ve learned that food is not only something that is necessary for your survival, but is also supposed to be a source of pleasure. You should eat what your body tells you it needs. You should eat what you actually enjoy and makes you feel good. It’s draining to hear her reinforce the ideas I’m working so hard to unlearn. I want better for her, but I still have discomfort talking about eating and dieting so I don’t know how to have the conversation with her about it. I usually don’t respond when she talks about it because I don’t want to encourage or reinforce it. Eating alone or in secret is still a behavior I resort to much more often than I think is good for me, so at the beginning of quarantine I even found myself scared to eat around my parents. The messages about eating and gaining weight I internalized from them made me feel like they were judging me or disgusted by me. It makes me wonder if my mother ever feels that way. Listening to her try to talk to me about Weight Watchers also makes me wonder if she’s subtly trying to suggest that I start it. But also that could be me projecting… 

It’s wild to think about how something as simple and essentially human as eating can be turned into a basis for making moral judgements about others. We decide who is good or bad based on how much they eat, what they eat, and what size their body is. We do this so much that people actually pay money to have their eating policed. It’s my opinion that diet programs, especially with names like Weight Watchers, are capitalist ventures that train people to develop eating disorders. I’m frustrated that my relationship to eating has always been so troubling, when it should be so simple. I think one thing I’m becoming more aware of in this class is how my perception of my body shapes almost all my behaviors. I remember going to college dining halls and being anxious to put the foods I really wanted on my plate because I thought everyone was looking at me disgusted, thinking “This is why they’re fat.” Sometimes I notice the ways I try to physically shrink myself when I’m around other people, especially people that are smaller than me. Standing next to someone smaller than me has always made me very anxious and still does. But I’ve also just recently started to realize that my body was never actually as big as I thought it was and the way body dysmorphia has really just been playing with me my whole life. And also that my body dysmorphia most likely originated from the fatphobia my mother passed down to me and grew from there. It’s interesting to think about how our bodies are forms of communication, too. We assume that people’s bodies tell us certain things about them. I assume that my body tells people I lack self control and don’t care about myself. But I’m learning that eating is caring for yourself and policing your eating is not.

In just a few weeks, this course has taught me about how the body is a source of knowledge and a medium for knowing the world. However, it has also made me think about what it means to use my body to know when I don’t really know my body. One of my side effects of living through a pandemic has been a heightened sense of body dysmorphia and depersonalization. The combination of being isolated with my family, gaining weight, rotating between three pairs of biker shorts and two oversized tees, and spending hours just laying in the bed during the first few weeks of quarantine really warped my perception of what my body looks like and how I exist in reality. Sometimes it feels like I have no idea what I look like. Sometimes I think I know and then convince myself that that idea is inaccurate and I could really look like anything. Sometimes I look in the mirror and my mind just flips back and forth between different bodies that are all supposed to be me. I had no one around to compare myself to, no other human beings around to measure the accuracy of my perception. It felt like we heard about the pandemic one day, started quarantine the next, and then when I woke up the next morning I was in a completely different body that didn’t look or feel the same as it did before everything started. It happened so fast, my mind needed time to catch up. I looked at myself and knew that was me but at the same time there was a disconnect between who I “knew” to be “me” and who I was looking at. A separation between self and body.