Stepping Against The Scale: “Health” Is Prescribed For The Human, Never The Black
Time and again, seeing doctor after clinician, primary care specialist after another, I’ve never come close to interrogating how much fatness and how being fat was an identity—not at least, to the extent which I’ve understood it when I started to accept my body outside of my family’s expectations of what they believed it should look like.
In my anecdotal piece, Appreciating My Black Body For What It Is—where I explore through narrative the structural foundations from which the insecurities about my body emanated from, which were intergenerational trauma, speaking broadly—and more specifically, aspirations to look good for my mother—as I was not a person—but an objectified extension of her, my aunts, my father, and my uncle—who all were guilty of making fun of me because of my weight to the point where I eventually became used to their fatphobia.
When I visited my doctor(s), regardless of what profession they claimed to work in, a significant part in how their assessments of me went uncontested was the pseudoscientific jargon they would use to pathologize and diagnose what “the issue” was. They would never disclose with me directly that I—the ‘locus of abjection’, was said issue. A few days ago, I reflected on the culmination of experiences I’ve had with predatory, antiBlack clinicians leading up until this point in my life.
Two white cardiologists, one of whom goes by the name of Russell Berdoff, MD, Marissa Lombardo, MD, along with nephrologist, Steven Gruber, MD of Mount Sinai have been responsible for providing me with care—but to no avail. All of them have consistently given me reductive assessments about my body—my existence—with regards to my health and have all concluded that my weight was and is the conspicuous culprit. Nothing else.
This was no coincidence. All of who disagree give too much credence to these so-called professionals who have gone uncontested about their practice(s). I have addressed all three of them to confront that the analyses that they’ve arrived at were suspicious and needed to be called into question—probed down to its roots.
All of them have failed—but this is by design of the system white people have created. This instance happened only a few days ago. In the middle of all this bullshit, one of the nurses or receptionists or whoever called me to follow up about me addressing the medical antiBlackness / medical neglect to my former nephrologist and cardiologists. She argued in favor of the nephrologist in saying that my message to him was “aggressive.”
I replied to her, saying that her suggesting my aggressive message was indeed racist I was seeking to to report him for medical negligence. I proceeded to ask her, “are you Black?”
She defensively replied, “my dad is Black.” This was the kind of response I’d expect to hear from a light skinned person saying they’re not colorist, or a settler or a nonBlack person saying they’re not antiBlack because they have a Black friend or relative. The phone call ended shortly afterwards.
The receptionist called back a minute or two later to have me cancel my appointment with him. I told her I’ve already canceled my appointment with Gruber (seeing as his ego got in the way of him taking accountability for his failure.) Fuck Steven Gruber. Fuck that receptionist who was clearly suckin’ Massa’s dick.
On a lighter note, a patient access manager reached out in regards to my request to start seeing a Black cardiologist and a Black nephrologist. I just made the appointment to see the Black cardiologist, which is not until next month. I asked to be put on the waiting list should she be available to see me sooner. Now, it’s just a nephrologist that the manager has yet to update me on.
As this has all transpired, I had just finished reading Frank B. Wilderson III’s metamemoir, Afropessimism, and felt incited to follow through by delving into Black, disabled, fat, trans and nonbinary activist and writer, Da’Shaun L. Harris’s work, Belly of The Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as AntiBlackness.
All of which Da’Shaun has addressed from how we fat Black people are systemically misdiagnosed by these so-called medical “professionals” and predatorily policed and killed by the fascist pigs to the overlooked sexual assault of fat Black boys and masculine-presenting bodies, has left me speechless with astonishment as well as grief and I have yet to finish their work. In defining the parasitic relationship between the colonial state and the “Black fat,” a phrase they use, Da’Shaun states:
As previously stated, the Black fat is misdiagnosed by medical professionals, are skipped over for jobs and housing, sit at the crux of harm committed by dieting and diet culture, experience heightened interactions with police, leading to state-sanctioned brutality, and are showcased as the evil that waits in children’s stories and beastly gluttons in religious texts. In various ways, the world has normalized the teachings that fat Black people are not Desirable and, thus, fat and Black bodies are deserving of the abuse they endure.
As if this didn’t confirm what I already knew, the difference is how much closer I am to understanding how much identity as a fat person is inseparable from my Blackness as well as my Queerness and for this reason, my big-bodiedness, exacerbates the everyday peril of antiBlackness. They continue:
For anti-Blackness and anti-fatness to be legitimate subjugating and objectifying structures, their existence had to be predicated on a Thing unobtainable by Black fat subjects. That Thing is health. In other words, to legitimize race, sex, and class statuses, health had a job to do. That job was to ensure that the Black — which is, too, the fat — was always fixed to be something that Black fat subjects could not be. This leads to the birth of the medical industrial complex — an institution built and sustained by race scientists and eugenicists dedicated to the continued Death of Black fat subjects.
I’ve seen in some social justice circles that body positivity doesn’t get at the root of what is to solved. To me, I felt discouraged that people were critiquing the movement in which way that people who were fat shouldn’t be celebrating themselves but I also suspected there was something unfinished about the movement. Fat people were still being mistreated—told to lose weight—relentlessly being bullied and cyberbullied into submitting to suicidality because they were fat. People have always found new ways to assail fat Black people with unmercifulness. In fact, Da’Shaun states at the outset of their book that body positivity is a ruse:
This is what is violent about “body positivity”; it is benevolent anti-fatness in that it is masqueraded as some sort of semblance of acceptance for fat people when it is, instead, an opportunity for Thinness to reroute, but not give up, its hold on fat people’s collective liberation.
In like manner, Da’Shaun informs and reminds me of more:
The Body—an entity of sorts, or the flesh we are born into—is not what creates the [fatphobic, antiBlack] violence. What creates the violence is an ideology and the power to enforce it, interpersonally or systematically. This means whether or not you love on, show up for, and transform how you view your body, the structure of the World does not shift. This is, again, the harm of “body positivity.” It cannot produce anything more than a quasi-self confidence, and even that is conditional because it—for a long time now—has not be asked to. Body positivity individualizes something that is bigger than the individual.
Leaning into this truth, it’s not sadness that I feel so much of—but further confirmation that body positivity is in fact a ruse—a multimillion dollar ruse that Da’Shaun later addresses in their book. Does this mean the few years of me coming into my accepting my body was in vain? I don’t necessarily feel that is the case—it just means that everything in the United States—everything in this world, can be traced back to the root: antiBlackness.
Synthesizing Da’Shaun’s research, thorough analyses and contextualizing them with the instances of medical malpractice that my former cardiologist(s) and nephrologist subjected me to—in addition to the antiBlack negligence all of my former medical clinicians have subjected me to have only reinforced—confirmed to me that these disquieting experiences I’ve had were a part of that ‘mode of professionalism’ Fred Moten has talked about alongside Stefano Harney in their text, The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning & Black Study.—that ‘professionalization’ and ‘negligence’ are one and the same in virtually any field or profession in the United States.
With attention to the medical and pharmaceutical industries, it is within the policy of the American cardiologist, nephrologist, clinician, psychiatrist, medical so-called “professional” or what have you, to purposefully, neglect their Black patients—witnessing the Black and neglecting us through the guise of medical terminology. To put it differently, it is their job to neglect us—to kill us—to leave us to die. Black suffering is what gives white civil society and the nonBlack— ‘coherence.’
If these clinicians were not structural constituents to our suffering, life would come to a halt, the Human would not exist, and they’d be out of a job. This is why health as a political weapon has been constructed in favor of the Human and against the Black since the 19th and 20th century. Unbeknownst to me, it may have been earlier than that. It feels like forever since European psuedoscientists have foregrounded an epistemological apparatus that they used to justify the subordination and enslavement of African peoples. I was not aware to the extent they have even rendered health itself to be used as an antiBlack weapon. Da’Shaun, again, reminds me that when these incorrigible Europeans created race, the Black—the Slave — was modeled as a paradigmatic representation of what was deemed intrinsically unwell for the reason that they were are Black. They state:
In fact, for “race” to be constructed, the Slave had to exist — and had to exist as the antithesis of health — so that European physicians, anthropologists, and other eugenicists could determine what set the Slave apart from, as J. F. Blumenbach called them, the Caucasian; that being the “degeneration,” or the corruption, of the Slave’s body from the Caucasian. For all intents and purposes, Blumenbach created race, and did so as to differentiate the Human from the Slave. These scientists based the idea of health on what Africans could and could not withstand and created health “issues” based on what Africans would not withstand.
All Eurowestern philosophers of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period (including all American presidents such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Harry S. Truman, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump) unanimously agree(d) with Blumenbach that the fat Black was—and is inferior. When we are assailed anywhere we are in this world, Blackness is the first designation that is indicated.
Now, I have yet to read Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present and having sifted through some of its pages, I will end with this:
Harriet’s work needs be a mandatory reading for all those looking to enter the field of medicine not just in this country but also the world. Most of these so-called “doctors” and “nurses” should’ve never had their careers — it ain’t never too late for these antiBlack motherfuckers to lose their jobs now because they were never on the right side of history.
Support Patrick’s writing:
cash.me | venmo | paypal
Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian independent Goodreads author, writer, music producer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.
