Yeah.

She talks about the inception of fatphobia going back to race- I mean, going back to, uh, slavery, right? And how we even came to this place in which we have demon- demonized fat bodies.

'Cause again, if we look at like Renaissance art, there's like voluptuous women and curves and hips and like all these beautiful things being memorial- memorialized as like a beautiful body to like adore.

And then at some point we switch to this idea that that's not okay, and that goes back to slavery.

That goes back to, um, this idea of trying to demonize certain bodies to justify the treatment of some individuals.

And so it's like when we can also go back to understanding that the way that we think about our bodies, no matter if we're Black, white, Asian, whatever, goes back to this idea that was rooted in harming a certain population, but it's still now, because of the way that we haven't decolonized our minds, hurting all of us regardless of what we look like, right?

Yeah.

And so, like, just having that awareness of- ... of looking outside of your own perspective and saying, "If I was a person that came into the room of a different gender, a different body size, a different race, how would I feel here in this space?" Mm-hmm.

Can you speak to that? Because I think that goes to what she was saying too.

Absolutely.

Literally took the words out of my mouth because that's exactly what I was going to say.

Yeah.

I'm Black American.

I am a descendant of enslaved people.

No one in my lineage has ever had the opportunity to make the choice to not have children.

What else would you want folks to know about the political implications of this decision and being child-free and also like how race plays a role in all of this and like how that makes that choice different depending on who you are and your identity?

And so can you talk a little bit about as you started peeling those layers back and going, well, well, well, what do we have here? Here we go with white supremacy just in a different container.

Yes, absolutely.

I love talking about this.

I could talk about this for the whole conversation.

So again, when I'm on this journey and I'm learning and I'm reading books, I come across in the work of Dr. Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body.

And in that book, Dr. Sabrina Strings really breaks down how this dehumanization of fat bodies dates back to slavery, right? Because if we think about historically, even in ancient art history, we see these big, beautiful bodies being immortalized and looked at as beautiful, right? So then it's like, how do we get from there to this point where we're demonizing people and larger bodies? And so her work is phenomenal.

I always recommend people read the book, but she talks and explains how in the time of slavery, right, there was this need to dehumanize certain types of people.

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