Dressing in a fat suit is not the new blackface

tea-and-catastrophe:

Someone posted old pictures of Jennifer Love Hewitt wearing a fatsuit, and up pops some commenter going, “oh look, the fatsuit is the new blackface.”

So I responded:

“Please don’t say that wearing a fatsuit is the same as wearing blackface. It’s definitely not the new version of blackface, since white people still keep doing the blackface thing. 

But as a black woman and a fat woman, I feel uniquely poised to assure you that it is not the same.”

It makes me so mad.

Wearing blackface is still the new wearing blackface because dumb white fuckers keep doing it. (I know at least two instances of it in the last week.)

Fatsuits and blackface are not the fucking same. Why can’t it be offensive, in and of itself, without hijacking other people’s struggles?

I’m not interested in playing the Oppression Olympics, but it’s not the fucking same. It’s just not.

I just feel like white people are sometimes all too ready to pat themselves on the back for racism being stamped out merely because the “right people” either a. aren’t racist, or b. don’t say anything explicitly racist, or c. aren’t wearing sheets and pointy hats.

I feel like, sometimes, when people make false equivalences like the Fatsuits = blackface, it’s like saying, ”Sweet, now that we’ve won on the racism front, it’stime to make it easier to be a fat person.”

And I’m standing there all fat and black, like, “Whoa! Hold up, champ.”