The woman on the right is Melody Barnes, the chair of the White House’s Childhood Obesity Task Force. On the left, of course, is Michelle Obama, the most recognizable face of the anti-child-obesity movement.
Looking at these two women, I feel confident they’re intimately familiar with the lives of obese children; that they are sensitive to all the crucial issues involved; and that their enormous experience with the lives of fat kids has left them well-suited to create a program that will avoid stigmatizing and harming fat kids.
I look forward to the White House’s program to help girls and women, to be led by Joe Biden; the program to help disadvantaged children of color, organized by Larry Summers; and the program to help LGBT youth, chaired by Rick Warren.
(Related.)
Well said-doesn’t help that they’re still sponsoring the production of high fructose corn syrup either:]
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/03/well-well-well.html
Although I do approve of them providing urban cities with access to healthy food:
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/02/lets-move.html
I don’t mean to call you out, but… what exactly did you mean by this?:
“Looking at these two women, I feel confident they’re intimately familiar with the lives of obese children;”
Because its wording implies some pretty shallow investigations to come to that conclusion. Could you discuss their qualifications a little more thoroughly than just their appearance? Thanks!
Oh wait… I’m obviously stupid… nevermind. ;)
Clever title. Tragically, your history of spelling mistakes will lead many to miss the joke. Go back and look at it again, people!
I am in agreement with you about disliking elitist members of government telling ordinary Americans, with whom they have little in common, how to live their lives.
I just wish you were in agreement with me about the same thing on the fifty kajillion OTHER areas of government where the exact same thing is happening. :)
According to your logic, I should stop helping victims of domestic abuse because I have never been abused. Should stop belonging to a group that defends the rights of the so-called “illegal immigrants” from Latin America since I’m neither “illegal” nor Latin American. Should not advocate for the rights of rape victims since I have never been raped. Should not insist that my university protect the rights of our disabled students since I’m not disabled.
The crap that children from dispossessed families are being fed in school cafeteria is abuse, pure and simple. You don’t need to have spent years eating that rubbish to realize how horrible and harmful it is. Why you are so upset with Michelle Obama trying to do something good is beyond me.
Is it just snarkiness for its own sake?
Robert, I’m all for the government trying to create a more healthy food and exercise environment for kids. (Does it make any sense to say that the government shouldn’t be involved with school lunches at public schools?) I just criticize the particular way this program is designed and how they’re framing the issue.
Clarissa, I certainly agree that you, me and other non-disabled people should support disabled rights. But how would you feel about a disabled rights initiative that didn’t include any disabled people with records of disabled rights advocacy at the upper levels? Would that particular organization be one that you should support?
What if the organization was “Jerry’s Kids” — that is, an organization “helping” disabled kids, using an approach which many disabled people have criticized as encouraging stigma and prejudice, and which was (at least initially) created and run entirely by non-disabled people? Would you support that organization?
Regarding the crap children are fed in schools, I’m all for making school food healthier. But doing that won’t be a “cure” (to use Michelle Obama’s word) for obesity, and it’ll be good for both thin and fat kids. Advocacy for better school food shouldn’t use an approach that singles out fat kids for stigmatization, or that continues the “fat people need to be cured” framing of the issues.
Although I approve of the point being made in general, I was a bit confused on a first read, because Joe Biden actually has done important things to benefit girls and women, notably writing and sponsoring the Violence Against Women Act. So at first I thought you were serious.
I would be much less bothered by Michelle Obama’s initiative if the content were less fat-phobic. I care about that much more than about who the public face of the initiative is. Unfortunately, given attitudes about fat and obesity in our culture, I think they would take this approach no matter who was in charge.
Unfortunately, I’m sure you’re right.
But I do think it makes sense for us to start pressing to see not just fat people, but fat people who are fat rights advocates, included in task forces like this one. We’d still be overruled, but at this point even being included in the conversation would be a major advance.
Agreed about Biden as well (I should have used a different example) — but nonetheless, it’s not imaginable that the administration would organize a task force intended to address women’s problems that didn’t include any women at all in the upper levels.
I’d judge it by results. It seems fairly pointless to focus on who is running it, rather than what it does. With the rare exception of a program which is designed to get X category of people into organization leadership, I don’t think it is necessary at all.
In fact, I think it’s usually a negative effect. Once you start typecasting on outwards qualifications–i.e. assuming that Joe will be better than Bob at the limited task of advocacy, because Bob isn’t a ____ person–then you start losing good people. Typecasting and assumption (a/k/a prejudice/discrimination/__ism) isn’t any more effective when used by liberals than it is when used by conservatives.
If the goal is “send more ___ kids to college” then the measure of success is how many ___ kids get sent to college, not how many ___ people are on the board. If the goal is “reduce childhood obesity” then the measure of success is how much childhood obesity gets reduced. It doesn’t matter if the program is run by Pavarotti or the Ashley twins; the measure of success is the same.
So if I’m choosing someone to head the white house program on girls and women, I wouldn’t choose based on the presence or absence of a vagina. I’d choose based on who would do a better job at fulfilling the goals of the program. The sex of the leader would only be relevant in how it affected their ability to do their job, but that’s it.
That said, do you even think there’s anything wrong with obesity in the first place? If not, worrying about the people leading the anti-obesity movement is a bit concern-troll-ish. If what you really mean is that they shouldn’t be focusing on obesity at all, then it doesn’t matter who runs it.
I think this sentence reveals the disconnect. Amp frames the issue primarily thru the prism of oppression, where the victims aren’t responsible for their condition and hatred of their condition is seen as a form of bigotry.
The Obama’s in contrast frame the issue like an achievement gap, and since it wouldn’t make much sense to have a high-school dropout mentor low achieving students, they ignore overweight role-models. Instead, you throw high-achievers into the community hoping their habits will rub off on the rest. To be blunt, they essentially blame the victim.
I realize the two views aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but suffice to say the latter view is the dominant one. I think we’re very very far away from viewing fat-hatred like we do sexism or racism. To be frank, I almost fell off my chair laughing when I first heard the term fat-hatred. As a right-winger, I just thought it was more seeking out oppression where none exists.
But after speaking with some scientists and biotech executives, I realized that the issue of obesity and weight loss is actually a great scientific mystery. At the end of the day, we don’t know the causes and we don’t know how to lose weight effectively. Despite all the propaganda, there has been no peer-revived/controlled study demonstrating effective weight loss thru diet and exercise (defined as being able to keep the weight off). And we’re not even sure why people are gaining weight in the first place, though its likely and ironically related to the enormous wealth of advanced capitalism, where food is no longer scarce and even the poorest among us have and abundance of food, and are strangely more overweight than the wealthy, whereas in lesser developed nations, its reversed.
anyway, the biotech execs ae predictably convinced the solution lies in medical intervention and new drugs. so thier view is more aligned with amp’s than obama’s. personally, i think we don’t have the knowledge necessary to know how to frame this iusse properly.
dittoheading robert. great title. classic.
First of all, this assumes that the process that came up with only ablebodied people was itself a neutral, objective process — in other words, you’re assuming that anti-disabled discrimination can’t have been part of the process leading to an all-ablebodied management of our hypothetical disabled rights initiative.
However, it’s pretty obvious that discrimination does exist. The pool of disabled people who know a lot about, and have a passion for, disabled issues is very large; if a board of a organization that helps disabled people has no disabled people on it, it’s a pretty safe guess that either they didn’t give disabled folks a fair chance to be on the board, or that there’s something about the organization itself which disabled people find repulsive. In neither case is the organization likely to be doing its work well.
Second of all, you’re assuming that experience isn’t relevant; that (to return to the subject of the OP) there’s no reason why fat people might know anything more than thin people about the lives of fat children, to such an extent that it doesn’t matter if there are any fat people involved in directing the initiative at all.
I don’t think that’s true. Experience isn’t everything, but it’s more than nothing. All else held equal, a board consisting of nothing but thin people simply doesn’t know as much about life as a fat person as a board which includes at least some fat people.
Look at the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. No doubt some people at the time would have said that caring about if any congressional aids were members of the gay community was reverse bigotry. But when push came to shove, it mattered; the few openly gay congressional aids made a big difference to how soon congress realized there was a crisis going on which needed to be addressed.
People aren’t abstract interchangeable tokens. If you want to serve a diverse community, you’ll do that more effectively with diverse management than with a nondiverse management. If your worry is obesity, then you should be involving obese people at every stage and every level of your project. Otherwise, how can you be sure that you have all the deep information you need?
This is pure gibberish, SM. How the hell can you hire a board based on how many ____ kids get sent to college based on the future work that the not-yet-hired board hasn’t yet done? Obviously, you have to hire based on factors other than future events that can’t yet be measured.
This is a genuinely good point. A touch, I do confess it!
My answer is, I don’t know. I’m quite positive obesity isn’t the HORRIBLE! CRISIS! many people say it is, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with it at all. If obesity is a side effect of bad diet and lack of exercise, and if there are people who aren’t “naturally” fat who are fat, then it’s a symptom of a real problem.
However, the fact is, most of the anti-obesity people — if you press them — will say that they’re concerned about the possibility of fat kids being picked on and marginalized (among all their other concerns); when asked, they claim that they want to be sensitive to fat kids’ lives. (I haven’t seen Obama or Barnes asked, but I strongly suspect they’d answer the same way).
So even if we momentarily accept, for the sake of argument, that obesity is a problem and better nutrition and exercise the solution, that doesn’t mean that fat right advocates have no place in designing the initiative. On the contrary, fat right advocates are essential if one of the program’s goals is to design a program of solutions that are sensitive to fat kids’ lives.
Top 10 cannabis studies the government wishes it never funded
http://joshfulton.blogspot.com/2010/04/top-10-cannabis-studies-government.html
Cannabis advocacy, on the other hand, has been proven to have a tragically debilitating impact on a person’s ability to determine whether a particular thread is open or not.
This one first:
because lots of these organization stay in place for a long time, and because lots of other ones address relatively short term goals (getting current high schoolers to go to college, for example.)
the anecdotal evidence linking cannabis to the munchies is rather strong.
Pingback: I see fat people « JAMILA
There’s also the issue of establishing credibility with the group of people your initiative is targeting so as to get the maximum buy-in from them. In that sense, having an obesity taskforce devoid of any fat people is a pretty bad idea. Whether or not any given person is capable of empathising with a demographic they’re not part of, if they’re SEEN as not capable of empathising that’s going to impact their ability to effectively reach that community.
It’s the same reason that, for example, you don’t create a social services group offering services to Asian or Hispanic people and staff it entirely with white social workers. However anyone might feel about it in the abstract, doing so does in fact create a situation where the community you’re trying to reach is going to be a bit suspicious of your motives.
I think that their logic is exactly counter to yours. It would appear that they believe that you can’t have fat people on a project to fight obesity. If you did, that would show that you aren’t serious about the initiative. Fat people are failed people. We can’t have people who can’t meet the objective of the initiative working in a high profile position on the task force.
IOW, their belief that fat is unquestionably bad ensures that they would never even consider putting fat people in visible positions on an anti-obesity task force.
Let me try it differently:
Other than the fact of their being obese, are obese people different from thin people? Do they think differently; reach different conclusions about things; understand things differently?
That would certainly suggest that it would be important to include their perspectives. But before you say yes: are you sure you want to go there?
Don’t forget the other side of the coin. If obese people think or act differently as a result of their obesity; if they have different perspectives purely as a result of their obesity; then perhaps in this setting that’s a benefit. But unless you want to completely play a “fair weather philosophy” game, there will be other settings in which all or some of those obesity-linked characteristics are going to be a negative.
I’ve never been a fan of what seems–to me–like a return to good old prejudice and discrimination, albeit under a more liberal name. When I see “we need some ____ people because they will bring a different perspective” it makes me cringe inside. Isn’t the whole damn point to DECOUPLE being ___ and having a preconceived expectation for who someone is? Aren’t you assuming here, for example, that anyone who was obese or overweight would be sympathetic to your cause (like you) as opposed to less so (like me?) After all, we’re not all that different in BMI, methinks.
Or is this one big True Scostman issue, where that “perspective” the ___ brings really means “the approved perspective?”
I’m all for having different perspectives, to the extent that it’s relevant to group goals.* But I’m not a fan of the groupthink that assumes “perspective = characteristics.”
Now, like I said before: there may be perfectly good reasons to have certain types of people in an organization, because of the third party effect. If you feel like your target audience won’t interact as well if there are no ____ people, then you should seek to have some. The criteria “how well will this board member aid our mission?” can certainly include “…by helping us reach our target audience?”
* This is–again–where consistency comes into play, and where we run into annoying semantics. I don’t think more perspectives are necessarily good, unless the meet the goals of the group. I don’t see the need for the “gays suck” or “AIDS is God’s revenge” perspectives on the AIDS Cure Council board, because those perspectives counter the goal of the board.
See, when people start talking about diverse perspectives, I’m never sure whether they mean all the time, or just when their favorite perspective isn’t getting enough play. I’m cynical enough to think it’s mostly the latter.
Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps if they had appointed two “health at any size” people to lead the group, you’d be pushing for an “obesity is dangerous” member on “diverse perspectives” grounds. Or perhaps if they manages to get some obese people who were fanatical about self-hatred and anti-obesity, you’d be perfectly happy.
But if not, why are you trying to couch a policy complaint in the poorly-targeted general language of diversity and perspective? Why not just say that you dislike the program’s goals, whoever the hell runs them? Why not just say what you mean?
I agree with the point about how the issue is framed.
America doesn’t have an obesity problem. America has a poverty problem. Targeting obesity is targeting the symptom, not the disease.
… that and a let’s-put-corn-syrup-in-frickin’-everything problem. Seriously, it’s rather hypocritical to say that Americans need to learn to eat better, when American food has about six times as much sugar in it than the same foods in other markets, because the US subsidizes corn growers
The biggest problem I’m having with the appointment of Melody Barnes to the chair of this task force is that she appears to be unqualified. She is a lawyer with a bachelor’s degree in history.
Melody Barnes has no experience as a doctor, dietitian, nutritionist, nurse, or in any other field related to health care. This characteristic alone, I feel, should disqualify her from leading a task force related to any health issues.
Uh, yes it would. I work in a school for students at risk of dropping out. They respond most to teachers who have had troubled pasts and dropped out themselves, and are most likely to understand the students’ perspectives and connect with them to explain why education actually is important, from something other than a middle-class/rich person’s perspective.
Fat people have different experiences because of their obesity because society treats them differently. A fat person designing a program responsible for healthy eating has probably been teased and faced all kinds of prejudice because they are fat. That means that when they design their program, they’re much less likely to, say, insinuate that all fat people got that way by constantly stuffing their faces with food; to only show scenarios in which thin people are kind, intelligent, or hardworking and fat people are mean, stupid, and lazy; and to perpetuate the false and negative stereotypes that have hurt them in the past.
Pingback: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » In Defense Of HAES, and of Denialism