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Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

Let's continue our conversation here about Black bodies, and talk now with an author who writes about health as a social construct, and the ways that this construct can actually damage Black women who don't fit perfectly into what is deemed good and healthy by our society.

Jessica Wilson: My name is Jessica Wilson. I'm a registered dietitian and author of It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting The Story of Black Women's Bodies.

Melissa: What is a dietitian, and how is it connected to community organizing?

Jessica: Oh, it's a great question. There are registered dietitians, those who have done clinical training, undergrads, and internships. Those are the folks that are going to be hired in hospital settings and clinical settings, not to be confused with nutritionists who can just label themselves as such. Then dietitians can get connected to community organizing as we see how our patients, especially our Black and brown patients, our poor patients, our queer and trans patients are treated by the medical system. For many of us, that causes us to take action and start organizing based on the mistreatment, or the lack of diagnosis we see.

Melissa: Is this about pointing out that Black and brown communities have higher rates of obesity and trying to fix those Black and brown bodies?

Jessica: Great question. In fact, it's trying to do the opposite. It's trying to point out that the ways that our bodies have been policed and neglected are causing health disparities in our communities. That blaming our bodies, blaming our lack of supposed health, blaming our size, is not actually solving any of the structural problems that contribute to how our bodies show up, how our bodies exist in society.

Melissa: The introduction begins with the story of Mia. Can you tell us a little bit about that story?

Jessica: Sure. Mia is mostly about one client, but really representative of so many young Black women that I've worked with who have been told by their medical doctors, or even society around them, that their bodies are a problem that they weigh too much. Early, my clients are taught about death, and basically how their Blackness is going to lead to an early death. Now, we have 20-year-olds afraid of their own mortality and engaging in behaviors that essentially are making them less healthy.

Mia, in particular, developed an eating disorder after going on her own wellness journey, cutting out a bunch of foods from her diet, starting to over-exercise, seeing the positive feedback she got from her predominantly white academic program. Even with feedback that her body had started to fail her, both physically and mentally, she was not able to start eating again for fear of losing the increased positive attention and social capital.

Melissa: That increased positive attention and social capital that praise for being smaller, for taking up less room. Can you walk us through that a bit?

Jessica: Sure. As Black women that, oftentimes, in many environments, just us being there, we're told that we are too much. We inherently take up too much space just by existing in a room that was not built or structured in a way to hold the natural abundance and power that we bring to any situation. In academic programs and business settings, so often we'll try to make ourselves smaller in order to be less, but also less of a threat to the power systems and structures that place there. The more oftentimes I see my clients, and my friends and family make ourselves both figuratively and literally smaller, we can become more accepted.

Melissa: It's such an interesting dichotomy, this sense of like, in certain ways, I think of the Black women I know and love, and I'm intimate with in my life, in my family, in my community. The way they take up space is so uniquely ours, and I'm so seduced by it, attracted to it, like it's magnetic for me. Then this pressure, as Mia says, I can't be the only Black girl in my class. I can't be the fat Black girl in my class.

Jessica: Similar to you, hearing Black women laughing is like the joy and the music to my ears. I say it makes me laugh, it makes me cry at the same time. Indeed, the space that we create, the communities that we share, the conversations that we have that we don't find anywhere else. They're loud, they're proud, they're so joyful. In other traditionally white environments, we inherently those behaviors. That joy is supposed to be dampened down to fit our environment.

Melissa: Talk to me which systems are broken. [crosstalk] Because it seems like there's a lot of different pieces here, and obviously, all things are connected. Talk to me about which systems are broken here.

Jessica: Sure. I always start back centuries ago with the transatlantic slave trade. Even before that, with the necessity to other Black folks in order to justify the enslavement of Black folks in society. Because, naturally, if we were to look at another human, we would be able to say, we should not be enslaving and owning Black folks, but society, white supremacy, white folks in the US were able to construct a narrative and dehumanize Black folks in a way that reinforced the need to keep Black people submissive and subservient.

That set up just centuries of othering of Black folks, of policing of Black folks. We think of modern-day slave patrols right now in our policing system. That's how our policing system was created. Those type of legacies, Jim Crow, just continue to us and on our bodies today. White supremacy is one system. Capitalism, obviously, also from enslavement are the overarching systems. Then all of the ways that business practices, policies, government policies have been enacted to reinforce these values.

Melissa: I'm a little bit interested in our own complicity, maybe complicity even when we know there's a problem. I'm thinking, I'm the parent-- Not only am I a Black woman, I'm the parent of two Black girls. One is 21 now, I guess. She's a whole grown woman. I have to accept that. There is this thing we do that was also done to us where we look, we see, we enjoy all of the things and persons that our girls are. Then we also can look at them through the eyes of those who won't look with soft eyes, those who won't love them.

It's like, "Ooh, let me get your hair parted perfectly." Not because I care if your hair is parted perfectly, but I know that, as was often said to me, you're going to look like you ain't got no parents. Nobody loves you in the world unless we get your hair together, and body is part of it. Unless your clothes fit a particular way, or your body appears healthy by certain standards. How can we as parents, as siblings, as community members, and friends, how can we resist reinforcing and reproducing this?

Jessica: I think that's such a great question. I'm glad that you picked up on the complexities of it because so often, it's easy for us to say, be engaging in respectability politics is a bad thing, and we just need to stop doing it. That's easy to do say in our homes, but leaving the house, it's another story, how we are treated, how our daughters, our children are treated.

I think something that came up through all the conversations I was having in this book is just being transparent about that. I don't care how you part your hair, and folks aren't going to police your body differently. I know and I love you. This is the reality of society. There is nothing wrong with you. That's the part that I want people to know. In order to survive society, these are games that unfortunately many of us need to play.

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Melissa: All right. Quick break right here. Back with more on Black bodies right after this. All right, y'all. We're back with Jessica Wilson, author of It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting The Story of Black Women's Bodies. What about the argument that it's just not healthy to have certain kinds of body sizes or shapes, that there are, in fact, healthier and less healthy bodies, and that by encouraging a certain kind of acceptance. You are actually, again, reproducing illness.

Jessica: One of the common lines among those of us in dietetics and body liberation spaces is that we're "promoting" obesity by saying that having a BMI, a body mass index over 25 might just be fine. Many things are at play here. If we look at body size generally, it's not going to be physical activity and diet that are primary contributors to body size. We're looking at genetics, we're looking at a lifelong history of food restriction, either through dieting, putting kids on diets earlier, or food apartheid, not having enough food on a consistent basis. We're looking at toxic environments.

There's so many different ways that our body size can be impacted that have nothing to do with what a doctor will tell me when I go into a doctor's office, which would be like, "Eat more chemo and kale. Start taking walks and your body will naturally shrink."

I will say, if it were true that being over a certain size was inherently unhealthy then everyone would be. It's easy for us to say that a BMI say over 30 is unhealthy, but it's not categorically true when we're looking at the things that we've decided health requires, so perfect lab results, vitals, et cetera.

If something is not true across the board, we're really just pathologizing someone's body for being larger, we're not looking at that person. Honestly, it really impacts those of us who are on the thinner side as well. I have people all the time not being diagnosed for things like sleep apnea, or not being diagnosed for chronic diseases because we can't be unhealthy because of our body size. It's all over the place when we're using body size as a proxy for whether or not somebody is healthy. We're not really doing anybody any favors.

What are we looking at when we're looking at people? If they are looking to be healthier, what are the things that are going to help and support them that are within their control? We can't control environments. We can help people with food access. Heart disease and blood pressure are directly impacted by how much racism we experience over a lifetime. Are we talking to people and understanding all that they bring into our office, or are we telling people that if they eat fruits and vegetables and buy a Peloton bike, that they're going to be inherently healthier?

Melissa: Although you've said it and said it beautifully, I do want to just get it one more time. You are telling me that body size is not primarily a result of what you eat and how much you move?

Jessica: How much you eat and how much you move is not the primary indicator of the size of your body. It is far more complex than just diet and exercise.

Melissa: I want to spend one more beat on this notion of health and experiences of trauma. Whether it's racism, whether it's experiences of violence, whether it's trauma we may not know we're experiencing because it's coming to us in our air and our water. Talk to me about how those pieces are connected?

Jessica: In our environment, so much that is happening to us that is outside of our control is really what ends up living on our bodies. I call that everything that you've experienced, everything that your parents, your ancestors have experienced, really does change our genetic makeup. All of that trauma that we experience individually and that of our ancestors does impact our overall health, our well-being, and just holding that however, our bodies are presenting today, it's not our fault. There are some things that we can do for sure, but blaming our body for not doing the things that we think it should be doing is really not what we need.

Melissa: Then I want to come to your final chapter because you do tell us a bit about what we need. You devote the final chapter to Black Joy. Can you walk me through that a little bit?

Jessica: Yes. Often, our body stories are completely wrapped around our vulnerability when it comes to trauma. If I look up Black women and vulnerability, it's our vulnerability to being assaulted, it's our vulnerability to being fired. It's all of these vulnerability to really negative things. I would like our bodies for Black women to exist in a space that offers more ease, to have vulnerability, to find more a softness, and that I want our joy to be celebrated.

A friend of mine says that I talk about joy and wielding it as a weapon in a society that is constantly trying to deny us access to this. We find joy engage in community. Really note that finding joy under white supremacy is rebellion and resistance just in existing. Ways that we can do that in community on our own, and just really recognizing how much of a protest Black Joy is.

This is my new policy obsession is, yes, I want everyone to have sick leave, but I also want everybody to have joy leave. I want to be able to say, "Hey, it's Girl Scout meeting night. I can't be here because I need to take time to do that." There's almost a way where we can sometimes get a little bit of room in our lives when there's tragedy or horror, but boy, it's real. It is genuinely easier to get time off for a funeral than a wedding and I want time for both.

Jessica: That's so true. How do we balance, how do we keep showing up, both? This is in the context of work. I think it's quite funny because oftentimes as Black women we talk about Black women in the context of our labor and what we're bringing to a capitalist situation. Again, we can't keep showing up over and over under capitalism, only having time off for terrible events. There definitely needs the parts that are joy, the parts that bring laughter, the parts that lift us up.

Melissa: I'm going on a camping trip. Bye. See y'all in a week.

Jessica: I highly recommend dirt. A clean type of dirt that you find in the woods, not the kind of dirt that you find in the city.

Melissa: Oh, I am a fan of dirt. It is why I live on a couple of acres. As I was going through my special time I talked to my big sister and I said, "I'm dealing with it in a very MHP way." She says, "What do you dig or build?"

Jessica: No, that is nice.

Melissa: That is what I do. Digging a ditch will get a lot of that drama out.

Jessica: I agree. I talk about my dad and his critique of my gardening and my critique of his gardening. That's just passed naturally to a lot of black folks. He grew up partially picking cotton in the summers, and we still continue those gardening and farming attempts today. It's just a connection to each other and a connection to the land. I love it. It's so fun. Camping is wonderful.

Melissa: I love it too. Jessica Wilson, thanks for sharing a little Black joy with me. Jessica's author of, It’s Always Been Ours: Rewriting The Story of Black Women’s Bodies. Thanks for joining us today.

Jessica: You're so welcome. This was great.

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