The last acceptable/open form of discrimination?
I've been seeing in a number of blogs recently that discrimination against fat people is the last acceptable form of bigotry. I'm not so sure. There are many groups which are just as maligned and which in the grand scheme of things probably suffer more. These people are failing to consider that many people would rather be accused of being fat
( Read more... )
I think a big part of the issue stems from a fundamental disconnect; people can't imagine what discrimination feels like, so they see it more as a chance at their 15 minutes of fame than as a real point of suffering.
In the same way that I can't imagine a life in which I have honest worries about paying for my next meal, I just don't have any experience whatsoever about what it is like to be discriminated against*. I'm a straight white upper-middle-class male, average in just about every way. I can't think of any cause I could get behind for which I could claim to be fighting against injustice of any kind as a person who has felt the effects of that injustice.
Causes against injustice are inherently good things, not just for their ostensible purpose, but because they provide a venue through which people can invest work for charity. More than that: people can, through their cause, work with people of like minds to improve the world. In the past, people would contribute to organized religions to get much the same benefit. However, that option is increasingly unattractive these days: religions are usually seen in intellectual circles as signs of mental laziness on the part of their members, crutches for those not inventive enough to come up with their own spirituality.
It's easy to look around, as part of the majority of people who are leading very nice lives, and see people getting behind these causes. It's easy to see the social benefits of supporting one, though I'm not sure many people actually enumerate them. Better, it's easy to see the attention focused on people with legitimate grievances to go with their causes.
And therein lies the crux of the problem: it's all too easy for people who have never felt true discrimination to desire some quality so that people will discriminate against them. You can't change the color of your skin or your sexual orientation, and the inconvenience of giving up economic status outweighs the benefits of whatever attention you could get through it.
Anybody can get fat. Being fat is obviously a bad thing. Can people be persecuted for it? Probably some people actually are. What's more important, though, is that it provides a wonderful way for anyone to get a cause to support "from the trenches". And that is why we have a cause against the discrimination against fat people.
* I can now say that I've been a minority--Japan is something like 98% ethnically homogeneous, and I am a member of the 2%--but I've never experienced anything that could be described as unjust discrimination.
Reply
Leave a comment