It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that when I was younger, I struggled with the idea of my own white (and male) privilege. Didn’t I grow up poor and rack up thousands of dollars of student loan debt before dropping out of university? I thought that having privilege was the same as not struggling, and I was far from the only white person I knew lacking financial security. I didn’t understand how my whiteness made the impacts of racism invisible to me. If I can’t experience it directly, how can I begin to comprehend how embedded it is in the systems of our society?
Our age, race, gender, and even weight (and the list of identities goes on) can determine whether we benefit from privilege or are subjected to discrimination. Intersectionality has us look at the overlap of identities to better understand how people move through life and under which (and how many!) forms of oppression. For instance, doctors on the whole have a nasty habit of medical gaslighting, especially women, people of colour, and fat patients. The more marginalized identities a patient has, the worse their chances of being taken seriously.
If this doesn’t describe you, picture this imaginary patient: she’s fat and Black and trying so hard to be heard and understood by a medical professional, who is actively minimizing her symptoms and pain and probably suggesting her problems can all be solved by GLP-1 medication (which isn’t even covered by RAMQ for weight loss). She can’t lose her temper without her male doctor tuning her out completely as irrational, overly emotional. Her doctor may even believe that she can’t feel pain based on the colour of her skin.
As a white man (albeit one who is nonbinary), I might have a difficult time envisioning and understanding this scenario if not for having read articles on medical bias and hearing stories of peoples’ lived experience. I can’t experience racism and I can’t experience misogyny; in fact, I benefit from both because of how I appear to the rest of the world. But I can read and listen to accounts of people of colour and of women, and it’s my duty to do so in order to continue challenging my cognitive biases. It’s essential to recognize that I actually have internalized racism and misogyny to unlearn, and that I can’t fit into society (or hope to help improve it) without committing myself to this lifetime of work.
Black History Month marks a great time to start on an educational journey if you haven’t already. I recently had my mind blown by bell hooks’ The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, which helped me understand how patriarchal masculinity shaped my younger self. I am currently reading Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness As Anti-Blackness which directly explores intersectionality (and references another amazing book, Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not An Apology). Booksellers have been putting together recommendations for a while, and you can find some great charts in the link below to help guide you:
Note that I said start an educational journey and that the work takes a lifetime: I plan to keep learning from authors of all races, genders, and lived experiences; with an emphasis on those I cannot have myself. I don’t want to move through life in ignorance (or worse, denial) of the systems of oppression that harm myself and members of my community. Remember, it has been less than six years since the death of Joyce Echaquan, and despite a coroner’s report stating otherwise, our soon to be former premier had the absolute gall to say and then maintain that there is no systemic racism in Quebec. Quel gros bullshit.
One final thing to bring it back to massage: the only difference between my thin clients and my fat ones is that those with bigger bodies have more powerful thighs. Because it takes strength and support to move through life in a fat body, especially in a world openly hostile to our existence.
To better support my community, I am offering a 50% discount this month to anyone affected by the dayslong power outage in frigid temperatures at the end of January. Use promo code PANNE26 on your next massage (book before end-of-day February 28th) and take advantage of my heated table at the Cavendish location, or my proximity to a métro at Meta 1111.
Remember that I also offer a year-round discount to clients who are BIPOC, queer, fat, or neurodivergent: three identities that I hold, and one to acknowledge my white privilege. Use code PINKPURPLE if you weren’t affected by the outage, or any other time of the year.
I will be away pet sitting the following dates:
- Wednesday, February 18th to Sunday, February 22nd
