Facebook and bigotry without malice

On Friday, I posted a graphic on my Tumblr that visually represented the difference in search results between "fat acceptance" and both "dieting" and "weight loss". The difference was very stark and was meant as an illustration of the marginalization of fat acceptance for those who routinely look at the world portrayed in this pictures and complain about how the red leaves no room for the gray.

Two of my readers responded to note with alarm that when they searched "fat acceptance" on Facebook, it gave dieting results. When I first read this, I took this to mean that they permitted dieting results to be catagorized with fat acceptance, or perhaps more likely the reverse. I was alarmed to discover it was actually much worse.

As of Saturday night, when you entered "fat acceptance" in the search bar on Facebook and pressed enter, Facebook redirected you instead to a page about dieting complete with a stock photo of a scale. I posted about this on Tumblr, and people quickly protested to Facebook only to discover the actual page on fat acceptance was, itself, replaced with the content of the dieting page. I think complaints have stopped the redirect, but as of this morning the content of "Fat Acceptance" was still copied from a Dieting article. This kind of erasure of fat acceptance is appalling and entirely intolerable. So, naturally, what happened next were a handful of people insisting we needed to tolerate this.

Some were naked in their bigotry. It wasn't a problem that fat acceptance was being so literally disenfranchised because fat acceptance doesn't deserve to be. This is predictable, sadly. Unfortunately, so too were the hordes ready and eager to not simply excuse Facebook for having this on their site by to mock us as stupid for even being upset by it. We had no right to blame Facebook.

See, I thought the fact that this search result come through Facebook's own site and had their logo right at the top of the page and their site in the URL all tended to point to Facebook's accountability, but that was obviously foolish of me. You see, Facebook simply took this content from Wikipedia and someone on Wikipedia had "vandalized" the fat acceptance page to redirect to dieting.

So?

I mean, I already figured this out. The page says its from Wikipedia. This struck me as the likely sequence of events. I just fail to see how this excuses Facebook. But then, I don't think oppression only matters when its done with malice.

This is a distressingly common belief from persons with privilege who want to police the outrage of marginalized groups. They seek to maintain and enforce their privilege by denying as much oppression as possible. Unless Facebook did this "on purpose" they are blameless. It doesn't even matter that this actually was done with malice by the "vandal" who did this at Wikipedia. Heck, just dismissing that act as vandalism and not bigotry is a way of trying to define the argument to their advantage. This isn't some dynamic exclusive to fat people, of course. It never is. Think of the white people who limit outrage over racism to the KKK and feel smugly satisfied with themselves as they ignore institutionalized racism that defies a sharply defined party to blame but result from a culture of oppression.

Oppression isn't only committed by secret cabals of bigots in dark room plotting to silence the already disenfranchised. I didn't imagine that someone at the Facebook corporate office plotted this. I think they were negligent. They exploit copy from Wikipedia knowing full well of the risks its open source nature carries to allow bigots to alter the content. Everyone knows that. Facebook may not have made a choice to specifically empower these bigots, but they made a choice that empowered bigotry. Indeed, is it that hard to conceive that hate-minded people have taken the time to figure Facebook's schedule for pulling content from Wikipedia and time their vandalism to ensure the widest audience for their hate? There are so many dark corners of the internet where hateful people actually plotting to advance the cause of oppression. Those corners may not be in the corporate offices of Facebook, but that didn't stop Facebook from this negligence.

Oppression from negligence and thoughtlessness is an all too real problem and not one hard to understand when it targets you. I understand why people with privilege would want to insist that "motive" matter above all, but intent is not magic. Intent does not change the facts of what happened. Intent does not erase the harm or undo the erasure. Great harm is done in this world by those who did not intend it. Facebook may have empowered bigotry without malice, but that doesn't change the fact that they gave power and resources to advance a bigoted mission. They must be accountable for that.

UPDATE: As of Monday afternoon, June 18, Facebook has updated the "Fat Acceptance" page so it has the proper content and doesn't redirect to Dieting. That this has been corrected is welcome, but it also doesn't absolve Facebook for responsibility for empowering bigotry like this in the first place.

The Agent of OBESITY Initiative

So, let me tell you a story. A couple days ago, I was checking my blog's stats and noticed someone had come to my blog from Feministe. Curious about the context, I clicked through to the post and discovered a minor fat hate free-for-all over New York's plan to limit the sizes of sodas because... um, fat people. Disappointingly, Jill Filipovic comes out pro-STOP THE FATNESS and the commenters mostly follow her lead, feeling unburdened with the need to respect fat people and giddy at the opportunity to concern troll fatties to their hearts content. I was not surprised to find that the link there was to Fat Hate Bingo as the comment thread was pretty much covering the Bingo cards in the rush to hand-wring over fatness. Its just the sort of discussion progressives tend to have when showing that fat stigma is non-partisan with a lot of outrage at the suggestion they are disrespecting fat people, only outdone by the actual disrespecting of fat people. Sadly, its nothing I haven't seen before.

In scanning the comments, one thing jumped out at me. One commenter had praised New York's fat shaming, saying "I’m glad to see a move against an agent of obesity." The continued on with some boiler-plate liberal fat hate about consumeristic culture of over-consumption, blah, blah, blah, but that phrase struck me as kind of funny. Soda is an "agent of obesity"? Fat people have agents now? Out servicing our agenda? Obviously, this was a person who prefers their fat shaming with a big dose of dehumanization, regarding "obesity" only as some nebulous concept and forgetting about the actual fat people that exist that they are trashing, but I couldn't help giggling at the concept of being an "agent of obesity". Like a spy organization? We have secret agents in service of OBESITY.

And off I went. I went over to Twitter and made a joke about the remark. Then created a hashtag. Then saw a bunch of other people joining in the fun, imagining our secret agent code names. Mine is Nick Fatty, Agent of O.B.E.S.I.T.Y. I even came up with acronym for that! Operatives Built with Exceptional Size Imperiling Thinness' Yoke. And from there I expanded to Tumblr and created my secret agent portrait and even an official seal for O.B.E.S.I.T.Y. (Which I've now typed enough times to wish I wasn't amused by the periods denoting the acronym). And eventually portraits of a whole lot of other O.B.E.S.I.T.Y. agents having fun with this as well. Heck, there are even t-shirts!

It occurs to me that this all might seem rather strange. The phrase "agent of obesity" was used to scare us, to stigmatize our bodies. To make us something other. And here we all are having a jolly time coming up with silly fat jokes and pun as our nick names. (The Incredible Bulk, Fatness Neverlean, Emma Frosting, Feastmaster) We came with other silly acronyms (FAT COW is Field Agent Training in Championing Obese Women, FAT PIG is Field Agent Training in Promoting Immense Gents), one of the Agent portraits features a fat superhero shooting laser donuts from her hand, I suggested an army of fatties in CPAP masks called our Sleeper Agents. How could we have so much fun with fat hate?

Well, what else are we to do with fat hate by belittle and diffuse it? And humor is a great way of sucking the venom out of hate. I'm not saying we always have to respond to fat stigma with humor, of course. Gosh knows I'm well known for my righteous indignation, but that doesn't mean humor can't be in our toolbox as well. Humor is used to dismantle the foundations of hate and shame built up to pen us in. We laugh at it. We scoff at the hate. Why should we take you seriously when you are fretting over an "agent of obesity"? Why shouldn't we regard that with all the respect it deserves? None. In the end, it feels silly to even say this was started by something at Feministe because we are so past that one bitter attack. Its about mocking the self-righteousness of fat stigma with goofy silliness. They demand to have our bodies acknowledged as a grave threat to all of civilization. We respond by imagining a network of super spies with silly puns for codenames. Seems like an appropriate response to me.

Humor's not just a tool to fight oppression. Its also a tool to simply cope with it. When we use humor to mock fat hate, we aren't belittling the problems of fat stigmatization, we are trying to find ways of dealing with it. When we create our own mocking language around fatness, we make it that much harder to hurt us when someone comes along trying to use humor to put us in our place. It means we already know our damn place and know we want nothing of it.

Fat Heffalump has already covered this with a lot more eloquence than I've mustered. I know it sounds like I'm being dour and serious about humor, but I guess in a way I am and that's okay. Mostly, though, I'm just having fun and amusing myself and that's great, too.

So join the revolution and sign up with O.B.E.S.I.T.Y. today. They say they want a war on obesity? Well, O.B.E.S.I.T.Y. is fighting back!

(UPDATE: I've removed the Tumblr and Twitter links as I've taken them all down. I'm not comfortable exercising the role I had to with this project and would rather take it down than upset or offend anyone. I'm sorry.)