Eight Signs of White Supremacy in HAES (Health at Every Size) and Ideas for Action
Recent coverage of racist killings by police and civilians and racialized death rates from Covid have reignited awareness of the need for ideological integrity and strategy.
If your work dismantling diet culture stopped feeling relevant as part of the call to prioritise anti-racist action then the work you are doing is not actually dismantling diet culture. Because dismantling diet culture, truly undoing the logic of the binary and replacing it with an entirely different logic, is also the work of dismantling the intellectual regimes, systems of thought and feeling, and social structures, that interact to reproduce white supremacy.
HAES might have saved you, it might be saving your clients. It might be your entire business. It can still be flawed, yes?
I am not disputing the fact that HAES impacts people’s lives and thinking in profoundly significant ways. I’m saying white supremacy is everywhere. It lives in the practices and institutions we benefit from and believe in, including those we imagine are anti-oppressive. Including HAES.
I’m a radical dietitian and poet. I used to advocate for HAES, so I’ve been part of the harm. I mean, really advocate. I co-founded HAESUK, introduced HAES to the NHS, and wrote heaps. My published…
