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The term heroin chic entered my vocabulary in the early 90s.
Luis Alvarez / Getty Images.
My grandparents, Mexican immigrants, were raising me in the Bay Area, just outside of San Francisco.
And oh, man, I wanted to be a real American with athird-culturezeal that felt almost epigenetic.
But every cartoon, movie, and TV show seemed to agree with them.
There was no question in my young mind: Thethinbody was the body that America loved.
I guess I knew deep down that this body I admired was also white.
I tried hard to be thin.
Business of Fashionrecently theorizedthat the resurgance of 90s style is bringing back the body standards of the same era.
Ive also celebrated as I watched plus-size models gracebillboards in Times Squareandusher in New York Fashion Week.
Beneath the surface were people fighting for fair treatment at work and dignity in their everyday lives.
These are the exact things that are at stake when it comes to promoting body diversity too.
The truth is that right now we are having a serious and multilayered cultural discussion onweight-based discriminationandanti-fatness.
Thin is in glosses over the racist history of our cultural obsession with thinness.
Both overtly and covertly, thinness has historically been tied to white racial superiority.
Dont get me started on theproblematic history of the BMI.
It was humiliatingand I suspect that was exactly the point of the exercise.
The this is in narrative also makes body size seem like a choice.
And theres also a lack of solid evidence that weight loss equals better health.
Medical providersexhibit this biasas well.
Thin was never out, but that shouldnt stop us from fighting for human rights.
Lets be honest: Thin was never out.
I know firsthand how toxic that messaging is.
My decision to stop trying to shrink myself was about reclaiming my fat and brown body as my own.
What my nine-year-old self needed to hear was that bodies arent trends.
Theyre interesting and weird and kind of magical.
Theres no such thing as a bad body.
Theres no need for in and out teams.
Were not fighting to be considered pretty; were fighting for our dignity.
Our bodies are incredible archives and inheritances of where and who we come from.
My body looks like my grandparents bodies and my great-grandparents bodies.
My face looks like my grandpas face.
My upper arms look like the upper arms of the women in my family.
I dont know about you, but Im not biting.
