Ally Week Event Accountability
**Content Warning: in order to be transparent and clear, NAAFA will repeat terminology referring to people who are attracted to fat people that some in our community try to avoid**
We sincerely apologize for the harm caused to members of our community by our recent post and the upcoming event it was promoting.
We understand and regret that the content in the post was harmful, and left folks feeling unsafe and unseen in a place where we should be protected and cared for.
The terms "chubby chaser" and "fat admirer" are problematic because they imply a dangerous and harmful body fetishism that many members of our community experience, especially women and femmes. Though some in the community, particularly the gay male community of which the speaker is a member, use the term “chubby chaser” , neither term is appropriate for use in NAAFA spaces without proper context and notice.
We have removed the offending content from our social media channels and website to not create further harm. For the sake of transparency and to honor the labor of those who commented we have archived the content and the comments here .
We endeavor to make NAAFA spaces as safe as possible for fat, superfat and infinifat people, for people with other marginalized identities, and for everyone who wants to participate in fat liberation in good faith. We failed to do that. This broke community trust; it hurt people; and it undermined other programming, community building, and growth. For some, it reactivated old harms from people’s past experiences with NAAFA and discouraged engagement from folks new to our community. Our failure to properly present the subject took away an opportunity to have an important, nuanced conversation about mixed size relationships and the responsibility of those with thin privilege in these relationships.
We take full responsibility for creating and naming the event and publicizing it. We also recognize a lack of safeguards in our processes that let this content reach the community without adequate input, review, and oversight.
The NAAFA Board of Directors are taking the following actions to better understand the harm we caused, how it happened and how we can support healing and avoid future mistakes.
We have scheduled a Restorative Practices session in place of the workshop on Wednesday, January 26th at 6pm PST, to hear from our community and explore solutions to begin repairing the harm. Board Member Christina Chase will lead this session.
Using what we learn in that session, we will create an emergency process for the board to address the harms caused and explore the solutions generated.
We then plan to review and revise our processes and update our policies on workshop and speaker criteria and social media content.
We will examine our approach as an organization to the role of allies in our programming.
We will begin this discussion during the Restorative Practices session on January 26, and we will generate an action plan and next steps, including further forums and other community input as needed.
We will update our community on these reviews and an action plan after our February board meeting.
We want to thank our community for caring enough about fat liberation to call us in and hold us accountable. We look forward to hearing more from you in the Restorative Practices session or across any of our forms of social media, or through email at admin@naafa.org.