Black Women and Femmes in NAAFA's History

Pic of Tigress Osborn, a fat, Black, light skinned, middle-aged woman with long curly hair and wearing clear glasses.

by Tigress Osborn, NAAFA Director of Community Outreach

Some time ago, I was tagged in an Instagram post about remembering that Black fat people are the roots of fat activism. The Instagrammar in question pointed out that if we are going to say things like "honor Black women & femmes," we should be backing that up by actually knowing fat activist history and naming the names of the people we mean. She named me. I was incredibly flattered. Who doesn't want to be included in the company of Juicy D. Light and Sonya Renee Taylor? But roots? Not me. I was born a few years after the fat liberation movement began, and I first heard of the size acceptance movement in the early 1990s. Fat activism has a much longer history than many people realize.

Months after that Instagram post, a journalist reached out to NAAFA and asked if one of us could write about the Black and Jewish women who founded NAAFA. No, none of us could do that. Black and Jewish women didn't found NAAFA. NAAFA was founded in NY in 1969 by Bill Fabrey, a young, white, thin man who was motivated by the injustices his fat white wife faced. Asked now, Bill notes that NAAFA probably should have been doing outreach to Black folx in its early days. (Bill and I discussed this history last fall in the NAAFA Webinar Series.) There were Jewish women involved in the early days of NAAFA. Some of them helped found the Fat Underground in CA. Through recent interviews with people who were around during those years, I have not been able to identify any Black women who were involved in creating the Fat Underground, either. Since receiving that journalist's request, I have been trying to track down anyone who can tell me more about the first Black participants in NAAFA (if you can, please reach out at chair@naafa.org).

NAAFA is recognized as the first fat activist organization. Although NAAFA is first--and at 52 years this year, the longest running fat rights organization on earth--we must acknowledge and understand that fat individuals who live unapologetically in a fatphobic society are defying expectations and thereby doing de facto fat rights work that benefits us. Their visibility as fat people is important. Certainly, there are Black women and femmes who fit that bill. Some of them are notable; others are everyday people who touched those around them but were not public figures.

There are also the champions of other social justice movements--especially Civil Rights, Black Pride, and the Movement for Black Lives--who were or are fat Black women and femmes. It's our duty to learn more about them and to recognize them as important to fat history whether or not they were important to the formally organized fat rights groups of their times. But we also need to be sure we are not coopting their legacies just so we can say fat community is diverse. What I mean is this: we must know, acknowledge, and respect the work of fat Black people as liberation leaders in a multitude of ways, but one of those ways cannot be pretending Black people were integrated into fat liberation movement in ways that they simply were not. This is also true for our activist heroes of other marginalized identities.

As the Chair of NAAFA a little past its half-century mark, I am only the second Black woman to lead this organization. (The first was Phyllis Warr, who served as Interim Chair in 2014-2015). Much of my work as an educator was focused on race and gender, and much of my goal as the creator of Full Figure Entertainment was about centering Black women. Frankly, NAAFA's history of leaving many BIPOC people feeling marginalized within fat community has been a challenge for me as a board member and was one of the reasons I had to do a tremendous amount of soul searching before accepting the chairing role. Ultimately, I accepted the Chair position because I believe the current Board and many NAAFA members are invested in creating a more inclusive fat community. I hope that the work we've done in the last few years shows that we are deepening a dedication to centering the most marginalized voices in fat community. We also plan to work harder to support other activist organizations and individuals who are committed to the same.

Highlighting the labor and love invested into the fat rights movement by Black women and femmes is essential to NAAFA's future. First, we have to know NAAFA's actual history rather than its idealized one. Where there's been actual erasure of Blackness from fat community narratives and fat activist archives, we need to rectify that. The same goes for the current body positivity movement (where it's much more accurate to say that Black women and femmes are indeed at the roots). Where there is an absence of Blackness because Black people were truly absent, we need to ask ourselves why. Then, we need to own the answers we find. And most importantly, we need to do better.

PIcture of Tigress Osborn, NAAFA’s Community Outreach Director and Boasrd Chair Elect (Board Chair position to begin January 1, 2021)

Tigress Osborn is the Community Outreach Director and NAAFA Board Chair . Tigress joined the NAAFA Board of Directors in 2015 and became Director of Community Outreach in 2017. She is the founder of Full Figure Entertainment in Oakland, CA and co-founder, with activist/blogger Nicholet Deschine Parkhurst of Redstreak Girl, of PHX Fat Force in Phoenix, AZ. Her professional background as a youth advocate, diversity educator, and equity and inclusion consultant informs the fat liberation activism she has engaged in since 2008.