Lizzo Defended by Fat Acceptance Activists After Kanye West's Remarks

Two weeks ago, hip-hop star Kanye West spoke with host Tucker Carlson on Fox News and made comments about singer Lizzo's weight. Given other controversial statements that West has made in recent weeks, his remarks were overlooked by many people. But activists have told Newsweek that his "fatphobia" should not be ignored.

The rapper, who legally changed his name to Ye, told Carlson in an interview that aired on October 6: "Lizzo works with my trainer, a friend of mine, Harley Pasternak. When Lizzo loses 10 pounds and announces it, the bots [...] on Instagram, they attack her for losing weight, because the media wants to put out a perception that being overweight is the new goal, when it's actually unhealthy."

"Let's get aside from the fact whether it's fashion and Vogue, which it's not, or if someone thinks it's attractive, to each his own. It's actually clinically unhealthy. For people to promote that, it's demonic," he said.

Carlson asked why "they" would want to promote unhealthiness, to which Ye responded: "It's a genocide of the Black race. They want to kill us in any way they can."

While Ye's comment sparked some outrage, it seemed to quickly fizzle out as the 45-year-old rapper became embroiled in other controversies. However, for some, his remarks about Lizzo have opened the door to a deeper conversation about the potential harm that he has allegedly inflicted on the fat liberation and fat acceptance movement.

Tigress Osborn, board chair for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), spoke with Newsweek about Ye's comments.

"We know that fat women in media and entertainment, and in the culture in general, are scrutinized and demonized, and we know that Black women in media and entertainment and in culture, in general, are scrutinized and demonized," Osborn said. "And so when we're dealing with someone who is fat and Black, and a woman in particular...the confluence of those identities means that the oppression and the shaming and the scrutiny that they're facing is exponential. So when you're looking at someone like Lizzo, it's just relentless."

Lizzo's messages about body positivity shine through her music and performances, but time and time again, the "About Damn Time" singer has publicly responded to body-shaming comments about her.

She even made a remark that fans suspected was a response to Ye's comments.

"I feel like everybody in America got my motherf**king name in they motherf**king mouth for no motherf**king reason," she said at a concert in Toronto a few days after Ye's interview. "I'm minding my fat, Black, beautiful business!"

Author and social justice activist Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of the online community The Body Is Not an Apology (TBINAA), told Newsweek that over the last several years, "we've done a lot of great work around body acceptance. I think that body positivity has become a very big buzzword, and I don't necessarily think that that's translated into fat liberation."

While body positivity has continued to grow over the years, Taylor added that the constant online chatter surrounding Lizzo proves otherwise.

"We're not telling the truth, and we know we're not telling the truth because of the way that we treat Lizzo. Because here's a fat, Black, powerful, brilliant, talented woman in the world, and here is what she consistently has to contend with in her body."

Fatphobia has become one of the more "pervasive" prejudices in culture, Taylor said, and the history of fatphobia aligns itself with a history of racism and a "bodily hierarchy."

"We can't ever actually dissect fatphobia without talking about racism, and we can't ever really talk about racism without talking about the particular additional burden that we've put on Black bodies, particularly based on size," Taylor said. "It is a pervasive prejudice because it is so deeply intertwined with all the other prejudices that we have yet to get rid of in the world."

In regards to Ye's comments about Lizzo's body being "clinically unhealthy," Osborn explained: "In the fat liberation movement, first of all, we reject the medicalized concept of obesity as a disease. We know that where fat correlates with health problems, it also correlates with social determinants of health including medical weight stigma, racism and classism—so we don't actually believe that there's adequate research to prove that fat itself is a health problem."

"Those bigger questions around how we perceive health and how we treat people according to our perceptions of health are really important," Osborn continued. "One of the things that we say at NAAFA all the time is: 'My health is irrelevant to my civil rights.' So if I'm being prevented from being treated equitably in this world because of my health status, that's a problem already. If the only reason you don't like my body is because you think it's not healthy for me or for the public, that doesn't give you the right to mistreat me."

Osborn also said she wished "more people would question the status quo around our ideas of what it means to be fat." She said doing so would allow critical discussion about comments such as Ye's, instead of "just taking it at face value, as you know, 'Ye's gonna be Ye.'"

"It's not just Ye—it's also the ripple effects of all of the rest of us having to watch what all of the rest of you say in response to Ye," she added.

A few weeks ago, Ye hadn't yet focused on Lizzo and had a different target of his criticism. While never specifically commenting on her body, the rapper took to Instagram in a social media attack against Vogue editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, taking aim at her sense of style after she criticized his "White Lives Matter" shirts that debuted in the Yeezy fashion show at Paris Fashion Week.

Osborn said that his social media posts about her, which have since been taken down, were "undoubtedly influenced by his attitudes about which bodies are OK and which are not. And his dismissal of her style led to horrifying and dehumanizing social media attacks on her body. The vile anti-fatness spewing from the people who came for her is supported by the cultural belief that you can say anything ugly to a fat woman, and you can say anything ugly to a Black woman, so you can damn sure say anything ugly to a fat Black woman because who is going to stop you?"

For Taylor, this is an important time to have such conversations about fatphobia and fat acceptance, not just regarding Ye but regarding culture as a whole.

"Twenty years ago, those comments would have gone uninterrogated in any way, shape or form. They would have just been another totally acceptable thing to say," Taylor said. "Today, we're on a precipice where we're like, 'Maybe there's something wrong about the way we're doing this.' And I believe that that energy is a powerful moment of possibility in creating a new way of being, and that's what I'm hoping we do."

Update 10/20/2022, 5:50 p.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.