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Fat, Black, & Yet Still Proud
Jim Goad
Lizzo
1,578 words
Melissa Viviane Jefferson, better known by her stage name of Lizzo, is the biggest black celebrity in the world. By “biggest,” I mean in the sense that she would be able to displace the largest volume of water were she to dive cannonball-style into a swimming pool. There are moons of Jupiter that are smaller than this woman. Were she to accidentally die during a charity mission to Africa, an entire village would be able to feed off her corpse for a year. An obscure Nigerian website lists her weight as 185 pounds, but judging from every fisheye-lens photo I’ve ever seen of this slobbering mud hippo, that would only be conceivable if she were three feet tall.
When TIME magazine selected the rapper, singer, and pro-fatness advocate as 2019’s Entertainer of the Year, she inherited the pedigree of a long and noble line of severely overweight but universally beloved black entertainers such as Al Roker (pre-diet), Fat Albert, and that monstrous dark blob who played the title role in the film Precious.
Born in Detroit and raised in Houston before she relocated to Minneapolis about a decade ago, the ebulliently lardy Negress is a classically-trained flautist who can’t seem to resist tarnishing her impressive musicianship by either twerking her unacceptably large black ass while playing or telling the audience to suck her dick.
According to her Wikipedia profile: “After struggling with body issues at an early age, Lizzo became an advocate for body positivity and self-love as she attracted more mainstream attention, while making diversity the focus of her music, in regards to one’s body, sexuality, race, and more.”
You can buy Jim Goad’s Whiteness: The Original Sin here.
Down to the very last fat cell, Lizzo wants you to know that she is unashamed of her body — so unashamed, a rudimentary image search of “Lizzo nude” yields an unholy elephant’s stampede of photos, each more objectionable than the last. She is not ashamed to show the entire world an ass that is larger than even the biggest box color TV set of the 1970s. In 2019 at an LA Lakers game, she again wiggled her Volkswagen-sized hindquarters in front of a startled crowd. She actually posts videos of herself bragging that she’s gained weight. Not only does she seem unashamed of her body, she seems like the type who’d corner you and force you to watch her undress.
She is so proud of her body, she records 12-minute videos crying about the fact that anonymous online commenters called her fat.
Right out of the hog pen, she is full of attitude, empty phrases, and Doritos. Lizzo wants you to know she’s a bad bitch. She’s that bad black bitch. She’s that fat black bad bitch who feels no shame and wants to wake you up in the middle of the night by screaming it in your ear while you’re sleeping. Her stylistic innovation was to take the strong, intelligent, sassy, empowered young black woman trope and add 200 pounds — and to make those extra saggy sandbags of suet the core of her entire identity.
Of all the potential things about which a person can be proud, black body fat seems oddly specific.
If it’s simply niche marketing so that tubby black girls can feel good about themselves, I suppose that’s okay. As Don Rickles once told Jerry Lewis when the unctuous telethon host had blown up to the size of a “Jew whale” after taking steroids for pulmonary fibrosis, “It’s a good gimmick.”
In the breadth of one rambling, ellipsis-filled paragraph, Lizzo manages to explain that she’s not making music for anybody, definitely not for white people, but she’s also only making music for herself, and yet at the same time she’s making music for fat black women such as herself:
I’m not making music for white people, I’m not making music for anybody. I’m a black woman making music. I make black music, period. . . . I’m not serving anyone but myself. . . . I’m doing this shit for the big black women in the future who just want to live their lives without being scrutinized or put into boxes. I’m not gonna do what y’all want me to do, ever, so get used to it. But what I will do is make great music and be a great artist and continue to uplift people and uplift myself.
Girl, you’re going to have to do some heavy barbell work on your shoulders and biceps to have a prayer of “uplifting” yourself, much less anybody else.
At least for the moment, the adipose titwillow has cornered the market for unapologetically fat black ladies. In fact, the Triple-Chinned Diva From The Twin Cities has eclipsed the market — you can’t even see the market from where she’s standing.
Blacks are not the only people who can make empty phrases sound profound, but they are among the art’s best practitioners. Once again, Lizzo’s innovation here, the one that’s given her a net worth of around $10 million, is to take the same dumb slogans and smother them in lard. Here are things she is not only unashamed to have actually written; they’ve led to her being feted as some sort of endomorphic sage:
“Close your eyes and say, ‘I love you, me.’”
“Be you. Do you. Don’t let anybody steal your joy.”
“I am a hundred percent that bitch!”
“Let’s get real, y’all.”
“Anyways, I’m-a continue to be me. I’m-a continue to be a bad bitch . . . ’bout to go to some bad bitch shit.”
“I want people to feel good! We can heal the world but first, we have to heal ourselves.”
Although I’m sure she has to take several breaks to catch her breath in between throwing haymakers, Lizzo is fighting against fat-hatred and fatphobia because we still live in a world where, hilariously, a Harvard study found that while “implicit biases” regarding “sexual orientation, race, skin tone, age, [and] disability” have waned over the years, collective animus toward the corpulent has only increased.
No matter how hard they try, they simply can’t get anyone to like fat people. They got them to like the blacks, the gays, and the trannies, but fatties need not apply.
By speaking up for fat colored girls who have considered suicide when two pizzas weren’t enuf, Lizzo has encouraged females whose bodies are clogged with melanin and cholesterol to eat their way into self-acceptance. She inspires fans to write things such as:
De-centering the most marginalized bodies from social justice issues that have gone mainstream enough to be somewhat watered down — such as with the case of body positivity being so focused on “self-love” that it can feel like an erasure of fat bodies, which are amongst those most victimized in a thin-centric world — is nothing new.
I may not be fat enough to understand a word of that.
Last year an interracial catfight between Lizzo and the horse-faced Jewish fitness instructor Jillian Michaels erupted after Michaels made the following comments to a reporter:
Why are we celebrating [Lizzo’s] body? ‘Cuz it isn’t going to be awesome if she gets diabetes. . . . Like, I love her music. . . . But there’s never a moment where I’m like, “And I’m so glad she’s overweight!”
Lizzo’s classy response was, “If my name is in your mouth, so is my pussy, bitch. Enjoy the flavor!”
Although it’s hard to tease out reliable numbers about exactly how many black Americans drop dead like big fat black flies every year due to obesity — very few death certificates actually list “obesity” as a cause — an estimated one in every four deaths in America is related to heart disease, so although Lizzo’s endlessly pro-obesity pabulum may make the occasional fat black woman stranded in Dubuque a little less lonely, I will state for the record that I suspect her empty verbal hogwash leads to more black deaths every year than the total number of unarmed blacks killed by police throughout American history.
And I will stick by that shocking assertion despite the fact that, for some reason that science has yet to blame, blacks who are moderately obese (BMI 30-34.9) live longer than blacks with little to no body fat. Regardless, my gut feeling is that Lizzo’s irresponsible dietary advice makes her a mass murderer by proxy. And I say this only because it makes me feel better about myself to falsely accuse others of murder.
As a writer for The Federalist rather cruelly put it, “She won’t feel good if she’s dead by 50, and neither will her fans.”
Tomorrow night, in the completely tasteless tradition of all-Down syndrome drag troupes and reality-TV shows where female dwarves compete for the affection of an alpha male dwarf, Amazon Prime Video will debut all eight episodes of Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, which one site describes thusly:
Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls follows Lizzo as she searches for women that embrace their every curve and can dance with the best of them. As she gears up for her world tour, she is on a mission to make sure there will be a representation of ladies on her stage that don’t necessarily self-identify as skinny or thin.
Here is a picture of the contestants who “don’t necessarily self-identify as skinny or thin.” In what I’ll assume was an unintentional faux pas, People magazine said that the show will be “heavily focused on the contestants.”
Watch Out for the Big Grrrls will drop tomorrow night — and when it does, it might fall straight through the Earth’s crust due to its weight.
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