#marquisele mercedes

[softandorsweet]

just ~ if you haven’t listened to the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back GO DO IT!!! it’s a group of Fat liberationist discussing everything fatness and anti-fatness. plus they all exist with multiple marginalizations, most hosts are queer and trans. it’s so brilliant i’ll never get over it!!!! god

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: Apr 24, 2024

Top physicians, including former Harvard dean, say required course is riddled with dangerous falsehoods

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo" and that weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor."

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum "promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation."

UCLA "has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate," said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. "As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking."

One required reading lists "anti-capitalist politics" as a principle of "disability justice" and attacks the evils of "ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism." Others decry "racial capitalism," attack "growth-centered economic theories," and call for "moving beyond capitalism for our health."

The essay by Mercedes "describes how weight came to be pathologized and medicalized in racialized terms" and offers guidance on "resisting entrenched fat oppression," according to the course syllabus. Mercedes claims that "ob*sity" is a slur "used to exact violence on fat people"—particularly "Black, disabled, trans, poor fat people"—and offers a "fat ode to care" that students are instructed to analyze, taking note of which sections "most resonate with you."

"This is a profoundly misguided view of obesity, a complex medical disorder with major adverse health consequences for all racial and ethnic groups," Flier told the Free Beacon. "Promotion of these ignorant ideas to medical students without counterbalancing input from medical experts in the area is nothing less than pedagogical malpractice."

Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician at Yale University, who has spent decades providing medical care to underserved communities, including in the South Side of Chicago, called the curriculum "nonsensical."

The relationship between health and social forces "should indeed be taught at medical school," Christakis wrote in an email, "but to have a mandatory course like this—so tendentious, sloganeering, incurious, and nonsensical—strikes me as embarrassing to UCLA."

UCLA did not respond to requests for comment.

Snapshots of the course have been leaking for months and left the school doing damage control as members of UCLA’s own faculty have spoken out against the curriculum. The most recent embarrassment came when a guest lecturer, Lisa Gray-Garcia, led students in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" after instructing them to kneel on the floor and pray to "Mama Earth." Lessons on "decolonization" and climate activism, as well as a classroom exercise that separated students by race, have also stirred controversy.

"There are areas where medicine and public health intersect with politics, and these require discussion and debate of conflicting viewpoints," Flier said. "That is distinct from education designed to ideologically indoctrinate physician-activists."

The mandatory class is part of a nationwide push by medical schools to integrate DEI content into their curricula—for residents as well as students— both by adding required courses and by changing the way traditional subjects are taught.

Stanford Medical School sprinkles lessons on "microaggressions," "structural racism," and "privilege" throughout its curriculum. Residents at Yale Medical School must complete an "Advocacy and Equity" sequence focused on "becoming physician advocates for health justice," while those in the infectious disease program must complete additional lessons on "Diversity, Equity, and Antiracism."

Columbia Medical School promotes an "Anti-bias and Inclusive" curriculum by encouraging educators to use "precise, accurate language." Instead of "women," guidelines for the curriculum state, faculty should refer to "people with uteruses."

The changes have been driven partly by the Association of American Medical Colleges—one of two groups that oversees the accrediting body for all U.S. medical schools—which in 2022 released a set of DEI "competencies" to guide curricula. Schools should teach students how to identify "systems of power, privilege, and oppression," the competencies state, and how to incorporate "knowledge of intersectionality" into clinical decision-making. Students should also be able to describe "public policy that promotes social justice" and demonstrate "moral courage" when faced with "microaggression."

The course at UCLA, which predates those accreditation standards, offers a preview of how DEI mandates could reshape medical education. It is littered with the lingo of progressive activism—"intersectionality" is a core value of the class, according to slides from the first session—and states outright that it is training doctors to become activists.

Students will "build critical consciousness" and move toward a "liberatory practice of medicine" by "focusing on praxis," according to the slides.

A section called "Our Hxstories" adds that "[h]ealth and medical practice are deeply impacted by racism and other intersectional structures of power, hierarchy, and oppression—all of which require humility, space and patience to understand, deconstruct, and eventually rectify."

That jargon reflects a worldview with clinical implications. In a unit on "abolitionist" health, which explores "alternatives to carceral systems in LA," students are assigned a paper that argues police should be removed from emergency rooms, where 55 percent of doctors say they’ve been assaulted—mostly by patients—and threats of violence are common, according to a 2022 survey from American College of Emergency Physicians. Other units discuss the "sickness of policing" and link "Queer liberation to liberation from the carceral state."

Flier said the syllabus was so bad it called for an investigation—and that anyone who signed off on it was unfit to make curricular decisions.

"Assuming the school’s dean," Steven Dubinett, a pulmonologist, "does not himself support this course as presented, it is his responsibility to review the course and the curriculum committee that approved it," Flier said. "If that body judged the course as appropriate, he should change its leadership and membership."

Dubinett did not respond to a request for comment.

One of the leaders of the course is Shamsher Samra, a professor of emergency medicine who in December signed an open letter endorsing "Palestinians’ right to return" and linking "health equity" to divestment from Israel.

"To authentically engage in antiracism health scholarship and practice is to explicitly name injustices tied to white supremacy and maintain an unapologetic commitment to antiracism praxis that transcends US borders," the letter reads. "As such, we, the undersigned,* unequivocally support a free Palestine and Palestinians’ right to return."

Samra, who in 2021 published a paper on "infrastructural violence and the health of border abolition," did not respond to a request for comment.

To the extent the course addresses actual medical debates, it frames contested treatments as settled science, omitting evidence that cuts against its activist narrative. A unit on "Queerness/Gender," for example, assigns readings on "gender self-determination" and "DIY transition," but does not include any of the research from Europe—such as the newly released Cass Report—that has led England and other countries to restrict hormone therapies for children.

"UCLA School of Medicine has decided to shield its students from the ongoing scientific debates playing out in Europe and even in the U.S.," said Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who researches gender medicine. "This is fundamentally unserious, and a stain on the school’s reputation."

The omission of inconvenient facts extends to a unit on Los Angeles's King/Drew hospital—nicknamed "Killer King" for its high rates of medical error—which the course promotes as an example of "community health."

Founded in 1972 as a response to the Watts riots, the hospital was majority black, had a documented policy of racial preferences, and was hit with several civil rights complaints by non-black doctors alleging discrimination in hiring and promotion.

It closed in 2007 after a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Los Angeles Times found numerous cases in which patients had been killed or injured by clinical mistakes, such as overdosing a child with sedatives and giving cancer drugs to a meningitis patient. Efforts to reform the hospital stalled, according to the Times, because its board of supervisors feared coming across as racially insensitive.

The assigned readings on King/Drew do not include any of this history. Lecture slides instead praise the hospital for "suturing racial divides," but suggest that it may not have gone far enough. A focus on "producing highly talented and skilled physicians," one slide reads, "forced" King/Drew to hire doctors who were, "in some cases, not Black."

The curriculum is a "compilation of ideologic and anecdotal assertions that represent a warped view of medicine," said Stanley Goldfarb, the founder of the medical advocacy group Do No Harm and the father of Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb. "American medical education needs to purge itself of this nonsense and treat every patient as an individual."

The slides suggest that "lived experiences," "historical memory," and "other knowledges" can constitute medical expertise.

Biomedical knowledge, after all, is "just one way of knowing, understanding, and experiencing health in the world."

==

The moral of the story is, if you see a UCLA medical school certificate on your doctor's wall, leave.

If you don't see this as the same thing as faith-healing, I don't know what to tell you.

[fatliberation]

love your page so much! have you read any work from Da’shaun L Harrison? they are so so amazing and have written an amazing book called the “belly of the beast: the politics of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness” they also co host the fat liberation podcast called “unsolicited: fatties talk back” with other fat liberationists whom i love like Caleb Luna, Bryan Guffey, Marquisele Mercedes and Jordan Hall! most of them are also trans! thought i’d share <3

Yes!!! I adore Da’shaun’s work as well as everyone else you just mentioned! I follow each of them individually and when I found out they were hosting a podcast together I geeked out SO HARD. I’m currently making my way through Unsolicited FTB and it is feeding my soul. What an incredible group of people. I highly recommend listening!

[weeklyedit]

Weekly Edit #2

What to Listen to, podcasts

What to Listen to, Music

What to Read, Articles

What to Read, Books

<3 <3 <3

[acosmic]

reading/watching/listening, 2021 [pinned]:

books (favourites asterisked):

*Zeroville - Steve Erickson

*The Day of the Locust - Nathanael West

*The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

The Case Against Satan - Ray Russel

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art - Scott McCloud

The Shining - Stephen King [ugh]

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller

*Surfacing - Margaret Atwood

The Love of the Last Tycoon - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Murder Mysteries - Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell

The Book of Illusions - Paul Auster

Sandman: Season of Mists - Neil Gaiman

Devil in a Blue Dress - Walter Mosley

*House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

Come Closer - Sara Gran

*The Drowning Girl - Caitlin R. Kiernan [killer, haven’t finished it]

*Whipping Girl - Julia Serano

Darryl - Jackie Ess

*Laziness Does Not Exist - Devon Price

An Unauthorized Fan Treatise - Lauren James (internet novel available here - for now)

honourable mention/large chunks of poetry but not full books: William Carlos Williams, H.D.

movies:

A Place in the Sun (1951) [hate it]

Barton Fink (1991)

Adaptation (2002)

Nosferatu (1922)

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

something by neil breen (roommate is evil)

short films: Illusions (1983), Emak Bakia (1926)

unfinished: The Watermelon Woman (1996), Paterson (2016) [horrible]

secondary sources re: assigned literature:

Batman: “The Dark Knight Errant: Power and Authority in Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” - Christopher Bundrick (Riddle Me This, Batman! : Essays on the Universe of the Dark Knight, McFarland, 2011); “Additionality and Cohesion in Transfictional Worlds” - Roberta Pearson, (The Velvet Light Trap, U of Texas, 2017)

House of Leaves: “What’s Beneath the Floorboards: Three Competing Metavoices in the Footnotes of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” - Michael Hemmingson (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2011); “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel” - Jessica Pressman, (Studies in American Fiction, 2006)

The Day of the Locust: “Artists in Hollywood: Thomas Hart Benton and Nathanael West Picture America’s Dream Dump” - Erika Doss (The Space Between, 2011); “Productive Desires: Materialist Psychoanalysis and the Hollywood Dream Factory in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust” - Todd Hoffman (Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 2018) [interesting but objectionable]; "The Paintings in the Day of the Locust" - Jeffrey Meyers (Anq, 2009)

Nietzsche [secondary source for Layton assignment, read originals later]: “Apollo and Dionysos in Dialectic” and bits of “The Tragic Moment” - Paul Raimond Daniels (Nietzsche and “The Birth of Tragedy,” Routledge, 2014).

secondary sources not explicitly related to specific assigned literature:

film [assigned]: “The Whiteness of Film Noir” - E. Lott (American Literary History, 1997); “Reading Hollywood” - Jonathan Veitch (Salmagundi, 2000); “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship” - bell hooks (Black Looks: Race and Representation). did a lot of skimming of articles and didn’t finish or thoroughly read many of them! probably missing some. rip.

misc: “The Concept as Ghost: Conceptualization of the Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory” - Anneleen Maschelein (Mosaic [Winnipeg], 2002)

refreshing concepts [not assigned]: chapters 3/“Narrative” and “16/Genre” in The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice (Routledge, 2018)

short stories, poems:

Fritz Leiber - Smoke Ghost

Ray Bradbury - There Will Come Soft Rains

T. S. Eliot - The Waste Land

Irving Layton - The Birth of Tragedy; The Fertile Muck

Margaret Atwood - It is Dangerous To Read Newspapers

Leonard Cohen - The Only Tourist in Havana Turns His Thoughts Homewards; A Kite is a Victim

AJM Smith - The Lonely Land

Jillian Weise - Ashley Shew Just Invented The Word Cryborg

Isabel Fall - Helicopter Story

June Martin - I sexually identify as the “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” controversy

rest TBA

essays/articles [very, very incomplete]:

A. H. Reaume - Brain fog

Michael Hobbes - Everything you know about obesity is wrong

Charlotte Hyde - We already have a name for that: why “zoom” fatigue is nothing new.

Gretchen Felker-Martin - “I wish there was a world for us”: on the choice to consume small art; What’s the harm in reading?; 

Katie J.M. Baker - The road to terfdom: Mumsnet and the fostering of anti-trans radicalization

Alex V. Green - The Pride flag has a representation problem

Jamie Mackay - The whitewashing of Rome: Colonialism is built on the rubble of a false idea of ancient Rome

Jules Gill-Peterson - A microdose of liberation

David Davis - XVII, Part 3: On genital preference

Marquisele Mercedes - The unbearable whiteness and fatphobia of “anti-diet” dieticians

Sophie Lewis - Collective turn-off

Daniel M. Lavery - Art criticism in a world where museums let you lick the art

re: helicopter story - How Twitter can ruin a life (Emily VanDerWerff); G F-M piece above; Clarkesworld removes Isabel Fall’s story (Mike Glyer); That Twitter thread [on criticism] (Lee Mandelo); The talented victim is not the point (Conor Friedersdorf);

miscellanea:

smaller stuff by more knowledgeable trans than i

a shitton of student presentations, small papers (pretty good), and slides with audio (terrible)

yewchube: corsetry-related videos by costumers, furniture repairs/restoration, recipes/cooking, friend catchup

note: silly formatting meant to aid reading. very, very incomplete. if you want to read any of the books/articles lmk there’s a 90% chance of me still having the file saved.

[the-final-straw-blog]

Fat Liberation for Revolutionary Leftists with Autumn

This week I am very excited to present an interview with Autumn (she/her/hers), who is an anarchist and scholar-activist, on Fat Liberation in all its many nuances, the pervasive, classist, racist, and colonial nature of fatphobia both in mainstream society and in far left spaces and thought, and the roots of Fat Liberation as a structure which originates and lives with Black, Indigenous, and brown, trans and disabled people. We also speak about Autumn’s syllabus entitled “Fat Liberation Syllabus for Revolutionary Leftists: Confronting Fatphobia on the Left AND Liberalism within the Fat Liberation Movement”. In this document, she compiles writings on the many aspects of fatphobia and gives her own analysis in bulleted form. This document is available for public use, and you can find it at https://tinyurl.com/FatLiberation!

People, works, and resources named by our guest in this episode:

- Da’Shaun L. Harrison book “Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness”

- Dr. Sabrina Strings book “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia”

- Hunter A. Shackleford “Hunter Ashleigh Shackelford (they/she) is a Black fat cultural producer, multidisciplinary artist, nonbinary shapeshifter, and data futurist based in Atlanta, Georgia ... They are the creator and director of a Southern body liberation organization, Free Figure Revolution, which focuses on decolonizing antiblack body violence … Hunter illustrates the relationship between Blackness, fatness, desire, queerness, and popular culture.” (Instagram: @huntythelion)

- Jervae (Instagram: @jervae)

- Dr. Dorothy Roberts’ work on CPS and how anti-Black racism and fatphobia infect this institution.

- Health At Every Size, evidence based medical paradigm that heavily critiques the social constructions of “obesity” and diet culture, and aims to present folks with a compassionate and inclusive framework for taking care of themselves.

- Books by Dr. Lindo Bacon (founder of Health At Every Size)

- podcast Food Psych with Christy Harrison

- Marquisele Mercedes article “How to Recenter Equity and Decenter Thinness in the Fight for Food Justice”

- Caleb Luna (Instagram: @chairbreaker Twitter: @chairbreaker_) “Caleb Luna (they/them) is a fat queer (of color) critical theorist, performer, poet, essayist, cultural critic, and performance scholar. As a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, their research focuses on performances of eating, and historicizing cultural representations of fat embodiment within the ongoing settler colonization of Turtle Island.

- Sonalee Rashatwar (Instagram: @thefatsextherapist)

- podcast Maintenance Phase with Aubrey Gordon (Instagram: @yrfatfriend Twitter: @yrfatfriend)

- Fat Rose Collective (Instagram: @fatlibink)

. ... . ..

Music for this episode:

Reality Check by Noname (Instrumental)

Check out this episode!

[siddysthings]

The Unbearable Whiteness and Fatphobia of “Anti-Diet” Dietitians | by Marquisele Mercedes | Sep, 2020 | Medium

[fatliberation]

Please read the full article by Marquisele Mercedes. Lindo’s extremely selfish actions are so telling. I am indebted to Mikey for her transparency and for putting in the exhausting labor to inform everyone of her experience.

For those who don’t know, Dr. Lindo Bacon is the author of Heath At Every Size and has been the face of the HAES movement since it began.

Here is an excerpt from Mikey’s article:

“Lindo was disingenuous about the project having space for my ideas. They proposed the HAES rewrite as something that necessitated a major rework of HAES and my specific critical lens when they were really just looking for a fat Black person that they could use as a show pony to point at as an example of both how charitable they are with ~leveraging their privilege~ as well as use to write complex, nuanced discussions of fatness, Blackness, disability, and other axes of oppression that they could also take credit for. And when it became clear I was not willing to play the role they wanted to force me into, they pivoted to seeing if they could still purchase my expertise via a ghostwriting arrangement that meant they would take full credit for my work without having to meet my needs as a co-author. This is on top of the fact that during this conversation, Lindo clearly articulated that they have no intention of stepping out of the spotlight or relinquishing their power over the fat people they claim to advocate for even when one of those fat people tells them very plainly that their continued hypervisibility is harmful.”

@fatmarquisele | marquiselemercedes.com

[fatliberation]

Public health — as an academic field, profession, and an apparatus of the state — is not interested in the political nature of food sovereignty, food justice, and food apartheid.

To acknowledge how the inequitable distribution of food is something that is done and doesn’t just exist would demand a reconsideration of public health’s entire approach to health.

In order to keep blaming fat people for their weight, public health cannot fully confront the role that power and privilege play in food access or eating... They also cannot demoralize food or body size or acknowledge fatness as a part of human body diversity.

Doing any or all of these things would negate a lot of the work of health professionals and institutions that rely on the demonization of fatness and take away an easy, uncontroversial means of talking about + around racism for many public health professionals.

If you find you cannot resist the opportunity to talk about “obesity” or “good” foods or “bad” foods or “health” when discussing food access, you may just be fatphobic.

-Marquisele Mercedes

@fatmarquisele