Tag Archives: New York City

Weight and Height Anti-Discrimination Law Comes to New York City

NYC (Black) mayor Adams signing law with several fat women standing behind him

Debbie says:

Last Friday, May 26, 2023, New York city’s governor, Eric Adams, signed the city’s first anti-height-and-weight-discrimination law. New York joins a few other places, including the state of Michigan and the cities of San Francisco, California, Washington D.C., Madison, Wisconsin, Urbana, Illinois, and a few others in this slowly-progressing forward-looking legislation.

City Councilman Shaun Abreu said weight discrimination was “a silent burden people have had to carry”.

During public hearings, supporters cited difficulty navigating seating at restaurants and theatres, getting turned away by landlords, and butting up against weight limits on the city’s bike sharing programme.

Councilman Abreu, who sponsored the bill, said he became more aware of the issue when he gained more than 40lb (18.1kg) during lockdown and saw a shift in how he was treated. He said the lack of protections had amplified the problems people face.

Of course, this kind of change always represents dozens or hundreds of activists putting in thousands of hours of work. Laurie was in San Francisco when that city’s law was passed (over 20 years ago!). We wrote about that experience here in 2008, when Massachusetts was trying to get a similar law passed. Here’s Laurie:

I attended all of the meetings with the board of supervisors in San Francisco in 1999 and 2000, before San Francisco passed its size acceptance law. My role was to talk as a mother about the effect of this kind of prejudice has on kids. Lots of other people spoke brilliantly on other aspects of the issue including Marilyn Wann and Sandra Solovay. Others folks spoke on the issues of height discrimination. Interestingly, one of the supervisors, Bevan Dufty spoke eloquently about the pain of a fat kid.

In 2000 San Francisco became the third city after Washington, D.C., and Santa Cruz, Cal., to legally forbid weight discrimination. Tom Ammiano, president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors at the time, said that the anti-discrimination measure passed because “many San Franciscans were being denied employment, housing and bank loans merely because they were perceived as being overweight.” I was thrilled when it passed here and it has been an effective ban.

In the intervening years, between San Francisco’s passage of the law, and Massachusetts’ failure, so much has happened to change the landscape of “legal” discrimination against people of color and other marginalized groups, and to feed the backlash against all kinds of protections for various protected or “suspect” classes.

Long before the first laws of this kind were passed, the extraordinary Dr. Arline Geronimus was developing and writing about her concept of “weathering,” as “the corrosive effects of systemic oppression on marginalized people’s bodies.” Dr. Geronimus, appropriately, applies her work generally to health outcomes for Black people and other POC. I believe it also applies, very directly, to health outcomes for fat people (and, of course, is multiplied when Black people and other POC are also fat). Check out Dr. Geronimus’s new book, WEATHERING: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an  Unjust Society, the first book on this subject.

So this is a taste of encouragement and possibility, in a moment when we finally have publicly accessible language to discuss why and how oppression affects health outcomes. Kudos to New York City for taking this leap, and may many cities and states follow.

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Taking Down a Racist Sculpture in the Center of Manhattan

statue of Roosevelt on horse, flanked by a Black man and a Native man on foot

Laurie and Debbie say:

For many decades, both of us have hated the statue on the east side of the Museum of Natural History (pictured above). President Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, flanked by two subservient men of color: the very picture of white supremacy in bronze.

In 2017, we put up a guest blog from Laurie’s brother Mike, about his engagement in activism to get it taken down:

To call this status racist, jingoistic and extremely offensive is to understate the case. The City of New York and the Museum of Natural History are reminding every visitor every day that they believe in white supremacy, that white privileged people like Roosevelt are appropriate leaders of “inferior” races. The statue says clearly that they are inferior: he’s dressed and they’re half-naked; he’s on a horse and they’re on foot. Thank God that in 2017 we still have powerful White men to show you Black people and Native Americans the way. …

This week, New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the statue is finally coming down. Nora McGreevy writes about this for Smithsonian Magazine:

… on Sunday, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and nationwide protests against racism, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that it would at last come down.

The removal came at the request of the museum, which also released a statement asking for the statue’s removal, reports Robin Pogrebin for the New York Times. It comes amid a nationwide push to remove public works honoring Confederate leaders, including incidents of some protesters taking matters into their own hands by vandalizing or pulling down memorials themselves.

It is shameful that the statue was ever erected, and more shameful still that it is standing in 2020. And yet, it will be an unalloyed pleasure to walk past that side of the museum and not be confronted with such a hateful image.

Symbolic victories can be satisfying.