Socialism 2026 speaker slams diet industry for policing 'Black fat flesh,' calls it 'body fascism'

An activist at the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago slammed the "diet industry" for policing "Black fat flesh," characterizing modern health standards and weight management as forms of "body fascism".

During a session on "Health Fascism" on Saturday, author Da’Shaun L.

Harrison said that the policing of "Black fat flesh" is foundational to broader "entire systems of governance." "Black fatness is made meaningful through suffering, through surveillance, and through control and the policing of Black fat flesh anchors entire systems of governance.

Without a population to discipline, there would be no BMI, no obesity epidemic , and no medical or scientific institutions organized around managing fatness," Harrison said.

"The diet industry reflects this logic.

It operates through what I once defined as formal and informal relationships among major food corporations, the medical-industrial complex, and individual wealthy benefactors to sustain a social order in which fat people are monitored, restricted, guilted, stolen from, and punished.

Diet culture has always linked food to morality, framing restraint as virtue and pleasure as danger through language like 'guilty pleasure,'" Harrison said.

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS ERUPT OVER 2028 ENDORSEMENT AS AOC SPECULATION GROWS: 'DANGEROUS PATH' The four-day Socialism 2026 conference, held at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place and organized by Haymarket Books, brought together activists, organizers, and communities from across the country and around the world, featuring over a hundred participatory discussions, lectures, and workshops, according to the event's website .

Harrison was one of three panelists — alongside podcast co-hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant—who spoke during a session titled "Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State".

Over 200 people attended the discussion, which formed part of the conference's broader "Health Fascism" series.

Clips of the conference were shared on X by Manhattan Institute investigative analyst Stu Smith.

"As governments retreat from care, and health increasingly becomes a signifier of discipline—rather than provision—fitness, disability, fatness, illness, Blackness, impairment, and bodily capacity are mobilized into measures of moral worth and political belonging.

This panel examines how health, disability, body size, and race are instrumentalized by the state and being reorganized under health fascism," according to an event description.