Why Is the NYT Trying to Kill Black Women?

This article in the NYT really pisses me off. I avoided reading any of it for a few days because I knew how it would make me feel, and I was enjoying my brief vacation. I read a few lines, and I was right, it did piss me off. My anger started from the title and progressed from there. A friend thought that the title served its purpose of getting people talking about the issue, and therefore the author (or editor who wrote the title) didn't "get it wrong." Here's my response to that.

Yes, she did get it wrong. We are talking about the article, but we are not talking about solutions to the black health care crisis. We are fighting with people who are making us the problem. That causes stress. Which leads to heart disease (and other health problems). So not only did she get it wrong, she's trying to kill us. How about "why is the corporate media trying to kill black people?" That would generate lots of readers too.

But really, putting a picture of Josephine Baker as the lead pic in an article about black female obesity? Are you f'ing kidding me? That is irresponsible. That is hateful. There are young black girls, perhaps living in the kind of upper middle class black household that subscribes to the NYT and values education enough to make the sacrifice to live in a place like Piedmont (an almost all white suburb of Oakland that has great schools), who will see that picture in the context of the article and hate their perfectly healthy, curvy, athletic bodies.

I know the mom of one such girl. The girl is a star athlete, plays soccer and runs track. She is curvier than her peers (mom ran track and could have been on that relay team I mentioned, and tells me that her daughter has a similar shape). She gets flack for being "big" all of the time. She's not. But that peer pressure affects what she eats and it affects her mood. It causes her to not want to live in her body. You can't be healthy if you don't love yourself. It's hard to love yourself if the media is making sport out of saying that you're fat, you're lazy, you're stupid. And if they are gonna put up a picture of one of the most beautiful women who ever walked the earth as an example of a "fat black woman." they can go straight to hell. Because they are a huge part of the problem that black women face as they struggle to simply be in this society.