The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

by Sonya Renee Taylor

The work is to crumble the barriers of injustice and shame leveled against us so that we might access what we have always been, because we will, if unobstructed, inevitably grow into the purpose for which we were created: our own unique version of that oak tree.

We did not start life in a negative partnership with our bodies.

Children do not arrive here ashamed of their race, gender, age, or disabilities. Babies love their bodies! Each discovery they encounter is freaking awesome. Have you ever seen an infant realize they have feet? Talk about wonder! That is what an unobstructed relationship with our bodies looks like. You were an infant once, which means there was a time when you thought your body was freaking awesome too.

People with disabilities are virtually nonexistent on television unless they are being trotted out as “inspiration porn.” Their stories are often told in ways that exploit their disabilities for the emotional edification of able-bodied people, presenting them as superhuman for doing unspectacular things like reading or going to the store or, worse yet, for overcoming obstacles placed on them by the very society that fails to acknowledge or appropriately accommodate their bodies.

Consider that the right to marry the person you love regardless of your gender was only legally sanctioned in the United States in 2015.11 In certain other nations (e.g., Australia), it is still illegal.12 Marriage equality for same-sex couples is in its historical infancy in the United States and nonexistent for most of the world.

Health is not a state we owe the world. We are not less valuable, worthy, or loveable because we are not healthy.

A National Center for Health Statistics report (as recounted in the New York Times) indicated that suicide rates in 2014 were the highest they had been in thirty years. American Indians, a community whose bodies have been met with an interminable history of oppression, erasure, and inequity, saw the highest rise in rates, with a horrifying increase of 89 percent.35 A ProPublica analysis of federal data regarding police-involved shootings found that young Black men between ages fifteen and nineteen were twenty-one times more likely to be killed by the police than young White men of the same age.36

We don’t need to stop using the word fat, we need to stop the hatred that our world connects with the word fat.2

“I began to see that my body was not the cause of the hatred directed against me—society did that. My body did not fail to protect me when I was attacked; I did not deserve violence. My body has never been wrong. Someone else decided that.”3 Kai Cheng Thom

“Liberation is the opportunity for every human, no matter their body, to have unobstructed access to their highest self; for every human to live in radical self-love.”