Asklemmy

If think they’re probably having a pretty rough time

Don’t be shitty to other people, and don’t try to play Oppression Olympics

At best: they need to experience more of the world. At worst: they're racist.

Well, they're definitely not the same thing.

However, the thinking behind both forms of discrimination is.

There's some people that will not be happy unless they have a target for hate and nastiness. That kind of person is going to have something to hate, and the only reason they aren't openly racist, or homophobic, or whatever other form of bigotry you pick is that they don't think they can get away with it.

If society as a whole moved far enough into not being assholes to people based on their weight, the haters would just switch to a new target.

So, absolutely, 100%, racism is not the same as weight based discrimination and prejudice. But the same kind of people are taking part. It's all based in the need to feel superior, to have someone to shit on, to point at and say "ha, they suck, I don't".

That's what I'd say to someone conflating the two as exactly the same.

Then I'd break down why they're different. How racism is built on systemic oppression on top of hate. How it's engrained into society through a long and violent history (and I'm not only pointing to racism against a single race here, pretty much every "race" has been a target anywhere that this conversation would be taking place, and it has all been violent at some point). How race isn't something you can change at all, barring multiethnic people that can "pass" as one of their ethnicities.

Then, I'd tell them that it's nice to see anyone taking a stand against any kind of hate and discrimination, offer them a fist bump or other congratulatory gesture they prefer, and then GTFO.

What I'd say is that there is no-one on Earth who believes that fat people were enslaved and brought across an ocean to break their backs on plantations, with the descendants of these slaves still haunted by poverty to this day. There do however exist people who think that fat people are discriminated against, and to this I would say that the kids in order to make fun of that fat person had to be taught that fatness is something to make fun of in the first place, and whoever taught this idea to them had to have a reason to do so, and when the same thing keeps happening again and again, there is probably some sort of systemic cause for it.

My point with this is that acknowledging that people experience discrimination or marginalization on the basis of a specific trait, is not the same as saying that this or that form of discrimination is "the same as" the most infamous form of systemic discrimination: every form of discrimination has a different history, different manifestations, different roles and different causes, and intersects with other forms of discrimination in novel ways.

I've never been fat myself, mind you, but my dad was, and after he died far too young when I was just a kid, my mom told me that he died as a result of medical discrimination against fat people. Not that I am a physician myself — and by all means we would both be biased to look for someone to blame — but I still today feel like he would've lived much longer if the world were just more accommodating for people of all shapes and sizes.

They need to be educated