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.

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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.

In the session, Harrison argued that diet culture conditions "obedience," "self-denial," and "discipline" before framing those concepts as central components of "body fascism." 

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"Abstaining from pleasure becomes a way to train obedience, to train self-denial, and to train discipline in service of a broader political order. Body fascism is not some relic of the past. It's an active feature of modern imperial regimes," Harrison explained.

Harrison also criticized GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, contending that efforts to treat fatness as a public-health issue are intrinsically connected to racial control.

"Every time a government decides whose body must be protected and whose bodies must be erased for the sake of national imagery, this is body fascism. Every time there is a call for sovereignty by state powers with the intent to maintain borders, this is body fascism. Every time Black flesh is wrangled, dismembered, abused, this is body fascism. Understanding this clarifies exactly how fascist ideologies operate through the body, not only by glorifying a narrow ideal, but also by violently repressing the Black fat," Harrison added.

Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist and author of "Therapy Nation," told Fox News Digital that Harrison's comments are a byproduct of ideology infiltrating everything.

"There are fair criticisms of BMI and how it’s used. But calling it ‘body fascism’ is what happens when ideology gets inserted into almost every part of life," Alpert said.

"We’re seeing more and more ordinary issues viewed through the same lens: Who has power? Who’s oppressed? How does race factor into it? Now even a conversation with your doctor about weight or diet can be framed as a form of oppression," he added.

"That fits neatly into the worldview being promoted at a conference like this. Instead of seeing people primarily as individuals who make choices and have some responsibility for their lives, everything gets explained through systems, identity and power," Alpert said.

"Socialism may be an economic philosophy, but the culture surrounding this version of it goes much further. Personal problems become political problems, and individual responsibility gets pushed aside in favor of identifying the system or group supposedly responsible," he explained further.

"As a psychotherapist, I think there’s a psychological cost to that. If you teach people to interpret uncomfortable information as an attack, they become less willing to hear things they may need to hear. Sometimes a doctor telling you that you need to lose weight or change your diet isn’t racism, oppression or an attempt to control your body. It’s medical advice," Alpert added.

Harrison and representatives for the Socialism 2026 panel did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.