SPITFIRE Substack

I wanted to ask an important question: what does it feel like for Black women to objectify white men? Lol, even something this petty can be made political.

This list was curated by me. It’s based on conversations with other Black women born during the 20^th century, and of course on my own thirst. The dates below indicate the time period of hotness

I could tell you a lot of memorable stories about graduate school. Once, in 2011, my final year of graduate school, someone broke into my office, which was shared with four other grad students. I immediately became the prime suspect. (I’ll regale you with the full story on that one some other time.)

Around the time of the break-in, I was having a

I had planned a lunch n’ Zoom with one of my girlfriends recently. We’ll call her Tess. Tess happens to be one of the most recognizable faces in the fat liberation space.

I tossed crushed red pepper onto my store-bought pizza and logged on. When our Zoom chat connected, I was surprised to see two faces. She was there as planned, eating fettuccini,

When I was a postdoc at Berkeley, I had one incredible Public Health Stats teacher. We’ll call her Professor Kelly. She was a white woman, and a stellar teacher for more than three decades. Her course was recommended to me by a couple of tenured profs. And yet Prof. Kelly herself was an untenured lecturer. (In case you don’t know, these are the

If you’ve ever heard me describe how I came to my research on fatphobia, you’ll know that a lightbulb went off for me at the age of 22. This was years after my grandmother kept trying to pull me into conversations about it. But you might not know that at that time, I myself was shamed for being fat.

I was working as a researcher at an HIV

A few years ago, I decided to rewatch What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. The film, based on a Peter Hedges novel by the same name, is a coming of age drama. It tells of the daily spoils and trials of Gilbert Grape, a 20-something store clerk in a 1000-person Iowan town, played memorably by Johnny Depp.

We watch Gilbert as he tries to manage his life at

For those of us working on size liberation, the FDA’s 2021 approval of semaglutides like Ozempic for weight loss has certainly thrown a wrench into the works. Arriving during a moment in which ideas ranging from body positivity and neutrality, to fat liberation were abuzz in the public discourse, the new glp-1s quickly derailed the conversation.

Wel

I didn’t think much about Jacky after that. We ran into one another at one final first-year faculty happy hour and we’d chatted politely. There was a woman there, not Janice but a new face, who was recently married. She began every sentence with “my husband.” I was quite sure this woman and I had no further business. But then Jacky, seeing this

I was invited to the UC chancellor’s mansion. The directions took me down a familiar street at night, the dark winding curves recognizable. The map said “turn here,” and as I looked to the left I saw a driveway I had never seen before, tucked away behind edging plants, and out of sight

.

As I turned in to the hidden driveway, it revealed its

I wasn’t always a fan of Mike Epps. When the original Friday hit theaters, I saw that movie at the budget Academy theaters in Pasadena with everybody I knew. It became a go-to activity for catching up with junior high homies who went to a different high school, like:

Hey gurl! Where you been? Have you seen Friday yet?

I’m not sure how many times I