I remember the first time I went to a queer people of color-centered party that I felt truly had potential.

I was hopeful that, for the first time, I would not feel left out in a queer space. I imagined that through being surrounded by other queer people of color, we would all finally be on a level playing field, and I could feel accepted, included, valued, and wanted in ways I had never felt in queer spaces that cater to white folks.

But I was so wrong – and so disappointed.

Even though there were no white folks present, it was still apparent that those who looked whitest were still the in-crowd. It was still the light-skinned ones, the thin folks, the masculine people, the ones without any visible disabilities.

As a fat person, I still felt so invisible and unwelcome, even though I was also a person of color like those around me. This felt like an even deeper betrayal, as it wasn’t white people for whom I have low expectations who were harming me – it was people with whom I was meant to be in community.

This experience really helped me see how white supremacy manifests in subtle ways in activist spaces, even by folks who identify strongly as people of color and/or as anti-racist and anti-oppressive.

I now see how even cultivating activist communities and spaces that consist of primarily young, thin, cis, and non-disabled people is a product of white supremacy, even if the people are not all white.

White supremacy isn’t about individual white people, though they are often the ones who benefit the most from it, and the ones who have the most at stake in upholding it. The intimacy of white supremacy is that whiteness as a standard becomes permeated throughout our lives in the ways we conceive of and conceptualize nearly every aspect.

This is a guerrilla tactic that allows even the most well-meaning and intentional people (both white and of color) to accidentally participate in it.

White supremacy no longer needs white people to maintain its status. This is most obvious to me in the ways non-Black people of color perpetuate anti-Blackness, which is another aspect of white supremacy.

This is how we can shift it.

1. Complicate Your Oppressions

An essential component of working through all the ways we have all inevitably internalized white supremacy is by thinking through all the subtle ways it appears in our lives – not only the ways that it is harmful, but also the ways we benefit from it, even as people of color.

For instance, people like myself benefit from light skin privilege by being in closer proximity to whiteness than darker-skinned folks, even if we still experience racism. And our oppressions do not outweigh our privileges. They live in conjunction.

It is so common for us, especially as we begin to learn about concepts of privilege and oppression, to really embrace our identities as people of color and begin to see all the very real ways that racism has impacted our lives.

Unfortunately, many of us often forget the other ways we’re privileged.

Even being able to use your eyes to read, or access technology to get on the Internet to read this without being made ill are privileges that we don’t often consider.

Concepts of privilege and oppression are shaped to be intentionally ambiguous. They are meant to be confusing so that they can make invisible the ways even the oppressed can oppress others.

We need to be asking not just how we are oppressed, but how we are privileged – including through thinness.

2. Remember That Thinness Can’t Be Separated From Whiteness

The way most people have been taught to think about body size is through the Body Mass Index, or BMI chart.

But what people don’t know is that the BMI was created by a Belgian statistician named Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, who used what was available to him – all white adult European men – for his study.

And recent examinations of the BMI have shown that racialized bodies don’t measure up the same way. So in addition to all its other problems, the BMI is, quite frankly, racist and sexist.

The idea of what we have been taught to believe a “normal” body should look like is literally based on ideas of white male bodies and has become translated onto bodies of color across the world.

This isn’t to say there are no thin people of color or fat white people. But regardless of what body the fatness or thinness on, its size and shape still references (or doesn’t) a body ideal rooted in whiteness.

By recognizing the white origins of the worshiping of thinness, we can begin to think about where, exactly, our personal and cultural distaste for fatness comes from.

We can begin embracing the body diversity of ourselves and realize how, when we get down on ourselves or others for being fat, we are enacting white supremacy against ourselves and others.

And we can recognize that an inclination (of any kind) to thinness, no matter on whose body it is on, cannot be separated from an attraction to whiteness in the current context and history of race and body size.

3. Stop Using Fatness as a Stand-In For Race

Even the way that fatness becomes talked about in popular culture shows how fatness and race have become subtly correlated, even amongst people who probably consider themselves progressive, not racist, and/or otherwise body positive.

In 2013, white television starlet Lena Dunham called herself “thin for Detroit” on The Howard Stern show, demonstrating how fatness has become racialized, where “Detroit” becomes code for Blackness.

Similarly, white actress Tina Fey’s quote from her memoir, about the pressures placed on (white) women to have “full Spanish lips” and a “Jamaican dance hall ass,” has been thoroughly critiqued for its association of racial stereotypes and body size.

Both of these comments reproduce ideas that communities of color are more accepting of fatness by virtue of being stereotyped as more attracted to it.

But Black and Latinx communities are actually pathologized for higher occurrences of fatness under white ideals of thinness – statistics that can’t be disentangled from the occurrence of fatness in impoverished communities and the disproportionate number of people of color who live in poverty.

All of these realities are the produced through white supremacy and capitalism structuring our society.

4. Recognize How We Judge Ourselves Against White Standards

We uphold whiteness in a lot of subtle ways. One of the most obvious is through internalized fat hatred and conceptions of what our bodies should look like.

How are we comparing ourselves to white standards that were never meant for us? Not just with body size, but aspects like height, color or shade, and body hair patterns.

I frequently get told that I “look young,” which is a complicated statement, and typically intended as a compliment. In our culture, youth is a virtue. And I constantly see people my age or younger who “look” older, which has led to a lot of confusion and insecurity.