Santa Claus's lap is where I first learned that my body was a problem.

Ho ho ho!

Whoa, you're a big girl!

The year before, when I turned six, I barely hung off of Santa's knee.

But now this word chubby had become synonymous with my name.

And Santa, this magical man responsible for making all of my Christmas dreams come true, was telling me I was too heavy to sit on his lap.

My body was already taking up too much space.

My earliest memories are of having a lot of problems with my body.

Writer Carvel Wallace began to understand the world's view of his body around seven or eight two.

Recently, he wrote about the different ways his black body has stood in the way of his happiness.

I was like as a kid, I'm chubby and then I went through this like phase when I looked back at it in my early 20s where I was very

slim and muscular and I lost a bunch of weight and I gained a bunch of way back. When Carvel was in eighth grade, he held a knife to his stomach,

contemplating the ways he could surgically cut off the rolls of fat from his body to fit the ideal.

This kid from your fourth grade class can run fast.

This kid's good at basketball.

This kid's good at football.

This kid can fight.

You don't have a body thing that you can do. It was in the way of my freedom and liberation.

With abs, he thought, came power and respect, the ability to be un-bothered, to be seen as human.

It really comes down to a question of do we get to experience our full humanity

as black people, and that's largely denied to folks who are deemed to look

inappropriate for white spaces.

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