Let’s Move in a Different Direction

Who does First Lady Michelle Obama think should start moving?  About whose obesity is she really concerned?

As part of doing my job, I was in a place today intermingled with a lot of high school students.  Evidently, at least two high schools, one in the Parkway District, and one in the Hazelwood District, (I could tell from the parked buses), had a joint field trip to this particular facility.  The Parkway District is mostly white, with some deseg blacks and residential Asians mixed in.  Hazelwood is heavily black, not from deseg, but from the residential demographics.  So I saw a good cross section of students.  Keep in mind high school students tend to be between 14 and 18 years old.

Michelle Obama keeps talking about adolescent obesity.  So much so that, as you read in this space a few days ago, Wydown Middle in the Clayton district was one of many middle schools and junior high schools nationally that participated in a mass outdoor whore dance at the same time (12:40-ish PM Central Time, translate to other time zones), to re-worked lyrics to a Beyonce whore song.  (Use your favorite internet search engine to find out what “getting bodied” means.)

Just who is really obese?  From what I saw, most of the white men, white women and black men are so skinny that a good stiff breeze that went through the place could have knocked them all down to the floor like dominoes.  True, you don’t expect a student of high school age to weigh as much as men and women in their thirties.  The young men will surely put on more muscle mass with age and use, and the young women will do some of that and gain some other sorts of pounds (treading lightly here).  But I saw a whole lot of skin and bones — Or rather, what I saw were a whole bunch of human stick figures that need to get their asses into the weight room ASAP before they spontaneously disappear.  I don’t remember me ever being that skinny in high school, nor any of the guys in my class, and very few in my school in general.  The young (white) ladies seem to have more to them “back in the day” (early 1990s) also.  Can’t build much muscle when you’re on Facebook all day, can you?

The only exception to the skinny generalization I saw today were the black women.  A good percentage of them are obviously well overweight, a majority counting those look like they need to lose a fair number of pounds.  It was only maybe about a third that looked like they were of at least healthy weight and appearance, and only a small handful looked like the emaciated stick figures that were most of the others.

Recall that I noticed that there were a whole lot of blacks among the student body at Wydown Middle doing the Beyonce whore dance at the behest of the First Lady.  Not just blacks, but a majority of those were young women.  That was the case with video I saw from other schools participating — mostly young black women.

So let’s pull this all together.  Is the First Lady concerned about youth obesity in general, or is she concerned about it mainly because so many young black women are obese?  If that’s the case, then I can’t blame her — She is a black woman, so it would stand to reason that the problems of other black women would occupy her mind most prominently.  But that doesn’t mean that the 14-year old white kid who barely registers three figures on the scale needs to eat like a herbivore.