White Supremacy and the Tinder Swindler

The assumption that thinness, narrow features, and wealth=trustworthiness might bite you in the butt

Photo by Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash, Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash edited by Author on Canva

You know, I hate to say it, but when people fall for racism, jump into a big vat of it, and then start drowning, I let out a full-throated laugh. White supremacy is the flipside of racism, or maybe its foundation, and that’s why I’m speaking about them interchangeably. So, when Consuelo Rivero Hoyos tricked rich executives to hand over their life’s earnings on a silver platter, I chuckled. But, let’s do a bit of background.

Diet Culture and White Supremacy

Many people are steeped in white supremacy. Take me, for instance. In graduate school, I began fasting because there weren’t enough hours in the day to eat, sleep, and do my assignments, so I figured, why not spend the hours I would have spent cleaning and cooking and put them into the library? I lost 10 pounds that summer, but that wasn’t the intention. I read everything and never missed an assignment. I was also a vegan.

Last year, when I was whining about my love handles, my boyfriend sent me a short documentary describing how diet culture and thinness are products of, you guessed it, white supremacy. In the video, professor Harriet Brown says,

“To be thin and to be white was to be original, like one…