Obesity: Socially Acceptable Discrimination?

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Obesity: socially acceptable discrimination? In America all people are supposed to be to be treated equally. A lot has been written about discrimination in regards to race, religion and ethnicity. However, obesity has been virtually ignored. The difference is that obesity is still discrimination based on physical appearance. Obesity is treated differently than race, because a person may be born into a certain ethnic group, but people believe that obesity is caused by one’s own actions. It may have been caused by parents over-feeding them, certain disease states or genetics, not just over eating or leading a sedentary lifestyle. There are several areas where overweight people face discrimination; at work, applying for a job, while shopping for clothes, traveling, and at school. Obese people are also prejudged by others based on the way they look. This continued negative attitude towards the obese in America causes them to be looked at differently, treated differently, and made to feel like they don’t belong. Obese people are looked at as being physically humorous and strange, just because they are overweight. The World Wide Web proves that obese people are being made fun of, as well as discriminated. If a person types “fat people” into an internet search engine, the first entries are all making fun of the way obese people look. The first three entries are “Supersize me: The Funniest Fat People Pics”, “Funny Fat People Pictures”, and “Fat People Pictures – Strange Fat People Pics”. If a person types “black people” or “Asian people” into an internet search engine, the results are much different. Instead of degrading pictures, the primary results are dating websites and factual history. The Blacks and Asians are not made fun of or discriminated online, but obese people are. This is representative of the way people think about overweight people. Obese

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