Phat Acceptance — Jess Mowry

Some might say 14-year-old Brandon Williams is an over-privileged snowflake. He lives in a million-dollar house overlooking the ocean in Santa Cruz, California, gets a weekly allowance equal to the take-home pay of many service industry workers, and has gone to a private, all-white school from Kindergarten through eighth grade. Health-nazis call him “obese," but to most normal people he's simply chubby, and handsome by Caucasian standards. Brandon should be happy - or at least think he is - but he's not. Like many young teens he's sure there must be a "there" somewhere that's better than the present "here," and he's tried to find it in fantasy games. He's also tried to dull his angst in various chemical ways, and wasted a year of his youth staying high. Brandon hopes to be a writer and use words as weapons to fight world's wrongs. Being who he is and living where he does, he's never experienced discrimination or hate based on appearance or race. Despite the protests of his liberal-minded and loving, but career-oriented and somewhat distant parents, Brandon decides to attend public high school. But his first day is a reality shock as he discovers what public education in the U.S. is all about... pounding just enough knowledge and mainstream values into kids' empty skulls so they can become productive Proles. Since no one knows him, he naturally falls in with the outcasts, which include Travis White, one of the school's few black students and the fattest at five-hundred pounds. There is also Bosco Donatello, a chubby world-class surfer dude, though indifferent to his fame and seemingly oblivious to the present as if he's been transported through time from 1963. As the story progresses, Brandon struggles with the question of whether a person can empathize with the suffering of others unless he or she has suffered. Along these lines he discovers that most of what he “knows” about black people - and fat people - is only what he's been taught. Phat Acceptance is a mix of issues, including consumerism, advertising, propaganda, xenophobia, and how kids are brainwashed from the time they first turn on a TV into buying what they're told to buy, wearing what they're told to wear, eating what they're told to eat, looking how they're told to look - which now includes weighing what they're told to weigh - and hating who they're told to hate. It also illustrates how the “war on childhood obesity” gives haters a group of people whom it's socially acceptable to hate, as well as how sheep-like most people are in accepting how “unhealthy” they are because they're being told they are by a health and fitness industry with multi-billion dollar profits. The result is a new religion of "health" and a holy war against those who won't worship.