Hold the Slurs--Fat Is Not a Four-Letter Word : Discrimination: Now that blatant racism is no longer publicly acceptable, fat people have become fair game.

When someone called me the N word--meaning I was lazy, ugly, stupid and subhuman--my parents taught me to defend myself against the nasty epithet. They taught me to have dignity in the face of racial slurs because they were, my parents assured me, false.

But when someone called me “fat”--meaning I was lazy, ugly, undisciplined and an inferior human--my parents taught me to acquiesce in the face of what, they assured me, was the truth.

As blatant racism has diminished, “sizism,” the prejudice against fat people, rears its ugly head as the most acceptable and marketable form of discrimination in the Western World.

Weight discrimination bears a resemblance to ideologies and methods of race discrimination used in our nation’s recent past. Where racist jokes have become, for the most part, fashionable only for fascists, it is still considered OK to poke fun at fat people. Fat comedians bring home the bacon by making fun of fellow fat people, much as some black actors were allowed to eke out a living by playing bug-eyed bossy maids or shiftless, shufflin’ Joes.

Before the civil-rights era, being black was considered anything but beautiful. “Black” did not just describe one’s color but summoned up 200 years of degradation associated with the term.

For these reasons, my parents and many African Americans of their generation, would instantly feel their blood boil if someone called them black. In polite conversation, African Americans and whites alike referred to the race as Negro, not black.

In the same manner, if polite conversation turns to weighty matters and a corpulent person is within hearing distance, people will refer to the “overweight,” not the “fat.” Fat people are often just as offended by being called fat as black people used to be when called black. To most, the word fat is not a description but an indictment.

During the civil-rights era, African Americans reclaimed the word that had been used against them in slogans such as, “Say it loud I’m black and I’m proud!” In the same fashion, many large people who fight against weight discrimination prefer to be called fat rather than overweight.

“Overweight” is a judgmental term and implies that there is some objective, perfect weight that one has exceeded. The weights on insurance charts were not delivered from a mount on high.

“Fat,” says the National Assn. to Advance Fat Acceptance, “is not a four-letter word. . . . Society has taken a simple descriptive word and given it a derogatory meaning. . . . The word should be viewed in its proper perspective.”

Marcia Millman, author of “Such a Pretty Face--Being Fat in America,” says that not only is the term derogatory, but it is assumed that a person’s fat is produced as a sublimation of other psychological problems, and that any problems a person has with being fat in our society are individually based and self-produced.

Just as with racism of old, even those enlightened enough to despise discrimination often still agree that the state of fatness (previously, blackness) is indeed an intrinsically inferior one. In the same way many antebellum abolitionists saw the Negro slave as their brother, but their lesser brother, so do current closet “sizists” consider their fat brothers, and especially their fat sisters, as somewhat weak-willed and out of control, at best.

Prominently displayed ads for skin lighteners and hair straighteners used to beckon to blacks in much the same way as diet ads tell fat people to correct what makes them different and gain a chance at being accepted for what they are not. The moderately fat are encouraged to pass for normal just as light-skinned blacks were sometimes encouraged to pass for white, rather than associate themselves with those in their group who are too far from the norm to be included at all.

When objectively measured, weight and race discrimination size up about the same. They both leave a bitter taste in my mouth.