In Chicago last weekend, a conference on socialism became the setting for a pointed philosophical argument: that the modern diet industry and medical weight standards are not neutral tools of health, but instruments of racial discipline embedded in the architecture of state power. Author Da'Shaun L. Harrison, speaking before more than two hundred attendees, traced a line from BMI categories to what he called the foundational policing of Black bodies — a claim that invites us to ask how deeply ideology shapes the institutions we trust with our wellbeing. The debate that followed reflects a recu