“I just love your confidence” is the line Shamika Sanders keeps hearing, and she has stopped taking it as a compliment. Sanders, a writer who describes herself in the piece as a Black plus-size woman, set out the register of praise that lands on women built like her: you have such a pretty face, I wish I had your confidence, you’re so brave.
Her argument is that none of it is addressed to a person. It is addressed to an exception. A 2024 study in Emerging Media by Nicolas Kervyn, Hilary Bergsieker and Susan Fiske names “I wish I had your confidence” and “You’re so brave” as microinvalidations, which is the academic word for a compliment that takes something away.
She is not the first to say it. Gabourey Sidibe posted on Threads, “me on my way to have my confidence studied.” Lizzo asked, “Is my brand being fat?” Danielle Brooks told NPR in September that “there’s 67% of women that wear a size 14 or more, and that does not reflect what we see on television.” Sesali Bowen made the case in Cosmopolitan in 2021.
The hardest line in the piece belongs to Sabrina Strings. “Weight loss is not reparations,” Strings said. Sanders’s own point is smaller and harder to argue with: she would like to get dressed in the morning without it counting as an act of courage.
