Race & Medicine

Obesity

Race and Obesity

in development

 

Books

There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina String…

There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.

In Fearing the Black Body, Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals―where fat bodies were once praised―showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority.

The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.

GUEST: Sabrina Strings, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her new book is called Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia BACKGROUND: Obesity we are told, is the scourge of health, linked to a large number of debilitating diseases including diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer and more. For women especially obesity comes with societal judgments rooted in notions of impossible skinniness. A new book examines how our attitudes toward obesity and fatness have been shaped by historical biases rooted in race and racism. In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, author Sabrina Strings writes, "racial discourse was deployed by elite Europeans and white Americans to create social distinctions between themselves and so-called greedy and fat racial Others."