The events of the last few months — including the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks (all unarmed Black people) and the public demonstrations and outcries in response — have highlighted something that I have always believed. We need to be vocally and actively anti-racist to dismantle white supremacy and eliminate racism because Black Lives Matter. We need to value, protect, and celebrate people in all bodies, not just thin, middle- and upper-class, white ones.
In her 2019 book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Black author and professor Sabrina Strings delves into the dark history of fatphobia, which is wholly rooted in racism. This historical lens is enlightening, urging the reader to fight back against both fatphobia and racism. Many parts of the book are painful to read, and I imagine those parts are especially distressing for those who identify as fat Black women. Despite this discomfort, I believe that this book is an essential read. (That said, if racist remarks, fatphobic language, or numbers associated with weight or BMI are triggering for you, read it with a support person or wait to read it until you no longer feel like you would be triggered.) Strings follows the history of Western views of race, body size, and beauty through art, philosophy, religion, newspapers, magazines, and medical literature.
Before the Thin Ideal
The 1500s – Europe
Strings explains that during the High Renaissance, the European aesthetic ideal for white women was plump, curvy, fleshy (but not too fat), and “proportional.” European artists and philosophers also considered voluptuous and “proportional” Black women’s bodies beautiful, but many of them found Black women’s facial features unattractive.
Body Size as an Indicator of Insipidity
The 1600s – Europe
In the 1600s, northern and western Europeans began to interact more with people from Africa due to the rise of the slave trade. Many artists and philosophers no longer considered Black women attractive or even fully human. Instead, they deemed Black people to be small and hypersexual. Whiteness became a prerequisite for beauty, and so now they described only curvy, full-bodied white women as beautiful. As time continued, European philosophers began to associate fatness with stupidity and leanness with reason; thus, European men adopted a thin ideal for themselves.
Body Size as An Indicator of Race, Morality, and National Identity
The 1700s and 1800s
Europe
In the 1700s, race science blossomed, and race scientists created racial classifications and hierarchies with white northern and western Europeans at the top. They distinguished races by skin color, body size and shape, and intellect. In contrast to previous beliefs that Black Africans were “small,” Black Africans were now viewed as tall, fat, stupid, lazy, gluttonous, barbarous, and inferior.
In contrast, white men continued to view themselves as intellectual, lean, and superior, as they had in the 1600s. Likewise, in the late 1700s, the beauty of the plump feminine white body was reconsidered. “Racial theories had linked fatness to blackness in European imagination. And they had also linked thinness to whiteness” (98).
In addition to race science, spirituality also shaped the ideas about body size and race in the 1700s. There was a religious push-back against decadence, including the consumption of sugar, alcohol, and other foods and beverages, as well as sexual pleasure. Protestant Christians viewed fatness as a sign of gluttony, indulgence, and intemperance, and, thus, they believed people in larger bodies were immoral. Though curvy bodies had recently been the aesthetic ideal, now fatness was considered unattractive. White European women began to restrict their food to demonstrate their religious temperance and attractiveness.
United States
During the 1800s, American Anglo-Saxon women adopted the ideals of 18th century England – temperance in eating and drinking. They adhered to strict diets to indicate their religious enlightenment and racial superiority over the Irish immigrants, Black people in America, and other racial Others. American white women manipulated and starved their bodies to be even thinner than women from northern and western Europe. They believed that their thinness now indicated their racial superiority, morality, health, and beauty.
Americans with “Nordic/Aryan” ancestry believed that they created the slender ideal body by combining superior white races. Between the 1880s and 1920s, there was a new wave of immigration to the United States from southern and eastern Europe. Eugenics became popular, and white supremacists argued that the superior races must not breed with the inferior races, such as people from Italy and the Russian empire.
Body Size as an Indicator of Health
The late 1800s to late 1900s – United States
Although body size, particularly women’s body sizes, had been monitored and judged for centuries, in 1891, public weighing scales became available. Now people’s exact weights could be measured. In 1913, scales became widely available for private use in homes. People became very interested in their body weights and began to discuss them with their doctors.
John Harvey Kellogg, a white, Christian (Seventh-day Adventist) doctor and eugenicist, linked race, femininity, weight, and health. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, he sought to reform white women’s health. Kellogg believed that fashion had led white women to become too thin and that to preserve what he considered the superior Anglo-Saxon race, they needed to use a vegetarian diet, hydropathy, and exercise as medicine. Thus, he was a proponent of eating more “right” food and drinking more water to gain weight and become healthier.
Although doctors like Kellogg had been concerned that white American women were becoming too emaciated due to the thin beauty ideal, in the late 1910s, doctors adopted anti-fat attitudes. This shift in attitudes was prompted not by science but by the rise of medical insurance companies in America. Health insurance actuaries began creating tables to define standards of weight and health based on the average weight-to-height ratios of middle-class white men. Based on these tables, insurance companies could refuse to cover heavier patients. Medical literature began to link fatness, disease, and racial deficiency without any scientific evidence.
Ancel Keys, a biologist and physiologist, exacerbated the notion of ideal body weights. He took the Quetelet Index, which Adolph Quetelet designed to assess body weights across a population in 1832; renamed it the body mass index; and decided to use it as a tool to measure obesity in individuals beginning in 1972. The category limits were arbitrary. In fact, in 1985, a BMI of greater than or equal to 27.8 for men or 27.3 for women was considered “overweight,” but in 1998, the NIH adopted 25 as the new cutoff. People went to bed “normal weight” and woke up “overweight” without gaining a pound.
Further, there is racial bias in the BMI system. Black people naturally tend to have higher BMIs than white people without a higher mortality rate at higher BMIs. Therefore, BMI cannot explain health disparities between races. However, there are health disparities between Black and white people. Scientific evidence shows that these disparities are primarily due to social and environmental factors. Yet, the medical system blames personal behaviors, specifically poor diet and lack of exercise.
Strings powerfully concludes:
The racial discourse of fatness as “coarse,” “immoral,” “black,” and “Other” not only denigrated black women, it also served as the driver for the creation of slenderness as the proper form of embodiment for elite white Christian women. In other words, the fear of the black body was integral to the creation of the slender aesthetic among fashionable white Americans (212).
Body Size Today
2020 – United States
If you feel compelled to restrict your food or to exercise excessively to achieve the thin ideal, recognize that you are being influenced by an ideology rooted in racism. Be unapologetically fat positive in your efforts to be anti-racist. Until then, we will never achieve true body liberation.
I highly recommend that you buy and read Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, by Sabrina Strings, to aid you in your social justice activism and body liberation journey.
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