Fearing the Black Body

I track instances on Instagram of dress-coding—when girls and women are disciplined for wearing clothes considered “too” revealing. This occurs in schools with rules, for example, forbidding tank tops or crop tops, and on airplanes (for some reason, the sight of a woman wearing comfortable clothes is a trigger for many travelers). Black women are singled out as sexualized most often.

To find out why, I turned to this eye-opening book. Strings demonstrates a connection between racism and anxiety over fatness. She traces how Black and white women’s bodies came to be seen as essentially different from each other. Fatness… show more.

Fearing the Black Body is a startling expose of how historical racism has shaped today’s fatphobia.

Historian Sabrina Strings offers a rousing account of how fat bodies have been valued differently over time, and why. During the Renaissance, women with plump physiques were the epitome of beauty, but fatness lost its luster when it was linked to Blackness during the 1700s with the expansion of slavery.

The cultural arbiters of the time—popular art, women’s magazines, and the medical establishment—promoted thinness as the new beauty standard for white women, a vehicle for moral superiority over Black women who were stereotyped as… show more.

Dr. Sabrina Strings painstakingly tracks the historical evolution of the relatively recent prizing of the white, thin body, rightfully identifying the origins of the diet culture as a form of literal and figurative distancing from Black bodies.

This book was a wakeup call that made my anti-diet work even more urgent because it’s more than simply a health intervention, it’s a form of social justice and body liberation work.

Strings traces what is nearly the entire history of fatphobia as it pertains to the current state of affairs in the western world.

At the heart of fatphobia is racism and anti-Blackness, which is why people in engage in it so ferociously (as Strings shows you in her book).

This book completely changed the way I thought about diet culture and anti-fat bias. It helped me to better understand the racial origins of fatphobia and how our modern diet culture began hundreds of years ago. It is a must-read to understand how racism and colonialism impact all of our thoughts and beliefs about bodies to this day.

We’re so used to thinking about weight and bodies in certain ways that it can be disconcerting to realize we don’t truly understand why we think the way we do. Sabrina Strings’ book opened my eyes to the true origins of weight stigma in the U.S., and those origins shocked me. Our current concept of the ideal woman’s body—thin, white, able—developed and became entrenched as a way to differentiate white people from “others,” whether they were Black, Jewish, Irish, Italian, or in some other visible way not-white. That’s pretty much all there is to it. And once you understand that,… show more.