Fearing the Black Body

Poor black women in the United States are often labeled "diseased" and treated as a drain on public health care in discussions of an obesity epidemic. Sabrina Strings traces that stigma back more than two hundred years and asks where the fear of fat black women began.

This is a work of non-fiction history and cultural analysis. Strings follows the subject from the Renaissance to the present day. Her evidence comes from paintings and other art, press coverage in newspapers and magazines, and scientific and medical publications, some of them from periods when fat bodies drew praise.

Her central claim is that fat phobia aimed at black women did not start with medical findings. It grew out of an Enlightenment-era belief that fatness signaled "savagery" and racial inferiority. On this account, the modern ideal of slenderness is racialized and racist at its root. The medical campaign against obesity only began in the early twentieth century, after those racial attitudes were already fixed in the culture.

The book makes an argument rather than a health case: that fat phobia uses the body to back up prejudice around race, class and gender. It suits readers interested in the history of race, body image, medicine and public health, and it reads as a scholarly, evidence-led study.