In her 2019 book, “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia,” Sabrina Strings contends with our collective fixation on thinness, tracing its development to race — specifically to anti-Blackness.
“Fatphobia is the fear and aversion to fat people, and this really developed in the Western world as a result of the creation of race science. Slavery…really started to take off in the late 14th, early 15th century,” she said in a previous interview with the Union-Tribune. “They decided to develop race science because they were like, ‘We think there are natural slaves. There are people who are born to labor for others, and we believe that Africans are those natural slaves, but let us start thinking about all of the qualities and characteristics that we can find amongst African people that prove that.’” The belief that Black people were incapable of self-control with regard to sex and food was among the arguments in justifying their enslavement.
Strings, professor and North Hall chair of Black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of the forthcoming book, “The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance,” will talk about “Fearing the Black Body” from 1 to 3 p.m. today at the Shiley Special Events Suite at the Central Library in downtown San Diego as part of the annual Black History Month author talk (registration is free). She took some time to discuss her work in tracing this history, the misconceptions of body mass index, and the work of fat acceptance and fat liberation movements to focus on more tangible ways to improve people’s health. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: In the beginning of “Fearing the Black Body,” you go into detail about how voluptuous bodies, especially among women, were praised and lifted up in art as ideal. And, while notable artists of the 15th and 16th centuries included Black women in their depictions, albeit in roles of service, Black women’s bodies were on par with White women’s in of possessing the acceptable standard of beauty. There is even an example in Peter Paul Rubens’ “The Four Rivers of Paradise,” in which he paints a Black woman as the social and physical equal to the White women in the piece. So, what happened? How did we go from an affinity for voluptuous, robust female bodies to this insistence on thinness?
A: Enter slavery. Don’t get me wrong, the slave trade had been going on since about the 14th century, beginning with the Portuguese; however, over time, it wasn’t so easy to determine who should be slave and who should be free. Of course, they were going to Africa, they were getting slaves, they were taking them into the colonies, and White men were having their way with various women. As a result, in the colonies, there was a lot of chaos; they were trying to constantly reconstitute what was the hierarchy, who was slave and free, because skin color was no longer reliable. There were all of these people who would ultimately be considered mulatto, all of these really light-skinned Blacks. ‘How are we sure who should be slave and who should be free?’ That was where race science enters. The earliest racial scientific treatise, which was written in the 17th century, had two aims: first, it was to intervene into this question, ‘Who are the natural slaves?’ There were a lot of debates going on in Western Europe in which they were like, ‘We think that some people are natural slaves,’ to justify the enterprise of slavery, which was extremely lucrative.
The second issue is, the entirety of the first ever, racial scientific treatise only described women’s bodies, full stop. So, we can understand the deep connection between anti-Blackness, misogyny, and fatphobia because (as I show in my new book, “The End of Love”) when White guys decided to start thinking about, ‘Who are the kinds of women we want? Who are our ideal?,’ this actually began in the 12th century, not in the 17th century. They started thinking about their ideal White woman in the 12th century. They were like, ‘Our ideal White woman has milky white skin, she’s thin, she has blonde hair.’ By the time of the first racial scientific treatise in the 17th century that was entirely about women, we can now understand why they didn’t spend any time talking about European women. They were listing how women looked in all of these other places—like China, Ethiopia, Egypt—because the whole idea was to sexualize women and to create a hierarchy. So, women who were dark-skinned, women whose hair was not blonde and straight, women who were fat? They fell outside of what they deemed to be the most elite, most beautiful women.
Q: Can you talk about Saartje “Sara” Baartman and her place within the construction of Black femininity, African beauty, and this European rejection of fat female bodies? First, who was she? And, how did she wind up with these projections that led to a representation of Black female bodies?
A: Even though the treatise in the 17th century created this hierarchy that discussed all of the different beautiful women around the world, European women are considered the most beautiful because they’re relying on this 12th century conception. So, even though that was going on, the negative representations of Black women actually intensify over time because, in the 17th century, while there were still ideas that Black women were inferior to White women, it became more and more codified, more and more vitriolic, by the 18th century. That’s when we started talking about the relationship between Black women and fatness because both of those were supposed to be degraded and outside of what is proper for a White man to desire.
Some people believe Sara Baartman was born during the tail end of the 18th century, only a few decades after this type of race science was being codified. She was born free, but she was later enslaved by a colored man. He would take her to dance for European soldiers at the cape in South Africa as their final sendoff. They were hospitalized because they had been wounded, and she was known as “an infirmary delight.” So, because she was so popular amongst the European men there, she was actually purchased by a White man and then taken to be placed on display in Paris and London as a so-called “perfect specimen of Africanity” because of her body shape and size. What they’re doing is simultaneously sexualizing her because she was a striptease artist (that’s what she was there to do that at these infirmaries), but also demeaning her in saying, ‘This is what it means to be hot for an African. These women are fat and we think that fatness is a problem. Now, we’ll sexualize her, but we’ll recognize it as inferior to our White women.’
Q: Let’s talk about where BMI fits into this. Where did it come from and what is its utility today?
A: So, BMI originated as a way to assess the distribution of weight across the population, and not for any real reason attached to assessing health outcomes. It was a tool of a Belgian statistician named Adolphe Quetelet. He was like, ‘Now we have a way to monitor weight across the population.’ I haven’t researched all of the reasons why he created it, but here’s something that I’m arriving at intuitively: if it’s the 18th and 19th century, it’s the Industrial Revolution, and it might be in the minds of those men in Western Europe at the time that ‘we want to make sure that people have sufficient food to eat and are healthy and vigorous to defend the nation.’ This is something that would have been said in the 20th century in the United States. I’m thinking, perhaps, that’s why he invented the tool; but when BMI made its way to the United States, it made its way through eugenics.
In the U.S., they had been relying on these insurance industry tables that tell people what they must weigh to be healthy, based on these studies of White, middle-class men who had jobs. They began using these tables in the 19th century, but after decades of using these tables, by the early to mid-20th century, doctors were like, ‘We are sick of having to rely on insurance companies. We need our own measure.’ So, you have this eugenicist by the name of Charles Davenport who uses something called the index of build. He was just talking about the Quetelet Index, but he just gave it a new name, index of build. And, he started performing these completely unreliable studies. In the 1970s, that’s when Ancel Keys enters the picture because he had already been doing studies, again, on how to maintain robustness and vigor. They were already doing studies with the Second World War on how little human beings needed to function as soldiers, so in the ‘70s, Keys was like, ‘No, let’s focus on people getting too much food. Let’s use this index of build and we’re going to rename it body mass index.’ Effectively, a tool that was never supposed to assess the relationship between weight and health, entered the medical field through a eugenicist and was picked up by Ancel Keys, and Ancel Keys was the one who got it on the world stage as a way of assessing the relationship between weight and health.
Q: With this long history of building an aversion to fatness, when do we see fat activism coming into play, and what is it?
A: The first evidence that I have of fat activism comes from the 1960s. In the 1960s, there were groups working on fat liberation. So, these groups ultimately transmuted to what is known as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). They began with something known as the Fat Underground and one of the organizers, a White man by the name of Bill Fabrey, said he helped to found this organization specifically because his wife was a fat woman and was tired of her experiencing discrimination.
Now, there was also at least one Black woman who made a speech, I want to say it was at the March on Washington. It’s been so hard for me to track down, but there is one article that I saw about this and she says, “I get disrespected for being Black, a woman, being fat,” she just went off, but her name has been largely lost to history. Even in the ‘60s, there were fat, Black women who were like, ‘No, we demand respect.’
One more thing I’ll say about this is there was an incredible, incredible book called “Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race” [by Maxine Leeds] and it’s about the dawn of beauty pageants within Black communities. One of the things that they were rejecting, as you might imagine, is the idea that Black women could not be fat. They were like, ‘Uh uh, our women can have curly, nappy hair; they can have wide noses and big lips; and they can have robust, full, voluptuous figures because we think that’s beautiful.’ Again, all of that’s happening in the Civil Rights era.
Q: What are some of the distinctions between fat acceptance, fat liberation, and body positivity?
A: I think of body positivity as something that people were engaging on the road to fat liberation, which I think is the ultimate goal. Body positivity simply says that instead of hating your body, why don’t you love it? The problem with that is that it assumes that your thinking is wrong, as opposed to living in an oppressive culture. Body positivity really took off in the early aughts, but by the mid-aughts there were plenty of people (myself included) who were like, ‘How come the representatives of body positivity are White women who are a size four?’ That’s not really helpful. There were a lot of critiques of body positivity, for that reason. It felt like a colonial project, still. I feel like what the fat acceptance movement is saying is that, ‘I get to live in a larger body, you don’t get to tell me anything else. You don’t get to tell me how I look, you don’t get to tell me about my health, you don’t know anything about what is my source of authority. You don’t tell me to follow Cosmo or these ridiculous, fatphobic doctors.’ That, to me, is fat acceptance.
Fat liberation, I think, is tied to our collective liberation. It’s more than just saying, ‘I have a right to exist,’ it’s saying, ‘No one has a right to oppress. No one has a right to oppress me based on my size, no matter what my size is.’
Q: Are you able to talk about some of the ways that the fat liberation movement addresses issues of justice?
A: I think that fat liberation is inherently invested in the end of racism, sexism, and all of the other “isms” because whenever you put the word “liberation,” it’s not just about, ‘I want fairness and equality.’ Liberation says, ‘No, we want to do away with all of the “isms” that are creating pain and suffering for everyone. We all want to get free.’ They foreground fatness the way that we foreground Blackness because we know that, in our society, these are amongst the people who are most marginalized, most hated, most ridiculed, so no one gets to be liberated unless those of us who are treated as the least among us, are liberated.
Q: Socially and culturally, how do we get to a place where we don’t simply “return” to an appreciation of a voluptuous form, but also remain informed about the reality of physical health and morality as it relates to a person’s size?
A: This is one of the most challenging things because, frequently, when I do presentations, people want me to come up with some other oppressive measure—‘OK, if it’s not BMI, what else can we use?’ I’m like, ‘We shouldn’t use anything.’ That always throws people for a loop. Like, if we’re interested in everyone getting a sense of dignity and respect and treated accordingly, then why would we have a metric that says you’re too fat? That’s useless.
I’ve always articulated that I’m an ally to the movement. I do the work that I can do, but part of what I do is I try to lift up other fat activists, especially those who are fat. I lift up people like Mikey (Marquisele) Mercedes and Tigress Osborn who are doing the work, and Da’Shaun Harrison. So, that’s part of what we need to do.
We also need to be willing to critique and fight and even offend the people who continue to reproduce traditional obesity science that harms everyone, not just fat people. It harms us all by making us all feel trapped, like we all have to be a certain weight to be healthy. So, we have to be willing to confront these people.
The other project that I’m invested in right now is finding out more about things that are actually beneficial to health. At Black studies at UC Santa Barbara, we are starting a Black Wellness Initiative that includes yoga, that includes a critical medical studies center, where we look into the actual things that will help people feel better, like rest. Rest helps us to feel better. Do we have clean drinking water? What’s going on in Flint, Michigan? Do we even have access to fruits and vegetables? We’re looking at the things that we know, for sure, help people and don’t stigmatize them.
Systems won’t change without us changing them, so instead of putting all of our energy into trying to figure out, ‘OK, is this the right diet? Should I follow the “Mean Girls” Kalteen bar diet?,’ we need to put our collective energy into challenging these systems of oppression. I’ve articulated some of the ways already: we don’t let doctors go around telling us about BMI, and we need to fight to make sure that there are grocery stores, and we need to fight to make sure that there’s clean water. So, there’s activism and organizing that’s necessary.
