I’m paraphrasing, but thank you to a Patron for asking this question.

The answer is yes. Welcome to the rabbit hole.

In an NPR interview last year (here is the transcript), Sabrina Strings shared the following:

So it turns out that the growth of the slave trade, especially by the 18th century, led to new articulations…of what types of appearance we could expect of people by different races and also what types of behaviors, such that by the middle of the 18th century, a lot of French philosophers in particular were arguing that…you know what? When we’re in the colonies, we’re noticing that Africans are sensuous. They love sex, and they love food. And for this reason, they tend to be too fat. Europeans, we have rational self-control. This is what makes us the premier race of the world. So in terms of body size, we should be slender, and we should watch what we eat.

Some may already be familiar with Sabrina because she is the author of “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” (support local by getting your copy via Bookshop).

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 past year has given us a number of pieces looking at, not just the relationship between fatphobia and racism, but how it relates to some of the most current and pressing issues of our times.

Teen Vogue ran a piece last summer, Ask a Fat Girl: Fatphobia and Racism, as the issue relates to police violence.

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Officer Wilson, who stood 6’4” and weighed 210 pounds, testified that grabbing 6’4” 292-pound Brown, “felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. … [T]hat’s just how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm.” Wilson used his categorization of Brown’s physical size, and perception of him as hulk-like, as a rationalization for his use of lethal force.

Even in my own dance world, the dots are being connected, and Sabrina’s work referenced, in this Dance Magazine Op-Ed Let’s Stop Talking About Racism and Fat Phobia as Separate Issues:

In her 2019 book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Dr. Sabrina Strings offers an analysis that suddenly brought this intersection into focus for me: “The fear of the imagined ‘fat black woman’ was created by racial and religious ideologies that have been used to both degrade black women and discipline white women.” Her book asserts that race is central to a clear understanding of American culture’s obsession with thinness. She calls race “a double agent. It entails the synchronized repression of ‘savage’ blackness and the generation of disciplined whiteness.”

A 2019 piece from Yes! connects the dots to the for-profit “health” industrial complex, The Fear of Fat: Our Last Acceptable Bias:

After World War II, the fear of fat coalesced into a phobia, Stearns says. By the 1950s, psychologists began to argue that being fat was symptomatic of “maladjustment and insecurity,” and that fat people were “miserable, self-indulgent and lacking in self-control,” according to Stearns’ Fat History. “Girls get fat because they’re emotionally disturbed,” was one example of post-WWII pseudoscience quoted in Stearns’ book.

Forbes last year published a wonderful piece, The Unplug Collective Explores How Diet Culture Is Rooted In Anti-Blackness:

The Unplug Collective is a platform designed to highlight the unique experiences of Black and gender-expansive people, with a particular focus on how things like weight discrimination and racial discrimination coalesce to shape one’s experiences. The platform centers marginalized voices while using social media as a “digital healing circle.” The founder of the Unplug Collective, Amanda Taylor, sat down with Forbes to discuss medical discrimination, how diet culture is rooted in white supremacy and anti-blackness and how the fashion industry can be more size inclusive.

So…yeah…

I ordered the book, and wondering if anyone else who might also order be interested in a Book Club discussion about it (in pieces or the whole thing).

And for those who may not have known the relationship and history of fatphobia regarding racism, I hope the sources above helped. If you already knew, I’m curious at what point you had connected the dots.

And generally wondering what your thoughts and reactions are to this. Looking forward to seeing your comments.