Anti-Blackness is the forgotten rationale that underlies both thin privilege and fat stigma.
Why do Americans cherish thinness while condemning heaviness? According to sociologist Sabrina Strings, contemporary fatphobia has roots in anti-Blackness. Here, she explains how corpulence became associated with both Black women’s bodies and “savagery,” which led to white society’s embrace of slenderness
Left: Histoire Naturelle, Générale Et Particulière, Avec La Description Du Cabinet Du Roi by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1761 edition. Right: An albino woman of African descent, engraving by Schmitz after de Sève. Plate from Buffon's Histoire Naturelle In the view of Buffon and other so-called “race scientists,” Africans were a sensuous people. This, it was argued, proved they were intermediaries between apes and Europeans. Unlike Europeans, Africans, they claimed, lacked the intellectual or moral capacity for rational self-discipline. Rather, they were given to indulging in the basest vices of the flesh: food and fornication.
Le Romain was a philosopher in his own right. And, having completed a short stint in the Caribbean, he was also a self-anointed expert on les nègres in the colonies. Le Romain would maintain the stereotype of sensuousness among Africans depicted by Buffon. But he would replace the praise of their “plump” physiques with vitriol for their greediness.
As a result, writers in New York and New England, many of them women, set out to encourage white women to slim down, lest they find their names uttered in the same breath as the by now famously fat women of African descent.
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