FEARING THE BLACK BODY: THE RACIAL ORIGINS OF FAT PHOBIA - SABRIA STRINGS

It’s wonderful and a little strange when you find a book on exactly the topic you were hoping for. After reading those 2 books about beauty and ugliness as well as excerpts and online stuff about aesthetics and the human body as well as pondering and considering the topics for my entire adult life. It’s a subject that I assume fascinates basically everyone since we all have bodies and desire to be considered beautiful. However, every time I’m reading about this stuff I get annoyed that they’re avoiding race. Well, this book fixes that. I know from Nell Painter that even in its infancy, race theory was obsessed with beauty and ranking beauty and finding the “most beautiful” people. In fact, it was this quest, as helmed by Blumenbach and Meiners that left us with the silly designation of “Caucasian” for YT people. Strings does a great job showing how just as Europeans began designing and implementing a global system to enslave and annihilate they need to construct hierarchies that explain, justify and even demand the “vast machine” (to quote THE SLAVE SHIP) being put in place. It’s illuminating how quickly the Europeans connect sloth and fatness and blackness. Likewise, true Europeans were tall and pale and thin and, thanks to a dash of Protestantism, hardworking. The book gets right at it and points out how this biopower, this idea that there is an ideal body that can be achieved, that not having it is a sign of laziness and that the best “ideal bodies” are white, cuts two ways. To quote the book, it’s used to “Degrade black women and discipline white women.” (emphasis Strings’). I really enjoyed sections at the end regarding BMI and how this and other metrics were designed for/by YT bodies, and for insurance companies who are seeking to impose a very specific worldview w/r/t medicine (I see this pernicious attitude corrode actual care constantly non-stop w/r/t mental health) and how Black women do have higher BMIs on average but not the same mortality correlation. I would have liked to see this idea explored further, though that might be more a doctor thing than a social science thing. Likewise, the book focuses heavily on the ways that this regime is focused on YT women (men, of course, are not at all interested in having their bodies criticized in this way nor to have them become the site of a political project) but features fewer instances of ways that this narrative was understood and subverted by Black people. The book features a long section about the founding of Cosmo and the ways that magazine sought to champion a specific YT body; Sir Mix-a-Lot famous said, “So Cosmo said you’re fat / Well I ain’t down with that.” I would have liked more history and anthropology around how different Black aesthetic ideals were developed and propagated in the same milieu that gave us the body image, if only to offer another perspective on the main story Strings is trying to tell. Irregardless, very interesting and had me thinking. Due to the cover illustration and title, it was somewhat hard to read on the train. 1886 beautiful pale YT women.