Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

...the current anti-fat bias in the United States and in much of the West was not born in the medical field. Racial scientific literature since at least the eighteenth century has claimed that fatness was ‘savage’ and ‘black.

The legacy of Protestant moralism and race science as it related to fat and thin persons loomed large. Indeed, many early to mid-twentieth-century physicians relied on moral and racial logics to rail against persons deemed too fat or too thin. But over time, a growing number did so specifically, and exclusively, to condemn fatness.

The author spells this out for the reader: “Stoutness, corpulence, and surplusage of flesh” are never desirable “except among African savages.”13 This raises several questions. First, what led some well-to-do Americans to believe that slenderness, especially among women, was both aesthetically preferable and a sign of national identity? How did fatness become a sign of immorality? How did fatness become linked to “Africanity” or blackness?

Obesity Kills More Americans Than We Thought.’ This headline, from the health news section of CNN’s website on August 15, 2013, commanded readers’ attention. Accompanying the article is an image of a fat black woman. She is wearing a sleeveless top, revealing the dark, fleshy skin of her arms. A tape measure around her waist is being held together by a pair of delicate white hands reaching out from a white lab coat.

...racial discourse was deployed by elite Europeans and white Americans to create social distinctions between themselves and fat racial Others. Black people, as well as so-called degraded or hybrid whites (e.g., Celtic Irish, southern Italians, Russians), were primary targets of these arguments.

Together, the two traveled to the south of France, where Bernier earned a medical degree in just three months. The degree, however, carried the somewhat suspect stipulation that his fast-tracked medical knowledge was not to be exercised in the French commonwealth.

To pay down his mountain of debt, Hendrik decided to display Sara to British soldiers. These soldiers came with the latest infantry in 1806. Their heads were aswirl with tales of the insatiable and carnal nature of black women at the Cape, stories that had been making their way to England for decades.91 So it was that Sara began her career as an exhibition for European titillation around 1806 while still in Cape Town. Her first shows took place at the local Naval Hospital, where a large contingent of military men found themselves immediately upon their arrival. An infirmary delight, Sara would reveal her naked body to the soldiers for their last gasp of sexual entertainment before welcoming sweet death. She was, according to scholars Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, “an early nineteenth century exotic dancer,” and for a fee, the dying men may have been able to touch her or even have sex with her.

On the contrary, Bernier wrote, he had encountered black women who were among the most beautiful in the world: What I have observed as regards the beauty of women is no less differentiated. Certainly, there are lovely ones, ugly ones to be found everywhere. I have seen some real beauties in Egypt, which put me in mind of the fair and famed Cleopatra. Among the Blacks of Africa I have also seen some very beautiful women who did not have thick lips and snub noses. I have encountered seven or eight in various places who were of such an astonishing beauty that they put in the shade the Venus of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome—with aquiline nose, small mouth, coral lips, ivory teeth, large bright eyes, gentle features and a bosom and everything else of utter perfection. At Moka, I saw several of them completely naked, waiting to be sold, and I can tell you, there could be nothing lovelier in the world to see.

Within the aesthetic system of the High Renaissance, pointed noses and fine lips were typically associated with a refined facial beauty. At the same time, well-formed, proportionate figures represented the height of bodily beauty. This aesthetic pairing led to the degradation of the African face and the exaltation of the African body.

In this book, I examine the history and legacy of the preference for slimness and aversion to fatness, with attention to their racial, gender, class, and medical contours. This book enters a decades-long conversation about the preference for slenderness and the phobia about fatness in the United States.

English ladies weren’t only painting themselves white to enhance their beauty. They were also painting themselves black to reveal, through contrast, the alleged hideousness of black women. In 1605, shortly after the death of Elizabeth, an infamous court masque known as The Masque of Blackness was presented by Jacob I’s queen, Anne of Denmark, and her court. The Masque of Blackness, by Ben Jonson, presented the tale of King Niger and his twelve daughters. While the king tries to convince his daughters that they are beautiful, they despise their black skin. An oracle (Aethiope) tells the girls that if they wish to remove their blackness, they should go to the land with the name ending in -TANIA (that is, Britannia), also known as “Albion the Fair.