Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

from easy shopping to better job and romantic opportunities, society promotes and rewards thinness and punishes fat.

Fatness serves as a potent class and race signifier. And so, when we wring our hands or jeer at fatness, we are often tacitly and unwittingly expressing classism and racism.

Naomi Wolfe, journalist and author of The Beauty Myth, writes, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

We are saddled with body shame because it is an age-old system whose roots and pockets are deep. Body shame flourishes in our world because profit and power depend on it.