discussions about racialized and gendered fat/slender bodies circulated largely in elite white spaces, and among white persons, prior to the mid-twentieth century. They served as a mechanism for white men and women to denigrate the racially Othered body. They also worked to police and applaud the ‘correct’ behaviors of white people, especially white women. This is the crux of the issue. The image of fat black women as ‘savage’ and ‘barbarous’ in art, philosophy, and science, and as ‘diseased’ in medicine has been used to both degrade black women and discipline white women. For decades, white feminist scholars and historians focused largely on the impact of the ‘thin ideal’ on middle- and upper-class white women. They claimed that the thin ideal was oppressive, but also suggested that they did not know how it developed. This book endeavors to address that question, adding a much-needed intersectional component to the analysis of the development of fat phobia and the slender aesthetic. Indeed, the racial discourse of fatness as ‘course,’ ‘immoral,’ ‘black,’ and ‘Other’ not only denigrated black women, it also served as the driver for the creation of slenderness as the proper form of embodiment for elite white Christian women. In other words, the fear of the black body was integral to the creation of the slender aesthetic among fashionable white Americans.
Sabrina Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, pg. 211-212
