The racial origins of fat stigma – By Taylor Mooney (CBS News) / Aug 20 2020
Perched on a couch, Sabrina Strings relates the story of a conversation she had with her grandmother.
“My grandmother is a Black woman from the South, grew up during Jim Crow, and for her, being able to eat regularly was a triumph. One time she told me that she got a basket of oranges one Christmas and it was one of her happiest memories,” she recalled. “But when she decided to move to California in 1960, as a lot of Black people were doing at the time … she encountered for the first time a lot of White women in her integrated community who were on diets, and she was like, ‘What? Why are White women on diets?’ This was something that she puzzled over for years, because no one could really provide her a satisfactory answer.”
It was her grandmother’s stories like this one that inspired Strings, who is now a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue research on the history of fat-phobia — the fear of fatness due to the stigmatization of weight — in the Western world.
Fatness wasn’t always culturally undesirable in the Western world. For centuries, being heavier was actually considered an attractive characteristic. Artists like Peter Paul Rubens and Titian famously portrayed heavier female bodies as the pinnacle of beauty in their works.
Continue to article: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fat-shaming-race-weight-body-image-cbsn-originals/
