FEARING THE BLACK BODY
Fearing the Black Body
The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Sabrina Strings
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
© 2019 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Strings, Sabrina, author.
Title: Fearing the black body : the racial origins of fat phobia / Sabrina Strings.
Description: New York, NY : New York University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018026988| ISBN 9781479819805 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479886753 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminine beauty (Aesthetics)—Social aspects—United States. | African American women—Social conditions. | Overweight women—United States—Social conditions. | Obesity—Social aspects—United States.
Classification: LCC HQ1220.U5 S77 2019 | DDC 305.48/896073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026988
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Also available as an ebook
For my grandmother Alma Jean Green
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Original Epidemic
PART I: THE BEAUTY OF THE ROBUST
2. Plump Women and Thin, Fine Men
PART II: RACE, WEIGHT, GOD, AND COUNTRY
3. The Rise of the Big Black Woman
4. Birth of the Ascetic Aesthetic
5. American Beauty: The Reign of the Slender Aesthetic
6. Thinness as American Exceptionalism
7. Good Health to Uplift the Race
Epilogue: The Obesity Epidemic
Introduction
The Original Epidemic
“Actually Starving! A Prominent New York Man Dies in Sight of Food. Why Could This Be So!” This dramatic if slightly awkward headline appeared in the February 16, 1894, edition of the New York Times, atop an article that began, “Thousands of men and women in New York are starving, although they have plenty of money to buy the best food!”
The unnamed author of the article went on to quote what was described as a “prominent physician” on the state of the American diet and physique. According to the doctor, the situation was dire. “I say … that they are starving to death—slowly, but surely,” he stated, adding that although many of those afflicted were members of the middle and upper classes, they nevertheless looked “emaciated [and] appear to be consumptives.”1
This article underscored the deep anxiety felt by many in the nineteenth-century regarding the state of the American physique. Doctors in particular agonized over what they described as the “pale, thin, and puny” forms that were apparently proliferating around the country. Several described with horror the “narrow chests, and lank limbs, and flabby muscles, and tottering steps [that] meet us at every corner.”2 Thinness, it seems, was nothing short of an epidemic.
If in those years slenderness was considered a general American failing, the paleness, leanness, and malnutrition of women was particularly troubling. Prompted by the fragile state of their bodies, esteemed doctors wrote disquieting manifestos on the question of their frailty.
The writings of the prolific and well-regarded New Englander Dr. William Alcott, a distant relative of the novelist Louisa May Alcott, were typical. In his 1855 treatise The Young Woman’s Book of Health, Alcott lamented the reality that “our children, females among the rest, are trained by a community which is thus destitute of a true appetite.”3 He warned Americans to take heed of what he described as the “whole generation of women trained as a whole to tenderness, delicacy, nervousness, feebleness of muscle [and] want of appetite.”4 Being
