Strings, S. 2019. Fearing the black body: The racial origins of fat phobia. In Fearing the black body. New York University Press.
In the blurb, Strings sets out that poor black women in the US are being stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. Her argument is that this racist fatphobia is the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which took root more than two hundred years ago.
This book does something remarkable that no other book I have read does. It brings into conversation loose, circulating fragments of my lived experience that I did not know were intimately connected. The various elements that she mentions – the learnt fear of the Black body, ingrained social fatphobia, unwavering Anglo-Saxon identity, white supremacy, structural and unrelenting misogyny, hate for the female body, paternalistic patriarchy embedded within Liberal ideology – are brought together in new analysis.
This is summed up (p. 134) as an analysis “... [in] the relationship between overeating, femininity, and race.”
I understood the systemic racism instilled in me in South Africa and England to fear the Black body; I have challenged fatphobia since I was a young adolescent; I identify and challenge patriarchy and misogyny. But I had not made the analytical link that societal fatphobia was built through the engineered fear of the Black body. As a child, born to a white British family who moved to Johannesburg in the late 1950s from England, I learned that Apartheid taught fear of the Black body. Concurrently, I learnt to distrust the female body, its tendency to go rogue, not behave as required and to grow up and stay thin.
Strings sets out the gap in knowledge (p.8) by recalling that, in scholarship, there is a general consensus that, by the 19th century, fear of fat and the glorification of thinness first gained widespread appeal in the US, and that these attitudes had the greatest impact on elite white women. Less acknowledged are the factors contributing to these processes. This is the work of this book. String brilliantly explores historical sites and narratives to demonstrate how the Black body, particularly that of black women, was increasingly used to control and shape white women’s physical image and identity for nationalist Anglo-Saxonism.
From the incorporation of black women into the lexicon of what was defined as ‘perfect female beauty’ (p.17) in the 15th century, black women ‘were progressively represented as small, low and foul’ (p.53), as ‘White women dominated the landscape of statuesque beauties.’
This transformation from ‘Venus to foul’ was wrought through the kidnapping of Africans for chattel slavery between the 15th and 19th centuries, and the pseudo-scientific theories of racial supremacy. Africans were described as “sexually and orally indulgent” and “utterly free from care because they are always sure to have plenty of food” (p. 53). Being able to stay well-nourished with little to no effort produced black Africans who were simple and stupid (p.77). Scientists and natural philosophers agreed that “… full stomachs were correlated to empty heads” (p.60).
I have personally heard people in my family and networks express these views in South Africa, England and Canada. These narratives became deeply ingrained, carrying on through centuries to the present. They were elaborated, accompanied and rendered legitimate through new European racial categorization and racecraft (p.77). Codifications of race morally reconciled Christianity and Enlightenment ideals of liberty with the brutality of human bondage and slavery (p.79). Growing French and British mercantile trade, growth of plantations and use of chattel slavery were justified through the inherent inferiority of presumed innate racial differences in mental capacity, industry, and sensual appetite” (p.79). The codification of black people as ‘gluttonous’ “developed as the slave trade grew.
String dedicates an informative section to the story of Sarah Baartman (pp. 86-93). Saartje (c. 1789–1815) was a Khoekhoe woman taken from what is now known as South Africa to Europe and forcibly exhibited. Strings highlights that Sara’s “excess” fat indicated a sign of her primitiveness (p.93). I am concurrently reading C.L.R James’ The Black Jacobins, originally published in 1938, and the discussion about the same period by Strings makes for rich analysis. James argues that to the French bourgeoisie, the ‘Rights of Man’ were always secondary to the sacrosanct right to private property. Saint-Domingue was the wealthiest colony in the world, generating massive surplus profits that fueled the growth of the French maritime bourgeoisie. Strings notes that in 1777, Louis XVI adopted the Déclaration pour la police des Noirs, which banned the entry of all “Noirs, mulâtres et autres gens de couleur” (p.94). The law was driven by an elite keen to preserve their power and worried about the growth of the Black population arriving in the metropole. In other words, it granted legal residency status only to white persons. Formally dismantled during the French Revolution, the underlying logic of racial categorisation, control, and state-sanctioned surveillance persisted.
Racecraft, the codification of race and pseudo-scientific race theories, directly shapes how non-white female bodies like Sarah Baartman’s were/and continue to be viewed, categorised, and commodified. It has taken France 341 years to formally repeal the Code Noir (Black Code) decreed by King Louis XIV in 1685 to regulate life, religion, and commerce across France's growing sugar and tobacco plantation empires. This was done on May 28, 2026.
“…[I]t was becoming part of the general zeitgeist that fatness was related to blackness” (97). Strings argues that at the same time that “… gluttony and fatness were being associated with African women in scientific racial literature, the values of delicacy, discipline, and a slimmer physique were becoming associated with English women by the arbiters of taste and purveyors of morality” (p.1000). Enter the Protestant Reformation, the Calvinists, Anglo-Saxon white supremacy nationalists who controlled white women’s bodies – and necessary thinness – through religious extremism and zealotry. This is the section in String’s book where I learnt the most.