Episode 207 Transcript
You're listening to the Fierce Fatty Podcast, episode 207: How Anti-Blackness Created Anti-Fatness. I'm your host, Vinny Welsby. Pronouns they/them, and let's do it.
Hello, welcome to the show. So pleased to have you here. For the last seven years, I've been recording the podcast on my phone for the video and then on my laptop for the audio. And I've got myself a new laptop. So this is the first time in ages I'm recording on my new laptop, so fingers crossed. If you notice a difference in the video or audio, maybe that's why.
Welcome to this big topic. I keep saying I need to make episodes that are less researched and shorter. And I'm like, "Yeah, great idea." Then it doesn't happen. I'm just like, "No, I need to add this. I need to..." I just feel like I can't get all the juicy information in, right? So this stuff takes a really long time to do, this episode especially. So if you like this content, feel free to donate on Ko-fi, K-O-F-I.
You'll find that in the show notes. By the way, I didn't know this, but someone told me that you can donate either monthly, by becoming a subscriber or whatever, or as a one-off donation. I didn't realise that when you click on the Ko-fi page on your mobile phone, it doesn't show the option at the top to make a one-off donation. So if you've ever been like, "I wish I could just do a one-off donation," you can, but you have to do it on your desktop. When you open it on your desktop, at the top it'll be like, "Do $5 a month," or there'll be a little toggle thing that says "One-time donation." So if that's ever been you, there you go. All these years and I didn't realise. People would say, "I wish I could donate one time," and I'd think, "You can," but it was only recently that someone told me about the desktop option. So thank you to that person who told me. I really appreciate it.
Today's episode, we're going back thousands of years to see where all this nonsense started, and we're going to be using a variety of sources. Of course, the go-to book for talking about this is Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings. We're also looking at Belly of the Beast by Da'Shaun L. Harrison, as well as concepts from bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and Saidiya Hartman, plus other sources.
And I video record these episodes, and I check it up on YouTube. So if you're interested in seeing my face while I'm talking, for this one I'm gonna be adding images as well along the way, because some concepts are from presentations I do, so some, I have like a few slides here and there about some concepts, and I'll just stick up some other random images. Don't get excited, it's not gonna be like a full YouTube thing, but that's gonna be there if you like that type of thing.
And trigger warning for the O words. I try and always avoid the O words, but there's a couple in here that I'm gonna say, so just heads up on that. Also, we've got a shit ton of anti-Blackness, obviously, slavery, sexism, general white fuckery. I mean, the whole thing is general white fuckery, right? So yeah, we're gonna talk about before, we're gonna talk about beliefs from quote scientists, big, huge quotation marks scientists. Just a bunch of fuckwits spouting nonsense, because you know what, I've always been like, "But why? But why?" Okay, yeah, okay, so they just decided that Black people are fat and therefore inferior, but why? Where does that come from? Where does the idea, like, is it made up? Obviously it's made up, but was there, what was going on there for them to pick that out and create this whole narrative? So yeah, we're talking about that.
And white women and health, and then other concepts as well tied in with this stuff.
So to start off, I need to share this again on my Instagram, but I have this picture—I don't know if you've seen it. I'll put it on the screen on the YouTubes—which is the levels of anti-fat bias. And so it's like a triangle. At the top, we have intrapersonal anti-fat bias. Then the next level is interpersonal anti-fat bias. So intrapersonal is your beliefs about fatness, yourself, fat people, or fat bodies. Interpersonal is how individuals treat fat people.
Underneath that, we've got institutional anti-fat bias, which is how society treats fat people. And then underneath that is ideological anti-fatness. So the idea that fat people are inferior, unhealthy, or XYZ—that's ideological anti-fatness. And we live in a society that has ideological anti-fatness.
So where the fuck does that come from? The belief that we all know fat people are ABC. I really like the idea of pulling the string, pulling the string, and seeing what we get. And we can think about other marginalized folks and the ideas that people have had about them, both currently and in the past. For example, the idea that women are hysterical, fragile, and inferior to men.
If we pull the string on that idea and we look back, where does that come by? Where does that come from?
It's informed by sexism, patriarchy, misogyny, anti-Blackness, and then we can be like, "Oh, surprise, surprise."
Or the idea that being queer is deviant and is a mental disorder. Pull the string—what do we get? Heteronormativity, homophobia, morality, religious authority.
And pull the string on the idea that fatness isn't healthy, abnormal, and a disease. Pull the string—anti-fatness, healthism, ableism, morality, white supremacy, religious authority, et cetera, et cetera.
And the thing is, all of these ideas are informed by evidence. I say "evidence," because we could find evidence that being queer is deviant or a mental health disorder, right? I'm saying quote-unquote "evidence" because we could cherry-pick things and find evidence that aligns with our biases and not consider other factors.
So how did we get to the idea that fat equals bad? If we pull that string, let's look at everything that is going on.
So TL;DR—too long, didn't read. You've kind of given it away already, but we're going even deeper.
The history of anti-fatness is rooted in anti-Blackness, colonialism, and religious morality, rather than originating as an objective medical concern about health.
So let's get in our time machine and go all the way back 2,000 years ago to the first century and early Christianity.
From the first century to the fifth century—so 2,000 years ago to 1,500 years ago—many early Christians viewed the body as something that required discipline. Spiritual growth was associated with self-control over bodily desires. So we've got that kind of 2,000-years-ago idea that spiritual growth is associated with self-control over bodily desires, right? We've got that, you know, if we've got this big pot of anti-fatness, we're gonna sprinkle some of that in.
Then if we go to medieval Catholicism, which is 500 to 1500—so 1,500 years ago to 500 years ago—during the medieval period, gluttony became formalized as one of the seven deadly sins.
And the medieval definitions of gluttony were broader than just "you eat too much, fatty." It was eating too soon, eating too expensively, being overly concerned with food, eating too eagerly, and demanding special preparation.
I'm like, "Fucking, can I have some salt in my food?" Like, "Shut up, you glutton!" I'm sorry.
So it was about appetite and self-discipline, but fat bodies weren't necessarily seen as a problem. You know, there might've been some connection there, but it was more about eating food versus your body size as much.
And so, going to 800 to 1600 CE—CE, common... what is it? Common? Common time? Common...? Anyway, it's a non-religious way of saying AD and BC.
So this is when, from 800 to 1600, Catholicism became the reigning religion in many areas and the dominant religion in most of Western and Central Europe. The church wielded enormous influence over politics, education, law, and daily life.
And during that time, fasting and avoiding certain foods were common as a form of penance. And the Catholic Church started, quote, "teaching falsehoods about other religions, painting those prophets as overly indulgent in physical pleasures, and even identifying some as false prophets or anti-Christ figures in some theological writings."
And this wasn't based on knowledge, but rather hearsay, fear, deliberate misinterpretations, and misrepresentations, as you do.
Then we've got 1517, which was when the Protestant Reformation began, when someone called Martin Luther challenged church practices and large parts of Northern Europe became Protestant.
And so when that happened, that's when we started getting deeper into this nonsense.
So we've got some quotes here from the Diet Culture Timeline website. By the way, I forgot to mention, all sources will be in the show notes. You can find the show notes where you're listening, but if for some reason you can't see them, they're always at fiercefatty.com/theepisodenumber. So for this one, it's /207, which is the page for this episode to get all the links.
And so, okay, from the Diet Culture Timeline website, some quotes:
"1500 to 1600: The Protestant Reformation. Food became synonymous with morality. Finding pleasure in food, quote, corrupted the soul and dimmed intellect. And eating disorder behaviors were praised."
And then there was a sect of Protestants called the Puritans who wanted to further purify their faith. And they believed that the rising wealthy were taking too much pleasure in food and drink, which, quote, "perverted the soul."
And they took these ideas with them when they colonized Turtle Island, AKA the Americas. Oh, can you imagine?
Oh, this is just fucking... these people sound so annoying and boring to hang around with, right? You're having a bite to eat and they're like, "You're going to hell. You're perverting your soul." You're just like, "Fucking shut up, Jeremy. I'm just eating some fucking lunch."
So anyway, these Protestant cultures, Puritan culture, said: "Laziness and gluttony equals a lack of self-control, equals poor character, equals moral weakness and a perverted soul, equals a reduced social worth."
So we've got some information here from Consuming Bodies: Fatness, Sexuality, and the Protestant Ethic by Leslie J. Owen. Global North societies have long been shaped by a mind/body split.
So this is an interesting thing about Catholicism versus other religions—and not all other religions—but something like Buddhism doesn't share this belief that the mind and body are split in the same way. There's this mind/body split that comes partly from Judeo-Christian traditions.
And so, in this mind/body split, the mind, the spirit, self-control, and rationality are seen as higher, purer, and closer to the divine. They're moral, right? The mind is moral.
And when they say self-control and rationality, that word rationality is all over the place when we're talking about this stuff. Rationality means to think logically, make reasoned decisions, and control impulses rather than being driven by emotions, desires, or bodily urges.
So you're rational if you're making reasoned decisions, controlling impulses, and you're not being driven by emotions, desires, or bodily urges. Which doesn't really make sense because, you know, are you not rational if you're like, "My body is saying that I need to do a poo. I'm driven to go and do a poo"? You're not rational? Well, of course you're rational because you're not gonna shit your pants, right? That's rational.
But there's a split, right? So the mind is rational; the body is not rational.
And so the body, emotions, appetites, and desires are seen as lower, worldly, and potentially corrupting. Because of this, activities associated with bodily pleasure become morally suspect, including sex, eating, resting, and eating food. And then, because of that, fatness therefore symbolizes a body that is perceived as indulging in physical appetites.
If you wanna know more about this religious aspect, I have a whole episode on it. Diet, Culture, and Religion is the title. It's episode 152: Diet, Culture, and Religion. The link for that is gonna be in the show notes.
But yeah, we go even deeper. I think if we talk about Gwen from The Way Down Diet, there's a whole documentary on her. It's like, if you lose weight, then being thin is being good. She's from the '90s and 2000s. It's a whole thing. Listen to the podcast about it or watch the documentaries. She is a character.
So we've gone all of that. We've gone all of that. The Puritans are coming over to Turtle Island, the Americas. They've got all of these beliefs. Being no fun basically will get you into heaven.
Now, some people will say, "Oh, it used to be really fashionable to be fat. In the olden days, people were really attracted to fat people."
Well, well, well, well.
So here's the thing. In the Renaissance period, which is the 15th to 16th century, people will point to those Renaissance paintings where you see chubby people and say, "Oh, that was what was desired, and that was what was seen as a beautiful body."
And during the early years of the transatlantic slave trade, even Black people were included in this aesthetic and said to be voluptuous and physically appealing, although inferior to white women.
But if you look at those images and compare them to body sizes as we know them today, these people are not fat, maybe small fat at a push, but they're all pretty much straight-sized people who were not very, very thin. But they're not thin, thin, and they're not fat, fat. They're not even thin fat. Thin fat's not a thing, but you know what I'm saying?
But we do have things like the first statue found in Willendorf was of a fat person, and it's thousands and thousands of years old. And if someone's making a statue of a fat person, it, we assume, means something like they liked that person, or this person was important. And we have other statues of fat bodies too. But we don't know what it's about, really. And we have other evidence and data that shows that, evidence in different times, blah, blah, blah.
But when people are saying, "We used to love fat bodies," this is normally what they're referring to: the Renaissance period and zafty, voluptuous bodies, which are not actually fat.
So it kind of gets on my flaps a bit when people say that because there are many portraits done of fat people, actual fat people, and they're not. They're more mocking a lot of times. But anyway, the Thin Ideal wasn't really established then, in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Okay, so then, the first groups of people who were targeted by the idea that fatness was not so great were actually men.
So, in 17th-century England, English philosophers, scientists, and artists like William Shakespeare and René Descartes began framing the fat male body as a sign of intellectual dullness, laziness, and a lack of self-control.
♪ René Descartes was a drunken fart ♪
♪ I drink, therefore I am ♪
That's a Monty Python song. I don't know if René Descartes was a drunken fart. It just rhymes.
Anyway, they began framing the fat male body as a sign of intellectual dullness, laziness, and a lack of self-control. And so the idea was that a full stomach equaled an empty head, and that indulging the body ruined the intellect.
Here's a quote from Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings:
"Walter Charlton, a natural philosopher and court physician to Charles I, published his own treatise on the perils of overindulgence. 'The finest wits,' Charlton wrote, 'were not the custody of gross and robust bodies, but for the most part are lodged in delicate and tender constitutions.'"
And he was in there writing that letter to a woman, telling her, "Don't eat too much, bestie, okay?"
But the first kind of pushes here for this were, "Men, don't be stupid. Make sure that you're not fat."
And of course, there were definitely women experiencing that too, and it didn't take long for it to become a massive push on women.
So at the same time, the slave trade, enslavement trade, was expanding, and the perception of Black women was changing.
The transatlantic enslavement trade began in the 1480s when Portuguese traders started transporting enslaved people. That was the 1480s, and in the 1500s it expanded on a large scale. By the 1600s, slavery was deeply embedded in European colonies.
Then race science developed, mainly in the 1700s. A big quotation is around "science" because it's not science, it's bullshit.
Race scientists began classifying humans into races and assigning supposed characteristics to them.
So you might have heard people saying that race is a made-up concept. And that's because there are not biological differences between races that we can categorise humans with. There's more biological variation between white people and other white people than there is between races.
It's not a real thing. It's a categorisation that people came along and said, "Oh, okay, well, these people are from this area, therefore they must be of this race."
And you see how that gets really muddy when we start looking at, "Oh, hang on, what about these people?" Or, "These white people are meant to be better than these other white people, but what?"
And hang on, we have a variety of different races in this one location. And so the difference between race, which is a social construct, aka made up, versus ethnicity. Ethnicity is a shared culture, a shared background, a shared religion, a shared location. And so that is real.
But we still do talk about race because people have claimed it as a reclamation of their identity, knowing that it's not based in natural science.
Anyway, long story short, the 1700s is when this race science started happening. Before that, Europeans justified slavery because slavery had been going on forever. Before that, slavery was justified through religion, conquesting lands, wanting stuff from those lands, economic interests, or ideas about making non-Christians "civilised."
But as slavery expanded and became super profitable, they had to come up with a quote-unquote "better justification." Because we can't be saying, "Well, we want to enlighten them by enslaving them."
So instead of saying, "These people, we're enslaving them because we conquered them, so tough luck," the argument became, "These people are naturally suited to enslavement because of their race."
And because slavery expanded, this contradiction became harder to ignore: the contradiction that European societies increasingly celebrated ideas of liberty and reason and equality and human rights, but at the same time millions of Africans were being enslaved and murdered.
So they're like, "We're so great, but ignore all that shit that's happening over there."
So if humans are equal, how can slavery be justified?
And one of the answers was to argue that not all humans are equal, obviously. And are Black people even human at all?
And so race science helped provide that answer. The argument began shifting from, "God says. God says we have to be this and that," to, "Well, science says. Science says. Science says. Science says those people are less than. And the characteristics of those people are bad."
So it was Protestant moralism plus race science.
And this time, the 1600s and 1700s, was a period called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that took place mainly in Europe. The idea was that humans should use reason and evidence and science to understand the world rather than just relying on religion or tradition or, "This is what we do."
So what are these scientists, what were they saying? What do we think?
And this is where I'm really interested. I'm just so fascinated with the way that people think. This is why I'm studying and doing a Master's in Psychotherapy. I'm always just being like, "But why? What's happening in your brain for this to go on?"
And we're answering that a little bit here.
Okay, so it's almost like these race scientists or experts, it's like a bunch of dudes with a podcast, and they all follow each other.
They're all like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, good progress, bro."
And so the first guy with a podcast we're going to talk about was a guy called Prospero Alpini, or Alpine, an Italian physician and botanist.
One of his podcast episodes would be called The Art of Fattening.
So he wrote in the 1580s of an Egyptian art of fattening and found this to be a great example of the immorality of the Egyptians. So this is before the enslavement trade was booming, 1580, but we've got some seeds, right? We've got these ideas kind of peppered around the place, and they're all coming together.
And so Prospero, here's a little seed that he left. Quote from him:
"Can one desire anything more shameful than an obesity?"
Oh, by the way, The Art of Fattening is him saying that people in Egypt were deliberately making themselves fat, like drinking, what was it, lard or something? He was saying they were guzzling something.
Anyway, so this is what he says:
"Can one desire anything more shameful than an obesity acquired through the infamous vice of the flesh and of unchecked sensuality? This vice is so widespread down there that one sees most women flop down on the ground like fat sows."
Really, Prospero? Really?
You and your dudes went on a lads' weekend down to Europe and saw most women flop down on the ground like sows? Yeah, sounds legit.
And he says, "African men incited their women to grow to the size of sows."
Isn't that interesting? African men incited their women to grow to the size of sows, according to Prospero Alpini, Alpine.
Does that sound familiar to something that we think about today? The racist idea that Black men only want to date fat women, and the idea that that is a part of their nature. It's a part of their nature that Black men are only largely attracted to fat women, and that being framed as evidence of the immorality of Black men and evidence of the ugliness of fat women.
And this is from 1580. He's saying that Black men incited women to grow to the size of sows, sows, cows.
You're like, where do these beliefs come from?
Five hundred years ago, some dickhead named Prospero. You know, oh my God. Anyway, okay, so next we have Samuel Purchas.
Quote: "In 1625, the Englishman Samuel published a four-volume set of stories, stories pertaining to the inhabitants of distant lands, based partially on travel narratives left behind by his fellow countryman, Richard Hakluyt."
Samuel Purchas has got these accounts from his bestie Richard, right?
So quote from Sabrina Strings:
"He, Purchas, too expressed his disdain for the unbridled sensuality of Blacks in Guinea, denouncing them as orally and sexually insatiable heathens. They have no knowledge of God." Oh my God.
They are very greedy eaters and no less drinkers and very lecherous and thievish and much addicted to uncleanliness. One man hath many wives and he is able to keep as many wives as he is able to keep and maintain.
Well, Samuel, you sound like a great guy to travel with. He's like, "Oh, they're dirty. Mommy, take me home and give me a bath. They're unclean." That was in 1625.
So then, the narrative. So we have these little seeds and then we have the narrative shifting dramatically in the mid-18th century as the slave trade peaks. People are like, you know, the white people were like, "Shit, man, we've got to get together. We have to come up with some fucking evidence to allow us to keep doing this, you know, we need to prove that these black people are not human and stuff."
So the first guy we're talking about here is Georges-Louis Leclerc, who was the Comte de Buffon, which is Count of Buffon, which is a place in France. This fuckwit didn't travel to Africa, but relied on accounts from his podcasting bros. And Buffon was the first celebrated scientist to assert that black people were tall, plump, but simple and stupid. And he argued that because their native lands were rich in pasturage and resources, they were able to stay well fed with little effort, leading to a natural idleness and plumpness. Is that so, George?
Then we had the Encyclopédie, the Encyclopedia, by Denis Diderot. The Encyclopedia was one of the most important books of the Enlightenment era. The title translates to Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. Denis Diderot collected accounts from people to create this Encyclopedia.
Did Denis go to Africa? No.
And one of the people's accounts that was in this Encyclopedia was someone called Jean-Baptiste Pierre Le Romain. He lived in the Caribbean, established himself as a self-styled expert on French colonies and sugar plantations. There's no evidence that he ever traveled to Africa either.
And he wrote dozens of articles about the Caribbean for the Encyclopedia. His descriptions of people from Senegal, Angola, and the Congo were based on his observations of enslaved people in these French colonies. And what he said was that black people were generally lazy, cowardly, and very fond of gluttony.
And then we move to some British clowns. British colonial writers like Edward Long. Edward Long feels like a real piece of shit. Well, the first guy, Georges-Louis Leclerc, was really influential and a lot of these people were like, "We love Georges, he's such a great thinker." So he was kind of like the Andrew Tate of his time. And these people came after him and were like, "Georges was so fucking good with all those ideas about black people. It's great."
So anyway, Edward Long wrote the influential The History of Jamaica in 1774. He managed and profited from plantations worked by enslaved Africans and served as a judge and colonial official in Jamaica.
He agreed with the French racists, describing the N race as having no taste for anything but gourmandizing. Gourmandizing, by the way, is the act of enjoying fine food and drink, often in lavish quantities. So he's saying that black people only have a taste for gourmandizing, lavish foods in lavish quantities, and drinking to excess, and that they had no moral sensations and a desire to be idle.
So he made sweeping generalizations about all African people, suggesting that black people in the Americas were no different from their, quote, "Brethren in Africa."
And did he go to Africa? (laughs) We know the answer. Of course not.
He also claimed that black people were large, fat, and well proportioned due to hot climates and a predilection for overeating. And this guy, he also was a polygenist. A polygenist is someone who believes that the races do not share a common human ancestor. So he was saying that black people were of a wholly different origin than white Europeans.
And then finally, in the 19th century, we've got French scientist Julien-Joseph Virey, who this fuck nut was saying that black skin was caused by a super abundance of black bile, which concurrently caused GI disorders and weight gain. He also thought that the hot African sun caused the body to retain excess liquid fats in the breast and belly.
What a bunch of losers. Dangerous men whose ideas led to untold harm to humanity.
Wouldn't you be so embarrassed if you learned that you were descended from or related to one of these fucking bozos?
So what they did was they gathered quote evidence to confirm their pre-existing biases and to help them continue exploiting, enslaving, and murdering black people. Because, I mean, come on, they're not like us, they're not human.
And of course, this is just one part of what they were saying. Obviously, the claims that black people were idle and greedy and stupid were accompanied by so many other stereotypes.
But my brain was saying, were these people all just making shit up? Because I really, really can't imagine. I'm trying to think, what's happening in their brain and their eyes?
They have gobs of privilege. That one guy, what was it, Long, was in Jamaica and he was a fucking judge. That amount of privilege. And then he looks at black people and he's just like, "They're so lazy and greedy and have no morals."
Like, what? Are they just making it up?
But what could be happening is, imagine what enslaved people were experiencing: extreme exploitation and brutal conditions. Which of course led to people being exhausted, malnourished, injured, sick, traumatized, and physically unable to work at the pace that was demanded.
So I'm thinking they saw people being humans, being exhausted, and not being able to work 24/7. And they're like, "Haha, look at that lazy person."
And on the other side, sometimes people were actively resisting. And what that could look like was many different forms of resistance. It's called everyday resistance or hidden resistance. Things like work slowness, feigning illness, breaking tools, sabotage, running away, withholding labor, preserving cultural practices, and everyday acts of non-cooperation.
And so both of those things — being sick and exhausted and traumatized and unable to do the work at the pace required, and, when possible, engaging in hidden resistance, which is a natural human reaction to enslavement — were willfully misinterpreted by white people as being innate racial flaws.
They labeled black people as naturally lazy and cowardly.
And I still, my brain is like, I still... I'm kind of imagining myself as a white enslaver and trying to imagine how. Can I not see? Like, do I not, I don't understand how
they can't have compassion.
And I guess, I guess, is that they've convinced themselves that these are not people. They're really deeply, deeply down, really do, they can't see, right? So it'd be like saying, try and have compassion for some inanimate object, like a chair or something. Which, I guess, if you said that to someone, they'd be like, "Well, what do you mean? I don't understand. Why would I do that? That's something for me to sit on and something for me to use."
I find that so interesting. I bet there's something like the psychology of enslavers. And sure, some of them, maybe they had personality disorders and didn't have the capacity for compassion. That's a small, small minority of people, right? But most people do have that capacity for compassion.
So anyway, you've got all of that, and then get this. You may have heard of the condition, quote unquote, drapetomania, which, if you haven't heard of it, was a pseudo-scientific mental illness that claimed that if enslaved Black people ran away, this must be a mental illness. The sole cause for an enslaved Black person to run away was believed to be the idea that slavery was natural for Black people. Anyone trying to escape must be clinically insane.
So Samuel Cartwright, the physician who came up with that bullshit, the drapetomania, also invented another disease, which he called dysaesthesia aethiopica, which he described as a weakness or lack of work ethic that supposedly afflicted Black people if they were not enslaved and strictly managed.
And so, by framing a refusal to work as a biological and mental disease, enslavers could justify relentless whipping and forced labor under the beaming sun as necessary medical treatment rather than an act of torture.
So if Black people are naturally lazy, they are naturally fat, and the only way to help them is to enslave them because, when you don't, they just are gonna be lazy and all these terrible things, apparently.
Honestly, the gymnastics, the mental gymnastics, are just astonishing.
So that's where the logic, quote unquote, for these beliefs came from.
And a prime example of these beliefs combining was in Saartjie Baartman. So you might have heard of Saartjie Baartman before. Just so you know, it's spelled S-A-A-R-T-J-I-E, Saartjie Baartman, or Sarah Baartman.
I'm gonna read from an article from Bust. It's no longer available, actually. This article. I don't know why. Why? Interesting.
Anyway, by the way, if you ever want to go and find something that is no longer available or is behind a paywall, you can use archive.ph. You can put a URL in there, and as long as someone else has posted it in there, then you'll be able to bring it up. So if there's a paywall or if the article is missing, you can even use it as a bit of a time machine because it stores versions of pages from different dates.
Anyway, long story short, The Racist Origins of Fatphobia is the title.
Quote:
"A slave from Cape Town, Baartman was the human property of the British entrepreneur Alexander Dunlop. It was Dunlop's idea that she be brought to Europe and exhibited for lurid delight. Exhibit-goers, both the curious and the lecherous, would encounter her in a small enclosure.
On a typical night, Baartman would be adorned with jewels and garments that had been poorly curated to represent the clothing and garments of her tribe, the Khoikhoi, also referred to by Westerners as the Hottentot.
She'd emerge from a dark corner, wielding a spear. Then she'd slowly remove her coat, allowing it to dangle coquettishly."
By the way, coquettishly means flirtatious or playful.
"To dangle a coat coquettishly from one shoulder gave the crowd a moment to take in her undulating curves. Her thick thighs, soft arms, and rounded belly were all major draws, but it was her general rotundity and jutting backside that brought throngs of spectators.
It was these qualities that made Baartman an archetype"—an original model, or a perfect example of that thing.
So she was presented as an archetype of Black femininity. People were seeing Saartjie and saying, "This is what all Black women look like" in the popular imagination. They were also saying that she proved what many believed were racial scientific claims of African barbarity.
Baartman's international fame popularized an idea that had been percolating since the 1700s: that Black women were constitutionally—meaning naturally—thick-set, and that this was evidence of their savagery.
So she was displayed in an enclosure in much the same way that an animal would be displayed in an enclosure.
And this is from the The Significance of Sarah Baartman article:
"Two centuries ago, Sarah Baartman died after years spent in European 'freak shows.'"
She died on 29 December 1815. She was, I think, 26. Yeah, she was 26.
Even after she died, her exhibition continued. Her brain, skeleton, and sexual organs remained on display in a Paris museum until 1974. Her remains weren't repatriated and buried until 2002.
It was Nelson Mandela who, when he came into power in South Africa, requested that her remains be returned hundreds of years after they had displayed her.
Ugh. It's just...
Anyway, continuing:
"Brought to Europe seemingly on false pretenses by a British doctor and stage-named the Hottentot Venus, she was paraded around freak shows in London and Paris, with crowds invited to look at her large buttocks.
Today, she is seen by many as the epitome of colonial exploitation and racism, of the ridicule and commodification of Black people."
Yep. Yep.
So Saartjie was said to have steatopygia. Steatopygia is a claimed genetic characteristic pronounced by fat accumulation in the bum and the thighs. It's an anatomical or anthropological term, not a medical diagnosis.
The trait is said to be highly heritable and most prominently observed among the Khoikhoi and San peoples of Southern Africa.
But here's the thing: everyone's fat distribution patterns are influenced by genetics and can vary substantially between populations. So it's basically just an observation that white people made about human bodies.
I mean, Khoikhoi people could have come to the UK and given a name to the lack of fat on British people compared to Khoikhoi people, right? They could have made up a word and said, "Look at these white people. Their bodies are so strange."
And then found someone with that body type and put them on display because of it.
But that's not what happened, right?
So I'm saying all this to say that she had a body type where she happened to have more fat on her bum and thighs, and it turned her into a freak-show exhibit.
So, moving to white women...
So white women. The phrase "Anglo-Saxon civilization" was commonly used to describe what many elites believed was the highest stage of human development. So Anglo-Saxon meaning English ancestry and people of Northern European Protestant descent.
And so for white women around this time, when we're doing all the race science nonsense, being an Anglo-Saxon Protestant meant acting as, quote, "God's appointed agent of morality." Oh, what a fucking title. God's appointed agent of morality. Oh my God.
Imagine if someone said, "Hey, do you want to be God's appointed agent of morality?"
No.
No, thanks.
Anyway, claiming to be Anglo-Saxon Protestant meant you were the right type of white person. The Anglo-Saxon thing later turning into Nordic, later turning into Aryan, and Nazis defining Aryans as a master race of Northern European descent.
And in this context, Northern Europe was classed as places like Germany, especially Northern Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and sometimes England. You know, that white, blonde hair, blue eyes type thing.
White women embraced strict diets to visually and morally distinguish themselves from Black people and distinguish themselves from new waves of immigrants, such as the Celtic Irish or later people from Southern or Eastern Europe.
These Anglo-Saxons were like, "The best people are from Northern Europe." Then we've got people from Southern Europe. They're okay, but they're not as good as us. People who were from anywhere else? No thanks. They're just off the planet.
That was the hierarchy: we're the best.
It's interesting, isn't it, how it just happens to be that where they're from happens to be the best place in the world. That's just very lucky for them, isn't it?
Anyway, white women were like, "Okay, well, we have to show that we're better than Black people." And then, as Irish people and other people from Europe came in, who were vilified by eugenicists, "We have to show we're better than them too."
And so eugenicists said that anyone who wasn't Northern European was constitutionally degenerate and gluttonous and fat. Sound familiar?
And also, they were considered a hybrid or inferior white race. They were biologically tainted by African or Asian blood.
There's this essayist, Thomas Carlyle, and he argued that the Irish appetite for potatoes—and he called Irish people "potatofagey." Piece of shit.
Potatofagey literally means potato eaters.
He claimed this was a constitutional deficiency proving their intractable racial degeneracy and lack of self-control.
Which, I'm Irish, British, British-Irish.
The Great Starvation in Ireland, by the way—we don't say the famine, the Irish famine, because it wasn't a famine. British people starved Irish people.
The UK described Ireland as the garden of England because there was so much produce from Ireland. And yes, there were blighted potatoes, but there was plenty of food to feed the Irish. The British took it, fed the English, and then said to Irish people, "You're so lazy and greedy."
I did a podcast episode with my mom—Mommy, Mommy, Sarah—episode 157, Intergenerational Food Trauma, talking about this. About how all of these beliefs that colonizers put on so many people, in this example Irish people, saying that they were greedy and lazy, become internalized as truths about us.
So many beliefs. And we look at them and we're like, "Why is it that I'm doing ABC?"
And it's like, "Oh, it's because I think I'm inferior, or someone else told me that I was inferior or superior."
But basically, some religious colonist piece-of-shit guy from hundreds of years ago thought this, and now my behavior has changed because of it.
And when you realize that, you're like, "Fuck no. Not doing that."
Anyway, if you wanted to learn more about intergenerational food trauma with Ireland, that's episode 157.
And I've been meaning to read it, but there's a book called How the Irish Became White.
Because at this time, Irish people—and if you weren't Northern European—then you weren't, quote unquote, white. You were, like I said, a hybrid type person.
But now Irish people are considered white. And there was a process by which Irish people became white: assimilation with, quote, white Americans and the brutalization of Black people.
Not always, but I know there were a lot of Irish people in police forces and communities where there was a lot of immigration from Irish people fleeing the starvation.
And yeah, became white by subjugating others.
But also, you know, there are lots of Irish people who are not down with that, obviously.
I don't know if obviously, but anyway.
In Godey's Lady's Book, Godey's Lady's Book, the most popular women's magazine of the 19th century, an 1813 article by a socialite named Leigh Hunt described the relationship between overeating, femininity, and race, reminding the gentle Anglo-Saxon reader that women who wanted to preserve their looks must never eat too much.
According to Hunt, no lady in American high society could hope to maintain her esteem while corpulent.
Only in Africa could a fat woman find admiration, since it was rumored that on the continent no lady could be charming under a higher weight.
So they're saying, "You don't want to be like the Black people who are attracted to or find charming someone who is fat."
The fear of the imagined fat Black woman was created by racial ideologies that have been used for almost 300 years to both degrade Black women and discipline white women.
Anti-Blackness is the forgotten rationale that underlies both thin privilege and fat stigma.
So this idea of fatness equals immoral, fatness equals ugly, could be easier for people today to pick apart because that's where we're at now.
Fatness is immoral. Fatness is ugly.
But they didn't stop there.
They moved to: fatness is also unhealthy.
So fatness is immoral, ugly, and unhealthy.
Under the guise of health, rather than just beauty or morals, biased ideas were easier for people to support.
So we've got a few of the suspects—some of the figures that moved this idea of health and fatness into an ideology in today's world.
First, we've got George Cheyne. Cheney was this fat guy who, oh, I feel sorry for him. Oh, no, fuck it, no I don't, no. (laughs)
He promoted a restriction of vegetarian diet as morally and physically superior. And he wrote one of the world's first diet books. He was like, eat, only eat like fucking, this stuff, rabbits eat.
His diet isn't working, he was fat himself. It was kind of funny.
Adolf Kettelay created the Kettelay formula based on, as we know, data from white men, European men, which later became the BMI. It reflected eugenic ideals, wasn't designed for health but was misused to label fatness as abnormal, unhealthy.
Louie Dublin, fuck this guy. He was a metropolitan life insurance company statistician, set arbitrary weight limits for policy holders. He was like, how much do my policy holders weigh? His policy holders were white men, and then said, oh, if you weigh more than what this average policy holder weighs then give us some more money, fatty.
So he set these weight limits that shaped US health policy and inflated risk categories. And then later lobbying from the diet industry lowered BMI cutoffs, fueling the oh-word epidemic rhetoric.
And then moving into closer today, we've got Jean Nydic from Weight Watchers, and she founded, which was the first major diet company, Weight Watchers in 1963, despite even then longstanding evidence that diets fail.
Weight Watchers openly stigmatized fat people, and their company's own data shows that their weight loss didn't work.
So the idea that in the 1600s, it was that, you know, that these bodies are inferior, it's an idea these bodies are inferior. Now it turned into an ideology. And now today we treat it as a fact.
We all know fat people are ABC, but if you pull that string and see what evidence we have, then you can be like, oh, racism, great.
Some of the concepts to consider.
So from "Belly of the Beast," the politics of anti-fatness is anti-blackness, Deshaun L. Harrison, great read, if you haven't read their book, it's a short one. So definitely go get it.
Quote from Deshaun, "To live in a body both fat and black is to intersect at the margins of a society that normalize anti-fatness as anti-blackness, hyper policed by states and society, passed over for housing and jobs and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals.
"Fat black people in the United States are subject to culturally sanctioned discrimination, abuse, and trauma.
"Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states.
"They're more likely to be houseless, die at higher rates when misdiagnosed as non-treatment.
"Fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted.
"And at the intersection of fatness, race, disability, and gender identity, these abuses are exacerbated."
So if we think about how anti-fatness and anti-blackness come to the worst conclusions in our modern society, it's in interactions with law enforcement.
There's a study that shows that racial bias and judgments of physical size and form for midability, again, links for everything in the show notes, episode 207.
Quote from that study, "People have a bias to perceive young black men as bigger, taller, heavier, more muscular, and more physically threatening, stronger, more capable of harm than young white men."
Deshawn says, "Black men tend to be stereotyped as threatening and as a result, may disproportionately be targeted by police, even when unarmed."
And so Deshawn talks about Eric Garner, quote, "The U.S. representative for New York's second congressional district, Pete King, urged a grand jury not to indict Pantelio."
Pantelio was the officer that murdered, because as he tells it, murdered Eric Garner, because as he tells it, the police were only doing their job to take down a, quote, "350 pound person who was resisting arrest."
According to King, Eric Garner's cause of death was not the illegal chokehold, but rather his asthma, his heart condition, and his obesity.
And Mike Brown, who was murdered by police officer, Darren Wilson, was described by him as Hulk Hogan, and that as he was being shot, he, quote, "Bulked up to run through the shots."
He also called him crazy and a demon, quote, "What Wilson described was a beast, a monster."
So police, media, medical examiners weaponized the size and the weight of black victims to frame them as superhuman, untameable beasts.
They're claiming that they are massive, aggressive, animalistic, and so the state justifies their murder as necessary action to protect society.
Think about those things, policing, surveilling, surveilling fat women being more likely to be sexually assaulted as we look at these other things.
So Saidiya Hartman, scenes of subjection, Saidiya argues that the extreme violence of slavery extended far beyond the torture and murder, enslavement, but the extreme violence was also in the everyday surveillance, control, and management of black bodies, as well as treating them as a spectacle.
So we've got two things that Saidiya is talking about, spectacle of black bodies, and something called fungibility. I'm gonna break it down for you.
So the spectacle of subjection, so the spectacle of black bodies.
So enslaved people were often forced to appear happy, entertaining, compliant, example, by singing, acting happy while being bought and sold, or dancing when they're chained up together.
Which reminds me of the film "Get Out", all these nice white people having garden parties and black people being forced to smile regardless of what horrors have happened to them.
And this, quote, "spectacle" hid the violence and terror of slavery, and helped make slavery seem more normal and harmless.
Like when you hear people, like you hear on social media, people doing tours on plantation, and it's like their ancestors plantation.
And they were like, "Oh yeah, the enslaved people here were happy, and they had a great relationships with their enslavers."
What the fuck are you talking about?
It's just, it's really horrifying, right? They're subjected to all of this, and then they have to do it with a smile on the face.
So at the same time, all this, enslaved people's bodies were constantly watched, and control, and judged by white society. So that's like this spectacle piece.
Fungibility and discipline.
So you might've heard of fungible from NFTs, non-fungible tokens. So it's like a, it's a finance term, right?
A fungible thing is something that can be replaced by another identical unit.
So for example, money is fungible. So if I gave you a $20 bill, and you were gonna pay me back, I don't need you to give me that same $20 bill, because you could send me a bank transfer, or any other $20 bill will do.
Or a liter of petrol is fungible. So if it's the same like grade in everything, if I lent you a liter of petrol, you gave me back different petrol, but it was like the same, whatever it is, you know, unleaded or whatever, it meets, it's fungible, right?
So anything of the same, it's all the same, right?
Something like a house is not fungible, because one house, even though it's a house, could be different in value and contents to another house, or something like a painting might not be fungible.
So the Mona Lisa is not fungible, because say if you painted another version of the Mona Lisa, it's not the Mona Lisa.
But maybe a print of the Mona Lisa could be fungible, if it was like the same size print and you know.
And so anyway, Hartman, Saidiya Hartman, talks about how enslaved people are treated as fungible.
So as she's saying that they're treated as though they were like money or animals or things, interchangeable units of property rather than unique humans with their own identity and lives.
And so because of this, white people could project their own needs and fears and desires onto them, because they're empty vessels, they're not objects, they're not people, they're objects.
But the reality is that they're not objects, they're people.
And so to keep them as things, maintaining the system requires constant surveillance, punishment and control, right?
We have to like control, punish the humanity out of them.
So we're gonna dehumanize you, treat you as an object, and you better smile and act happy about it, because if you don't, it will upset us white people, because you're acting like a human and you're not.
So how this relates to fatness, surveillance and control.
Black people are still heavily monitored and regulated today, especially through medicine and public health.
So for example, tools like the BMI are a way of labeling and disciplining bodies.
We're gonna surveil you, we're gonna surveil your weight, and we're gonna control you, we're gonna tell you that you need to lose weight in order to access care.
And what an excellent method of control dieting and anti-fat bias is, and anti-blackness, right?
What an excellent method of control, because when you're dieting, what's happening to your body is just exhausting.
I'm gonna do maybe the next episode, talking about what happens to your body on diets.
Is just a, if someone could design a way to control people dieting would be a really good, really good way to do it.
So then we've got that, so surveillance and control, and then the body is a spectacle.
Fat bodies, visible symbols of supposed laziness and overeating or bad health.
So think about Sarky Bartman, she was a spectacle.
Today, think about the shows like The Biggest Loser, turned fatness into entertainment.
Or how, even how blackness is seen as unprofessional or unattractive.
The same things are taken by white people to be celebrated.
And then how we view fat black bodies as being either comedic, the mammy, the clown, or on the flip side, angry, dangerous, violent, which are characters that serve thin white interests.
It's the happy black person or the scary black person, just like it was hundreds of years ago, right? Like, like this idea is describing.
And finally, the ongoing objectification.
And so Saidiya Hartman talks about slavery, treating black people as property, right?
Now stereotypes about fat black people continue to reduce them to objects and limit their bodily autonomy.
It's the whole, it's the whole like, you know how they're saying, oh, fat people are so much worse off.
Or fat people are stupid.
Black fat black people are stupid.
It's the whole, we need to make decisions for fat black people because they aren't intelligent enough, or they don't care enough.
Like the Let's Move campaign from Michelle Obama, or putting calorie numbers on menus, or claiming fatness is a black issue, and black people are fatter than white people.
So there's a opinion piece in the New York Times by Sabrina String's title, "It's not obesity. We know why COVID-19 is killing so many people. It's slavery."
A quote in here is that's 42% of white Americans, and 49% of African-Americans are fat.
So she's saying black people are fatter than white people.
Researchers have yet to clarify how a 7% point disparity, so 7% more black people are fat.
Researchers have yet to clarify how a 7% disparity in fatness prevalence translates to a 240 to 700% disparity in fatalities.
So what Sabrina is saying here is that if it's fatness that is causing ill health in regards to COVID-19, and death in COVID-19, why is it that black people are dying an increase disparity than white people?
Surely it should be a 7% because black people have higher weights than white people in the U.S.
And so if it's fatness, and what Sabrina's saying is, it's racism, it's racism.
And then if you're fat and black, it's racism and it's anti-fatness, right?
Okay, so moving to Bell Hook's books, "Ain't I a Woman?"
And Hook talks about how slavery denied black women the social status and protections associated with black women were treated as sources of labor, sexual exploitation and profit.
So the first thing is labor and dehumanization that Bell Hook's talks about that black women were ruthlessly exploited in agricultural labor force, and they often performed the same tasks as black men.
And this reality contradicted the 19th century idea of the, quote, "cult of true womanhood," which was women being framed as fragile and physically weak and only suited for domestic labor.
And so white men were like, hang on, I'm seeing these black women working so hard, although black people are lazy, but hang on, but also they're working hard, make it make sense.
So they were saying that, you know, black women are showing them the opposite, and instead of being like, oh, I wonder what's going on here.
I believe that the women are weak and inferior, but I'm seeing these black women, you know, just not being weak and inferior.
So instead of being like, oh, I worked it out, it's 'cause I'm a sexist racist piece of shit, these white people concluded that, I know what it is, black women are not real women, of course, they're not real women.
So they were portrayed as, quote, "masculinized subhuman creatures."
And this started the myth of the black Amazon portraying black women as possessing an animalistic subhuman strength that justified their continued physical exploitation.
They're not real women.
So, you know, the cognitive dissonance in my brain, I don't need to think about it 'cause I'm just gonna move the goalposts.
And then the sexual exploitation, and, you know, black women were routinely subjected to sexual violence during slavery today.
And to justify this, white people, again, did some white logic and invented the myth of the bad or sexually loose black woman.
And this drew on Christian teachings that viewed women as the origin of sexual sin, i.e. Eve eating the apple, which is interesting, that the sins of the world were due to a woman, eating, biting a fucking apple.
The sins of the world due to a woman eating. (sniffles)
And it's this idea that women are susceptible to temptation. They're more likely to lead men into sexual sin.
So with this idea of women, they're labeled, black women as Jezebels or sexual savages.
And they made out that black women are, they're just naturally promiscuous, they're sexually aggressive, they're unable to control their animalistic desires.
And this absolved white men from the sadistic assaults, because, well, you know, they want it. They're savages, it's just, and they're so sexually aggressive.
And at the same time, that allowed white men to elevate white women's bodies as desexualized goddess-like, pure, innocent.
And then we also have breeding, black women having an economic value as breeding machines, and enslavers equating black women with livestock using forced breeding to increase their wealth.
So, Bell Hooks talks about the two images of black women describing the mammy and the sapphire.
The mammy, which is the stereotype that portrays black women as nurturing, you know, that breeding thing, self-sacrificing asexual caregivers whose primary purpose is to serve and care for white families.
It was used to justify and romanticize black women's exploitation.
Think Aunt Jemima, you know, on the, what is it, the syrup bottle, you know, that jolly, fat black woman just there to serve your white family with a smile on her face.
And then the other one, the sapphire, which is the stereotype that portrays black women as angry, aggressive, domineering, and difficult.
And I think that's another, quote, excellent tool to keep black women quiet is to say, oh, you're so angry, you're so aggressive, because then when a black woman shows the very much appropriate anger at this oppression, then it's, oh, look at this, angry black woman.
And so having to suppress their real emotions, again, like that, the idea of the spectacle.
Do it with a smile on your face, raise your concerns, but be nice about it.
So more about the mammy character.
So the mammy character, the fat, asexual mammy, is used as a tool to mask the reality of white men sexually exploiting black women in their homes.
So the mammy would be fat and unkempt, which renders her asexual.
And Sean Harrison talks about this in "Belly of the Beast" saying that this caricature continues to be enforced today, that the idea that a black fat body is only acceptable when performing labor or providing care for others.
Here's a quote from Deshaun.
"It is not too difficult to imagine how whites came to create the black mammy figure.
"Considering white male lust for bodies of black females, it is likely that white women were not pleased with young black women working in their homes for fear that liaisons between them and their husbands might be formed so they conjured up an image of the ideal black nanny.
"She was first and foremost asexual, and consequently she had to be fat, preferably oward.
"She also had to give the impression of not being clean.
"So she was the wearer of a greasy, dirty head rag, two tight shoes from which emerged her large feet were further confirmation of her bestial cow-like quality.
"Her greatest virtue was of course her love for white folk, whom she willingly and passively served.
"The mammy image was portrayed with affection by whites because it epitomized the ultimate sexist racist vision of ideal black womanhood, complete submission to the will of whites.
"And in a sense whites created in the mammy figure a black woman who embodied solely those characteristics they as colonizers wished to exploit."
And finally, we've got Black Feminist Thoughts by Patricia Hill Collins, and looking at the chapter, "Mammies, Matriarchs and Other Controlling Images."
"Controlling images are stereotypes about black women that help justify and maintain racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality by making racism, sexism, poverty, et cetera, appear natural, normal and inevitable.
"Controlling images."
And so it's like controlling stereotypes almost, but these images that we conjure in our brain of what can we do to keep people subjugated, claim that they're like this.
And so Patricia Hill Collins said that there's four primary controlling images, used to justify the subjugation of US black women.
We've got the mammy, and it's, you know, all of the stuff we talked about, she represents the good black mother, faithful, obedient, asexual domestic servant.
And then we have the matriarch, and that's the bad black mother.
And so the matriarch is depicted as overly aggressive, unfeminine, emasculates her lovers and husbands, and by claiming black women are too strong and domineering, we can blame black women for the poverty and failures, quote unquote, of their children. If we blame them, it means that we don't have to put the blame where it belongs, when there are inequalities, which is systemic issues.
So the matriarch is kind of, you know, similar to that, it's that again, it's that angry, you're bad.
And then we've got the Jezebel Hoochie, which is again, what we're talking about with the Jezebel before.
Deviant, sexually aggressive, whose sexual appetites are animalistic or freakish.
And finally, the welfare mother/welfare queen.
The welfare mother is described as an updated version of the enslaved breeder woman.
Notice how all of these things are just like weaving together all of the same concepts.
So the welfare mother is described as an updated version of the enslaved breeder woman, whose fertility was harnessed for economic gain.
The welfare mother image emerged to portray black women as content to sit around, collect state funds, and pass on bad values to their children.
And then this evolved into the highly materialistic and domineering welfare queen.
And this stereotype makes it easier to control black women's fertility and masking cuts to government social spending by blaming poverty entirely on the victims.