S1: Welcome in San Diego , it's Jade Hyndman. On today's midday edition , we're talking about the connection between body mass index and racism with researcher and author Sabrina Strings. This is KPBS Midday Edition. Connecting our communities through conversation. Anti fat bias or weight stigma , refers to the devaluation of people who are perceived to have excess body weight , and over the last 200 years , much of that stigma has been targeted towards black women in particular. To hear more about this , I sat down with Sabrina Strings , professor of Black studies at UC Santa Barbara. She's also author of the book Fearing the Black Body The Racial Origins of Fatphobia. I asked Professor Strings to take us back to where the societal desire for thinness began.
S2: We frequently believe that the desire to be thin has something to do with the medical field , that doctors realized that obesity was a problem , and that they started to try to get people to lose weight. And in fact , that's not true. What actually happened was that during the height of the slave trade , there were a number of various colonists who were going to the colonies , and they were writing reports about the size and shape of black people's bodies , and especially black women's bodies. Now , these reports were largely being used to suggest that , you know what ? Black people are overwhelmingly fat , and actually we're thin , and therefore we understand that we need to teach black people how to control themselves , how to control their so-called animal appetites. So the 18th century was the beginning of Europeans thinking that , well , Africans are prone to obesity , are prone to what they would call corpulent at the time. But us Europeans , we're thin , and we want to promote this as the proper way to manage your body. Yeah.
S3: Yeah.
S1:
S2: By the time race science intervened. And part of the issue that a lot of colonists were having is that , well , it was difficult to tell who should be slave and who should be free , because , as you might have imagined , all of the sex , not infrequently rape that was going on in the colonies. And so what this did was it created an idea that we could look at an individual's body and determine if we can't tell by skin color anymore. We can determine by their size whether or not they have a right to freedom. So this was used directly to justify ongoing enslavement and suggest that black women in particular should not be free. I mean , don't get me wrong , they were trying to apply it to many different populations , but black women were the center of the discourse because they were saying , look at their bodies. They don't know how to control themselves. Therefore they need colonial management.
S1: So they put this judgment on it and then attached a moral judgment really on on body size. Absolutely.
S2: Absolutely. They tried to turn what was ultimately a lucrative enterprise , enslaving people and exploiting them into a scientific enterprise. Hmm.
S3: Hmm.
S1: So tell me more about the role of race science. I heard you mention that earlier.
S2: The very first racial scientific treatise was written by a Frenchman named Francois Bernier , and it was four pages of him identifying how women look in different parts of the world according to things that he had read about or probably even seen. And so this inaugurated an entire series of trying to figure out , oh , wait , there must be biological differences of people in different regions of the world. Hmm. So let us then think about that. So his conception , he was literally like , there's 4 or 5 races. It's like , come on , dude , is it 4 or 5 ? But then after him in the 18th century , in the 19th century , people were like , there's definitely five. No there. Six. One guy who was like , oh , you know what ? There's dozens. And so we can see how preposterous all of this is now. But it was taken very seriously at a time period in which it was a very useful tool to put black people in a position of continuous enslavement. Mhm.
S3: Mhm.
S1: And it's all according to a man's perspective , too. And to this day you could go to a doctor's office and tell somebody that your toe hurts , and they will tell you it's because you need to lose weight.
S2: This is what makes this problem so outrageous because people don't understand. Doctors are also part of the culture. And so many medical doctors were learning , quote unquote , learning about black people through race science. And now we have this whole legacy of race science filtering into the medical field through eugenics that doctors today don't yet understand and honor. And it's one of the reasons why they think that what they're doing is race neutral , whereas in fact , it's very color conscious. Yeah.
S1: Yeah. And you mentioned eugenics.
S2: So race science was really a cultural movement. It was about , okay , let's look at different parts of the world and determine how people look and act. We know this to be false today. But eugenics was like , okay , now that we have these racial understandings , what if we applied them to the principle of quote unquote , better breeding ? So the whole idea of eugenics was like , okay , it's not just that there's differences in people across the globe , but that some people are better than others. And what we want to do is try to make sure these kinds of people , the good people , breed , and we're going to try to breed out the undesirables. And so one of the individuals who was integral to bringing Fatphobia into the medical field was actually a eugenicist by the name of , by the name of Charles Davenport. And this person inspired. And Sookie's , who was the man who coined the term body mass index.
S1: These things are are readily available. This information is readily available.
S2: There's the design , there's the inquiry , there's the results. This is not the kind of science that so-called obesity researchers were relying on. They were relying on a form of science known as eminence based medicine. That is , you have a very important white guy in a lab coat , and he's making rules for everyone else. So Charles Davenport was one such eminent theorist. And so keys was yet another eminent theorist , which is to say that people hold on to body mass index because very important white guys were telling them that this is something to think about and they have not yet let it go. And part of the reason why they haven't let it go , even though it did not follow the scientific method , was that it is extremely lucrative.
S1: Because.
S4: Because.
S2: Doctors , many of them are unaware of this history and others might be aware but they simply don't care. Unfortunately , this is a lot of what we're seeing in the medical field. Whenever a person of color shows up , there might already be a little bit of tension because you're being told about your health and your body , usually by a white person who may not have very much cultural competency. So on top of that , it is the case that black people have the heaviest weights in America. That doesn't necessarily have to mean anything about our health outcomes. In fact , I did a study in 2023 that showed black people are very highly likely to be diabetic when they are thin , when they're in the quote unquote , normal weight range. But the problem is these doctors are having a couple of things going wrong. They have this anti fat bias based on BMI. And then they also don't know very much about black persons. And so a black person who is fat can show up and meet a doctor. And they don't have any idea how to treat them with respect and kindness , even if the doctor might want to , because they haven't been trained. And so part of the difficulty that we're seeing is that a lot of fat people , and especially fat black people , don't want to go to the doctor. There's the troubling legacy of so-called obesity science. And of course , there's the always already problem of various forms of scientific experimentation on black people with Tuskegee and other forms of experiments that we're aware of. So there's a long legacy of the medical field being disrespectful or otherwise disregarding the humanity of black people. Yeah.
S3: Yeah.
S1: And you touched on this earlier when you talked about bone density , muscle mass , um , things that that may not be considered when we're talking about BMI. First.
S2: The guy who developed it was a Belgian statistician. His name was Adolph Kettle , and he did not develop this tool to suggest that it could give us some valuable information about the relationship between weight and health. He was actually just trying to do a survey of weights across the population , that's all. But when Charles Davenport got his hands on it , he renamed it the Index of Build. And then when Ansel Keys got his hands on it , he renamed it Body Mass Index. Now , this is a tool that was not in any way supposed to be used to tell people about the relationship between weight and health , and yet that's precisely how doctors have been using it. That's the first problem. The second problem is when they finally did start to do studies on BMI , the entire group under study were white people or. Overwhelmingly white men from only a handful of Western countries. It's like , come on. There's a reason why we demand representation in medical studies. It's not because race is biological , but it doesn't mean that race doesn't have an effect on our bodies , because maybe as a black person , you're going to live in an area without access to healthy fruits and vegetables. Maybe you'll be a Latino person who doesn't live in a walkable neighborhood. So because of the relationship between race and class in this country , people of different races might often have different body weights. So the fact that they only looked at white people in these studies is yet again , a form of racism.
S1: Indeed it is. This is KPBS Midday Edition. We're back after the break. Welcome back to KPBS Midday Edition. I'm Jade Hindman , speaking with Sabrina Strings today , who is a researcher and author. We are talking about the connection between body mass index and racism. You know , I noticed that when talking about obesity , you kind of you use the air quotes around it. Why is.
S3:
S2: And when I talk to them , they say they prefer the term fat to the term overweight or obese. And the reason is clear fat is simply a descriptor. You can call someone fat without trying to dehumanize them. But when you call someone overweight , you're suggesting a problem. When you call someone obese , you have literally turned fatness into a disease. That's why I prefer to follow the lead of the fat activists and just call fat people fat. Okay.
S1: Okay.
S4:
S2: There's certainly that correlation. And that's what they like to really lean into in the medical industry. They're like it's correlated with cancer. The problem is that a correlation can exist between two variables for any number of reasons. For example , there is a correlation between being black in America and being murdered by police. But the solution isn't to eradicate being black , right ? Um , correlations are not the same as causation. And so simply because two variables are correlated in a model may not tell us very much , as is the case with this ludicrous obesity science. Hmm.
S3: Hmm.
S1: Sabrina , how ? I mean , can you tell me how you first got interested in this work ? Yeah.
S2: You know , it actually came out of my family history. Um , my grandmother was part of the second wave of the Great Migration. She left Atlanta , Georgia with her small nuclear family and arrived in Los Angeles in 1960 and was suddenly met with all these white people and diets. And she was like , what ? Um , and , you know , in the mid 90s , when I was like a sophomore in high school , she'd be like calling me into conversations like , now look at this white woman. Why are these white women dying to meet them ? And , you know , as a kid , you're not that concerned about issues that might be pressing to your elders. You know , you're just sort of , like , off in your own little world. I like to tell people now , I was busy trying to master the choreography to Brandy's I want to Be down , you know , I couldn't. So I was like , I can't worry about.
S3: That , okay.
S2: But you know , about I want to say about eight years later , um , shortly after I finished my bachelor's degree , I was living and working in the San Francisco Bayview Hunters Point area , or I was working there rather , and I was living elsewhere in the Bay , and I met a couple of women of color at our particular clinic who didn't want to take their HIV meds because they did not want to gain weight. Now , this is a precise illustration of the problem. People are acting like any way that you can lose weight. To be thin is healthy , whereas we can all identify many different forms of people going on diets and getting less healthy. This is a prime example. Consider the fact that these are two women of color who were willing to risk their lives to remain thin , instead of simply taking their HIV meds. Mhm.
S3: Mhm.
S1: And you know , it's something I feel like it's a very California thing to write. I mean you were talking about , you know , your mother and your grandmother , everybody kind of asking what is the deal with this wanting to be thin. And then you think about like even the founder of Jazzercise , Judi Sheppard , mischief or mischief , she she was from California. Um , I want to say , wasn't the founder of Jenny Craig. She was from she's from California to the San Diego area. Um , it's so deeply ingrained in the area , too , I think. Yeah.
S4: Yeah.
S2: You know what ? That's actually a wonderful connection that I had not made before. It makes me want to do more research into this. It's interesting because I often describe this in terms of Jim Crow. My grandmother left the Jim Crow South in 1960 and arrived in Pasadena , and it was more integrated. But let's not act like there are all of California for that matter , is not still a racist place. Um , but what was interesting for my grandmother growing up , and part of the reason why she had this question in her mind was that in the black community in Atlanta at the time , she was considered to be too thin. You know , she was like told that she had like , pencil legs or like chicken legs or , you know , there were a lot of , like , leg based dishes. And so when she arrived in a community where this was prized , she was confused. So and I talk about this in my book as well , there were definitely different regional , um , demands in terms of women's appearance. And in the West , for some reason it was the case , possibly because of the link to Hollywood and their expectations for a woman's appearance. But it was certainly the case that on the West Coast , women were expected to be thinner. Hmm.
S3: Hmm.
S1: Popular media often highlights whatever body is considered desirable at a given moment.
S2: You know , when I first started doing this research , I was like , oh , you know what ? There used to be Marilyn Monroe. So white ladies had that. And then there was Twiggy , and I was like a few years later. So for a long time I was like , that was something that happened in the 50s , in the 60s , you know. Um , but , you know , as I started to research this , um , some of the people , some of the incredible people on my committee at UC San Diego were like , you should be looking at women's magazines , because women's magazines usually tell women how they're supposed to look. And sure enough , very quickly looking into the history of women's magazines , I could see that white women who were identifying as proud Anglo-Saxons were trying to teach other Anglo-Saxon women how to eat , because they would say things like temperance at the table is very important. It was important. For godliness. And it was important racially. This was something that they were saying at the tail end of the 19th century. Hmm.
S3: Hmm.
S1: Can we talk about two about how fatphobia stands in the way of employment , even and and sort of and rising up the ranks ? Yeah.
S4:
S2: Fatphobia impacts every aspect of our lives. Really ? All of our lives. But it hurts fat people and especially fat black people first and worst. And so it is absolutely the case. There's so much research that suggests that if you are fat , people might assume that you're incompetent. Um , like , oh , well , you're not competent enough to know how much to eat , and therefore you couldn't possibly perform this job. Well , these kinds of discrimination exist everywhere , and I highly recommend that people look into this. There's there's so many different places where they can find information , but the reality is that you might not be hired for a job or you might be hired for a job in which people are expecting you to be maybe behind the scenes. So there's so many different ways in which the expectations about how women should look , which , again , rooted in the white male gaze , um , impacts whether or not you can even be employed.
S1: That was a conversation with Sabrina Strings , professor of black studies at UC Santa Barbara. She's also author of the 2019 book Fearing the Black Body The Racial Origins of Fatphobia. So that's our show for today. I'm your host , Jade Hindman. Thanks for tuning in to Midday Edition. Be sure to have a great day on purpose , everyone.
