with two humps instead of the single humped Dromedary...though Willie Green swears there were more than two humps involved.
Posted on 08/22/2020 9:42:13 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Watch the new CBSN Originals documentary, "Speaking Frankly | Fat Shaming," in the video player above. It premieres on CBSN Sunday, August 23, at 8 p.m., 11 p.m., and 2 a.m. ET.
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.
As the art and fashion historian Anne Hollander wrote in a New York Times article from 1977, "The look of actual human bodies obviously changes very little through history. But the look of ideal bodies changes a great deal all the time."
While the 1977 Times article considers the switch to thinness as the preferable body type to be part of "a period of revolution in both taste and politics" in the late 18th century, Strings' research traces how that "revolution" is actually rooted in slavery and Protestantism.
"With the dawn of the slave trade, skin color was the original sorting mechanism to determine who was slave and who was free. But as you might imagine, with slavery progressing through the century, skin color became a less reliable source of sorting various populations," Strings explained to CBSN Originals.
"Therefore, they decided to re-articulate racial categories, adding new characteristics, and one of the things that the colonists believed was that Black people were inherently more sensuous, that people love sex and they love food, and so the idea was that Black people had more venereal diseases, and that Black people were inherently obese, because they lack self-control. And of course, self-control and rationality, after the Enlightenment, were characteristics that were deemed integral to Whiteness."
Strings found that these ideas about Blackness were "synergistic" with Protestant and Christian ideals. The "Protestant ethic," initially coined by sociologist Max Weber in 1904-1905, describes the concept of hard work and self-discipline as highly valued traits that would lead to eternal salvation. The "mortification of the flesh," or the act of putting sins related to the body to death by abstaining from certain pleasures, is a concept common to all Christian denominations, reflected in practices like fasting or abstinence. Strings says that many of these ideas were taken up by Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the U.S. in the 19th century.
"What they wanted to do was show that they were both morally upright and racially proper, in the way in which they ate and how they maintained their figures," said Strings. "And so, they were very clear that to be of the elite race and to be a Christian peoples means that you need to show what they would call temperance in the face of food — or restraint is the way we might think of today — because if you did not show temperance, that was evidence that you were one of the savages, and also, that you were un-Christian."
While the medical community and public health officials continue to study the serious health risks associated with obesity, Strings' research provides context around the social and cultural issues related to weight — and the legacy of racist and outdated ideals embedded in many of our common assumptions.
"We cannot deny the fact that fat-phobia is rooted in anti-Blackness. That's simply an historical reality," she said. "Today, when people talk about it, they often claim that they don't intend to be anti-Black ... they don't intend all of these negative associations, and yet they exist already, so whenever people start trafficking in fat-phobia, they are inherently picking up on these historical forms of oppression."
You're paying for it - in more ways than one!
Regards,
Agreed.
I think the author (Strings) has her brain strings too tight.
There are obese women in every race. Some is due to genetics, some to “food poverty” or “limited available foods” (whale blubber for example), or just bad eating habits.
Re “genetics”, let’s take the racial differences in “black” women across much of Africa. You have the more slender Masai, the Nilotic Nubians of the Nile River, the Congo pygmies, the Hottentotts with their extended buttocks (water storage in their very dry desert homeland), to Yorubas, Fulanis, Ibos, Housa, Zulu, Luo, Kikuyu, etc. throughout the continent.
European women also have some obesity traits, from the peasants of Eastern Europe to some Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards.
Genetic isolation plus environmental conditions (limited food sources such as face the Eskimos, Chuckchi reindeer herders of Siberia and related ones in Finland, Newfoundland, the Yak herdsmen of Mongolia, etc.) all can lead to survival obesity.
Rich foods in Western Europe, America, etc. add un-needed poundage while food poverty in Appalachia showed genetic extremes from obese to rail thin.
If Italian/Greek painters and sculpturers liked heavy women during one art period, and then slender ones in another, IT IS CALLED A TREND. For the liberal-left-minded illiterates, you can find a definition of “trend” in a dictionary, if you know what one is.
Characterization by weight can be racist as happened in many American newspapers, esp. in the South, for a long time, but then again, both the Nazis of Germany and the Communists of the Soviet Union (and pre-SU Russia), showed Jews with exaggerated facial features and physical postures.
Not everyone is nice to everyone else. We have to live with some of this being due to insecure and/or mentally ill people perpetuating stereotypes, but also to liberals as they describe conservatives in similarly psychotic words.
The world is a complicated place and so is humanity. The more we understand about the mechanisms that work in both the world and human beings, the better are our chances of trying to weaken the more harmful discrimination that takes place in most societies.
The chances of the Left ever understanding this “need” is best described in two words, pun intended - “Fat Chance!”
I deny fat phobia, and I deny it is rooted in Anti-blackness.
This would be funny if it wasn’t so lame. What about those monster cabooses white women are paying thousands for?
She actually died of a heart attack brought on by crash diets and opioid abuse. In Harry Nilsson’s flat. Where Keith Moon died four years ealier.
Show people!
Look at the kids. High schoolers in the 70s were string beans compared to kids today.
with two humps instead of the single humped Dromedary...though Willie Green swears there were more than two humps involved.
So now being obese and wanting to get healthy is racist. It’s official - there’s nothing a leftist can’t inject racism into!
I have been using the Weight Watchers app for two months now (doing great, thanks). In the groups where people post pictures, before & now, etc., there are PLENTY of black women in the process of getting healthy - and they look very happy and not oppressed.
By the way, I joined WW because radio talker Mike Gallagher has been referring to his now-50+ pound weight loss and he mentioned counting points, although he didn’t mention the name WW and said they weren’t a sponsor. A friend has also lost 40 pounds during lockdown with it, and she eats out almost every meal. The version I’m on is not restrictive at all, not like old WW!
This is absolutely insane. I want to look at the data.
Every culture has an ideal that they like their women to fit into. I’m thin and short, but a near perfect hourglass; I never find clothes that fit outside of vintage shops.
In earlier times, heavy, pale women were desirable because that meant they didn’t have to work, and therefore their families had money. Women started becoming thin around Twiggy; androgyny became “in” and women expected to be Calista Flockhart small.
And having grown up heavy and as pale as a GD lily, I was relentlessly teased. No racial component.
None of that passes the sniff test. There were white slaves too, and they were highly prized in Africa because they were an oddity.
That was actually fascinating.
And race has no impact on medicine, right? It affects your genetics, which determine your health; it has an impact.
This is nothing but denial of reality and Blame Shifting.
4 Out Of 5 American black women are morbidly obese.
Not black women in Nigeria, or Senegal - but AMERICAN black women.
Jesus specifically warned about overeating:
"And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with excess eating and drunkenness and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares."
Some translations say "feasting" or "surfeiting" - which means: 1: an overabundant supply : excess. 2 : an intemperate or immoderate indulgence in something (such as food or drink) 3 : disgust caused by excess.
It isn't a "White" thing to point out that God is not pleased with overindulgence. Obesity isn't caused by "racism." It is caused by eating too much, eating junk food, and drinking too much alcohol.
There have always been slaves throughout history. The practice predates recorded history in many cultures.
The author takes aim at Christianity because temperance and self-discipline are “bad”. Both of those virtues extend beyond eating to good work ethic, maintaining a home, setting good examples for children, good health, treating people fairly. Most importantly, showing respect for the Creator and your body, which was meant to be a temple of the Holy Spirit.
All reasons for leftists to hate Christianity, since they adhere to the Satanic motto, “Do as thou wilt.”
I’m as white as you can get. My parents were both grand children of Scandinavian immigrants. Up until now, I’ve been “over weight” ever since I was a teenager. My mother grew up during the depression living in a family of four, lead by a single mother who’s only income came from working as a maid for other families in small town middle America. It was not a very easy life for them. Her father died from an industrial accident, and the family was on their own for survival. On many nights the family went to bed hungry. This was not untypical for many families of that era.
My family was also typical of post WWII. My father grew up on a farm where he reached “adulthood” when he turned 14, “graduated” from eighth grade, and was sent to work essentially as an indentured servant a hundred miles from home. He was the breadwinner of our family, and worked as a laborer all of his life. My sister and I grew up on the lower side of the economic ladder, but never considered our family “poor”. We always had sufficient food, and my mother made sure we ate it - all of it. No one EVER left the dinner table with food on their plates.
I grew up overweight. To this day, I never leave the table with food on my plate. It was drummed into our heads that slim, “picky eaters” were bad, and that “big boned” was good. This is certainly not a scourge of Blacks only. Justifying it on the basis of skin color is as racist as the KKK.
For the record, over the last 2 years I have lost 75 lbs., and am now down to my “ideal” BMI. I intend to keep it there. I accelerated my pace to achieve this because of COVID-19. Obesity was my only co-morbidity other than age, and I can’t do anything about that.
Also claims self discipline is racist.
My disapproval of obesity is directly linked to the fact that they want me to pay for their health care .
Marry, sir, she’s the kitchen wench and all grease;
and I know not what use to put her to but to make a
lamp of her and run from her by her own light. I
warrant, her rags and the tallow in them will burn a
Poland winter: if she lives till doomsday,
she’ll burn a week longer than the whole world.
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