A weight culture journalist said during an interview Tuesday that fitness-minded people working on a thin body type are “complicit with white supremacy and patriarchy.”
Author Virginia Sole-Smith told NPR’s “Fresh Air” podcast that United States society’s desire to be skinny — and adversity to fatness — can be traced to the end of American slavery as a way of preserving out-of-touch, white beauty standards.
“The thin ideal is definitely a white ideal. When we trace the history of modern diet culture, we really trace it back in the United States to the end of slavery,” Sole-Smith told host Tonya Mosley while promoting her new book, “Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.”
“Obviously, white supremacy is trying to maintain the power structure. So celebrating a thin white body as the ideal body is a way to ‘other’ and demonize black and brown bodies, bigger bodies, anyone who doesn’t fit into that norm. So this is really about maintaining systems of white supremacy and patriarchy.”
“If you can understand that, actually, by continuing to pursue thinness you are in some level, maintaining your complicity with white supremacy and patriarchy,” she added.
Sole-Smith — whose work centers upon reclaiming the word “fat” and teaching children not to fear weight gain — pointed to sociologist Sabrina Strings’ 2020 work, which made the case that white Europeans noticed black slaves were naturally thicker and decided they didn’t want to pursue that body ideal anymore.
As generations progressed and skin color could no longer be a clear indicator of an individual’s ethnicity — particularly after slavery in America ended — white Americans looked for other ways to “other” themselves from those they deemed as less than them, she said.
Also, in her book “Fearing the Black Body” Sabrina Strings explained how the preference for thinness allegedly stems from slavery.
Strings’ told NPR in 2020: “They decided to articulate new aspects of racial identity. And so eating and body size became two of the characteristics that were being used to suggest that these are people who do not deserve freedom.”
Sole-Smith also argued that fat people experience a similar form of stigma as those who live under the thumb of “racism or other forms of bias.”
The author said society’s disgust of fat people results in daily implicit bias or outright prejudice.
“This raises your stress level this has you in a constant state of fight or flight and stress hormones are elevated. That takes a toll on our bodies,” she said. “This is how we ask that people to move through the world: always on guard knowing that they may be ridiculed, shamed, stigmatized. That takes a toll on our mental health and our physical health.”
Doctors are some of the worst perpetrators of anti-fat bias, Sole-Smith said.
The author said providers tend to blame weight for their fat patients’ health issues, even when an individual comes in seeking treatment for a sprained ankle or sinus infection.
“It means that fat folks often receive subpar health care compared to send people with the same conditions,” Sole-Smith said. “They may be delayed on getting actual treatment because they’re told they have to pursue weight loss before they’re a candidate for a medication or surgery or whatever would be the recommended course of action for a thin person. It also means that folks, then understandably delay going to the doctor, they’re more likely to doctor shop.”