I’ve been reading “Fearing the Black Body” by Sabrina Strings. Opening chapters explores many of the ideas that early Europeans made to be our “norm” as we know it today. How it came from the need to distinguish lines around freedom. Developing many of the ideas we even have around food and dieting in fitness culture as we know it today.
Before the 18th century, the curvy body was widely accepted across the globe. The fuller figured femme was valued, you saw it in the Renaissance paintings of the time. Then as the slave trade grew, and white Europeans discovered that the bodies of Africans were also curvy, and they couldn’t have that.
White Europeans shifted their prospective to value being slender, and began to villainize food and the pleasure that could be brought from it. The shift came to put a dividing line between them as Europeans and Africans, to show who deserved freedom, and those who didn’t.
That makes me incredibly sick.
As anything evolves, we can see how these ideas manifest in our world today. We have every diet under the sun that eliminates ethnic foods. The invention of the BMI, and the continuous obstacles anyone who is fat must navigate when seeking medical treatment (not to mention the obstacles if you’re fat and Black).
The diet and fitness culture has played a huge role in my life, and at times still does. I’ve played part in keeping this system of oppression…..going. A majority of the body positivity movement has been taken over by thin, white women; when it was begun by Black women for bodies that didn’t fit the mold. Not to say those who are in “socially acceptable” bodies don’t still feel social pressures to be ‘perfect’, we all have some sort of pressure to look like people we see in media. But body positivity is a call for liberation of the bodies that are outright stigmatized by media. The bodies everyone fears to be.
This book is taking me a bit to get through. I have to take periods of time to unravel the things that I’ve learned to embody this information. I highly recommend, especially to those in the fitness industry, to read this book. It will definitely open your eyes to the lie of “it’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle”.