A review by beautyisterror
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

4.0

This book set out to underline the historical evidence that fatphobia is forged and steeped in racism, which often goes ignored in books about the history of fatphobia and how it came to be, and it did exactly that - yet while reading it I expected black people to be more prominent.

Especially in the last chapters it became exceedingly clear that, between eugenists thinking minorities in America would die out and their racial bias not including them (or not accounting for them) in their research, the world, especially in the last couple centuries, has been built around the lack of understanding of black women's needs and features - but still always used them as a cautionary tale to keep white women in check.

I thought the early chapters were interesting but as they went on every single paragraph seemes to drag on and reiterate the same concept over and over; sometimes i felt trapped in a loop and had to check i wasn't reading the same page over and over again. Despite that the book is well researched and gives plenty of resources to find new information about the topic (half of the text is made up of notes and bibliography!).