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Why Black Women Are Fat
Why Black Women Are Fat
Why Black Women Are Fat
The black poet Lucille Clifton’s 1987 poem “Homage to My Hips” begins
with the boast, “These hips are big hips.” She establishes big black hips as
something a woman would want to have and a man would desire. She wasn’t the
first or the only one to reflect this community knowledge. Twenty years before,
in 1967, Joe Tex, a black Texan, dominated the radio airwaves across black
America with a song he wrote and recorded, “Skinny Legs and All.” One of his
lines haunts me to this day: “some man, somewhere who’ll take you baby,
skinny legs and all.” For me, it still seems almost an impossibility.
Chemically, in its ability to promote disease, black fat may be the same as
white fat. Culturally it is not.
How many white girls in the ’60s grew up praying for fat thighs? I know I did. I
asked God to give me big thighs like my dancing teacher, Diane. There was no
way I wanted to look like Twiggy, the white model whose boy-like build was the
dream of white girls. Not with Joe Tex ringing in my ears.
How many middle-aged white women fear their husbands will find them
less attractive if their weight drops to less than 200 pounds? I have yet to meet
one.
But I know many black women whose sane, handsome, successful husbands
worry when their women start losing weight. My lawyer husband is one.
And it’s not only aesthetics that make black fat different. It’s politics too. To
get a quick introduction to the politics of black fat, I recommend Andrea
Elizabeth Shaw’s provocative book “The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat
Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies.” Ms. Shaw argues that the fat black
woman’s body “functions as a site of resistance to both gendered and racialized
oppression.” By contextualizing fatness within the African diaspora, she invites
us to notice that the fat black woman can be a rounded opposite of the fit black
slave, that the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit
political statement and active political resistance.
The billions that we are spending to treat diabetes is money that we don’t
have for education reform or retirement benefits, and what’s worse, it’s
estimated that the total cost of America’s obesity epidemic could reach almost
$1 trillion by 2030 if we keep on doing what we have been doing.
My goal is to be the last fat black woman in my family. For me that has
meant swirling exercise into my family culture, of my own free will and volition.
I have my own personal program: walk eight miles a week, sleep eight hours a
night and drink eight glasses of water a day.
I expect obesity will be like alcoholism. People who know the problem
intimately find their way out, then lead a few others. The few become millions.
Down here, that movement has begun. I hold Zumba classes in my dining
room, have a treadmill in my kitchen and have organized yoga classes for
women up to 300 pounds. And I’ve got a weighted exercise Hula-Hoop I call the
black Cadillac. Our go-to family dinner is sliced cucumbers, salsa, spinach and
scrambled egg whites with onions. Our go-to snack is peanut butter — no added
sugar or salt — on a spoon. My quick breakfast is a roasted sweet potato, no
butter, or Greek yogurt with six almonds.
I may never get small doing all of this. But I have made it much harder for
the next generation, including my 24-year-old daughter, to get large.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 6, 2012, on Page SR5 of the New York edition with the
headline: Black Women And Fat.