The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

Guest: Sabrina Strings, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, Author of “Fearing the Black Body” America is in the grips of an obesity epidemic, according to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. Health is the reason for our concern. Excess weight leads to a whole host of problems, we’re told. But if you pull the threads of that concern back a few centuries, the reasons why we’re so convinced that fat is bad, have a lot more to do with race than with health.