"On today’s episode of “You Can’t Make It Up, You Don’t Have To,” a CBS News documentary set to air Sunday promotes the notion that fear of gaining weight — okay, getting fat — is rooted in anti-blackness.
The CBN Originals documentary, “Speaking Frankly/Fat Shaming,” in part features University of California sociology professor Sabrina Springs, who relates the story of a conversation she had with her grandmother, who grew up in the South and later moved to California.
“My grandmother is a Black woman from the South, grew up during Jim Crow, and for her, being able to eat regularly was a triumph. One time she told me that she got a basket of oranges one Christmas and it was one of her happiest memories.“But when she decided to move to California in 1960, as a lot of Black people were doing at the time […] she encountered for the first time a lot of White women in her integrated community who were on diets, and she was like, ‘What? Why are White women on diets?’
This was something that she puzzled over for years, because no one could really provide her a satisfactory answer.”
Springs said her mother’s puzzlement led her to research the history of “fat-phobia” — the fear of “fatness” due to the stigmatization of weight — in the Western world...Read all.
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