Hasnain says:

“White America has always denigrated corpulence as a sign of immorality and sin. Historians, including Stearns, have long argued that modern Western dieting and beauty standards are direct descendants of puritanical Protestantism: fasting, self-discipline, and self-denial of earthly pleasures. More recently, sociologist Sabrina Strings, PhD, delved deeper into this connection, citing the confluence of Protestantism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In her 2019 book, Fearing the Black Body, Strings notes that the overtly racist concept of African gluttony, sloth, and ignorance, invented by European colonists and race scientists, met its perfect match in early American Protestantism. Thus, slimness was established as a mark of righteousness and superiority, while fatness symbolized unintelligence, immorality, and “blackness.””

Posted on 2022-11-06T22:25:54+0000