Josephine Baker embodied a curvier form of the ideal black woman. / Walery/Getty Images
Black Women and Fat
By ALICE RANDALL
Published: May 5, 2012
FOUR out of five black women are seriously overweight. One out of four middle-aged black women has diabetes. With $174 billion a year spent on diabetes-related illness in America and obesity quickly overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer deaths, it is past time to try something new.
What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America. Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.
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.
Another friend, a woman of color who is a tenured professor, told me that her husband, also a tenured professor and of color, begged her not to lose “the sugar down below” when she embarked on a weight-loss program.
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.
When the biologist Daniel Lieberman suggested in a public lecture at Harvard this past February that exercise for everyone should be mandated by law, the audience applauded, the Harvard Gazette reported. A room full of thin affluent people applauding the idea of forcing fatties, many of whom are dark, poor and exhausted, to exercise appalls me. Government mandated exercise is a vicious concept. But I get where Mr. Lieberman is coming from. The cost of too many people getting too fat is too high.
I live in Nashville. There is an ongoing rivalry between Nashville and Memphis. In black Nashville, we like to think of ourselves as the squeaky-clean brown town best known for our colleges and churches. In contrast, black Memphis is known for its music and bars and churches. We often tease the city up the road by saying that in Nashville we have a church on every corner and in Memphis they have a church and a liquor store on every corner. Only now the saying goes, there’s a church, a liquor store and a dialysis center on every corner in black Memphis.
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.
WE have to change. Black women especially. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blacks have 51 percent higher obesity rates than whites do. We’ve got to do better. I’ve weighed more than 200 pounds. Now I weigh less. It will always be a battle.
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 call on every black woman for whom it is appropriate to commit to getting under 200 pounds or to losing the 10 percent of our body weight that often results in a 50 percent reduction in diabetes risk. Sleeping better may be key, as recent research suggests that lack of sleep is a little-acknowledged culprit in obesity. But it is not just sleep, exercise and healthy foods we need to solve this problem — we also need wisdom.
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.
That’s soul food, Nashville 2012.
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.
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Let's Get Real:
A Reponse to Alice Randall's
'Black Women and Fat'
I tried to ignore Alice Randall's op-ed in the New York Times Opinion pages after reading the title. I've grown weary of any title that consists of the terms "Black Women" and "weight," so I figured I would save myself from any possible annoyance. Of course, this fabulous invention called the internet simply would not let me be great. Randall's piece was everywhere - from my Twitter timeline to my gmail inbox. So giving into the peer pressure, I clicked on the link leading to it and had my initial fears confirmed. Once again, black women are on the receiving end of a scolding for the rise of obesity in the U.S.
In her piece, Ms. Randall made light of such a complex issue by correlating our rates of obesity to our supposed desire to keep our men happy. Not once did she bring up the issue of economics and food deserts. Its no secret that the black community has been one of those to be hit the hardest by the economic downturn. With many families lacking proper monetary funds, it becomes impossible for them to buy organic foods. And even if they were able to buy a few fresh, organic apples once or twice a month, where would they go?! The First Lady has brought to the forefront the issue of food deserts - urban areas that lack adequate grocery stores. In many urban areas, you may come across 3 chicken spots, 2 McDonalds and a Chinese takeout before you ever find a grocery store. Surely this deprivation of fresh foods plays a considerable role in the health issues that is affecting our communities. I respect Alice Randall's quest to be healthy and fit, and I respect her call to arms for other women to get healthy with her. However, I need her and others to stop trying to make black women the face of the obesity epidemic. We are not. This is a nation-wide issue that is in need of a nation-wide solution. When discussing how obesity affects marginalized communities, we must take into account what foods are available in neighborhood supermarkets, on our blocks and in our schools. We have to take into account that losing weight is a momentous action that affects one psychologically as well as physically. And most importantly, we must understand that one's weight is not THE way to make conclusions about one's overall wellness. So many other factors must be taken into account. I implore Ms. Randall and others to educate themselves more, and to stop making us the whipping-boys (or shall I say the whipping-girls) of our nation's failings. Valerie Jean-Charles is a 23 year old community servant and writer in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BA in Political Science from Fordham University. Follow at @Empressval to join her never-ending conversations about everything and then some.
>via: http://www.forharriet.com/2012/05/lets-get-real-reponse-to-alice-randall.html...
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The Warning Signs Are There
Eleanor Hinton Hoytt is the president and chief executive of the Black Women’s Health Imperative.
MAY 7, 2012
Does the current conversation on black women and weight attempt to answer the critical question of why so many of us, across the age and class spectrum, flounder under the undue burden of being overweight?
I suspect not.
Most of us are well aware that obesity is deeply rooted in black culture. It's the result of our culinary legacy, sedentary lifestyles, where we live and what we eat. But what we, at the Black Women’s Health Imperative, are beginning to understand more is the very complex and vexing relationship that black women have with their bodies.
Black women miss a lot of the warning signs, and often weight-related symptoms, of illness, depression and discrimination.
It is a relationship that causes us to be disconnected from our physical selves. Therefore we miss a lot of the warning signs, and often weight-related symptoms, of illness, depression and discrimination.
We also labor under the misguided notion that bigness denotes power and strength. By being overweight, we’re big and in control, taking care of our kids and everyone else, but not ourselves. But most important, we love our curves, or so we tell ourselves. As do our men.
It’s a myth that’s slowly killing us, and as black women, we need to come together to support one another in health and wellness – something we don’t naturally do well.
I agree with Alice Randall: We have to change! We must take off our masks and face the reality that for black women and our families, obesity is an epidemic. We must come to grips with the fact that obesity is a leading preventable cause of poor health and death.
It is time for black women to kick the old habits of denial and misguided optimism and make an uncompromised commitment to put our health first.
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>via: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/07/women-weight-and-wellness/the...
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One Size Does Not Fit All
Stephanie Covington Armstrong, a writer and speaker, is the author of "Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: A Story of Bulimia."
UPDATED MAY 7, 2012, 7:18 PM
Good health is paramount to our survival. Without taking proper care of ourselves, the quality of our lives is compromised and affects everything we attempt to be and do.
Maybe this perceived acceptance of black fat is based on black women living in a society that constantly reminds them of their second-class status: less likely to marry, more likely to earn less or live in poverty, not seen as being as attractive as white women…This is a personal and not a political issue.
You can be darn sure we learn to love ourselves, big thighs and all, because our spiritual survival depends upon it.
As a black woman recovered from an eating disorder, I learned the hard way that without real self-esteem, it doesn’t matter what my body looks like. At various times in my life I have either loved or loathed my body. It has never been oversized, heavy, zaftig, obese or fat -- but that did not deter me from viewing my image with shame. When I learned to answer some important questions honestly both my self-esteem and my body recovered. Am I living my best, most fulfilled life? Am I eating to nurture my body or am I using food to shove down deeper issues? Does it really matter what size I am if my thoughts are fat and unhealthy? This is a personal and not a political issue. It’s a conversation I can have only with myself. While there is a greater acceptance of a curvaceous body in the black community, that holds true for other cultures as well -- Latino, Armenian, Italian and Greek, to name a few. I don’t believe you can generalize that it’s universally acceptable to be one weight based solely on skin tone. That would be like saying Barack Obama and Wiz Khalifa are identical. One size, pun intended, does not fit all.
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>via: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/05/07/women-weight-and-wellness/one...