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The color of fat: racializing obesity, recuperating whiteness, and reproducing injustice

ABSTRACT I argue here that even sympathetic representations of obesity as a pathology most prevalent among black and Latina/o women and children can help reproduce racial injustice. At a time when fatness is deeply stigmatizing, fat bodies denote civic unfitness, and high white obesity rates jeopardize whiteness, raced and gendered obesity discourses effectively reify white superiority and maintain white dominance. They function as a racial project in two ways. First, they fortify white normativity by associating nonwhiteness with fatness and pathology and by exalting “white” consumption practices. Second, because they unfold in a political context pervaded by welfare-queen imagery, these discourses forge a new public identity of black womanhood, the obese black woman, which revives tropes of black women as insatiable, lazy bad mothers who deplete the state and economy. This imagery invites and justifies discriminatory and exclusionary practices that sustain structural racial inequality. To combat rather than reproduce racial inequality, anti-racist anti-obesity discourses must expose obesity as an embodiment of structural racism and promote structural transformation.