Once you accept that white supremacy is at the root of every ill minorities face today, everything begins to make so much more sense. According to a professor at Portland State University, for example, the higher obesity rate among minorities is just another racial injustice perpetrated by white privilege.
Breitbart reports that political science professor Rachel Sanders argues in a recent journal article that "discourses that racialize obesity contribute to a racial project of preserving white normativity, derogating black femininity, and rationalizing racial disparities in health, wealth and life chances." She goes on to observe, in typical academic and social justice jargon,
Only by sustaining a critical approach to constructions of public health crises, and by explicitly treating obesity as an embodiment of structural racial injustice, can we redirect critical and political energy away from emphasizing and stigmatizing the symptoms of an unjust basic structure and towards overhauling the structure itself. A transformative approach to racial and gender patterning of obesity in particular, and racial health disparities in general, must analytically connect the racial demography of obesity to structural racism and must address the former by redressing the latter. In short, transforming bodies requires transforming the basic structure.
As Breitbart notes, black and Hispanic Americans do have the “highest age-adjusted rates of obesity” at 48.1 percent and 42.5 percent, respectively, among ethnic groups recorded in the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study (with “non-Hispanic whites” coming in third at 34.5 percent). But Sanders claims that this medical imbalance "reifies white superiority”:
Sanders writes that talking about the high rates of obesity amongst minorities is problematic because it “effectively reif(ies) white superiority and maintain(s) white dominance,” especially at a time when “fatness is deeply stigmatizing, fat bodies denote civic unfitness, and high white obesity rates jeopardize whiteness.”“Processes of devaluing fatness, blackness, brownness, and femininity—and thus of idealizing thinness, whiteness, and masculinity as norms and passports to privilege—have been central to the semiotic construction of the ideal American body,” she argues. “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.”
So if you thought that the obesity epidemic among minorities is something that could be addressed through such common-sense steps as nutrition education, better eating, and exercise, you're missing the bigger picture: the problem isn't obesity; it's the devaluing of fatness and bodies of color, and the privilege of thinness and whiteness.
