The Weight of Stigma: Confronting Fatphobia in the Black Community

Fatphobia has always been about more than health. It is about visibility, desirability, and control. It punishes what can be seen while ignoring the hidden struggles that many carry. And nowhere is its impact more complicated than in the Black community, where centuries of exploitation, double standards, and desirability politics have shaped how bodies are viewed, judged, and valued.

In African traditions, fullness was once celebrated as a sign of abundance, fertility, and prosperity. But under colonialism and enslavement, Black bodies were stripped of that meaning and instead subjected to European ideals of thinness as refinement and superiority. By the 19th and 20th centuries, slimness was marketed as discipline and class, while fatness became synonymous with laziness, failure, and lack of control.

No story captures this violent shift more clearly than that of Sarah Baartman, a South African woman paraded through Europe in the early 1800s as a sideshow attraction under the name “Hottentot Venus.” Her body, specifically her buttocks, was gawked at, ridiculed, and dissected by audiences who saw her as less than human. Drawings and posters exaggerated her figure for mockery, turning her existence into a cruel spectacle. Baartman’s story is not just a tragic footnote; it is the blueprint for how Black women’s bodies have been simultaneously fetishized and shamed ever since.

The echoes of Baartman’s exploitation still shape desirability politics today. Within Black culture and beyond, weight is not judged equally — it is judged by where it sits. When weight is proportioned to the hips, thighs, and butt, it is often celebrated as “thick,” praised as desirable, and even glorified in music and media. A smaller waist or flat stomach can allow someone to be embraced as the cultural “ideal,” regardless of being full-figured overall.

Advertisement

But when weight gathers elsewhere — in the stomach, arms, back, or face — the celebration disappears. Suddenly, that same fullness becomes “unhealthy,” “sloppy,” or “undesirable.” The line between “thick” and “fat” isn’t drawn by health; it’s drawn by desirability. And the cruel irony is that this desirability is shaped by the same colonial and patriarchal gaze that once turned Baartman into a spectacle.

This contradiction leaves many Black women caught in an exhausting negotiation with their own bodies. One is praised, another shamed — not because of who they are, but because of how their weight can be consumed by the eye. It proves that fatphobia is not about wellness. It is about whether a body can be molded into a fantasy that others find acceptable.

For those who fall outside this narrow standard, the weight of stigma is heavy. It shows up in families where children are nicknamed “big-boned” before they even understand what that means. It shows up in doctors’ offices where concerns are dismissed as “just lose weight,” while deeper issues go ignored. It shows up in dating, where desirability politics erase plus-sized women unless their bodies align with the hourglass mold.

And perhaps most insidiously, it hides behind “health.” People are quick to label fatness as unhealthy, while ignoring invisible sicknesses that don’t announce themselves in size — mental illness, cancer, STDs, blood disorders, autoimmune diseases, stress, insomnia, depression. These illnesses are just as dangerous, but they don’t make someone a visible target. Fatness does. That is why fatphobia stings so sharply: it singles out what can be seen and disguises the punishment as concern.

The truth is this: fatphobia is not natural to us. It was imposed, reinforced, and internalized over generations. Our ancestors once honored fullness, and we can reclaim that reverence by rejecting narrow ideals and embracing the dignity of every body. To be liberated is to say that health cannot be measured by desirability, and worth cannot be tied to proportions.

Blackness in every size — hips, stomach, arms, face, curves, or no curves at all — has always been beautiful. And it will remain beautiful long after these false standards fall away.