This afternoon, Jovelyn Richards, one of the rotating hosts of KPFA's book program Cover to Cover, had a delightful half-hour interview with author Sabrina Springs on her new book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat-Phobia. The thesis is that white American women were subjected to pressure to be "disciplined" in their behavior with stereotypes which associated round-bodiedness and excessive appetites with the supposed primitiveness of non-white and particularly African women. The pressure was eventually so effective, and white American women were so emaciatign themselves, that ironically the cereal maker Kellogg then tried to encourage them to gain weight back, fearing that too many white women would be unable to bear children and would trigger the much-feared "white genocide".
https://kpfa.org/episode/cover-to-cover-open-book-may-29-2019/
https://kpfa.org/episode/cover-to-cover-open-book-may-29-2019/