"But it wasn’t until the late seventeenth century that fat became a resource for racial categorization. The writings of early race scientists like George Cuvier, J.J. Virey, and Georges-Louis Leclerc drew direct ties between gluttony, stupidity, and the characteristics of Africans, whose idleness was attributed to their warm climate (a pervasive trope also found in colonial discourse about India). Enlightenment-era rationalism elevated food to the moral plane of asceticism required for intellectual pursuit. Soon, a thin physique had gone from being a sign of sickliness to evidence of the moral and intellectual superiority of Europeans, supported by the writings of anthropologists and naturalists seeking to codify and biologize a racial hierarchy. These works placed particular emphasis on the bodies of southern African women, who were depicted as grotesquely monstrous and animalistic while also serving as a source of voyeuristic fascination in formats like Cuvier’s traveling ethnographic menagerie, which featured pay-per-view displays of robust enslaved African women like Saartjie Baartman."
Hannah Carlan
“Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia"
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