Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

not amazing and not really what i expected it to be. doesn’t go into much depth, the topic is way too huge and broad for a book of under 300 pages. not bad, but i didn’t really learn much.

I don't want to rate this since Goodreads only allows you to rate based on if you've liked it and it's kind of a dilemma for me because it is an IMPORTANT book but reading it was just not fun. It's very scientific and I'm glad my college education helped me through it but I would not recommend it to people who just want to start knowing more about racism and fat phobia. (Could be that it also depends on your mother tongue how much you understand.) The aspects stated in this book are not new to many scholars and people who care for social issues in general but Strings did a good job on collecting all of them and making them describable and scientifically proven. Another book to prove that racism really is a system and not an individual problem!

This is a very informative book about the history of black women and how the "ideal body" changed over the decades. At times, a bit dry, that's why I took a while for me to get through. However, it is well-researched and gives you plenty of information in terms of history, stereotypes, and the different "other."