"White, Fat, and Racist": Racism and Environmental Accounts of Obesity

This paper offers a novel argument for the claim that "environmental" explanations of obesity meant to help address racial health disparities may actually reinforce racism. While some contend that these explanations reinforce racist and sizeist interracial dynamics, we argue that environmental explanations can bolster intraracial hierarchies of whiteness that reinforce white supremacy. Deployments of environmental accounts in contexts like the U.S. invoke and intertwine two damaging dichotomies: the "good fatty/bad fatty" and the "good white person/bad white person." This supports a cultural system that oppresses people of color and enables thin, white proponents to position themselves as "good white people" against those who deploy racist, moralizing accounts of obesity, and against fat white people, who are implicitly framed as morally inferior. This analysis furthers our understanding of racist and sizeist discourse about fatness and the insidious ways that attempts to address racism can reinforce it.