Portland State Professor: Higher Obesity Rates Among Minorities Is ‘Racial Injustice’

A professor at Portland State University argued in a recent journal article that the higher obesity rate amongst American minorities is a racial injustice.

Rachel Sanders, a political science professor at Portland State University, argues in a recent journal article that the higher obesity rate amongst minorities is a racial injustice because it perpetuates “white superiority.”

As long as America’s basic structure remains racially unjust, discourses that racialize obesity contribute to a racial project of preserving white normativity, derogating black femininity, and rationalizing racial disparities in health, wealth and life chances. Only by sustaining a critical approach to constructions of public health crises, and by explicitly treating obesity as an embodiment of structural racial injustice, can we redirect critical and political energy away from emphasizing and stigmatizing the symptoms of an unjust basic structure and towards overhauling the structure itself. A transformative approach to racial and gender patterning of obesity in particular, and racial health disparities in general, must analytically connect the racial demography of obesity to structural racism and must address the former by redressing the latter. In short, transforming bodies requires transforming the basic structure.

Sanders isn’t wrong that minorities often struggle with weight issues. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), black and Hispanic Americans and have the “highest age-adjusted rates of obesity” at 48.1 percent and 42.5 percent, respectively, among ethnic groups recorded in the most recent study, although “non-Hispanic whites” came in third with a rate of 34.5 percent . But she goes much farther in this entry than just pointing out this concerning trend. She argues that such a medical reality reifies “white superiority.”

Sanders writes that talking about the high rates of obesity amongst minorities is problematic because it “effectively reif(ies) white superiority and maintain(s) white dominance,” especially at a time when “fatness is deeply stigmatizing, fat bodies denote civic unfitness, and high white obesity rates jeopardize whiteness.”

“Processes of devaluing fatness, blackness, brownness, and femininity—and thus of idealizing thinness, whiteness, and masculinity as norms and passports to privilege—have been central to the semiotic construction of the ideal American body,” she argues. “To combat rather than reproduce racial inequality, anti-racist anti-obesity discourses must expose obesity as an embodiment of structural racism and promote structural transformation.”