In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by sociologist Sabrina Strings, Strings walks through the entangled relationship between anti-fatness and anti-blackness.

She explains how as the slave trade grew in the 18th century, there was a shift in expectations for how different races should look.

There was a need to differentiate white bodies from the Black bodies who were being so brutally enslaved. Enlightenment philosophers were not only concerned with defining racial differences but also with promoting the ideal of a "perfect" or "civilized" European body.

Thinness became a symbol of white purity and cleanliness and a way to establish a visual and moral divide between white and Black people.