Yung Baby Tate Body Shamed at Afropunk; Fatphobia is Still Alive and Well

Graphic by Margeaux Rocco

In a slew of photos that surfaced after Afropunk in late September, performer Yung Baby Tate was seen wearing a leopard print bodysuit with knee-high black platform boots. The internet was sent into a frenzy after she performed with much of her natural body showing, sparking a barrage of hate comments and fatphobic backlash. Many hate comments, on both Instagram and Twitter, told Tate to “lose a few pounds.”

This instance is not just a blatant example of fatphobia; it’s an example of anti-Blackness.

Image courtesy of The Source.

Anti-Blackness is deeply rooted in our obsession with skinniness. Oftentimes in academic settings, the actual roots of societal issues are not explored to the fullest extent of comprehension; we brush over topics we see as well-known without truly understanding the depth of history that undergirds these issues. Take a walk with me through the history of American anti-Black and anti-fat sentiments.

In the early 19th century, the natural curvature of a woman's body was praised in pop culture. Women with curvy, “hourglass” figures, such as actress Marilyn Monroe, were more prominently spotlighted. These mainstream sentiments changed in the mid-20th century when white women were pushed by popular culture to maintain skinniness.  Magazines like Harper’s Bazaar found it “important that [middle-class and upper-class white women] ate as little as was necessary in order to show their Christian nature and also their racial superiority.” 

These fatphobic sentiments were always supported by white supremacist ideals, tying all the way back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In interacting with Black slaves, stereotypes about black bodies abounded. Slave owners believed Black populations to be more prone to obesity, and this became another justifier of oppression as white people felt superior. 

 Author and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, Sabrina Strings dives into this history in a recent CBS News interview. 

“They decided to re-articulate racial categories, adding new characteristics, and one of the things that the colonists believed was that Black people were… inherently obese, because they lack self-control. And of course, self-control and rationality, after the Enlightenment, were characteristics that were deemed integral to Whiteness”.

 In an effort to further differentiate racial categories that allowed the justification of slavery, fatness became intrinsically tied to Blackness through racial stereotyping. In order to be distinguished from Black slaves, there was a white societal push for skinniness. 

Strings explains that after 200 years of white and Black people living in close proximity with one another, society could no longer use skin color to differentiate racial binaries. 

“Now we have all of these people who are... biracial. And so what they did was they decided to articulate new aspects of racial identity. And so eating and body size became two of the characteristics that were being used to suggest that these are people who do not deserve freedom,” Strings says in a recent NPR interview.

Black people have long borne the brunt of both anti-Black and anti-fat sentiments; Yung Baby Tate is just one example. Despite efforts to bring Black issues to light in the modern age, there are still numerous implicit societal standards that allow for anti-Black sentiments to covertly thrive. Fatphobia is not commonly known in the mainstream to have roots in anti-Blackness, however the two are inextricably linked. 

In spite of the internet hate Yung Baby Tate received, she started a trend on Twitter for women to showcase their natural bodies, putting a body-positive spin on the negative attention she was experiencing; garnering support from droves of people, gaining new fans, and receiving DMs from Rihanna in the process. In order to truly have allyship for Black individuals like Yung Baby Tate, it is imperative to continually understand and actively counteract anti-Black systems and thought processes. We must decolonize our minds.

Image courtesy of @imbabytate on Twitter.