Black Women’s Weight Loss is NOT Reparations

The 2024 Hims & Hers Super Bowl ad is a fantastic example. With visuals backed by the Donald Glover rap track, This is America (queue the Black-friendly vibes), it insists that “obesity is America’s deadliest epidemic.” It explains that the problem isn’t a lack of self-control, but a multibillion-dollar diet industry that feeds on failure. The solution? Cheaper weight loss meds. 

Embedded within a montage of thin white women and trembling round bellies sits the one figure repeatedly shown in the ad: a lovely fat Black woman. We see her lounging at the pool, then opening the door thrilled to receive her weight loss meds by the post. We learn that the meds are affordable, designed by doctors, and can easily fit into any regimen. “You deserve to feel great in your body,” the ad advises. And the way to this triumph is by changing your body with these meds! In the final shot, we have that same Black woman alongside other fat people, a surprising number of whom are Black, smiling at their pending victories.

This is, of course, not the first time a Black woman was used as the face of a weight loss medication. Queen Latifah did ads for Novo Nordisk (the makers of Ozempic), in which we learn that we must “take obesity seriously” because “our lives are on the line.” Oprah hosted an ABC special titled Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution with execs from Novo and Eli Lilly (maker of Mounjaro) that was so favorable to the medications that the FDA cleared its throat, and notified them to stop the misleading claims that “downplayed boxed warnings and other serious safety risks” that are linked to these drugs. And who can forget the controversy surrounding Serena Williams who, in the aftermath of Black people on social media questioning her blond wigs and her possible skin lightening routine, was found happily endorsing a GLP-1?

There are two glaring issues I want to address here. First, for hundreds of years in the West, fatphobia thrived because it was linked to misogynoir, or the stigmatization of Black and female bodies. 

Beginning in the 18th century, race scientists argued that Black people were constitutionally fat. Black women, they claimed, were particularly likely to reach dimensions that the typical European might scoff at. The men of Africa were said to like their women robust, and tales of festivals intended to fatten Black women to the desired, “unwieldy” size were continuously reproduced in the European press. This, in the eyes of race scientists, made Black women unattractive and unhealthy, destined to die off along with the men of their race in due time.

After over 100 years of the cultural and social shaming of Black women as supposedly unattractive and sick because of their purported heaviness, the medical establishment entered the conversation. The views of physicians, beginning around the late 19th century, reflected the prevailing racial scientific logic. It continues to do so until today, as one of the major medical tools used to gin up fear of fat Black women is Body Mass Index (or BMI), a routinely discredited measure, that doctors continue to use for ease, and well, to be on message with historically eminent physicians. There is a term for this: “obesity confirmation bias.” The idea is that doctors have long thought that being fat is bad, so despite a bounty of contrary scientific evidence, they’ll just continue to do so.

Consider the irony of Black women, long the face of a derided fatness, becoming the face of a joyous weight loss. Here is where I have my second issue. These ads, and much of the public conversation surrounding glp-1s, makes it appear as if Black women having access to them is a form of social justice. The system, has failed us, they claim. Our lives are at stake. It’s unfair how expensive the drugs are. But! We get to take back our right to social respect and equality, because we have now been given access to affordable weight loss solutions. In short, these ads try to make weight loss a form of reparations.

Weight loss, though, is NOT a form of reparations. Reparations are about making amends for a harm that has been done by aiding those who have been wronged. Black women who have been shamed like Lizzo, Oprah, Serena, and Queen Latifah, might have achieved greater respect for more closely approximating the way we are all told to appear in a white male supremacy. But getting access to slightly cheaper (if still expensive) medications to change physical features our culture deems unacceptable is not a form of amends. Reparations are not about repairing yourself. They are not about making yourself more acceptable to the mainstream. The word for that is assimilation. 

The repair that’s needed doesn’t come with a prescription. It’s the one that says, you have a right to be as you are, without shame. We won’t end fatphobia, and the health consequences it causes, by making people thinner. Thinner does not equal healthier. 

Hims & Hers was right about one thing: people do deserve to feel great in their bodies. But the solution to our chronic health crisis is not weight loss. The solution to the stigma of fatness that strips fat folx of dignity is not eradicating fatness. 

The solution is in our universal right to compassionate healthcare, and to bodily dignity. Thick thighs and all.

Learn more about the nexus of anti-fatness and anti-Blackness in my first book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia