Gender studies professor suggests President Trump is to blame for obese black women
'I hate when people talk about black women being obese'
October 16, 2019
Image source: via Twitter @BlackWomenOWN video screenshot
President Donald Trump's policies and racism are responsible for overweight black women, Brittney Cooper, a Rutgers University women's and gender studies professor, suggested last month.
"I hate when people talk about black women being obese. I hate it because it becomes a way to blame us for a set of conditions that we didn't create," Cooper said. "We are living in the Trump era. And look, those policies kill our people. You can't get access to good health care, good insurance."
Cooper also claimed that white women have an advantage when shredding unwanted pounds because black women are more stressed because of Trump.
"It's literally that the racism that you're experiencing and the struggle to make ends meet actually means the diet don't work for you the same," Cooper claimed.
Cooper later told Campus Reform that she was not connecting Trump's policies to obese black women — then cited scholarly work to suggest that Trump's alleged racism is exacerbating the weight issues of black women.
"I wasn't making an argument about Trump admin policies and weight," Cooper said. "Dr. Arline Geronimus' [a public health research professor at the University of Michigan] research from the 1990s argues pretty convincingly that black women have physiological stress responses to racial stimuli and this affects our long-term health."
"I was citing this body of work and the president's status as a racially polarizing figure that contributes to issues of racial stress for people of color," she explained.