Stereotypes Of African American Women

Stereotypes, although some are good, are usually horrible and rude things that are just assumed about a person based on their race, religion, or sex. Asians are believe to always be smart and have smaller genitals. Mexicans are supposedly lazy and dirty. Jews are apparently greedy and out to steal money. Even white Americans are stereotyped by being called fat and lazy. My point is there are no exceptions to stereotypes, it is something everyone will have to live with in life because no one is perfect and we all have mistakes. In this essay I am going to go over the stereotype body image of African American women. Although it is not the same for all African American women, a majority are viewed this way. I am going to go over what people think
But you rarely hear about the body images of African American women. Unlike white women, who are praised for being tone and skinny, African American women are more praised when they are larger and fat. 18 year old Katrina grew up in Bronx had Jamaican immigrant parents and was regularly fed large quantities of traditional Jamaican dishes. She had always been surrounded by female figures that were larger in size and none of them cared about their weight or thought that they were ugly or fat. She said that she was always more thin than the other girls so she made herself eat more and as she put on more weight she became more accepted amongst her friends and even within her family. Researcher Collins said that the Afrocentric ideals of beauty are more focused around creativity and uniqueness. Because of these African Americans think that going against the norm of beauty is what makes them beautiful. That is why they adopted this larger lifestyle and it is why they are all so content with being fat. Even African American men prefer women with more pronounced figures. White women with in African American communities tend to feel dissatisfied if they are skinnier than the average woman in these
African American women have the highest obesity rate of any group of Americans.
Four out of five African American women have body mass index above 25 percent. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that that is the threshold of being overweight or obese. BMI or body mass index is a measure of body fat in adults. Calorie-rich, traditional soul food is a staple in the diets of many African Americans, and fat African American women are embraced positively through slang like “thick” with “a little meat on their bones.” Like I mentioned earlier, songs like the Commodore’s “Brick House” or Destiny’s Child “Bootylicious” praise their larger body image standards. A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post earlier this year found that 66 percent of overweight African American women had high self-esteem, whereas 41 percent of average-sized or thin white women had high self-esteem. This still does not mean that African American women need to ignore the fact that this lifestyle they are living is unhealthy. An all black college, Spelman College in Atlanta, is disbanding its NCAA teams and devoting those resources to a campus-wide wellness program. President Beverly Daniel Tatum cited a campis analysis that found many of