But in most of these conversations, the connection is only fleetingly made, if at all, between ballet's obsession with thinness and its attachment to whiteness. In her 2019 book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Dr. Sabrina Strings offers an analysis that suddenly brought this intersection into focus for me: "The fear of the imagined 'fat black woman' was created by racial and religious ideologies that have been used to both degrade black women and discipline white women." Her book asserts that race is central to a clear understanding of American culture's obsession with thinness. She calls race "a double agent. It entails the synchronized repression of 'savage' blackness and the generation of disciplined whiteness."

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