In the 19th century, an enslaved Black South African woman named Saartje (Sarah) Baartman — better known as the Hottentot Venus — was exhibited around Europe and made famous in popular culture for her large buttocks, but in the scientific world, she was known “as a freak of nature based on the size and shape of her labia,” said Sabrina Strings, PhD, a [Chancellor's Fellow and] sociologist at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Fearing the Black Body. … These white, male European doctors were looking for any excuse to justify slavery and claim racial superiority, said Strings.

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