Eating While Black

A Case Study on Food Shaming and Policing

Psyche Williams-Forson

Psyche Williams-Forson, a scholar of African-American food culture, will discuss her research on the intersections of food, politics and race during a lecture at Dickinson, titled “Eating While Black: A Case Study on Food Shaming and Policing,” on Monday, Oct. 10, at 7 p.m. in Allison Great Hall.

Williams-Forson’s research centers on the implications of shaming, policing and critiquing African-American food culture. Food, Williams-Forson argues, is not a neutral object, but rather reflects race and class ideologies. The health-food movement and rhetoric surrounding “clean” and “healthy” food, Williams-Forson contends, has become another way of policing black bodies and reifying racial hierarchies. Williams-Forson says the culture that proclaims thinness as a measure of self-control can then demonize “unhealthy” food and larger bodies as morally suspect.

Williams-Forson is an associate professor of American studies, women’s studies, African-American studies and anthropology and archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also an associate editor of the journal Food and Foodways and author of the award-winning book Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. Williams-Forson is a recipient of numerous teaching awards and fellowships, including a Smithsonian Museum Senior Fellowship and an award for her course, “Fearless Ideas,” from the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Center for Sustainability Education, the departments of Africana studies, American studies, anthropology & archaeology, English, environmental studies, and women’s, gender & sexuality studies. It is the third event in the Clarke Forum’s 2016 fall semester theme, “Food.”

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Published October 5, 2016