From society to healthcare systems, the message that Black women get about our bodies is that we’re too much. This narrative is centuries in the making with roots in the streets of London. It was here where Sarah (or Saartjee) Baartman, an enslaved South African, was trafficked in 1810 and forced to be on display.

In her book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia, Dr Sabrina Strings details that Baartman was marketed as “an erotic and scientific curiosity” due to the size of her body, particularly her buttocks. Slight Londoners would pay to gawk at and even touch Baartman’s naked body. Even after her death medical professionals studied the “largesse” of her body; she was a medical mystery. Dr Strings connects the ways that, for over a century, Europeans and then Americans inextricably linked Blackness to fatness after the introduction of Baartman, and both remain pathologised in medicine.

This harmful legacy greets us each time we seek healthcare. Our bodies are judged by the racist body mass index (BMI) as soon as we are greeted by the medical assistant. The origins of BMI lie in the 1800s and had nothing to do with health, and everything to do with one man’s curiosity.