Is President Trump making Black women fat?

Sometimes women ask, “Does this make me look fat?” Believe it or not, a professor in New Jersey says President Donald Trump may be the cause of some Black women’s obesity, reports Fox News. That’s what Brittney Cooper of Rutgers University suggested on “Black Women OWN the Conversation” on Oprah Winfrey’s television network. Cooper suggested that research shows Black women lose weight more slowly than White women, and the Trump presidency may be exacerbating the situation. “We are living in the Trump era,” she said, “and look, those policies kill our people. You can’t get access to good health care, good insurance. Increased stress could be changing Black women’s metabolisms to the point where it becomes more difficult to shed extra pounds, she said. “I hate when people talk about Black women being obese,” Cooper continued. “I hate it because it becomes a way to blame us for a set of conditions that we didn’t create. It’s literally that the racism that you’re experiencing and the struggle to make ends meet actually means the diet don’t [sic] work for you the same.” In a separate interview, Cooper told CampusReform.org that she was citing 1990s information from Dr. Arline Geronimus, a public health research professor at the University of Michigan. Geronimus “argues pretty convincingly that Black women have physiological stress responses to racial stimuli and this affects our long-term health,” Cooper said. “I was citing this body of work and the president’s status as a racially polarizing figure that contributes to issues of racial stress for people of color.”