Black on the Ground, White in the Air

2016

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Once again, we find ourselves attacked, and this attack isn’t physically immediate or verbally abusive, but it certainly is sinister, covert, and ongoing. Its onset is slow but the damage is long lasting. We are being attacked with environmental racism and classism. This type of racism doesn’t thrive off of foul words and violence, and this classism doesn’t inspire juxtapositions of economic disparity and grotesque frivolity. Instead, it is a type of racism and classism that perpetuates a system that lawfully allows for low-income and non-white peoples to be deliberately subjected to debilitating pollution, toxicity, and degradation, all for economic benefit and convenience.

I can briefly elucidate horrific instances of environmental racism and classism. If the nation-wide recognition of the Flint, Michigan water crisis isn’t enough for you to acknowledge that certain people’s health and environments are treated with awesome disregard in the name of economics and convenience, then maybe I should acknowledge and voice other instances of environmental racism and classism. There is Chester, PA, home of a population that is predominantly black, and also home of one of the largest groupings of waste collection and burning facilities in the United States of America. And we must never ignore the electronic waste that flows from many western countries, like Italy, Canada, and the US, and into now depleted, toxic, and sickening lands like Agbogbloshie (Ghana), Lagos (Nigeria), and Guiyu (China.) There is also Cancer Alley which stretches between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana and is is home to predominantly black populations, and is also home to 17 refineries and over 100 petrochemical companies. In many cases of overt pollution, concern is often met with non-solutions, dishonest reassurance, and neglect. This monumentally small sprinkling of cases where environmental racism and classism is evident doesn’t come close to fully explaining the true breadth and impact of the issue, but it is not my responsibility provide you with this exhaustive list of atrocities. You have the agency and the research ability to learn this easily found information on your own. What I aim to do is to welcome the acknowledgement of the often fatal and always debilitating tactics and effects of environmental racism and classism, so that we can began to induce change.

Much like actual purifiers, detoxifiers, and filters, non-white and poor peoples are ironically often used in the same way these objects are used. Our unhealthiness is induced and callously disregarded. We are suffocated, congealed, buried, and sickened by the nauseous and toxic residue that permeates from the burdens of racism and classism. We blend into our degraded environments as if we belong there and as if the pollution was not brought to us, but as if we were corporealized from within the pollution. We become one with our environments, to the point where conditions like asthma become synonymous with the poor and with non-whites. We are the solution to all of the dominant culture’s problems. Not only do we serve as excellent substrates to accumulate and congeal the undesirable qualities, particulates, and components of white supremacy but we serve as excellent filters. Our bodies are purposefully subjected to the most undesirable aspects of society and pollution and are used to effectively absorb and contain all of the unwanted remnants formed and cast away from white and economic supremacy. We exist to attract the intoxicants and to purify the terrain, so unwanted toxicities do not end up where they do not belong, much like a water filter. But unfortunately, we are not filters, we are not purifiers, we are not worthless beings, and we do deserve equality. Please, imagine how much more difficult the battle for equality and humanity becomes when most of us have been used to absorb society’s physical and oppressive toxic waste since birth. This must change, but first, we must change.

In order to garner collectivity and to lead to actual social change, we must first change ourselves and become non-compliant. We must recognize and acknowledge this world that not only attacks the economic, social, mental, spiritual, and emotional health of certain groups of people, but also penetrates our physiological wellbeing and debilitates us from the inside out. We are certainly being attacked. We are being brutalized, shut out, crushed and drowned. I need us to recognize this, to acknowledge this, and to empathize with this, so that we can all help to change this. Our immobility, inaction, and compliance is destroying us in ways that we will never be able to undo, and at this point, we do not need to be active perpetuators of injustice and atrocity to be a part of this dire problem.