Abstract
While media attention has focused on the visceral brutality of police chokeholds, less noticed are the breath-taking effects of air pollution caused by the (in)actions of state agencies dedicated to environmental protection. To think through how race and racism are embedded in the processes that underlie the Anthropocene, I reframe three key terms of engagement to analyze with greater rigor contemporary criminal anthroposcenes (i.e. scenes constituted by the inextricable enmeshing of crime and anthropogenic climate change): (1) climate and weather, (2) bodies and environments, and (3) anestheticization. Shaping a racial geography of dirty air, a climate of anti-Blackness in the US has been quietly impacting the health and lives of African Americans for centuries, so that the deadly impact of viral outbreaks can merge with existing modes of spectacular and slow violence. From the murder of George Floyd to the establishment of sacrifice zones, the complexity and messiness of recent breath-taking scenes of injustice are formed and maintained by a dangerous mixture of racial apathy and racially-charged violence.
Introduction: Dis-ease in a time of disease
In 2020, a virus disrupted the world. While COVID-19 and its variants continue to unsettle our bodily capabilities and ways of life, they are not the only disturbing force in action that can topple connected social and environmental systems. Amidst city lockdowns and new rules for social distancing, the effects of global climate change have not lessened or disappeared. Despite a 7% decline in fossil fuel burning due to COVID lockdowns, the average global temperature across the Earth’s surface in 2020 was still high enough to jointly hold the record for the hottest year in history (Carrington, 2021). As the pandemic’s impact overlaps with the unfolding trajectories of environmental ruin, there is greater urgency to think through how viscerally imaged crime scenes are inextricably entangled with “invisible” scenes of anthropogenic climate change (Brisman, 2018)—what I have previously called “criminal anthroposcenes” (Lam, 2020). As one means by which criminology can engage with the Anthropocene (for others, see Holley and Shearing, 2017; Shearing, 2015; 2017 Special Issue of Crime, Law and Social Change; White, 2018), the idea of criminal anthroposcenes can be situated in a reinvigorated green-cultural criminology. Grounded in examinations of media representations of environmental crimes and harms (e.g. Brisman and South, 2013; Brisman et al., 2014; Brisman and South, 2014; Carrabine, 2018; McClanahan et al., 2017; Natali, 2016), green-cultural criminology has sought to expand the criminological imagination by considering the ways of seeing and unseeing that have enabled environmental degradation to occur as business as usual. From this perspective, the concept of criminal anthroposcene offers to account for overlooked perpetrators and unseen victims of environmental harm, while also grappling with the interconnectedness of suffering and privilege in the age of the Anthropocene.
When I reflect upon the pre-COVID conception of criminal anthroposcene in a time of disease, I feel at dis-ease. In valuing the vibrancy of nonhuman actors, especially as climate change victims, the idea sidestepped an explicit reckoning of how race and racism map the contours of privilege and suffering in the Anthropocene. Linked to the burning of fossil fuels and anthropogenic climate change, the term “Anthropocene” has been used by scientists to designate a geological epoch in which humans have become the dominant drivers of planetary changes (Crutzen, 2002; Steffen et al., 2007). But the Anthropocene is just as importantly a story. When understood as a narrative tool (Malm and Hornborg, 2014), the dominant story of the Anthropocene operates by appealing to the universal “we” (Armiero, 2018; Bonneuil, 2015; Colebrook, 2016)—that is, the “we” envisioned by us, as both a human species and collective, geophysical force. There is a presumed “we” that can now be united through a shared experience of impending environmental catastrophe (e.g. Chakrabarty, 2009, 2012). Although I appreciate that we are all vulnerable to the planetary harms caused by anthropogenic climate change, the universalizing “we”—which I am guilty of deploying (e.g. Lam, 2020)—ultimately obscures the asymmetries and inequities associated with systemic, intertwined forms of violence. By presuming that “we” have all become crewmembers on Spaceship Earth (e.g. Harrington et al., 2017), ongoing, racial inequities can remain concealed in the Anthropocene. As Pulido (2018) has cogently argued, there has been little attention to race and racism in most scholarly engagements with the Anthropocene, precisely because there has been a reluctance to connect racially uneven outcomes within nations—most starkly in terms of determining who lives and who dies—to dominant beliefs, practices, and structures. This lack of attention to circulations of racism in current understandings of climate justice has been so profound that Tuana (2019) suggests that there has been a habituated forgetting of race in the context of climate change.
Rather than hovering at the edge of the unsayable and the unnamable, I explore in this article how race and racism have shaped a triptych of criminal anthroposcenes in the US during the first year of the global pandemic. Although COVID can be conceived as a complex, contemporary version of the Black Death, it also “points us toward Black death in our own times” (Armstrong et al., 2021: 4). While COVID can severely affect anyone’s ability to breathe, the disease disproportionately affected Black communities in the US. In 2020, the disease’s lethal effects converged with other forms of breath-taking violence, including the brutally spectacular suffocation of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Because American media outlets favored narratives about shocking incidents of racially-driven police brutality, quieter stories about the slow violence of environmental racism 1 circulated less frequently and with less fanfare, despite the long-term suffering of ecological harm by Black communities. By focusing on various, overlapping forms of breath-taking state violence, this article aims to respond to the CMC editors’ exhortation to read the pandemic through crime, media, and culture by “[c]atching our breath” (Armstrong et al., 2021: 3). In short, I consider what it might mean to “catch breath” in a world where air pollution, anti-Black racism and COVID-19 can steal it with relative impunity.
In so doing, this article is an opportunity to highlight how race and racism have infused a story of interlocked criminal anthroposcenes. If storytelling is integral to how humans make sense of the Anthropocene, then it is crucial to retell familiar stories in order to meaningfully reframe the following three terms of engagement in relation to race and racism: (1) climate and weather, (2) bodies and environments, and (3) anestheticization (i.e. how overlapping forms of slow violence are rendered invisible). In what follows, I (re)tell a contemporary story of who is able to breathe freely, and who is restrained from breathing clean air, highlighting the grave consequences of living in a climate of anti-Blackness. Shaping the racial geography of dirty air, this climate, in turn, has been quietly impacting the health and lives of Black Americans long before the appearance of COVID-19. However, the virus’s impact has been amplified by existing and ongoing entanglements of race and environment. From the murder of George Floyd to the siting of fenceline communities and the establishment of sacrifice zones, the story of dirty air during a global pandemic can be assembled by connecting together multiple scenes of racial injustice. Forming a larger archive of Black breathlessness, these intersecting criminal anthroposcenes are complex and messy, requiring us to attend to racially-inflected forms of slow violence with the same rigor that we already expend on spectacular performances of physical violence.
Criminal anthroposcene 1—“I can’t breathe”: Representing weather in a climate of anti-Blackness
Climate is the long-term state of the atmosphere at a particular location—in a sense, the “average weather” over a long period of time (NASA, n.d.).
Climate, despite being understood as an effect of human handiwork, is an abstraction that we can never directly perceive. By contrast, weather is the very stuff of our direct experience (Taylor, 2016), the “hurtful, or destructive condition of the atmosphere” that we can immediately see or otherwise sense (OED definition of weather). To tackle the challenges associated with representing the climate crisis, some media outlets have turned toward portraying extreme weather events, precisely because these events have generated the kind of images that really bring home the size of the [environmental] challenge we face: week after week we see images of devastating floods, wildfires, droughts – and the people caught in the middle of them. This human impact, we feel, is a much more dramatic way of projecting the urgency of the crisis (Collingridge et al., 2021).
In foregrounding the drama of anthropogenic climate change, such editorial policies can work to relegate ongoing forms of slow violence to the background. Unlike extreme weather events—where natural forces, such as violent winds or powerful tidal waves, “attack” cities and destroy human lives—slow violence occurs gradually as relatively imperceptible, delayed destruction (Nixon, 2011: 2). Typically not viewed as violence at all, slow violence can, nonetheless, aptly describe the long-term risks and slow(er) dyings associated with living and working in a toxic climate, especially when that climate has been shaped by both the effects of anthropogenic climate change and racism. To foreground race and racism in conversations about weather and climate, I reframe in this section the murder of George Floyd as an extreme weather event, one that highlights a pervasive climate of anti-Blackness in the US. Here, climate serves as a sensitizing metaphor for articulating racism as an atmospheric condition. Like climate, racism has the power, sometimes visible and sometimes barely visible, to shape bodies and environments.
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was accused by a convenience store employee of purchasing cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. He died in police custody after being arrested. Moments before his death, Floyd repeatedly declared “I can’t breathe” more than 20 times as a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee into his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds (Singh, 2020). Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” echoed those spoken by at least seventy other people who died in US law enforcement custody between 2010 and 2020, half of whom were Black (Baker et al., 2020). As in the case of Eric Garner (Capelouto, 2014), Floyd’s words were ignored by officers on the scene, but became a rallying cry of solidarity for the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of his death. Unlike many of those who died in a police chokehold, Floyd’s last moments were captured on film and televised. As the footage of Floyd’s murder circulated across the American media landscape, it shocked viewers. Even for Oscar-nominated director Ava DuVernay, who had become desensitized to images of racially-driven police brutality because of her work on films such as 13th (2016) and Selma (2014), the video of Floyd’s murder brought her to her knees. As she explains, the filmed scene unfolded as viewers actually watched both parties’ faces, perfectly framed. It wasn’t a body-cam footage where you saw the Black person be shot and you did not see the officer. It wasn’t grainy footage from a security camera across the street. It was both men right in your face, right to the lens, one begging for his life, and one taking his life. And the startling nature of that for me is [. . .] it made me realize that we have let police officers who abuse off the hook by allowing them to recede into society and kind of disappear. We know the names of Black victims – Philando Castile, Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, Sean Reed, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, it goes on and on. But we never know who killed them, right? This invisibility allows us to tell a story that is incomplete (DuVernay, 2020).
Instead of maintaining the typical invisibility of those who engage in racially-charged acts of state violence, the images of Floyd’s fatal encounter with Minneapolis police officers strip away the namelessness and facelessness of state actors committing criminal wrongdoings. They show viewers with startling clarity what has been previously missing, often standing out of frame and off-screen, in many news stories about racial injustice: a clear image of state actors causing Black pain and suffering. In other ways, however, the static and moving images of Floyd’s murder are exactly the kinds of vivid images favored by media’s “events-based tactics” (Doyle, 2007: 133), especially when it comes to representing both specific criminal incidents (e.g. Greer, 2009) and larger environmental issues (e.g. Brisman and South, 2014). In general, media outlets tend to fixate on isolated, or discrete moments of spectacular violence—the kind described by Nixon (2011: 2) as occurring immediately in time and with “instant sensational visibility.” In doing so, the resulting media representations discount long-term, barely perceptible risks (e.g. Allan et al., 2000; Anderson, 1997), as well as the long-term casualties of slow violence.
As covered by most American media outlets, Floyd’s murder highlights breath-taking violence by state agents as a singular event or scene caused by a singular practice (the police chokehold). But what happens when his murder is read, in the context of media strategies for representing climate, as an extreme weather event? What if we follow the logic of climate modeling by correlating individual weather events to demonstrate a larger pattern of atmospheric conditions? While Floyd’s death can be connected to other televised examples of police-initiated racial violence, such as the videotaped beating of Rodney King in 1991, it can also be connected to a larger archive of Black breathlessness in the US—one that adds the declarations of “I can’t breathe” by unarmed Black men suffocated in police custody to the destroyed lungs and troubled breathing of Black plantation workers (e.g. Fanon, 2004; Haraway et al., 2016; Sharpe, 2016), slaves-turned-convicts (e.g. Tuana, 2019), asthmatic children as well as the disproportionate number of Black Americans affected by COVID among other criminal anthroposcenes of racial injustice (or “weather events”). By making these connections between breathlessness, Black death and weather, we can begin to reject the temporal delineation of events, and instead recognize the “temporally diffuse violence of an atmosphere” (Opperman, 2019: 69). Like the meteorological atmosphere, this material and metaphoric atmosphere can exert a force on those it envelopes. When conceived as the air we breathe, it provides the very conditions for life and existence, and as such, can crucially impact if, when and how we breathe. The atmospheric force that repeatedly steals breath from Black bodies has been named “racism” by Opperman (2019: 73) and “antiblackness” by Christina Sharpe. For Sharpe (2016: 104, 106), anti-Blackness is as pervasive as the climate, and ongoing sites of Black suffering can be registered as weather. While weather events can change over time, they can also be repeatable; and in their repetitiveness, they become part of the prevailing patterns that make up a climate. To consider American anti-Black racism in terms of weather and climate, then, is to examine how this racism permeates and percolates into the environments in which Black communities live, work and suffer.
Criminal anthroposcene 2—Breathing toxic air: Bodies entangled in racist environments
Climate has the power to shape and reshape environments, often through a quietly, insidious form of slow violence where (human and nonhuman) killers are invisible, anonymous, and faceless. To make sense of the relationship between climate, bodies, and environment, I explore in this section how a prevalent climate of anti-Blackness contributes to the formation and maintenance of racist environments. Rather than use the term “environmental racism,” the idea of a “racist environment” destabilizes racism and the environment as distinct realms of study (Opperman, 2019), which, in turn, can enable green-cultural criminologists to examine how environments are inextricably entangled with bodies, as well as with processes of racialization and devaluation. When a climate of anti-Blackness shapes racist environments, there is a mutual devaluation of Black bodies and the spaces they inhabit (Wright, 2021), precisely because both bodies and environments can be racialized in the same breath. Like the air itself, such racialization and devaluation can be felt most gravely by those who directly experience it, but they are not necessarily seen by everyone. Indeed, racial realities tend to be obscured in mainstream framings of environmental challenges because the issues are typically presented as harming a raceless, undifferentiated human population. According to Mills (2001), this kind of universalizing frame obfuscates how Black Americans have been thought of as disposable waste in the (white) body politic for centuries in the US; they live in spaces that can ultimately be written off because they are people that can be written off. As a result, “[t]he devalued space interacts with its devalued inhabitants. They are ‘outside’ the boundaries of empathy, not like us, not an equally valued body in the intercorporeal community that is the collective white body” (Mills, 2001: 88–89). Helping to constitute the boundaries of empathy, racism appears in the entanglements of humans and spaces (or bodies and environments) as a powerful atmospheric force. In the words of Fanon (2004: 36), it manifests as a “pervading violence of an atmosphere.” Ultimately, a climate of anti-Blackness can enact a reality where some communities are denied the opportunity to breathe clean air. When we praise the transformative effects of breathing “fresh” air, we assume that everyone has access to clean air, especially in first world, developed nations like the US.
And yet, African Americans continue to experience today a reduced ability to breathe “normally,” because direct, physical forms of breath-taking state violence (e.g. in the form of police brutality) still converge with the indirect, gradual violence of state-sanctioned air pollution. As a threat hiding in plain sight (Gardiner, 2019), dirty air is typically not listed on anyone’s death certificate as a killing agent, but exposure to its smoggy, smoky presence can shorten lives, by increasing the risk of illness and causing premature death (World Health Organization [WHO,], 2014). The normalization of air pollution, however, has turned dirty air into a silent, slow and “invisible killer” in the age of the Anthropocene (Fuller, 2018). Typically, we assume that the degraded environments of the Anthropocene lie “out there” – that is, as environments separable from, and outside of our bodies. Yet the ruins of the Anthropocene can be internal(ized) as much as they can be externally located in the geosphere. Anthropogenic climate change and racism do not simply hover outside and surround human bodies as passive, environmental factors; rather, both can strike within bodies because the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from matters that make up the environment (Alaimo, 2010; Taylor, 2016). Humans are irrevocably entangled with their environments; and as humans are mobile, so, too, are some of the nonhumans that make up the environment. The devastating impact of air pollution, for example, lies in the mobility of nonhuman pollutants that can easily cross not only jurisdictions, but also physical boundaries more generally. Air pollutants can penetrate the body and destroy it from within.
As the embodiment of air pollution, particulate matter (PM) is not only one of the most deadly pollutants in the world, but it is also the largest environmental health risk both in the US and across the world (Cohen et al., 2017). Brought into being by the burning of fuels (coal, wood, oil) and vehicular emissions, particulate matter is “a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets found in ambient air” (EPA, 2018). It can take the form of smoke, dust, and soot (i.e. the ashy substance in coal smoke). As microscopic, fine particles, particulate (PM2.5) pollution can make the air appear hazy, and more importantly, it can enter the bloodstream of human bodies when inhaled. Once the pollutants enter the bloodstream, they can penetrate organs causing serious, long-term harm to human health, including the development and exacerbation of chronic bronchitis and aggravated asthma. When exposed to dirty air at a young age, children grow up with an unseen, life-long frailty—lung function impairment—that sets their futures on a different trajectory than their peers’ (Gardiner, 2019; Gauderman et al., 2004; Paulin and Hansel, 2016).
From an early age, experiences of breathlessness can be intertwined with racist environments. For a while now, health researchers have noted that Black children are twice as likely to develop asthma when compared to their non-Black peers (Akinbami et al., 2014). According to Jacqueline Patterson, the Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, “[a]n African American child is three times more likely to go into the emergency room for an asthma attack than a white child and twice as likely to die from asthma attacks than a white child. African Americans are more likely to die from lung disease, but less likely to smoke” (quoted in Toomey, 2013). In short, Black Americans are more likely to develop and be fatally affected by asthma, not necessarily because of any biological predisposition but because of the air they breathe. When compared to white Americans, Black Americans are, on average, exposed to greater concentrations of PM2.5, breathing in 56% more air pollution than they generate (Tessum et al., 2019), because of where they live. When white mothers live in “Black zip codes” (i.e. neighborhoods where most African American children live), for instance, their children are as likely to develop asthma as Black children in the same neighborhood (Alexander and Currie, 2017). This is because Black neighborhoods are often situated closer to coal-fired plants (NAACP, 2016), highways, and other industrial facilities, such as commercial, hazardous waste facilities (Bullard, 2011; Bullard et al., 2007). Since Black Americans are 75% more likely to live in close, physical proximity to oil and gas facilities that emit toxic air pollutants (Fleischman and Franklin, 2017), they are most likely to inhabit what Lerner (2010) termed “fenceline communities” (i.e. communities that are immediately adjacent to heavily polluting industries). While socioeconomic status can intersect with race in the siting of fenceline communities, African American households continue to experience a higher pollution burden even when compared to their lower-income, white counterparts. For example, Black Americans with household incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 still live in neighborhoods that are, on average, more polluted than the average white neighborhood, where household incomes are less than $10,000 (Downey and Hawkins, 2008). Differences in pollution burden by race remain larger than differences by income, especially when it comes to uneven or unequal exposure to particulate air pollution (Thind et al., 2019). In these fenceline communities, Black Americans fall ill from pollution-induced disease, sacrificing their health in ways that most white Americans can avoid.
Criminal anthroposcene 3—Anestheticizing race: Sacrifice zones and indifference during COVID
One day before George Floyd’s murder, The New York Times (NYT) paid tribute to the fatal impact of the coronavirus in anticipation of the US reaching 100,000 COVID-related deaths. As a new respiratory infection that can be transmitted by air, COVID-19 can cause breathlessness in those infected, both as a severe symptom before death as well as a long-term effect in those who do not require hospitalization. To visualize those who lost breath because of COVID, the NYT filled the entire front page of its Sunday paper with the names and obituaries of 1000 victims. Printed in black and white and without any images, the front page used a format that was “certainly a first in modern times” (Tom Bodkin, chief creative officer of the NYT, quoted in Grippe, 2020). Instead of offering readers a grid of images representing hundreds of COVID victims, the NYT chose an “all-type concept” (Grippe, 2020). Yet this monochromatic “all-type” format can have important effects on readers: it can induce colorblindness among readers because it erases visualizations of race in the process of representing COVID victims. It can enable readers to not-see race in order to demonstrate that the listed victims “were us” (The New York Times, 2020). Playing on a similar universalizing gesture as assertions of “all lives matter,” whether in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement or in conceptualizations of victims in the age of the Anthropocene, the NYT’s colorblind aesthetic obscures how racialized people have been rendered disposable in the US, so that their deaths are met with an absence of care and urgent intervention.
Even from the early days of the pandemic, COVID-19 disproportionately impacted communities of color across the US. Inequities in the likelihood of dying from COVID were made clear by the APM Research Lab’s Color of Coronavirus project. Once age differences were adjusted for all groups, all populations of color experienced higher nationwide mortality rates in 2020 when compared to the death rates of white Americans. Across the US, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Americans were at least 2.7 times more likely to die than their white counterparts; in 17 states, more than 1 in 1000 Black residents had died since April 2020 (Egbert and Liao, 2020). Preliminary data from the John Hopkins University and American Community Survey indicated that of the 131 predominantly Black counties in the US, the infection rate was 137.5 per 100,000, and the death rate was 6.3 per 100,000 (i.e. more than six times higher than in predominantly white counties) (Thebault et al., 2020; Yancy, 2020). Notably, the disproportionate impact of COVID on Black communities is not the result of biological differences between racialized groups; rather, the racially uneven outcomes are the result of social and environmental determinants of health (Vasquez Reyes, 2020; Yearby and Mohapatra, 2020). The cumulative effects of living in a climate of anti-Blackness have placed Black communities in a chokehold: many communities in which Black Americans live are characterized not only by higher concentrations of fatal air pollutants and poor access to health care, but also by increased exposure to the coronavirus.
As COVID infections continue to spread across the US, often exploiting racially differentiated, environmental vulnerabilities, the anestheticization of their racial impact—as exemplified by The NYT’s “all-type” tribute to victims—is worthy of investigation. Attending to anestheticization can sensitize green-cultural criminologists to the ways in which a climate of “virulent antiblackness” (Sharpe, 2016: 109) perpetuates slow violence without intense public scrutiny. Previously, I have argued that multiple forms of anestheticization characterize our engagements with criminal anthroposcenes (Lam, 2020). These anestheticizations numb us to seeing environmental degradation as a cause for urgent concern (see also Mirzoeff, 2014), and can desensitize us to the point that we fail to actively stop another’s suffering. Indeed, moral and emotional anesthesia can set in when we ultimately do not connect someone’s suffering to our own (see also Sontag, 2003). Intersecting with these forms of moral, emotional, and visual anestheticization is another insidious source of anesthesia: racial apathy. In contrast to the shocking, overt forms of racially-charged action, racial apathy is its nearly silent and invisible counterpart, though no less powerful because of its subtler, less explicit form. According to Forman (2004: 44), racial apathy manifests as “a lack of concern about racial and ethnic disparities and an unwillingness to address proximal and distal forms of racially disparate treatment.” Stemming from an absence of feeling for the social circumstances of racialized groups, racial apathy can be connected to racialized forms of slow violence, and understood as the indifference that maintains a climate of anti-Blackness. For Wachtel (1999: 36), indifference has been one of the overlooked ways that contemporary racial prejudice manifests in the US: Perhaps no other feature of white attitudes and of the underlying attitudinal structure of white society as a whole is as cumulatively responsible for the pain and deprivation experienced by [racialized people] at this point in our history as is indifference.
It is this indifference—passive, non-visceral, and typically not worthy of any media coverage—that shapes environmental racism (Tuana, 2019). Both locally and globally, racial apathy characterizes the attitudes, policies, and practices of much of the Global North toward those destined to die prematurely in their own countries as well as in the Global South.
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As Laura Pulido (2018: 121) argues, racially differentiated outcomes in the age of the Anthropocene are crucially maintained by indifference: Like all other racisms, indifference is based on a devaluation of nonwhite lives and an overvaluation of white ones. We must recall that racism is first and foremost a relationship of power between two groups; it is not unidirectional. Thus, many in the Global North might assume the current valuation of white lives is the norm. But, as Cacho (2012) insists, racism is fundamentally a differential valuation. The devaluation of one group is predicated on the overvaluation of the other.
Playing out on a large-scale across the US, the consequences of devaluing one group repeatedly over time can create a pattern of unequal exposures to harmful agents—not only to the coronavirus, but also to environmental contaminants that can exacerbate the virus’s fatal outcomes. Even before the coronavirus swept through Black communities, these communities were conceived as “sacrifice zones.” Originally coined as a government designation to refer to areas dangerously contaminated by the production of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, the term “sacrifice zone” can nevertheless be applied to government-sanctioned pollution in the age of the Anthropocene, especially when such environmental contamination strikes some communities more frequently and with greater intensity than others. Although some might argue that the concept of sacrifice zone has become less analytically meaningful in light of the large-scale scope of contemporary ecological crises, I would argue that the notion remains crucially important for attending to the racial inequities of anthropogenic environmental degradation. To study how climate change effects intersect with a climate of anti-Blackness, an analytic focus on the formation and maintenance of sacrifice zones can help guard against a simple casting of the entire world as a sacrifice zone. In presuming that specific communities are no more sacrificed than the world itself, we run the risk of reproducing a version of the NYT’s “all type” colorblindness. We end up erasing the ways in which the bodies and environments of people of color have been disproportionately harmed in the age of the Anthropocene by state (in)actions characterized by racial apathy and indifference.
Consider the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) record of enacting indifference. Despite a mission to “protect human health and the environment” (EPA, n.d. ), the government agency has repeatedly failed to take action in Title VI cases. Beginning in the early 1990s, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been used to address racial discrimination in the siting of polluting facilities that cause environmental health risks to nearby communities. Yet when it comes to handling Title VI complaints by African Americans and people of color, the EPA has demonstrated the following modes of indifference: consistent dismissal of complaints without any clear criteria for doing so (Harden, 2002), and unresponsiveness to the point of creating a decades-long backlog (Deloitte, 2011). A 2016 report by the US Commission on Civil Rights concluded that despite having nearly 300 Title VI complaints in its docket, the EPA has never made a formal finding of discrimination, and never withdrawn financial assistance to state environmental agencies that might be enabling environmental contamination (Newkirk, 2016). The EPA’s routine failure to intervene can be read as “passive support for the racial status quo in society” (Forman, 2004: 50), especially because it paralyzes—through time delays, backlogs, and rejections—racialized individuals and groups from seeking redress for the harms they experience in their everyday lives.
Even before the Trump administration assumed power, critics highlighted the EPA’s slowness and overall ineffectiveness at investigating and accepting Title VI complaints, emphasizing the agency’s inability to properly enforce environmental regulations (Bullard et al., 2008). During the Trump administration, however, more environmental (in)actions unfolded in even greater silence because “Trump [was] not tweeting about air” (quoted in Pulido et al., 2019: 526). Instead, the Trump administration diverted the public’s attention to spectacular acts of racism while quietly perpetuating breath-taking slow violence. It used the COVID-19 crisis to “speed up the repeal of environmental laws and the sale of land to oil and gas mining and timber corporations” (Whyte, 2020: ix). By October 2020, the Trump administration officially reversed, revoked, or otherwise rolled back more than 70 environmental rules and regulations (Popovich et al., 2020). Of these regulations, 26 rule reversals were completed in relation to regulations that aimed to protect Americans from air pollution and harmful emissions. During the COVID pandemic, the EPA suspended enforcement of anti-pollution regulations for entities that it normally regulated under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. As a result, industrial facilities (e.g. refineries, coal-burning factories and chemical plants) would not be routinely monitored, tasked with reporting pollution, or be given penalties for breaking environmental laws during the pandemic, so long as they could claim that their noncompliance and violations were caused by COVID-19 (EPA, 2020). According to the Associated Press’s review, waivers of non-compliance were granted in more than 3000 cases since March 13, 2020, many of which were requests from oil and gas companies; according to EPA’s own enforcement data, 40% fewer tests of smokestacks were conducted in March and April 2020 than in the same period in 2019 (Knickmeyer et al., 2020).
Even as air pollutants intensified the severity of COVID’s impact on racialized communities, the head of the EPA—Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist—rejected scientists’ advice to tighten air pollution standards for particulate matter, including for soot emitted from the smokestacks of coal-burning plants. Instead, in April 2020, the EPA lowered the emissions standards for six coal refuse power plants in West Virginia 3 and Pennsylvania 4 (EPA Press Office, 2020; Rauber, 2020), so that they could burn cheaper, lower-quality coal, and emit even more harmful air pollution in predominantly Black fenceline communities. By effectively lowering air quality standards, the EPA deliberately ignored emerging evidence that linked particulate pollution to an increased risk of COVID-related death (Wu et al., 2020). During the first year of the pandemic, the EPA’s “apparatus of particulate matter science denial” (Song and Younes, 2020), coupled with its lack of enforcement, contributed to a 13% increase in air pollution across 700 counties; this intensification of air pollution could, in turn, be associated with an estimated 38.5% increase in COVID cases and a 19.1% increase in COVID-related deaths (Persico and Johnson, 2020). Because of the existing racial geography of fenceline communities and sacrifice zones, the Trump administration’s policy-induced increase in air pollution had the effect of serving death sentences to many Black Americans. The EPA’s indifference permitted pollution-related diseases to further infect Black communities at a time when a viral disease, such as COVID, was already leaving residents gasping for breath. Through its modes of action (e.g. suspension of anti-pollution regulations) and inaction (e.g. handling of Title VI administrative complaints), the government agency was sanctioning the deaths and physical degradation of racialized bodies and environments (see also Pulido, 2017).
Conclusion
While there has been heightened media awareness of the racialized dangers of police brutality, less noticed are the devastating effects of air pollution on Black communities. However, both can be considered breath-taking forms of state violence against Black communities. Both can be imagined and positioned as intersecting criminal anthroposcenes that point to a larger archive of Black breathlessness and death. When conceived as ongoing, extreme weather events, both document and point to an overall climate of anti-Blackness in the US. Because race itself has been mostly anestheticized from mainstream conversations about climate change, it is important to reframe climate as an atmospheric force for racial violence. Not only does a climate of anti-Blackness materially impact the conditions of Black life, it can also serve as a metaphor for sensitizing us to the varied textures and layers that make up contemporary criminal anthroposcenes.
In contrast to the universalizing, colorblind narratives of the Anthropocene, this article explored how race and racism are embedded in recent criminal anthroposcenes, where the deadly impact of viral outbreaks can merge with overlapping modes of spectacular and slow violence. In an age of air pollution, those who breathe clean air are also those who live freely with the knowledge that their bodies and environments will be protected by the state. Yet the state is not a neutral force: it can enable or remain indifferent to the ways that both visible and invisible (human and nonhuman) killers increase the risk of death and disease for certain communities. In the first year of the pandemic, the overlapping burdens of air pollution, disease, and police brutality were disproportionately borne by Black Americans, whose lives were rendered disposable in the same breath as their environments were treated as sacrifice zones. To foreground and analyze these kinds of complex sites of racial-environmental injustice, there are two important observations that can serve as fruitful starting points for future research.
One, humans are deeply connected to their environments, so that analytic attempts to isolate them as distinct realms can obscure racially-charged processes that shape both natural and social/cultural actors. In the Anthropocene, the anthropo (human) has primarily been conceived as the human species; however, such a universalizing approach leaves unexamined how some humans have been so de-animated as protagonists in the story of the Anthropocene that they have implicitly been relegated to the background as not-fully or not-quite human. Querying the “we” at the heart of the Anthropocene narrative enables researchers to investigate who is being saved from environmental contamination, and who is being left behind to suffer and die. Studying the racial geography of dirty air in the US, for example, points to the racist environments of the Anthropocene, where bodies and environments are entangled in processes of racialization and devaluation.
Two, indifference can maintain the continued application of racializing and racist policies, procedures, and performances. While much has been written about developing an ethics of care to notice damage and ruin in the Anthropocene (e.g. Harrington and Shearing, 2017; Tsing et al., 2017), care—as a means for combatting indifference—requires an emotional investment beyond sheer apathy, as well as sympathy. As Sontag (2003: 99) has argued, So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not an inappropriate—response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others [. . .] for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering [. . .] is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.
The initial spark created by the stunning images of George Floyd’s murder led to local and global protests in the name of Black Lives Matter. But for a racial reckoning to manifest in criminological engagements with the Anthropocene, it might be as important to feel dis-ease—that is, to feel discomforted and troubled by the post-COVID possibility of simply restoring the world back to normal. The “normal” world before COVID was built on a map that privileged few and disadvantaged many, both locally and globally. Knowing that the consequences of breathing dirty air are unevenly distributed across racial lines, there is a responsibility to breathe new life into a criminological imagination that examines entanglements of race and environment with the same vigor as other media images of suffering. Attuning research to environments haunted by racial violence, whether in its explosive or nearly silent forms, can push us toward radically imagining other worlds where “normal” is no longer the standard by which we set our course.
