Blacks weather, Whites climate

This essay explores the intersections of race, weather and climate. Earth science construes weather as the temperature and precipitation that impacts environments. Thinking about how this applies to bodies has come into vogue in trying to understand the disproportionate number of COVID-19 infections and deaths for Blacks and Latinx people. Arline Geronimus pioneered this in 1992 when she transposed the notion of “weathering” from its standard meaning of a process that decays wood onto the cumulative racism experienced by Black women resulting in excessive maternal death. Her “weathering hypothesis” tracks the assemblage of negative health outcomes for all African Americans caused by dangerous work environments and polluted neighborhoods. My essay shows how these embodied health effects are linked to larger histories of burning fossil fuels. We now know burning coal and oil transforms the climate by increasing the ratio of CO2 molecules. We also know that this shifting climate determines specific weather outcomes. However, we don’t yet have a full picture of the racial dynamic undergirding this. As a corollary to weathering, this essay proposes a “climating hypothesis” to help expose the power that Euro-descendant whites have wielded for centuries to intervene in the earth’s climate.