“I CAN’T BREATHE”

The mission of this blog is to spread awareness on the environmental injustices that occur in vulnerable communities from corporations, industries, and capitalist America creating greenhouse emissions. Emissions in areas where these point sources are not forced to send their children to school in, but what black communities are forced to inhale and breathe in. That is why we cannot talk about climate injustice without addressing racial inequality when it is evident environmental injustice targets low income black communities. Communities that suffer decades of a racially prejudiced institutionalized system built on white supremacy. 

Climate injustice IS racial injustice, they are inextricable and directly connected with one another. A green future requires racial integrity.  

Ironically, the name of this blog is Waiting to Xhale. The name conveys the long suffering of communities with respiratory medical conditions due to polluted air, and unfortunately what future generations may inherit. It communicates the suffering of those with mesothelioma, asthma, lung cancer, and lead in their bloodstream due to their zip code, redlining, and racial/socioeconomic discrimination. It conveys the agony of young black boys and girls who cannot breathe without proper health care from their own environmental hazardous public schools and neighborhoods. It expresses how communities are waiting to exhale because they “can’t breathe.”

Those were the last words of Eric Garner, George Floyd, and many of whom we will never know as they took their last breath. The protests and riots are a result of centuries of grief and frustration. It is the consequences of when voices and cries continue to go unheard and unnoticed: when those in power continue to provoke innocent people. Innocent black lives are being taken by the hands of those who swore to protect them. The oppressed are tired of the hashtags, they are tired of saying their names, and they are saying enough is enough. We are not witnessing an outcry of one innocent man; we are witnessing a public mourning of the thousands of black lives from the past 400 years. 

My maxim when addressing climate change is you cannot negotiate with nature. As one who personally experienced numerous racist encounters, whether it was having my intelligence constantly questioned by my white colleagues/professors , the unnecessary racist intended interrogations by police, hair discrimination, witnessing racism towards my black colleagues, etc.; I also say this, you CANNOT negotiate with basic human rights.

Many as myself withhold the emotions as a coping mechanism to sanely face the reality of how the world views you, that the obstacles will give you thick skin. Remaining silent may be embedded from fear, exhaustion, or it may be you executing the motto “when they go low, you go high.” Regardless if you act on it or not, you are forced to deal with it internally . As a first generation American who already can dissect how racism altered my mental/emotional health , I can only imagine the generational trauma it is engendered on Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved by the current oppressor. 

The issue is not bad cop versus good, nor is it just a few bad apples ruining it for all. The issue is that the American system fails to prosecute those who are murdering its people with the notion of bigotry as it has for centuries.  “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he got the power to lynch me, that is my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power,” Stokely Carmichael.

The American judicial system birthed institutionalized racism and police brutality; therefore it is the only thing that can destroy it. The system is not broken. It is flawlessly operating exactly how it was designed, so repairment is not essential, destruction and reconstruction is. 

America was built by slaves and immigrants. Disintegration is its fate if the system continues to view minorities as targets and not as equal citizens, as animals and not as human beings; whose blood is too, the red that is on the American flag. If the system continues to not perceive Black Americans as “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness;” then it will not be the land of the free, but the divided. America was nothing but an experiment, in result, slavery became the histones of the nation’s DNA; so without Blacks, there would be no America. 

Just as the freedom riders who boycotted segregation , the Black Panthers who protected their communities against white supremacists, and the activists who marched with Dr. King in Washington; the power is in numbers, unity, and organization. There is hope for a better America if citizens continue this momentum of standing up against hate and racial injustice together; if we fight for better reform, and exercise our right to vote in local elections. We cannot expect change if we continue to stay silent.

Enough is enough.

Ways to help:

https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/

https://minnesotafreedomfund.org/donate

Anguish and Action