Capitalism is reproducing itself by restructuring humans on a cellular level as “racially devalued bodies” that become pollution “sinks”

We find two emerging strands of PEH particularly generative for thinking with the literature on racial capitalism and Black feminisms to understand COVID-19 in the context of anti-Blackness: PEH that attends to race and racial capitalism and PEH that attends to intergenerational health consequences. In a recent Progress Report on geographies of race and ethnicity, Laura Pulido (2017) argues for a more significant linking of literatures of environmental justice and racial capitalism. So doing, she argues that racial capitalism restructures the environment in ways that not only build from, but create racial difference, and further that these processes reshape bodies. She writes, “[Racial] capitalism is reproducing itself by restructuring humans on a cellular level” as “racially devalued bodies” become pollution “sinks” (Pulido, 2017, p. 529). Because people of color are deemed expendable, industry can pollute in the places in which they live, building profits out of their inhumanity. One of us, Neely (2021b), argues that racial capitalism in apartheid South Africa, which started from the position that Africans were inherently inferior, shaped everything from labor and employment patterns to nutritional science to health and infectious diseases and to the policies and NEELY and LOPEZ 3 of 15 programs to address them (see also, Wylie, 2001). The result is ongoing large racial disparities in morbidity and mortality and limited possibilities to address them. Barbour and Guthman (2018) take up the questions of racial capitalism in their examination of pregnant farmworker exposure to pesticides in a context where farmworker knowledge is devalued as bodies are harmed for profit. They write, “it is not only immigration policy and the precarious legal status of farmworkers that makes for their vulnerability to pesticide exposure, but the racist logics embedded in capitalism itself that renders certain bodies vulnerable and disposable” (Barbour & Guthman, 2018, p. 335). Drawing on Pulido and thinking through the epigenetic impacts of pesticides, they argue that industrial agriculture may offer an example of “how racial capitalism transforms bodies at the cellular level” (Barbour & Guthman, 2018, p. 337). Mansfield and Guthman also address questions of race and racism in their work on epigenetics. In critically interrogating the science, they argue that epigenetics offers a new way to pathologize difference—in the relationships between genes and the environment—which reifies existing racial inequality (Guthman & Mansfield, 2013, 2015; Mansfield & Guthman, 2015). In this work, they also examine the intergenerational imaginations and impacts of epigenetics through the long-term and multi-generational effects of environmental exposure. According to the science of epigenetics, the exposures of grandparents can effect grandchildren's genetic makeup even if those children never have the exposures their ancestors did, thus rendering the body temporally elastic. Mansfield and Guthman see epigenetics as a way to understand how histories of inequality manifest in bodies and shape differential health outcomes and health futures. They write, “Researchers are discovering biological pathways through which social stresses such as racial discrimination and joblessness are somatized....can be cumulative… [and] can be embodied. These observations are leading to new theorizations about biology and race such that biological difference—not reduced to genomics—can be an effect of social relations” (Guthman & Mansfield, 2013, p. 11). This approach is important because it recognizes the biological impact of the “histories that produce inequality in resource access and wealth in the construction of racial difference” (Lafferty, 2012). And this is important for understanding the uneven impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it relates to anti-Blackness through what are commonly known as pre-existing conditions like asthma, heart disease, and diabetes. The next section offers an in-depth examination of how racial disparities come to be in the first place through an analysis of the literature on racial capitalism, and why they matter to both individual bodies and society, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic