The discursive spectacularization of climate crisis results in displacement of narratives into a re-iteration of racialized Yellow Peril.

Yet small bodies and intimate environments often get lost in big atmospheric narratives. Since its seventeenth-century origins in English, the term atmosphere has signaled the fluid medium of above-ground relations, its contradictory figuration as a space of geology and life, and a background that forges exchange between social and physical processes. Atmospheres can surround big and small bodies, and can shift as bodies entangle and disentangle spatially. With industrial pollution, lower atmospheric space abounds with plumes of toxic gases (methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide) as well as noncarbon by-products (e.g., nitrous oxide and ozone) that unpredictably concentrate in our bodies as we encounter a busy street, a power plant, or a factory farm. In addition to rising to heights where they can trap solar heat, these gases fix in soil and water, returning unpredictable flows of toxicity to the lithosphere where plants grow. These toxicities— often concentrated in poor and minority communities—contribute to childhood asthma, lung disease, and the spread of various cancers.

In an account of living with toxic sensitivity to airborne heavy metals, Mel Chen describes navigating and transforming unpredictable atmospheres and their conjoined affective and spatial entanglements. The improvisational strategies for prophylaxis—such as donning a particulate mask to avoid exposure to vehicle emissions on a busy street—inevitably conjure public surveillance. “Suited up in both racial skin and chemical mask,” writes Chen, “I am perceived as a walking symbol of contagious disease like SARS, and am often met with some form of repulsion.”21 Chen’s account points to how the materiality of everyday air pollution subtly intertwines with the materiality of race. Race, according to Renisa Mawani, might itself be understood as an atmospherics rather than a “social construction.” Drawing on Fanon’s accounts of race and atmosphere, Mawani explores “race as an affective movement, a force rather than a thing, a current that reconstitutes and reassembles itself in response to its own internal rhythms and to changing social and political conditions.”22 If race is not simply a phenotypic characteristic but an ecology of affective movement and exchange, the effects of carbon pollution— disability, disease, forced migration, and sometimes death—can catalyze the emergence of xenophobic fears about economic and ecological interconnection.

Racialized climate reporting draws affective power from senses of pervasive and inescapable environmental pollution. Michael Ziser and Julie Sze detail the persistent geopolitical and racial fears driving US responses to climate change. Contrasting the sentimental domestication of the (white) polar bear in US media with persistent fears of the cross-Pacific migration of Chinese air pollution, Ziser and Sze argue that climate discourses conjure earlier racial panics about “yellow peril” and obscure primary US responsibility for contemporary and historical emissions.23 While such reporting contributes to an atmosphere of fear and crisis, the everyday physicality of climate processes inscribes fear at the site of the skin. Atmosphere names a space of unpredictable touching, attractions, and subtle violences—a space at once geophysical and affective, informed by yet exploding representation, a space where the violences of late-carbon liberalism subtly reform racialized sensoria through shifting scales of interface.