![]() Weather is what and how we live (in ways that profoundly make up who counts as one’s “we”), but also where we live. Yet even in our different experiences thereof, the weather imaginary for most humans likely begins at ground level and extends some meters upward. The weather is neither incidental, nor accidental it is an intra-active, naturalcultural phenomenon. Anti-blackness as the total climate and other socio-atmospherics of power are made by molecular mixes in matters that enter mouths, lungs, and blood, but they are also made by human bodies that channel power and violence into the air. As Timothy Choy writes, “atmospheres do not equalize, and … breathing together rarely means breathing the same.” 6 An important point about these weathers is not only that they are experienced as environmental and socio-cultural, but that they are-like climate change in the purely climatological sense-always also anthropogenic. We are reminded that air quality is a question of environmental justice, and that the weaponization of air and breath targets certain populations differentially within settler capitalist white supremacies. Sharpe points out that breathlessness as weather has always accompanied black life, from Frantz Fanon’s understanding of the connection between revolt and an inability to breathe, to Eric Garner’s final words on a New York sidewalk: “I can’t breathe.” This critical understanding of weather and breath connects to other scholars’ discussions of phenomena such as “settler atmospherics” and “socio-atmospherics of power.” 5 Here, racism and colonialism are understood not (only) as discursive constructs, but as material phenomena that imprint on bodies (like all weather). When Sharpe asserts that the weather of antiblackness manifests as “archives of breathlessness,” she implicates matters discursive, structural, material, and environmental. The milieus with which our bodies contend are material, comprising particles, gases, forces, pressures, contaminants, and other matters meteorological conditions are but one manifestation of these external structuring conditions. Yet, definitively separating social and cultural conditions from environmental ones is impossible. ![]() ![]() There may be a temptation to read Sharpe’s work as metaphor or analogy (antiblackness is like bad weather). 2 She writes, “In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate.” 3 Sharpe’s chapter “The Weather” from her 2016 book In the Wake specifically references the Middle Passage and black slavery in the U.S., as well as its contemporary manifestations (such as black deaths in custody and police killings of black and other racialized people), but her point is that this climate cannot be reduced to an event or a set of events Sharpe’s quarry is instead “the totality of the environments in which we struggle the machines in which we live what I am calling the weather.” 4 Weather is context and milieu-both pervasive and often unnoticed-with which human bodies must contend. 1īut is weather only a meteorological phenomenon? What else swirls in/as the weather world to mark us, to structure our quotidian lives? Black studies and feminist scholar Christina Sharpe suggests that weather is anti-blackness black bodies must endure “the total climate” that is antiblackness. We could say that weather is the external conditions that structure one’s quotidian existence this existence is felt in and as our bodies. Like hail-damaged rooftops and sun-bleached laundry, our bodies bear the impressions of the weather-world. Our armpits dampen in response to the heat our jaws and tongues stiffen in the biting cold. As an embodied experience and agentic force, weather moves, scars, imprints.
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