For gamers like Deer Lakes seventh grader Lucas Channel, a school club dedicated to Super Smash Bros. and Minecraft sounded like a dream come true. “I love this club,” Channel said. “It’s a bit of time after school where you get to play in a nice surrounding.” The 13-year-old is
This month s bookshelf highlights writings illustrating the inconvenient truth that communities of color suffer most, and most severely, when disaster strikes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed again a fundamental truth about the Anthropocene: When disaster strikes, the vulnerable take the hardest punches. Communities of color have suffered much higher rates of infection, hospitalization, and mortality, both because they are disproportionately represented in frontline service positions and because their access to routine healthcare is more limited.
This pattern has long been observed in studies of environmental and climate justice, as the titles in this month’s bookshelf show. Vulnerable communities of color face more and more serious exposure to environmental hazards and have more limited access to economic, social, and political remedies.