Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that “environmental racism” is a “preexisting condition.”
The New York Democrat was explaining during an interview with Democracy Now! last week that the coronavirus has hit areas in New York where minority residents live the hardest, linking it to “environmental racism" and inequality.
“Inequality, environmental racism, these are preexisting conditions. And when you have a pandemic, similar to what we saw with Hurricane Maria, when you have a, a natural disaster or an event like a pandemic hit communities that have already been ravaged by weakened healthcare systems, weakened infrastructure — the South Bronx has one of the highest childhood asthma rates in the country,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“When we talk about environmental racism, we’re talking about illegal dumping. We’re talking about concentrating waste sites and concentrating highways and trucking zones through the poorest communities in the country, and the blackest communities and the brownest communities," she added. "And so, we already have an issue of extreme and acute concentration of respiratory illnesses in the Bronx. That is largely due to the trucking that comes through here, through the environmental inequalities that come through here.”
Ocasio-Cortez also tweeted last week that “COVID relief should be drafted with a lens of reparations” due to the related deaths "disproportionately spiking in Black + Brown communities."
