Abstract
Through poetry, I offer a creative, critical analysis of the intersections of COVID-19, structural racism, and racialized police violence—situating present COVID-19 discourse within a broader historical arc of respiratory distress within communities of color, all while centering Earth Day and climate change as both metaphor and corollary. In doing so, I enact poetry as praxis, reflecting critically on the racialized contexts and consequences of overlapping threats to our health, while simultaneously crafting counternarrative to public health’s ahistoric, apolitical, and racist proclivities in times of public health crises
Keywords
Health promotion is facing a most challenging future in the intersections of structural racism (Bailey et al., 2017; Bailey et al., 2020; Gee & Ford, 2011), COVID-19 (Egede & Walker, 2020; Laster Pirtle, 2020; McClure et al., 2020; Petteway, 2020; Yearby & Mohapatra, 2020), racialized police violence (Edwards et al., 2019; Krieger et al., 2015; Mapping Police Violence, n.d.; Mesic et al., 2018), and climate change (Krieger, 2020). Now is a critical moment to ask how health promotion might become more responsive to and representative of people’s daily realities. How it can become a more inclusive partner in, and collaborative conduit of, knowledge—one capable of both informing intellects and transforming hearts. It needs to feel the pulse of the “fierce urgency of now,” and perhaps nothing can reveal this pulse more than the creative power of art (Griffith & Semlow, 2020)—especially poetry.
In this spirit, this piece offers a creative, critical analysis of the intersections of COVID-19, structural racism, and racialized police violence—situating present COVID-19 discourse within a broader historical arc of respiratory distress within communities of color, all while centering Earth Day and climate change as both metaphor and corollary. It integrates news media, academic research literature, and music lyrics, weaving them together through verse—evoking/in dialogue with the pulse of OutKast’s 1998 work, “Elevators.” In doing so, it enacts poetry as praxis (see companion piece, Petteway, 2021), reflecting critically on the racialized contexts and consequences of overlapping pandemics/threats to our health, while simultaneously acting as counternarrative to public health’s ahistoric, apolitical, and racist proclivities in times of public health crises (Petteway, 2020).
We’ll need many tools to dismantle the systems that produced our present condition, to spark our imaginations, and to feed our souls as we work toward a future in which we can all breathe. In these times of darkness, when love and resistance must be simultaneous acts, “poetry is not a luxury” (Lorde, 1984). It’s a flashlight, and if need be, a lightsaber. Add it to the toolbox.
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PARTICULATES//Tulips
(Or, Estimating Respiratory Effects of Ambient Air Pollution and COVID-19 Using a Policing-Climate Adjusted Hazard Function) We movin’ up in the world . . .
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. . . like ventilators allocated by algorithms
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built by the same hands that collapsed Eric. I can’t breathe. But it’s Earth Day so I’ll plant trees to offset secondhand chokes in the light of a rising sun. Uproot these particulates
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like tides, pens without memories or fingerprints clicking while the cameras roll and mouths shutter, feigning surprise at the deforestation—
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permitted,
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while our fossils fuel spring flowers. Let’s clear this space
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and make room for someone else in this urban heat island
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; let’s switch to solar and power organic tanning beds next to cafes where black gets dripped for white lips on lattes, Blood Orange interpolating with the hum of A/C. it is what it is . . .
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Caught between asthma
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and COPD,
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these lungs aren’t built to survive the formulas of a science without conscience creating a public without memory: it’s always been hot when selling trees leads to bodies being planted on Earth Day. So let’s burn sage in her memory, our melanin coloring the soil for new tulips to rise . . .
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Me and you, your mama and your cousin, too.
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Footnotes
Supplement Note:
This article is part of the Health Promotion Practice supplement, “Arts in Public Health.” The supplement includes exciting projects, strategies, frameworks, practices, and places that advance health through the arts. The Society for Public Health Education is grateful to the University of Florida Center for the Arts in Medicine and ArtPlace America for providing support for the issue. The entire supplement issue is available open access at 
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Notes
References
Supplementary Material
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