In 2016, University of California professors Julie Sze and Lindsey Dillon published a paper in which they put “environmental justice literature in conversation with critiques of anti-Black police violence, as a way of understanding the multiple ways that racism becomes embodied in the U.S. today.”

I spoke to Sze, who is a professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis. (Her coauthor, Lindsey Dillon, is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.) Sze has studied the intersection of race and the environment for more than 20 years. She’s noticed an uptick in interest in her 2016 paper since the massive wave of protests following the police killing of George Floyd in May, as well as data showing that Black Americans have faced disproportionately severe outcomes from COVID-19.

Sze: I’ve been interested in race and health issues [around] vulnerability and premature death for a long time. A lot of the time, people who are killed by the police already have some sort of vulnerability [like obesity, asthma, or hypertension]… and their vulnerability gets weaponized against them. Like Eric Garner — that’s when that connection got really clear for me. Communities of color not being able to breathe — it’s kind of normalized: Black and Latino communities have [much higher rates] of childhood asthma and it is accepted and normalized.

Black Lives Matter and other insurgent social movements are basically saying that this ‘normal’ condition — of death for some people, and not others — is not okay. There’s nothing inherent or genetic about why communities of color are dying at higher rates from COVID or asthma or police brutality. These are social and structural problems.

Read the full conversation about pollution and police violence with Julie Sze at Grist.