AOC on the Coronavirus: ‘Environmental Racism’ Is a ‘Pre-Existing Condition’ in NYC

EXCERPT:

OCASIO-CORTEZ: "Well, as I had mentioned earlier, inequality, environmental racism, these are pre-existing conditions. And when you have a pandemic, similar to what we saw with hurricane Maria, when you have 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. 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. 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, to the environmental inequalities that come through here.”