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The Color of Climate
California Is on Fire and Choking Out Its Most Vulnerable
As California wildfires send smoke all over the United States, activists scramble to help vulnerable populations
This is The Color of Climate, a weekly column from OneZero exploring how climate change and other environmental issues uniquely impact the future of communities of color.
On a recent Tuesday evening in August, trans disability activist Quinn Jasmine Redwoods drove into Oakland to buy 12,000 KN95 respirator masks.
Redwoods is the founder of Mask Oakland, a group that collects and distributes masks primarily to Oakland’s houseless population, which is disproportionately Black, and other housed people of color. They started the group in 2017, when blazes were burning throughout Wine Country and the smoke from those fires drifted into the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area.
In order to get these 12,000 KN95 respirator masks, Redwoods had to rely on an informal network of community members, activists, organizers, politicians, and business people they’ve built up over the past few years. Rebecca Kaplan, a city councilwoman from Oakland, heard from a local businessman that someone in his community of small-business owners had gotten…
