Two children can grow up four kilometres apart and breathe air with a measurably different burden of particulate matter for their entire childhoods, and nothing about that difference will appear on a map unless someone specifically goes looking for it. Air resists the usual visual grammar of urban inequality — there is no fence, no visibly different building stock — which is exactly what allows unequal exposure to persist without generating the kind of outrage that visible segregation eventually does. EqualitySymptom names the way a body's health outcomes become the delayed, legible symptom of an exposure inequality that was otherwise invisible at the time it occurred — asthma rates arriving years after the emissions that caused them, long after the political moment for accountability has passed. Atmospheric politics, treated seriously, means refusing to wait for the symptom before treating the air itself as contested territory, since by the time the symptom is legible the exposure has already done its damage.
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