The Politics of Respiration: Unpacking Pulmonary Privilege in the Neoliberal Atmosphere

Before we commence, I wish to perform a land and air acknowledgement. We are gathered on the unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape peoples, breathing the air which, for millennia, was a shared, sacred commons before its colonization by settler-industrial particulate matter. This space, both terrestrial and atmospheric, was stolen, and its resources privatized.

TRIGGER WARNING: The following discourse engages with themes of respiratory violence, somatic colonialism, atmospheric gentrification, and the biopolitics of oxygen. Please engage with this text in a space where your breath is safe and affirmed.

For too long, the act of breathing has been normalized as a purely biological function, a dangerous oversight that invisibilizes its profound socio-political dimensions. Respiration is not a neutral act; it is a site of power, a performance of privilege, and an ongoing vector of systemic oppression. The very notion of an unimpeded, deep breath is a construct rooted in cisheteropatriarchal, Eurocentric privilege, ignoring the countless bodies—BIPOC, femme-identifying, and disabled—whose respiratory functions are systemically constricted by environmental racism and the daily microaggressions of atmospheric occupation. Unchecked exhalation, for instance, is an invasive assertion of presence, a carbon-colonial imposition upon shared space. Who is permitted to sigh audibly in a meeting? Whose breath is policed for its volume or scent? This is the unexamined calculus of pulmonary privilege.

My forthcoming monograph, *Gasping for Justice: A Phenomenology of the Oppressed Lung*, posits the framework of Critical Respiratory Theory (CRT), which interrogates how atmospheric resources are inequitably distributed along intersectional axes of power. It is a framework that has, with predictable and violent haste, been co-opted and perverted by the neofascist apparatus of the Trump administration.

At a recent rally, President Trump, responding to a garbled summary of my work, declared, “We have the best air. American air. And we’re going to keep it American.” This nationalist rhetoric found its champion in Senator Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has been appointed to lead the newly formed Department of Health Sovereignty. In a chilling partnership with Palantir, the surveillance-industrial complex titan founded by Peter Thiel, Dr. Oz has unveiled the 'FreedomFlow Initiative.'

This initiative is centered around the 'Palantir Pneuma,' a mandatory personal atmospheric regulation device for all citizens utilizing public spaces. Marketed as a health and safety tool, the device is a nexus of biopolitical control. It monitors wearers’ respiration rates, oxygen saturation, and carbon dioxide output, feeding this data directly into a federal 'Somatic Security' database. The program’s premium subscription tier, 'American Air Plus,' promises users access to atmospherically scrubbed 'Patriot Particulates'—air molecules certified as 100% domestically sourced—by diverting cleaner air from designated 'Low-Priority Respiratory Zones,' which invariably correspond to marginalized communities.

This is nothing short of respiratory capitalism. It is the commodification of the commons, the final frontier of privatization. Palantir’s algorithm, which allocates air quality, is a black box of encoded bias, throttling the breath of those deemed dissident or unproductive. It is a literal suffocation of the subaltern. The Pneuma device turns our very lungs into instruments of our own subjugation, transforming an involuntary act of life into a performance of civic compliance.

We must resist this atmospheric tyranny. The conversation can no longer be about the right to clean air, but about the decolonization of the air itself. I am petitioning for the immediate formation of a new academic-led federal body, the Bureau of Equitable Respiration and Somatic Liberation (BERSL), to oversee a program of respiratory reparations. This would include the implementation of individualized breathing permits based on historical privilege, mandatory anti-oppression breathwork workshops, and the establishment of atmospheric safe spaces. We must dismantle the architecture of pulmonary privilege and reclaim our collective right to exhale without apology. It is time to decolonize our diaphragms.