"The fires have been raging for weeks, destroying 2.2m hectares of bush, over 700 homes, killing several people, and an uncountable amount of animal life, but it is the poor visibility in Sydney, the terrible air rated magnitudes worse than ‘hazardous’ that dominates media attention. Photos of a vanishing Sydney proliferate. People can’t believe it’s happening even as it happens to them. It occurs to me that to live in a racialised body, in a white supremacist society, is not unlike being in the choking grey haze of bushfire smoke: you are hyper aware that somewhere your people are dying, that the flames are coming closer, and that racist politicians and their followers will deny any of this is real right until their last ashy breath."