A very common segregation tool
Young Americans for Freedom made the mistake of sneering at the observation that racism is built into many US highways, thus giving a lot of people the opportunity to educate onlookers about the well-documented fact that racism is built into many US highways. Own goal.
No, they’re right, it’s not parody, and it’s true.
That thing about roads designed not to allow buses? That’s closely tied to voter suppression, too. The suppressionist bills that limit voting places are helped along by extra difficulty getting from Point A to Point B for people with little money and no car. If you have to go a long distance to vote and there is no bus route near you – bam, there’s your obstacle to voting.
LA public radio station KCRW in June 2020:
While Los Angeles does not feature statues of slave traders or Confederate generals, there are less obvious monuments to structural racism. Just turn to freeways.
When construction of the Interstate Highway System began in the 1950s, white-dominated municipalities nationwide often routed freeways through communities of color or as a divider between Black and white neighborhoods.
The 10 freeway is a prime example. It split the affluent northern parts of the LA basin from some of the economically struggling Black areas of South LA. This affected thriving Black communities, including the Pico neighborhood in Santa Monica and the Sugar Hill area in West Adams.
Planners didn’t generally say “put them in the black neighborhoods,” at least not in public, they framed it as urban renewal, slum clearance, a brighter tomorrow.
I am constantly surprised by just how many things have racism built in or in the background. I haven’t had to live those constant racisms, so I’m actually privileged to be ignorant and surprised. I have no inkling just how many thousands of cuts POC suffer every single day.
Ya see, here’s my issue. Many civil engineering choices have been guided by racism to further racist ends. However, describing that as building racism into roads just seems ridiculous, implying that anything made for a purpose, whether primary or secondary, has that purpose somehow internal to itself. So, for example:
* our military’s weapons have democracy physically built into them.
* my computer has gaming physically built into it.
* my house has photography physically built into it.
* this bottle of scotch has inebriation physically built into it.
It’s a metaphysical step I just can’t take.
How about pushing the whole Interstate highway system instead of making an Interstate railway system and other forms of public transportation projects?
@maddog1129
Agreed, I was going to make almost the exact same comment.
A book from my posgraduate days:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3627598.html
It’s mostly about housing and property, but he does also write about how segregated housing was deliberately situated where freeways blocked connections between it and the rest of the city (there’s a striking image in it of a set of tower blocks completely cut off by freeways surrounding it). You can imagine how that affected residents’ employment prospects.
Racism is built into a lot of things. In case any of you missed it when it was being discussed, racism and colour film:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/25/racism-colour-photography-exhibition
@Mike Kuebler: The figurative and literal should really not be confused.
Yes but you’re taking what Buttigieg said too literally. You’re reading “racism physically built into some of our highways” as meaning racism plus concrete=highways. That’s a possible reading, yes, but it’s not what Buttigieg meant. Think of it for instance from the point of view of people who live in the shadow of such highways and know why they were built there and not somewhere else. There the highway is, a physical object, and its presence there is because of racism.
guest @ 4 – Nicholas Lemann also wrote about the Chicago projects and how calculatedly fenced off they were by the freeways in The Promised Land. It was years ago that I read it and I still remember the shock-horror.
Then again, I can agree that “physically built in” was a slightly clumsy way to make the point. I think “inseparable from” or “inextricable from” would have been better.
I think the useful point here is that I suspect a lot of actually well-meaning and progressive people have the perhaps unarticulated idea that ‘racism’ is ‘a thing (white) people do’, and if tomorrow everyone honestly agreed that humans are humans regardless of skin colour/ethnicity and stopped ‘being racist’ we’d at least be on track to creating an equitable nonracist society.
It eludes a lot of people, because a lot of us just don’t consciously consider the physical circumstances we live within and adapt to, that the physical structure of our places and our lives has this racism (and sexism as well of course, Caroline Criado-Perez has done incredibly important work demonstrating this in a way too comprehensive to ignore) built into it. It’s not going to disappear overnight, or even in a few years, and it’s not going to disappear because people’s minds and belief systems change. It may not disappear at all from our built environment, except gradually over decades and perhaps centuries.
Ophelia: I understand that the phrasing can be used metaphorically, just as many similar ones; e.g., “in its DNA”, “in my blood”, etc. And the reality of knowing why something is the way it is in virtue of racism can feasibly be described that way. My explicitly literalist interpretation is intended to illustrate that YAF is engaging with the statement on a different axis from those defending it. This makes the responses providing evidence of racism in the roads’ planning and construction completely miss the mark. YAF is saying not-A, while all the defenses say B.
Whether any given person even recognizes that the phrasing is properly metaphorical is an open question. Given the way the gender folx abuse language, I am less willing to give people the benefit of the doubt nowadays. :shrug:
That would have been much better.
guest – nailed it.
It’s easy to roll your eyes at stuff like this but here in the Rose City, the truth of it (at least here) has been been dredged up because of talk about correcting a shitty interstate design that passes through downtown. Portland hates the car but it still has to address the bottleneck in the center of town from all the 60,000+ Clark Co automobiles that commute into the city they love to hate each day for work. You see, I-5 narrows to 4 lanes right in the heart of Bridgetown, creating traffic jams that are starting to look like Seattle on a nice day. There’s been talk about expanding it to 6 or 8 lanes.
However, I-5 was built to essentially cut the primary minority owned part of town in half, because it’s always easier to argue for the greater good against disenfranchised people. Once thriving neighborhoods fell to progress. People still remember. And they seem to have a problem with being further displaced so some white people from the Couve can have an easier time benefiting from N OR opportunities and services.
FYI, that’s part of what derailed a proposed new Columbia River Bridge after $175,000,000 had been squandered in ‘planning’? Part of the justification was the commute time over the river. The idea was an even split of costs but when the Couve rejected the inclusion of light rail and it came to light that roughly 6 times more Clark Co residents commuted to Portland as opposed to the reverse, a lot of Portlanders said, ‘screw that’ and thus, we are one moderate earthquake away from separating for good.
I’ve often suspected the reason there was no interstate connecting Oklahoma City to Edmond, a suburb to the north, was precisely to make it more difficult to get to Edmond. There definitely was not, and I think still is not, any mass transit going that way. Since Edmond, a sleepy little bedroom town, grew in a wild frenzy in the latter half of the twentieth century, and since that growth was driven by people moving from Oklahoma City when the schools were desegregated, and since they subsequently priced most black (and, actually, most white) families out of the city, it is likely that there was some idea about making Edmond difficult to get to.
Edmond also did everything it could to purge poor white people. My family stuck in spite of them, until about ten years ago when my dad sold the family homestead (in the family since 1889) to a luxury apartment complex so he could live out his old days in reasonable comfort without having a farm to tend, and probably also in part so the children wouldn’t fight over what to do with the property after he died.
If my family was trying to establish there today, I doubt even my husband and I could afford it. I imagine our small house we sold when we moved to Nebraska is now out of our price range.
And…it worked. Edmond is still almost completely white (though I think they are starting to get an established Mexican-American community, and the university attracts a lot of international students, many of them people of color).
Here in Detroit I-275 obliterated the Black Bottom neighborhood.
NiV@5:
Isn’t that almost the definition of a joke?
That’s what I think this analogy is; a sort of pun. A deliberate, jarring absurdity, which requires people to unfold its meaning in order to understand it. Once they’ve done that, I think the analogy communicates its meaning very efficiently, which is, after all, what analogies are for.
Which is a long-winded way of saying mileage varies: I kind of like it, personally.
#15 – Bruce, It was I-375. But yes, they did indeed wipe out the black neighborhood that was there. They also removed the streetcars in 1957. The buses that replaced them often did not go past the Detroit boundary into neighboring cities where many of the jobs moved to. Lawmakers have made auto insurance rates in Michigan the highest in the nation. Many of the poor in Detroit (read black) don’t drive because they can’t afford the insurance. Even recent attempts to reduce these rates haven’t been entirely successful. All of these measures and more (read Institutionalized Racism) keep the poor, mostly black from bettering themselves and building wealth.
latsot @ 16: Yeah, it’s kinda punny. Problem is that people end up talking at cross purposes when one side is being figurative and the other literal. Another problem is that people often end up treating things initially intended to be figurative or absurdist as literally true, something we know people will consider themselves virtuous for doing. Still another is when people speak figuratively intending that some number of people take their words literally. You know, things we used to deal with in arguing against religions and the religious.
“What he said was obviously absurd. No reasonable person could have believed he meant it literally.”
“I was just being metaphorical when I said all TERFs should go against the wall. It’s not my fault someone took that literally.”
Null,
I get that, but every message isn’t for every person and there’s no imperative for a united front. We might just as well argue that squabbling about how to put across a message is counter-productive to a movement…. and of course, people do that all the time. I’ve done it too, in the past. I shudder to think of it now and again when I see younger people doing exactly the same.
Besides, I found the message quite powerfully put, and I wouldn’t have seen it at all if people hadn’t been criticising it. Horses for courses.
Also, about this specific quasi-metaphor – an aspect I think I didn’t fully take into account yesterday is that a freeway that cuts your neighborhood in half is a very physical thing, It physically shapes your life, especially if you don’t have a car. (I don’t have a car, and I’m happy not having a car, but walking over or under freeways plus having to go blocks and blocks out of my way to do that, is not my favorite thing about not having a car.) If all that plus the freeway is there because freeways get dumped on people of Those Other Races, then yes, from your pov the racism really is physically built into the freeway.
latsot:
Like, I wouldn’t even have a problem with the phrasing in isolation. What bugged me was the “dialogue”: a response from a literal interpretation was responded to with evidence supporting a figurative one. It takes very little to say, as Ophelia did, that the statement is metaphorical and to take it literally is a mistake. That people didn’t suggests, at least to me, that people didn’t even realize what they were doing. What they saw and responded to was, “Racism wasn’t/isn’t a significant part of the planning and construction of our infrastructure.” What they should have been responding to was, “So then what’s the mass per unit volume of racism?”
Ophelia: That’s why it’s a good metaphor. The better the metaphor, the less distance there is to carry the concept between metaphor and subject. (Which, of course, is also grounded in metaphor. (Which, of course, is also grounded in metaphor. (Which …)))
Heh.