It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the Interstate Highway System of the United States was one of the most impactful public works projects in the nation’s history. Tying together one of the largest nations on the planet with millions upon millions of miles of asphalt, many Americans credit it with helping to bring a scattered nation closer to unity. They hold this assumption in ignorance of the ways in which it also drove us apart.
According to this article from the New York Times Magazine, public transportation as an industry, from the rails to the roads, has been used to perpetuate all manner of racist policies. Born in the era of Jim Crow, the spreading of the highways and urban renewal begot segregation far beyond the reach of the legal codes themselves (both in scope and in physical distance: this occurred in cities and towns all across the U.S.). Routinely, the planned routes for these new roads were drawn straight through mostly minority neighborhoods. Homes, businesses, and livelihoods were paved over as the inhabitants were displaced and potentially dragged back to forced labor through practices like vagrancy laws.
Where the roads did not destroy minority neighborhoods, they ran between them and white neighborhoods to act as a mechanism of segregation physically entrenched more than laws ever could be (indeed, this type of segregation persists today, uncaring for advancements like the ruling on Brown v. Board of Education). It cut many Black Americans off from easy access to jobs, schools, stores, and other essential locations. To compound the harms of the physical segregation of neighborhoods, oppressive economic practices like redlining further crushed the inhabitants of these neighborhoods by denying them loans, discouraging local business growth, and ensuring cycles of poverty could flourish in those areas.
Racism is quite literally built into the stones of this nation—the infrastructure of the U.S. was designed around keeping groups like Black Americans oppressed and separate from white people. This, in no uncertain terms, is our history. How, then, can we reconcile an anti-racist future in light of this country’s racist past? How far should we go in tearing down the parts of this country that are shaped by racism in order to rebuild?