Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality

Civil rights lawyer Archer debuts with a searing look at how government decisions about transportation, including where to locate highways and public transit routes, have been deployed to “create and reinforce” racial divisions. While some aspects of Archer’s narrative—such as the displacement of communities of color by highway construction in multiple American cities in the 1950s and 1960s—may be familiar to readers, Archer makes clear that such actions were part of a larger and more concerted effort. As racist legislation and regulations, such as discriminatory zoning laws and restrictive housing covenants, were ended or diminished by the civil rights movement, infrastructural interventions in those neighborhoods were enacted as intentional and direct substitutes, she argues, citing numerous examples. In the 1960s, immediately after residents of the Los Angeles neighborhood Sugar Hill won a lawsuit against racially restrictive covenants, a freeway was built that split the neighborhood in half and destroyed newly desegregated housing. Other examples reach into the present day, such as the criminalization of public transit fare evasion, which Archer chillingly notes is present only in cities with large Black populations, such as Detroit, New Orleans, and New York, but not in Seattle or Portland, Ore., where riders are mostly white. Well researched and disturbing, this is a vital contribution to the literature on modern-day inequality in America. (Apr.)