Biden administration announces first major step to fight America's racist roads

MSNBC ^ | 9/20/22 | Ja'han Jones

[Impala64ssa]

Jackson's water crisis is latest in history o Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced a large grant that'll be used to dismantle a highway built to destroy a Black community. And there's more.

The Biden administration is capping off the president’s recent trip to Michigan, focused largely on worker rights and transportation innovation, by handing out its first federal grant to dismantle a highway built to perpetuate racial discrimination.

The move is part of the Biden administration’s broader effort to remake America’s infrastructure to be more equitable, including addressing racist roads that were designed to facilitate white flight and deprive Black communities of housing and commercial opportunities.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday that $104.6 million in federal funds coming from last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill will go toward a plan to dismantle Interstate 375, a highway built to bisect Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood and its epicenter of Black business, Paradise Valley.

The funds are being allocated to Detroit as part of a $1.5 billion grant program called Infrastructure for Rebuilding America, or INFRA, for states to move critical projects forward.

“This stretch of I-375 cuts like a gash through the neighborhood, one of many examples I have seen in communities across the country where a piece of infrastructure has become a barrier,” Buttigieg told the AP about the Detroit highway.

“With these funds, we’re now partnering with the state and the community to transform it into a road that will connect rather than divide,” he added.

According to the AP:

Detroit’s project would create a slower-speed boulevard that aims to improve safety by removing a steep curve and adding LED lighting, while removing 15 old bridges and two stormwater runoff pump stations and building out wider sidewalks, protected bike lanes and pedestrian crossings.

[Impala64ssa]

Another service of the anti DESTINATION league. We need to get the word out to the woketards that oxygen is a RACIST patriarchal heteronormative construct. Instead of "we can't breathe" they can stage mostly peaceful protests chanting "WE WON'T BREATHE!"

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Who reads this ding dong crap? Highways facilitating White Flight??? Please.

I-375 is about one mile long and was built IN A BLACK NEIGHBORHOOD! I doubt that one single White person used the road to permanently flee Detroit, unless, maybe, he was moving to Windsor, Canada.

MSNBC: Lies and more lies!

[brownsfan]

Racist roads... breath-takingly stupid. To live in a world where this fiction is given credence is dispiriting beyond words.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

And THEN, I can’t imagine driving a large U-Haul or moving van through that tight, low-ceilinged Detroit-Windsor Tunnel! The White person fleeing Detroit for Windsor would have probably gone down I-75 and then exited to the road to the Ambassador Bridge!

[farmguy]

So... joe is taking a stand against street racing?

[FlingWingFlyer]

I’m surprise old Fourteenth Row Joe hasn’t come up with a new color or colors for the WHITE House. All that WHITE paint has got to go. It gives minorities, especially illegal aliens, the willies.

[dfwgator]

The White person fleeing Detroit for Windsor would have probably gone down I-75 and then exited to the road to the Ambassador Bridge!

And headed straight for "The Windsor Ballet"!

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

How many bloody White farms did the rural interstates bisect. How many majority-White villages went to pot because the interstate bypassed them? Maybe Petie would get a clue if he wasn’t so busy “breastfeeding” his kid.

[Michael.SF.]

dismantle a highway built to destroy a Black community.

But it did not destroy that community did it? So tearing it down serves no real purpose, does it?

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

It is going to be funny when they tear out the roads, cojoin the communities, and find each community is loyal to a certain gang.

[A Formerly Proud Canadian]

After the first three paragraphs, I had to 'circle back' (blech!) to make sure this wasn't the Babylon Bee. Unfortunately, no.

Why is it that so many Babylon Bee articles seem true and so many MSM articles sound like the Babylon Bee? How pathetic! We seem to be living in 'Bizarre World'!

[WKUHilltopper]

Why are these retards in office?? The GOP Congress is fighting for you! LOLOLOLOL

[ConservativeInPA]

Just wait and see …. Five, maybe ten years from now, we’ll find out the negative impact to the black community that was caused by the removal of the highway. Buttplug and Biden are morons. Neither has the ability to critically think and anticipate the consequences of anything that they do.

[A Formerly Proud Canadian]

Might I change slightly, your comment? I would suggest it will be 'bloody funny'.

[Sirius Lee]

Not a Bee headline.

[GaltAdonis]

"...dispiriting beyond words..."

.

Actually I personally am feeling quite 'stifled' by all of this massive stupidity.
Downright oppressed even.

Can I SUE somebody? Or protest?
Or just start a mostly peaceful riot somewhere, maybe?

.

/SSS - Semi-Serious Sarcasm

[conservative98]

NBC, Racist and anti-American.

The question of our time: Do you have something valuable to say, or just a dad hat and a podcast mic?— Ja'han Jones (@_Jahan) September 19, 2022

Dude really reached for the “yassa boss” affect. The ancestors wept, then wiped their hands of him.— Ja'han Jones (@_Jahan) September 19, 2022

Just last week, I wrote about why Herschel Walker’s performance of Blackness—as an athletic simpleton—appeals to white conservatives is the GOP. Here he is, doing the dance… https://t.co/1nBeO1E9p3— Ja'han Jones (@_Jahan) September 19, 2022

No one who frames Ron DeSantis’ racist immigration charade as an acceptable form of “protest” is worth even a second of your time. #ReidOutBlog https://t.co/1JikNlOmMS— Ja'han Jones (@_Jahan) September 16, 2022

[Labyrinthos]

Critical thinking is irrelevant as long as the decision feels good.

[ExTxMarine]

Jackson’s water crisis was self-inflicted by corrupt mayors, city council members, water authority personnel, and other basic internal affairs - PERIOD!

The whole “white flight” excuse is so bogus, even their own records PROVE the city income and property values went UP!!

The real problem was the EPA told them they had issues, and the Mayor(s) simply ignored the order! Even worse...HID THE ORDER FROM THE CITY COUNCIL AND THE CITIZENS OF JACKSON!!

[HamiltonJay]

So replacing an interstate stub, with a major boulevard is somehow going to “recreate” the neighborhood that used to be there?

I’m not quite sure what the point is here... This road is now nearly 60 years old.. are they really claiming that the Neighborhood hasn’t evolved or changed since 1964 and this roughly 1 mile road someone still divides things in a way that hinders growth or other things here?

I won’t argue that in the 50s and 60s they definitely made decisions about where interstates were going based on socioeconomics.. poorer communities tended to get screwed, but it wasn’t exclusively.... In laws live on a street with I75 right in front of their house in Akron. Driveways from where the homes that used to be there but were torn down to build I77 are still visible... However this wasn’t some primarily black neighborhood at the time... but was lower socioeconomically.

If the road is obsolete, get rid of it, that’s fine.. but don’t play some stupid political “racist” game...