Infrastructure Is Crumbling And Robert Moses Is Still Dead

Most of us drive on roads and over bridges, regardless of whether we’re right, left or somewhere in between. We ride on subways and trains. We fly on airplanes. We purchase products manufactured elsewhere that magically turn up at our local store or at our door. Most of us, regardless of our race, gender, religion or ethnicity, need functional infrastructure for our world to happen, and a huge piece of that infrastructure involves transportation.

So what does our Secretary of Transportation have to say about it?

Transportation @SecretaryPete: " If an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach, […] in New York was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices." pic.twitter.com/0XWkDZehYM

— The Hill (@thehill) November 8, 2021

Putting aside the ancillary details, as Puerto Ricans were not an issue in the 1920s, he’s not wrong even if he’s not entirely right. Robert Moses, who designed New York’s parkways among other things, was a pretty open racist, and parkways were designed to be roads for passenger cars and not commercial vehicles, including buses. Whether this was to deliberately keep black people away from Jones Beach and force them to go to Jacob Riis Park instead, or whether this was an acceptable consequence of a bigger notion of creating a system of park-like highways for those who owned private cars is a fine issue for debate.

But now that Congress has enacted a massive infrastructure bill, what’s one thing got to do with another?

Conservatives had a conniption Monday over Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s acknowledgment that racism has historically played a role in the layout of America’s cities.

Buttigieg was asked during a news conference how the administration plans to counteract racist urban planning that has included highways that cut through Black and brown communities, poorly maintained roads and streets with no sidewalks.

“I’m still surprised that some people are surprised,” Buttigieg said Monday about objections to comments he made in April calling out racist infrastructure policies. “I don’t think we have anything to lose by confronting that reality.”

And indeed, right wing conservatives had a conniption. Who cares? Buttigieg wasn’t entirely right about Robert Moses, but neither was he wrong. Tucker Carlson ridiculed Buttigieg about it on Fox? Who cares? The only time I learn what Carlson says is when he’s being attacked for his performance because I don’t watch Carlson because I’m not into song and dance shows for the hard of thinking.

The question raised isn’t whether crazies on the right want to deny that Moses’ parkways served, even if not explicitly built, to keep black people away from white folks’ beaches. They did. We’ve known that for decades, even if Moses primary purpose was to create a more park-like experience.

The question that matters now is what does this mean now that there is $1.2 trillion of infrastructure money to be spent? This is the question that some of us who don’t care what Tucker Carlson, Ron Desantis or Darth Cheeto have to say about it. We have no interest in arguing about what was happening in Robert Moses’ head in the 1920s when he decided to make underpasses too low to accommodate buses and trucks so that only automobiles could travel on parkways.

Is the Secretary of Education saying that this money, allocated by a bipartisan vote of Congress to address long-needed maintenance and repairs of roads and bridges, rails and ports, all the hard infrastructure that allows us to go from here to there without it eventually crashing down on us?

Sure, there are some tangential things to be done, the creation of electric charging stations for vehicles that we’re told are going to become the norm if and when they figure out the many bugs that plague the concept and persuade people to spend a great deal more money on vehicles that will be disposable after ten years.

Sure, there will be funds to create a public wifi system for those who can’t afford it, even if they’re watching videos on their iPhones at this very moment, which may mean something to most of us or not.

But does Pete Buttigieg’s raising the racist Robert Moses mean that the money Congress just allocated to infrastructure will be used to raise the overpasses on parkways so the buses that couldn’t drive to Jones Beach in the 1920s will now be able to bring the black and Puerto Rican folks out to the white folks’ beach in summer?

The Cross Bronx Expressway divides uptown Manhattan and the Bronx, separating neighborhoods that are home to black and Hispanic people, so that people to the right of Queens can get to New Jersey. Are we going to move the highway to Westchester, where the expensive single-family homes are and tear out what’s left of the garbage and pot-hole ridden highway?

What is the point that Buttigieg makes when he brings up the decisions made a century ago, when there was no concern for how these choices affected minorities? Conservatives may want to fight one battle with Buttigieg, but those of us who aren’t at all conservative (unless you’re on the left fringe, in which case everyone but them is conservative) want to know what it is you’re trying to say, Pete. Are you going to use this money to fix the decrepit bridges or are you going to use this money to raise overpasses in a fine state of repair because they are racist legacies? Are you going to fix the Cross Bronx or move it elsewhere?

Republicans do this thing where they try to get you to second-guess things you feel and observe. The belief is that if they scoff enough at something — racism or a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, for example — they’ll shame you out of believing it happened. But unfortunately for them, they can’t mock the truth away.

Republicans are an easy target when they make knee-jerk arguments denying whatever it is the Democrats have to say, but forget the GOP and tell us, Pete, what your purpose is, what your point is, when you speak of our infrastructure and Robert Moses’ racism? Moses, like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, is still dead, and his parkway bridges are still too low for commercial traffic. But our bridges are falling down, Pete. Which one of these gets fixed?