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Dividing Lines

How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

A USA TODAY BESTSELLER

From an eminent legal scholar and the president of the ACLU, an essential account of how transportation infrastructure—from highways and roads to sidewalks and buses—became a means of protecting segregation and inequality after the fall of Jim Crow.

Our nation's transportation system is crumbling: highways are collapsing, roads are pockmarked, and commuter trains are unreliable. But as acclaimed scholar and ACLU president Deborah Archer warns in Dividing Lines, before we can think about rebuilding and repairing, we must consider the role race has played in transportation infrastructure, from the early twentieth century and into the present day.

As Archer demonstrates, the success of the Civil Rights movement and the fall of Jim Crow in the 1960s did not mean the end of segregation. The status quo would not be so easily dismantled. With state-sanctioned racism no longer legal, officials across the country—not just in the South—turned to transportation infrastructure to keep Americans divided. A wealthy white neighborhood could no longer be "protected" by racial covenants and segregated shops, but a multilane road, with no pedestrian crossings, could be built along its border to make it difficult for people from a lower-income community to visit. Highways could not be routed through Black neighborhoods based on the race of their residents, but those neighborhoods' lower property values—a legacy of racial exclusion—could justify their destruction. A new suburb could not be for "whites only," but planners could refuse to extend sidewalks from Black communities into white ones.

Drawing on a wealth of sources, including interviews with people who now live in the shadow of highways and other major infrastructure projects, Archer presents a sweeping, national account—from Atlanta and Houston to Indianapolis and New York City—of our persistent divisions. With immense authority, she examines the limits of current Civil Rights laws, which can be used against overtly racist officials but are less effective in addressing deeper, more enduring, structural challenges. But Archer remains hopeful, and in the final count describes what a just system would look like and how we can achieve it.

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    This title is a well-marked up and structured book, which is fully accessible. This book contains images, table of content, page-list, landmark, reading order, Structural Navigation, Acknowledgments, Selected Sources, Notes, Photo Credits, Index, and semantic structure, short alt texts are provided. This ebook passes Daisy's Ace WCAG 2.0 Level AA checks. Additionally, blank pages have been removed from the ebook, while their page break labels have been left in for reasons of structural flow.

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    • Kirkus

      February 15, 2025
      A review of the racial consequences of passenger transportation policy in the United States. Archer, a law professor at New York University and the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, illustrates the oft-told story of the government's complicity in racial discrimination and segregation with a focus on highway construction, street planning, and mass transit. "In the history of the United States," she asserts, "transportation infrastructure is, and always has been, a political act." Bluntly put, it is "white supremacy by another means." With racial inequality endemic to America, it is no surprise that interstate highways in cities divide Black from white communities, streets are arranged to prevent Black people from driving into white neighborhoods, punitive policing disproportionately targets Black motorists and pedestrians, bus transit is highly racialized, sidewalks are fewer and poorly maintained in Black neighborhoods, and regional rail lines mainly serve white commuters. Archer deploys numerous examples from cities such as Birmingham and Indianapolis to describe the racial consequences of transportation policy while highlighting court decisions that have either reinforced racism or left it unchanged. Of particular concern are Supreme Court rulings that require a finding of intent, rather than overwhelming statistical evidence, to demonstrate racial injustice. Only a single chapter, however, is devoted to a serious legal analysis. Archer calls for a reparative approach that compensates for prior disadvantages and proposes mandatory Racial Equity Impact Assessments for all policy initiatives. Little is said about how this would work. Nevertheless, Archer deftly documents the detrimental effects of transportation policy on Black mobility and does so while acknowledging governmental policies (such as mortgage redlining) that have also contributed to Black inequality. Given her legal activism, one wishes that she had more critically attended to transportation politics and, by doing so, elaborated a path toward a just transportation policy agenda. According to Archer, Black America is still at the back of the bus.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 12, 2025
      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.

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