Infrastructure Implementation Coordinator and former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu appeared for the White House propaganda hour yesterday. Prompted by one of the state stenographers posing as a journalist, he decried America’s racist roads, trains, bridges, and rivers.
You probably didn’t know that inanimate objects could be White Supremacist™. Thank heavens government bureaucrats are here to educate us.
Via Whitehouse.gov, from the May 12 press briefing (emphasis added):
Press member: Thank you, Karine. Thank you, Mayor. Secretary Buttigieg has appeared where you’re standing now and discussed how federal funds will be used to redesign urban areas that are assessed to contain infrastructure that was racist in its original design and its original execution. Are you collaborating with him on that effort? Are any of the infrastructure funds you’re talking about being used for that purpose?
Landrieu: Well, as you know, equity is really important to the President of the United States for the very simple reason that he thinks that unless we go forward together, it’s hard to go forward at all — so, first thing to remember.
And this administration believes that diversity is a great strength, not a weakness, and that if we’re going to do all of this stuff, it’s not just a matter of trust; it’s — it’s a matter of numbers as well. That’s first.
The second part of it is this: There are, in fact, highways, waterways, roadways — if you ask anybody in the African American community or communities of color, “Where do you live?”, they will often say, “I live on the other side of…” — and it’s usually a railroad track or water or a highway that split historic neighborhoods.
The “racist infrastructure” talking point isn’t new. Biden’s “infrastructure bill,” which actually never had much to do with infrastructure at all, was instead a smattering of Social Justice™ identity-based social engineering projects packaged and sold as “infrastructure.”
Via NPR, 2021:
In his $2 trillion plan to improve America’s infrastructure, President Biden is promising to address the racism ingrained in historical transportation and urban planning.
Biden’s plan includes $20 billion for a program that would “reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments,” according to the White House. It also looks to target “40 percent of the benefits of climate and clean infrastructure investments to disadvantaged communities.”
Planners of the interstate highway system, which began to take shape after the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, routed some highways directly, and sometimes purposefully, through Black and brown communities.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Related: Racist Roads Are Killing Minorities — or Something
In 2021, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the overall U.S. infrastructure a grade of C-, not a good look for the richest country in world history.
Rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure is probably a project the vast majority of Americans of all races could get behind. If the federal government has any legitimate function, after all, is it not building roads and bridges that facilitate travel and commerce between states as well as internationally?
Why poison the well by injecting Social Justice™ talking points into the program?
It’s increasingly clear that the social engineers are obsessed with worsening racial animosities, not healing them — presumably so that the new-age oligarchs can slip out the back door with all the cash while the peasants fight among themselves. Classic divide-and-conquer stuff.
Until the last decade or so, America had made substantial progress pursuing the ideal that MLK Jr. espoused: a nation in which people are judged by the content of their character, irrespective of race or other immutable characteristics.
At some point, it seems that, in the service of rolling back any progress on the race relations front, the civil rights ethos of the left shifted away from color-blind equality into color-obsessed, grievance-based “restorative justice” policies like the proposed white business tax in Denver by a self-described “democratic socialist” city council member.
They understand well that such projects will inevitably generate resentment among the majority-white (for now) population, which will in turn promote white grievance-based politics (not wholly illegitimate, in my view, but nonetheless destructive in a multi-ethnic society) and the country will degenerate into racial warfare.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member