Cars, Racism, & The Climate: How American Car Culture Exploits Us All Algorithmically Inconvenient
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- Politics
Capitalism was nurtured & brought to maturity by human trafficking (i.e. slavery). Between 1444 & 1888, human trafficking established trade routes, the shipping & insurance industry, fueled innovation in the ship building industry, formed the backbone of the stock market, was the currency accepted for debt almost everywhere, & provided the labor force for cultivation, domestication, & settling of the vast area of native owned land in the Americas. In North America, Richmond, Virginia was the second busiest port for slaves for decades. In fact, there were so many slaves sold in Richmond that as construction of the East Marshall Street VCU medical school campus happened, in just three days some 44 individual remains were found in 1994.
Capitalism has cleared entire continents: North & South America, Australia, Africa, & much of Europe. It brought materials & products from all corners of the globe to centers of manufacturing & trade. In late capitalism, neoliberalism, it has expanded trade routes by having materials from all corners of the globe converge on Southeast Asia, North America, & Europe for manufacturing & sale. Coltan from the DRC, aluminum from Chile, gold from South Africa, semiconductors from Taiwan, & batteries from Japan, converge on Shenzhen to make our consumer electronics.
It may not be apparent at first, but the transportation of goods, services, & people is who we as a society want to invest in. America has a long history of virulent racism that plagues not only the genealogy of its victims, but the physical infrastructure that we see around us.
Neighborhoods, highways, to cars themselves (demonstrated clearly in their use as a weapon against protests for justice), are by-products of racism. White supremacy is based in the fear, paranoia, & suspicion of people who are not white or outside the definition of whiteness.
As African Americans converged on northern cities as a result of the terror campaign whites waged in the South during the late 19th & early 20th centuries ("The Great Migration") & black soldiers coming home after WWI & WWII settling in cities, white Americans fled & created suburbia.
Identical model homes sprang up all around the country. Work was still in the cities, necessitating transportation into cities. In keeping with the massive capital investments made in the United States at the time, one of the main avenues for the return on that capital were cars. It provided a personal mode of travel to & from work away from African Americans who often could not afford vehicles & depended on carpools, taxis, or public transportation. America changed its civil rights laws, but not it's mode of economic production or development. As George Romney, Mitt Romney's father would say, suburbia was a "high-income white noose" around black inner cities.
Cars are a way to distance ourselves from one another & remain suspicious fearful of those that live around us. They are a created need by capitalism that is reinforced by the idea that we should be scared of one another. It takes the form that oil refineries, distribution centers, chemical plants, power plants are almost exclusively near or in black neighborhoods. I-95 ran through Jackson Ward, a historic black community in Richmond, destroying the community. In not choosing public & social modes of transportation we perpetuate the disease of racism in it's personal and structural forms. It also pollutes the world we live in (disparately) & impoverishes us all.
Wyatt Gordon and I detail a way forward for transportation & our world.
Wyatt Gordon:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/yitgordon
Virginia Mercury: https://www.virginiamercury.com/author/wyatt-gordon/
Sources:
East Marshall Street Well Project:
https://emsw.vcu.edu/
Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law:
https://www.propublica.org/article/living-apart-how-the-government-betrayed-a-landmark-civil-rights-law
Capitalism was nurtured & brought to maturity by human trafficking (i.e. slavery). Between 1444 & 1888, human trafficking established trade routes, the shipping & insurance industry, fueled innovation in the ship building industry, formed the backbone of the stock market, was the currency accepted for debt almost everywhere, & provided the labor force for cultivation, domestication, & settling of the vast area of native owned land in the Americas. In North America, Richmond, Virginia was the second busiest port for slaves for decades. In fact, there were so many slaves sold in Richmond that as construction of the East Marshall Street VCU medical school campus happened, in just three days some 44 individual remains were found in 1994.
Capitalism has cleared entire continents: North & South America, Australia, Africa, & much of Europe. It brought materials & products from all corners of the globe to centers of manufacturing & trade. In late capitalism, neoliberalism, it has expanded trade routes by having materials from all corners of the globe converge on Southeast Asia, North America, & Europe for manufacturing & sale. Coltan from the DRC, aluminum from Chile, gold from South Africa, semiconductors from Taiwan, & batteries from Japan, converge on Shenzhen to make our consumer electronics.
It may not be apparent at first, but the transportation of goods, services, & people is who we as a society want to invest in. America has a long history of virulent racism that plagues not only the genealogy of its victims, but the physical infrastructure that we see around us.
Neighborhoods, highways, to cars themselves (demonstrated clearly in their use as a weapon against protests for justice), are by-products of racism. White supremacy is based in the fear, paranoia, & suspicion of people who are not white or outside the definition of whiteness.
As African Americans converged on northern cities as a result of the terror campaign whites waged in the South during the late 19th & early 20th centuries ("The Great Migration") & black soldiers coming home after WWI & WWII settling in cities, white Americans fled & created suburbia.
Identical model homes sprang up all around the country. Work was still in the cities, necessitating transportation into cities. In keeping with the massive capital investments made in the United States at the time, one of the main avenues for the return on that capital were cars. It provided a personal mode of travel to & from work away from African Americans who often could not afford vehicles & depended on carpools, taxis, or public transportation. America changed its civil rights laws, but not it's mode of economic production or development. As George Romney, Mitt Romney's father would say, suburbia was a "high-income white noose" around black inner cities.
Cars are a way to distance ourselves from one another & remain suspicious fearful of those that live around us. They are a created need by capitalism that is reinforced by the idea that we should be scared of one another. It takes the form that oil refineries, distribution centers, chemical plants, power plants are almost exclusively near or in black neighborhoods. I-95 ran through Jackson Ward, a historic black community in Richmond, destroying the community. In not choosing public & social modes of transportation we perpetuate the disease of racism in it's personal and structural forms. It also pollutes the world we live in (disparately) & impoverishes us all.
Wyatt Gordon and I detail a way forward for transportation & our world.
Wyatt Gordon:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/yitgordon
Virginia Mercury: https://www.virginiamercury.com/author/wyatt-gordon/
Sources:
East Marshall Street Well Project:
https://emsw.vcu.edu/
Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law:
https://www.propublica.org/article/living-apart-how-the-government-betrayed-a-landmark-civil-rights-law