Racist-built suburban infrastructure perpetuates transit opposition even without current racists

Evidence

Even when the suburbs became more racially diverse, they still remained opposed to MARTA. In 2019, Gwinnett County voted MARTA down for a third time. Proponents had hoped that changes in the county’s racial composition, which was becoming less white, might make a difference. But the initiative still failed by an eight-point margin. Officials discovered that some nonwhite suburbanites shared the isolationist instincts of earlier white suburbanites. And even though the overt anti-Black racism that had shaped the suburban boom had subsided, new generations of residents there remained constrained by the built environment that panic had etched into the landscape, and they, too, conformed to its limitations. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1206

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the built-environment determinism idea from the 1619 Project’s broader infrastructure arguments — physical layout outlasts the racism that created it, echoing the ‘grafting and trees as infrastructure’ piece in reverse.
• SEED: Angle: ‘zombie racism’ — housing and transit decisions made by one generation lock in the politics of later ones. Essay on how built environments preserve discriminatory outcomes past the people who made them.