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Buttigieg used disputed Moses story to claim road racism: fact-checker
Buttigieg used disputed Moses story to claim road racism: fact-checker
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg used a disputed claim about Robert Moses to argue that racism is built into America’s highways and bridges, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler …
nypost.com
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg used a disputed claim about New York City “master builder” Robert Moses to argue that racism is built into America’s highways and bridges, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler admitted Wednesday, two days after defending Buttigieg’s statement.
During the White House press briefing Monday, Buttigieg was asked by The Grio reporter April Ryan “how you will deconstruct the racism that was built into the roadways.”
Buttigieg responded that he was “still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach — or that would have been in New York — was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.”
Kessler backed Buttigieg’s comments, which referred to low-clearance bridges on Long Island’s Southern State Parkway, claiming the nefarious designs were “detailed at length in Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Robert Moses, ‘The Power Broker.’”
Commentary:
Interestingly, when the Bronx River Parkway was built in the 1920's it was viewed as an environmental measure, meant to stop waste and pollutants being dumped into the Bronx River. If AL Bore, the WWF, Sierra Club and other tree huggers were around back then they'd have been100% supportive of Robert Moses' parkway projects. The problem with the parkways manifested with the building up of the suburbs after WW2 which made many stretches of those roads effectively obsolete and inadequate to handle the extra traffic.
Boston has the exact same Parkway roads and underpasses. These roadways were built in the early 20th Century over existing wagon roads before busses and cars existed. They were built for horses and pedestrians to pass under. There's nothing even "racist" about them, it was just how things were built back then.
IMO, Pete's response to the question was prepared. He likely knew what the question was before it was asked.
