One of President Biden's biggest accomplishments so far,
I mean, aside from allowing students to keep their debt,
has been the infrastructure package.
It's a $1.2 trillion law
that's gonna help rebuild roads,
expand access to clean drinking water,
and finally get around to adding all the other colors
to stoplights.
And while most of the infrastructure package
was pretty uncontroversial,
there was one thing that was buried deep in the package
that has actually got a lot of people riled up.
NEWSMAN: Democrats, led by President Biden,
say now is the time to build back better.
But leaders don't just want to build and update roads.
In some cases, they want highways torn down.
Democrats would like to provide funding to tear down highways
that had a damaging effect on urban minority communities.
There is racism physically built into some of our highways.
And that's why the jobs plan has dollars specifically committed
to reconnect some of the communities that were divided.
NEWSMAN 2: Critics though slamming the secretary
after he said Biden's infrastructure bill
would address racism in highways.
I guess now, according to Democrats,
roads are now racist
and you need to apologize for it.
Roads can't be racist.
You can't build racism into a road.
Roads are made of sand and gravel and asphalt.
Ask any road builder.
Roads cannot be racist any more than toasters
or sectional couches can be racist.
They are inanimate objects. They're not alive.
Okay, first of all, toasters can totally be racist.
Yeah. I can't even count how many times
I've put a piece of white bread into a toaster,
and it came out wearing blackface.
That shit wasn't cool.
But yes, look, the idea
that highways can be racist has completely blown the minds
over at Fox News, and I get why. I get why.
I mean, I get why Tucker is so puzzled by this.
If highways were racist,
then, surely they would have been a guest on his show by now.
It must be very confusing for him.
But there is actually a real explanation
for why Pete Buttigieg is so mad about America's roads.
And it's not just because
he keeps failing his driver's ed test.
No, there's another reason.
So let's find out why in another installment of
"If You Don't Know, Now You Know."
♪ ♪
Highways. They are the vital arteries
that crisscross America,
helping the country's truckers transport goods,
its workers commute to and from the office,
and its O.J.s flee the LAPD.
But what you may not know is
that when America first started building its highway system
back in the 1950s, people were often forced
to leave their homes to make room
for all these fancy new roads.
And guess which people were moved the most. Guess.
NEWSWOMAN: The Federal Aid Highway Act
of 1956 was one the largest public works projects
in American history.
It added 41,000 miles to our interstate system.
NEWSMAN: Pretty much every major city in the country-- New York,
D.C., San Francisco, Philadelphia, you have
major highways cutting through neighborhoods,
requiring the demolition of lots
of housing and other sorts of buildings.
That as they're thinking about
where they're gonna drop highways
and destroy neighborhoods, they invariably single out
what they see as the worst neighborhoods
in their communities.
NEWSMAN 3: It became a pattern in cities
across the country. Poorer and minority residents
were displaced to make way for highways,
and white residents used those highways to commute
into the city for jobs and commute back home at night.
NEWSMAN 4: Planners had an uncanny ability
to pick out the Black neighborhoods.
The route for I-94 in St. Paul displaced one in seven
of the city's Black residents.
"Very few Blacks were living in Minnesota,"
one critic noted, "but the road builders found them."
Yeah, that's right.
Highway I-94 could have been anywhere in Minnesota,
but it just happened to displace the very few Black people
living in Minnesota.
More commonly known as the Minnesota Timberwolves.
And look, don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong.
These highways had to go somewhere, right?
I'm not saying "no highways," but more often than not,
that somewhere was right through a Black neighborhood.
Because you see, rich white neighborhoods--
they didn't allow this to happen to them.
But brown and Black families didn't have any political power
to stop it.
I mean what were they going to do? Take to the streets?
It was impossible. They hadn't been built yet.
And look, Black people are used to being displaced
by gentrification, even today.
But at least when that happens,
they get to enjoy Shake Shack for a few months first.
These highways, on the other hand--
they didn't provide any improvement to the neighborhood.
They slashed a hole through it.
And whatever was left
of that neighborhood just withered and died.
NEWSMAN: From the beginning, the Rondo neighborhood
was a haven for people of color.
At its peak, from the '30s to the '50s,
it had Black-owned grocery stores, credit unions
and social clubs.
During construction from 1956 to 1968,
Rondo lost 700 houses, 300 businesses,
and the population declined by 61%.
NEWSWOMAN: In Florida, Overtown was the center of Black Miami.
The I-95 tore through the neighborhood,
wiping out countless homes
as well as its thriving business district.
Kansas City, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, New York City,
Montgomery, Los Angeles. The list goes on and on.
Man, it's actually pretty heartbreaking to see
how devastating these highways were
for the Black communities that they ran through.
Streets that were once filled with Black people
are still empty to this day.
And of course, of course these communities crumbled
once a highway ran through it.
I mean, highways, think of all the things they bring.
Highways bring noise, they bring pollution,
and if you're really unlucky, spontaneous musical numbers.
I'm trying to get to work!
I mean, have you ever looked on the side of a highway
and thought to yourself:
Yeah, that looks like a nice place to live.
No. You probably thought:
I wonder if I could use the bathroom in that gas station
without being murdered.
And the fact that they destroyed Black neighborhoods
wasn't the only racist thing
about how highways were designed.
You see, around the time the highways were being built,
segregation laws were being struck down in America.
But, lucky for the racists,
they didn't need the laws to enforce segregation,
because now the highways did it for them.
NARRATOR: Infrastructure didn't just break up Black communities,
it reinforced segregation.
The 1938 Federal Housing Administration
Underwriting Manual said an artificial barrier,
like a highway, could protect a neighborhood
from "adverse influences,"
like "inharmonious racial groups."
They laid the interstate down right on the black-white line.
Bam! And what that meant was, that it would be much harder
to have school integration.
I mean, you couldn't have kids walking across the interstate,
for heaven's sakes.
NARRATOR: A report from the Georgia Historical Society says
that while deciding the route of I-20,
the Atlanta Bureau of Planning said it would be
the boundary between white and African American communities.
Because the highways in Atlanta were laid down
primarily with a regard to keeping the racists apart,
rather than keeping traffic moving efficiently,
it laid them down in a way that, today,
traffic in Atlanta is incredibly snarled.
I-20 zigzags from east to west in a route that makes no sense
unless you know it was laid down with the desire to segregate.
Man, racism is a hell of a drug.
I mean, think about it, instead of designing
the most efficient highway, they instead made it zigzag
around the city like some kind of racist Mario Kart.
Well, if you... if you're real about it,
Mario Kart is pretty racist.
'Cause in real life, when Italians get in a car accident,
they don't yell: Mamma mia! I love-a the spaghetti!
Do you have any insurance on you?
And, guys, I don't know about you,
but there is nobody that I hate more than I hate traffic.
Like, I will literally shake hands with my worst enemy
if it means I can get where I'm going 30 minutes faster.
I'm still not friends with you, Winter,
but at least we're both gonna get home at 5:00.
And I'll make the sun set at 5:00.
-Ooh, I hate you so much! -(laughing)
Oh, can you turn on the AC, please?
So yes, highways might not be following Black people
around department stores or turning them down for loans,
but the way that highways were built in America
was inarguably racist.
In ways that still affect American society to this day.
And I know, like, that people like Tucker and Sean Hannity,
they love to make it seem like talking
about the racist history of highways
means that you're somehow calling people racist today
because they still drive on those freeways.
Waah, you're a racist, you're a racist!
No, no, that's not the case.
Nobody's telling you to walk to your next family vacation.
What we're saying is, if we can try to understand the history
of how a thing came to be, then maybe we can figure out
how to make it better when we build new roads in the future.
And if you don't know, now you know.