Public transportation systems operating within American cities are highly racialized. By tying together first-hand accounts, news stories, and a range of data from studies in different disciplines, with an emphasis on conditions in Los Angeles, we aim to show how the country’s systems of capital and infrastructure are deeply entwined and organized to make people of color feel invisible and unwelcome as they navigate through space. At both macro and micro levels, these networks reinforce segregation and the policing of bodies, imposing damaging and deliberate impediments on the freedom and agency of people of color. It is clear, when looking at investment decisions and service plans, that funding and effective routes are steered away from communities of color toward vanity projects for white people. Transportation systems may not necessarily seem to fit into the traditional definition of architecture, but they are indisputably a part of the physical environment. As such, they play an important role in providing – or limiting – access to other architectures of society, whether those places be for work, domesticity, or leisure. Again, though, this infrastructure is in and of itself a site of racialized power dynamics, a direct mode for industries and the government to filter, control, and corral people of color. Studying transportation networks is a way to explore the spatial practices of people, to understand how settler colonialism and other socioeconomic dynamics condition life for disenfranchised populations, and to see how space and material can be used to keep people apart and assert who belongs where.

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast