Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claimed that car fatalities are indicative of racial discrimination. He made his comments during an interview with Al Sharpton, the controversial figure that some say engages in race-baiting, according to The Post Millennial.
While on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation” last week, Buttigieg said that fatalities in car crashes are “comparable to gun violence,” citing racial disparities in these cases. Sharpton asked the Biden administration official how he was targeting the inequality in these incidents.
“It’s something that deserves more attention,” Buttigieg said, adding that 40,000 people every year and black and brown residents are most impacted. He claimed that infrastructure in the United States is inherently racist because they were built more unsafe than in other areas.
In a bid to be more “racially equitable,” Buttigieg launched his “Reconnecting Communities” initiative last year which cost $1 billion on the back of Biden’s $2.2 trillion infrastructure package. The goal was to reconnect communities that have been racially segregated after he alleged that racism is “physically built into some of our highways.”
When asked how he would “deconstruct” that racism, the former mayor did not go into specifics of his plan but highlighted his shock that some people are surprised that black and white neighborhoods are historically divided. He then brought up an alleged myth that New York City civil engineer Robert Moses designed overpasses to be too low so that minorities could not get to Jones Beach by bus.
But the information that Buttigieg cites is reportedly flawed, as The Washington Post pointed out. Arnold Vollmer, the architect that designed the bridges, alleged that costs were too much to design the overpasses any higher.
But Democrats are still campaigning on the racist American infrastructure. Reps. Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar, signed a letter calling to reform “racist traffic enforcement.
