You're listening to Comedy Central. 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 at one point two trillion dollar law that's going to 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 very deep in the
package that has actually got a lot of people riled up. Democrats, led by President Biden, say now is the time to build back better. But leaders don't just want to build an 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. Critics, though, slamming the Secretary after he said Biden's Infrastructure mill 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 anymore 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 black face. That ship wasn't cool. But yes, Look, the idea that highways can be racist has completely blown the mines over at Fox and US And I get why, I get why, and I get white. Taka 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 is so mad about America's roads, And it's not because he keeps failing his driver's head tests. 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're the vital arteries that criss cross America, helping the country's truckers transport goods, it's workers commute to and from the office, and it's O J's flee the l A p D. What you may not know is that when America first started building its highway system back in the nineteen fifties, 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. Yes. The Federal Aid Highway Act of nineteen fifty six was one of the largest public works projects in American history. It added forty one miles to
our interstate system. Pretty much every major setting in the country New York, d C. Sanrancisco, Philadelphia, you have major highways cutting through neighborhoods, requiring the demolition of lots of housing and other friends of buildings that as they think about where they're gonna drop highways and destroy neighborhoods, they invariably single out what they see is the worst neighborhoods in their communities. It became a pattern in cities across
the country. Poor 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 nine. Planners had an uncanny ability to pick out the black neighborhoods. The route for ninety four 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 ninety four 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. I'm not saying no highways, but more often than not, that's 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 gonna 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 shape check 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. From the beginning, the Rondo neighborhood was a haven for people of color. At its peak from the thirties to the fifties. It had black owned grocery stores, credit unions, and social clubs.
During construction from nineteen fifty six to ninety eight, Rondo lotts seven hundred houses, three hundred businesses, and the population declined by In Florida, Overtown was the center of black Miami tour through neighborhood, wiping out countless homes as well as it's thriving business district. Kansas City, Chicago, Boston, Detroit,
New York City, Montgomery, Los Angeles. The list goes on and on, and 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 can 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. Infrastructure didn't just break up black communities, it reinforced segregation. The Federal Housing Administration underwriting manual said, an artificial barrier like a highway could protect a neighborhood from quote adverse influences
like quote inharmonious racial groups. They laid the interstate down right on the black white line dam and what that meant was that it made much harder to have school integration. I mean, you can have kids walking across the interstate,
for heaven's sakes. A report from the Georgia Historical Society says that while deciding the route of I twenty, 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 regard to keeping the races apart, rather than keeping traffic moving efficiently. Uh, it laid them down a way that today traffic in Atlanta
is incredibly startle. I twenty zigzags from east to west and a route that makes no sense unless you know it was laid down with a 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 Kotts. Although if you if you're real about it, Mario kott is pretty racist because in real life, when Italians get in a car accident, they don't yell
my mommy, I love the spaghetti. Do you have any insurance? Something of 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 thirty minutes faster. I'm still not friends with you, winter, but at least we're both gonna get home at five, and I'll make the sun set at five. You so much, well,
can you turn on the A C 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 I know that people like Taker 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. Why are you raised? 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 what's the daily show weeknights and eleven Central. Learned Comedy Central and stream full episodes
anytime on Paramount Plus. This has been a Comedy Central podcast