It happened quite frequently, for instance when constructing the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago. Somehow it’s always easiest to demolish vibrant black neighborhoods.
Somehow yeah
And Los Angeles building the Santa Monica Freeway.
And St. Paul, MN for interstate 94.
St. Louis arch
The Dunsmuir Viaduct in Vancouver, BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan's_Alley,_Vancouver
Halifax, Nova Scotia. Demolished a black community for a bridge.
Brooklyn neighborhood in Charlotte, NC, which is now mostly just parking lots
It’s not perfect, but Austin, TX did an almost okay-ish job protecting Blackland. It’s not great, but it’s a symbol of what the tiniest amount of progress can look like.
The neighborhood was originally known as Blackland and was settled by Swedish immigrants
Nashville’s i65 on the North West
I-10 in New Orleans
The reason traffic is so bad out to Jones Beach on Long Island is because they built the roads so buses couldn’t go. Black people rarely had cars at the time.
There’s a really good Behind the Bastards about the guy who made those decisions. Can’t remember his name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted
This dude?
Btw just discovered behind the bastards by delving into L Rom Hubbard. Hilarious.
No, Olmsted was a landscape architect (also did Biltmore in NC). The state or city parks commissioner who did it. Can’t remember his name. He also explicitly didn’t leave room for future light rail expansion when they build the LIE, or some other expressway. Been awhile since I lostened to that one.
99 Percent Invisible also did a great mini series about the book The Power Broker, which is about the life of Robert Moses.
I375 in Detroit
Same in St. Louis, but they went also went right through the “not the right color of white” Italian and other immigrant neighborhoods.
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From the Wikipedia page
A newspaper account at the time suggested that Seneca Village would “not be forgotten”
Then later
The settlement was largely forgotten for more than a century after its demolition.
Also just kinda interesting that one of the residents was named Edward Snowden.
Nah, time travel and transrace!
Now look up the Tulsa Massacre
Once i learned about what they did I can’t forget it and will always bring up to people when relevant. Fucking insane what they burned it to the ground because they couldn’t stand successful black people. And not one person ever faced justice for this.
I have family in Tulsa that had never heard of that until I brought it up when I learned about it a few years ago. Crazy shit man.
I didn’t learn about the Tulsa Massacre until the first Trump term. I’m over 50 years old.
I watched the Watchmen TV series a couple years back (at age 40) and during the Tulsa massacre scene I was like “oh this takes place in an alternate history where the KKK won”
Then next year in college I took a course in American History… oof.
I’m not American, but I also learned about it watching the Watchmen series, then Wikipedia. Wasn’t that surprised, though. The only time I went to the USA some kids threw a heavy rock through our camping tent window while we, Mexican kids, were away. It didn’t strike me like some kids mischief even at that time.
There is an unfortunate anti-homeless sentiment in some parts of the US, where people will wreck camping tents on sight regardless of the occupants’ skin color. I’m sorry you had to deal with such hateful behavior.
It was at some Boy Scouts of America event.
Oh yeah, probably racism then. They have a history of it.
There were also a number of similar incidents elsewhere.
It’s very similar to how a lot of Americans didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre until it was in The Watchmen.
I learned about it because of the show.
But I’m also not from the US. Still felt weird that it wasn’t talked about more
Where I live they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was. Ripped through the middle of town. I hate that highway so much, they keep adding lanes too. Fucking racist twats and the effects reverberate to this day, no transit just more lanes because of handshake agreements between good ol’ boys in the 1960s.
“Nothing changes, even when it wants to” Hayes Carll
they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
630?
75\85?
275
…six seven?
Sweet Auburn!
Or Tulsa, where the whites were like “go make your own black town!” So they did, and prospered while the whites stayed poor. So the whites just straight up raped, pillaged and burned the black town and got away with it
Worse part of The Tulsa Race Massacre is it took fucking tv show for it to become widely known. My wife and ex wife grew up here never heard of it. Not fucking once had it been taught in schools. Now the local media talks about it constantly. But only because it had been exposed by the HBO show Watchman. Fucking racist fucks all around.
To be fair if highschool history covered every act of overtime racism and suppression committed by the US government there would be no time to cover anything else.
So?
So there would be no time for Americans to learn about other countries and the advantages of the metric system. Oh… wait… never mind.
Where are you from?
Oh look he needs help setting up his ad hominem attack.
Afraid to answer the question when it’s not an ad hominem. Go ahead and attack me. I don’t mind cowards.
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https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino-communities/
Still happening to this day. This is in Houston 5 years ago.
Holy fuck I was not prepared for the sheer amount of similar events described in the comments. It’s is almost as if racist people are inferior human beings, unable to understand empathy. Hen and egg problem, I guess. But yeah, w.r.t. structural racism, a Zager & Evans verse comes to mind: “[…] or tear it down - and start again.”
It’s always been this way. Really dumb fucks ruin everything. And the meme of racism simply won’t die as long as there are dumb, gullible shitheads that gobble it up. Humanity exists on a bell curve, and the smart enough people on the top end of the curve basically fight each other for the right to manipulate the idiots for their own selfishness. Racism is an easy meme and extremely virulent among religious. The actually smart people have better things to do and have no interest in all this stupid shit. Humanity is so fucking disappointing. A bunch of stupid fucking apes with nukes.
[…] the smart enough people on the top end of the curve basically fight each other for the right to manipulate the idiots for their own selfishness. […] The actually smart people have better things to do and have no interest in all this stupid shit.
I was going to object to your first bit, but then you objected yourself. Did you notice the contradiction? :p
I would argue that the people trying to manipulate others are not “the smart ones” but a certain level of intellect is the tool you need to act out your psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies, which are actually what triggers the desire to manipulate others.
haha, you’re right. The nuance you add about certain level of intellect is a good addition and it was my intent to communicate that.
That said, most manipulators still look like borderline retarded from my perspective. And there are people way smarter than myself :)
To add to y’all’s reading list:
Dulles Airport (the big international airport that serves Washington DC and Northern Virginia) did the same: https://travelnoire.com/town-destroyed-international-airport
Also, maybe tangentially related, The Tulsa Race Massacre: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=TU013
And this one
Plus the interstate system specifically chose to go right through black neighborhoods if they could
This is currently happening, right now, in Knoxville, Tennessee and Nashville, Tennessee
And let us not forget the Vanport flood, which the Portland authorities downplayed for decades and used as an excuse to pave over a vibrant community to make a raceway and a golf course. They only recently admitted that there was ‘some’ loss of life.
On the one hand, every country has a fucked up history that they ain’t teaching in classes. I learned most of my countries real history through reading books about this times
On the other hand: the US has a particular brutal and fucked up history that they ain’t teaching
On the one hand, every country has a fucked up history that they ain’t teaching in classes
I don’t think it is being intentionally obscured, it’s just too specific for elementary or high school education. There’s a chance a teacher could use it as spotlight type thing, but overall, that level of education is too broad.
The US does teach about screwing over indigenous people and slavery… well maybe not in red states. And now the current administration is whitewashing history.
Also, it sounds like those two things are the same hand. What’s your country?
People have grandiose expectations of elementary or high school education. At best, you have time to cover topics at a very high level and I’ve never had a class that even made it to the twentieth century.
As important as this historical tidbit is, it’s not a condemnation of history education. More than likely, this would come about in a college level course that is more specific.
People are erased all the time, our job is to make sure they were at least documented and were. The current administration is trying to erase recent and distant history. Hoard the data. Keep the dates. Write it down on paper, but still, we are watching the library burn in front of us.
This isn’t just this administration, not even close. My family is from Tulsa, had never even heard of the atrocities that have been done to the black communities there.
The Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis was also a black community that got bulldozed. Unsurprisingly common
Stupid question, but I’ve been to NYC many times and I’ve always considered Central Park to be one of the only enjoyable parts of the city… am I allowed to enjoy it if it was taken this way?
Nobody should allow you or disallow you. Whether you still can and want to is up to you.
Generally what I and other anarchists find is that none of us can live outside of exploitative structures right now, so it’s a matter of being kind and patient with each other and ourselves while weaning ourselves off things one at a time. Which is easier when you replace it with something better.
Eating vegan became a lot easier after helping out in a few community kitchens. Calling out unjust authority became a lot easier after organizing a soft coup of an anarchist book club lead by someone who didn’t act anarchist.
In the end, doing right by people only takes sacrifice if society is built wrong, and the best solution to that is to build society right instead. Maybe you can help make NYC a better place, maybe you’re glad to make it out of there needing less than a week’s rest. And while sacrifice can be worth it if the short term gains are big enough, nobody is going to be helped if you’re making yourself miserable.
(Concretely for NYC and every city in the US, a good start would be superblocks. Though Manhattan should probably go car-free and rely entirely on public transit. That way every street can be converted into greenery, and you don’t need to go to Central park to sit under a tree and enjoy the sounds of birds and of children playing. Restorative justice for Seneca village probably wouldn’t involve sweeping changes to Central Park - the descendants have built lives elsewhere - but that’s for the descendants, the people of New York, and for white and black USAmericans in general to reckon with).
Yes. Or you couldn’t enjoy the majority of the US, which was taken from indigenous people.
It’s not a stupid question at all, it’s actually quite a complex one.
I suppose the real meat of the question is it morally wrong to derive pleasure from something where suffering is involved. You didn’t personally make the decision to harm people, so you have no responsibility there. You also did not consent to existing as a person, which means you largely have no say about where you find yourself as a human being, the circumstances of which led you to that park.
But conversely you’re now burdened with the knowledge, which understandably changes your outlook. By way of utilising the park, you’re implicitly condoning it’s creation, therefore the suffering. Before you were blameless, now it’s a little muddier. You still wouldn’t have condoned the actions taken though, which does count for something.
If we’re taking “allowed” as a social context, some may find it distasteful. It largely depends on who you talk to. I don’t think it should affect your own reasoning much though.
Ultimately what we’re left with is a physical space that has a somewhat difficult history. As it stands, no action you do can alter that fact, it will always be that thing, unfortunate as it may be.
Considering all that, on the range of all possible human activity, I think the enjoyment of a park is fairly reasonable behaviour. I don’t think you can unlearn the context though, so whether or not you can enjoy it largely depends on your own internal moral workings. In the end, I would recommend going with what your heart, gut, and mind tell you.
