evidence: (ideas.work.) Much has been made recently of the fact that many of America’s highways are racist. It started when USDOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg told April Ryan in an interview with TheGrio, "Often this wasn’t just an act of neglect. Often this was a conscious choice. 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…" I have eternal admiration for that kind of talk at such a high-level. The truth is so fresh. After all, most urban highways are racist. Some white neighborhoods were also carved up by highways over the last century, of course, but because decisions about the location of highways were determined by the discriminatory mindset of American public policy prior to federal civil rights legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they did far more damage to Black and Brown communities. For example, not long after Fortune magazine famously called Auburn Avenue the "richest Negro street in the world" in 1956, the planned downtown connector’s mind-boggling, traffic-inducing "Grady Curve" was intentionally warped around the east side of the central business district to break the back of Sweet Auburn.