Jim Crow Era
The era commonly called “Jim Crow” is best known for the system of laws that mandated racial segregation and upheld White supremacy in the United States between 1876 and 1965. Legal codes, social codes, and building codes intersected to keep people separate and unequal. The academic truism that race is “constructed” rarely brings to mind these concrete brick and mortar structures, much less the digital structures operating today. Yet if we consider race as itself a technology, as a means to sort, organize, and design a social structure as well as to understand the durability of race, its consistency and adaptability, we can understand more clearly the literal architecture of power.
Take the work of famed “master builder” Robert Moses, who in the mid-twentieth century built hundreds of structures, highways, bridges, stadiums, and more, prioritizing suburbanization and upper-middle- class mobility over public transit and accessibility to poor and working-class New Yorkers. In a now iconic (yet still disputed) account of Moses’ approach to public works, science and technology studies scholar Langdon Winner describes the low-hanging overpasses that line the Long Island parkway system. In Winner’s telling, the design prevented buses from using the roads, which enabled predominantly White, affluent car owners to move freely, while working-class and non-White people who relied on buses were prevented from accessing the suburbs and the beaches. And while the veracity of Winner’s account continues to be debated, the parable has taken on a life of its own, becoming a narrative tool for illustrating how artifacts “have politics.”33
For our purpose, Moses’ bridges symbolize the broader architecture of Jim Crow. But, whereas Jim Crow laws explicitly restricted Black people from numerous “White only” spaces and services, the physical construction of cities and suburbs is central to the exercise of racial power, including in our postcivil rights era. And, while some scholars dispute whether Moses intended to exclude Black people from New York suburbs and beaches, one point remains clear: the way we engineer the material world reflects and reinforces (but could also be used to subvert) social hierarchies.
Yet plans to engineer inequity are not foolproof. In April 2018 a group of high school students and their chaperones returning from a spring break trip to Europe arrived at Kennedy Airport and boarded a charter bus that was headed to a Long Island shopping center where parents waited to pick up their kids. As they drove to the mall, the bus driver’s navigation system failed to warn him about the low-hanging bridges that line the Long Island parkway and the bus slammed violently into the overpass, crushing the roof, seriously wounding six, and leaving dozens more injured. As news reports pointed out, this was only the latest of hundreds of similar accidents that happened over the years, despite numerous warning signs and sensor devices intended to alert oncoming traffic of the unusually low height of overpasses. Collateral damage, we might say, is part and parcel of discriminatory design.
From what we know about the people whom city planners have tended to prioritize in their designs, families such as the ones who could send their children to Europe for the spring break loom large among them. But a charter bus with the roof shaved off reminds us that tools of social exclusion are not guaranteed to impact only those who are explicitly targeted to be disadvantaged through discriminatory design. The best-laid plans don’t necessarily “stay in their lane,” as the saying goes. Knowing this, might it be possible to rally more people against social and material structures that immobilize some to the benefit of others? If race and other axes of inequity are constructed, then perhaps we can construct them differently?
