Opinion: Buttigieg’s ‘systemic racism’ claim is the leftist myth about Robert Moses – By Vincent J. Cannato (New York Post) / Nov 14 2021
Discussing the alleged systemic racism of American transportation at a recent press conference, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg used the example of how “an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach . . . in New York was . . . designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.”
Conservative commentators quickly pounced on Buttigieg’s remarks, leading Washington Post writer Philip Bump to point out that Buttigieg was merely talking about a well-known story from Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker,” his massive and authoritative biography of Robert Moses. In the book, Caro alleges that Moses designed the overpass bridges on the Southern State Parkway leading to Jones Beach too low to be used by buses that would carry poor minorities there.
To Bump, it was “not only obviously true that American governmental bodies used infrastructure spending as a way to bolster both directly and indirectly racist policies, but it is an equally obvious truth that such systemic decisions have often been ignored in the teaching of the country’s history.” And such omissions were why, Bump maintained, something like the 1619 Project was needed
