Governing through growth did not begin with Biden (or Bill Clinton). It’s a political path as old as Jim Crow. It’s also the surest road to even deeper racial and economic inequality, one that begins with politicians’ misguided faith in infrastructure.
In America, infrastructure performs political and economic miracles, not just by moving goods and services, but through its ability to deflect protest and political organizing, to liquidate Black wealth, to appease White voters weary of the demands of people of color and to shepherd costs and benefits — invisibly, swiftly — along racial lines.
It’s called structural racism, but infrastructural racism might be just as accurate, for it entails targeted devaluations of Black neighborhoods. It helps mortgage brokers underwrite housing segregation. It enables real estate agents and urban planners to carry out racial containment. It allows regulators to ignore landlord and merchant profiteering. And it emboldens the political class, all the while, to declare that infrastructure advances the common good.
The example perhaps most familiar to Americans today — “redlining” — arrived under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the oft-invoked and fondly remembered granddaddy of bipartisan infrastructure compromises. “Red” neighborhoods, home to millions of African Americans, were also home to systematic real estate devaluation and dispossession. The Home Owners Loan Corp. gave out nearly $3 billion in loans for the purposes of refinancing mortgages, paying delinquent taxes and making home repairs and improvements. But African American mortgages were allowed to fail on a national scale, often bundled and sold off by foreclosing lenders to landlords and speculators.
This occurred amid new housing projects, school construction, social spending and miles of roadways laid. These efforts spilled forth scores of new government programs and agencies all operating in observance of Jim Crow principles. Meanwhile, the Roosevelt White House refused to take a policy position on lynching, employment discrimination or Black disenfranchisement lest it risk alienating White Southerners at the polls and in Congress.
None of the burdens placed on Black America represented unforeseen costs. They originated in political calculations.
Consider the experience of Dicie Griffith, a 77-year-old Black woman who, in 1942, owned a small farm in Harriman, Tenn., just west of Knoxville. According to local reports, Griffith had her eight-acre farm snatched away for an amount 10 times less than its value. White agents wielding federal dollars under-appraised and grabbed her land by forging her signature. She tried to fight back, but a big government project was coming through — the Manhattan Project, and everybody thought it was a good idea.
Divested Black property owners lucky enough to find work in the new atomic facilities in Tennessee were soon concentrated into segregated one-room government-built shacks in Oak Ridge.