The other day I heard a white woman say that white people driving alone in their cars was segregation, and I realized I had never thought about it that way.
I've thought about cars as a land-use problem because they are space-inefficient. I've thought about how they make us lonely and separate. I've thought about how the suburbs were built on white-flight, of course. I know that many white people disdain buses, and to a lesser extent all public transit, because it's for "other people" — which is coded language for Black people.
But I hadn't specifically thought of the act of driving itself as segregation until she said it. I think it's true: it's a structure of segregation.
A few days later this cartoon by Jen Sorensen showed up in my inbox:
It's a perfect fit.
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