October 29th from 12:00pm-1:00pm
The Highway that Racism Built - Jean Yang, Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture, SUNY ESF.
In the 1960s, I-81 plowed through a historically Black neighborhood in Syracuse, displacing hundreds. When most of us think of racial injustice, interstate highway design isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. It is, in fact, a perfect example of structural racism in action: intentional government policy, enacted in almost every city in the country, that damaged every aspect of Black lives—cultural, economic, environmental, educational—for generations.
In recent years, more people and high-level institutions have acknowledged the structural racism built into the country’s highway system. The in-progress demolition of the I-81 viaduct is an opportunity to repair the legacy of injustice done to their long dis-enfranchised community and establish a template that actively addresses systemic injustice while knitting these communities back together.