“Manifest Dismantling”; Critical Race Theory; and Biden’s Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Bill

"Manifest Dismantling"

Attention Economy defined: the collective human capacity to engage with the many elements in our environments that demand mental focus.

In the final chapter entitled “Manifest Dismantling,” of her best-selling book, How to Do Nothing, author, Jenny Odell writes about some of the misguided atrocities that occurred during the 19th and 20th centuries as privileged Caucasian leaders and politicians “crossed” the United States carrying out “Manifest Destiny” (newspaper editor John O'Sullivan coined the term 'manifest destiny' to describe the belief that God intended for the United States to occupy North America from Atlantic to Pacific).

Odell warns that as we face an advanced technological future and an impending environmental catastrophe, we must learn from the industrial and cultural pitfalls of Manifest Destiny and make informed decisions that truly serve humanity, not just one faction of it.

Odell:

One of the main points I’ve tried to make in this book-about how thought and dialogue rely on physical time and space-means that the politics of technology are stubbornly entangled with the politics of public space and of the environment. This knot will only come loose if we start thinking not only about the effects of the attention economy, but also about the ways in which these effects play out across other fields of inequality.

By the same token, there are many different places where manifest dismantling can begin to work. Wherever we are, and whatever privileges we may or may not enjoy, there is probably some thread we can afford to be pulling on. Sometimes boycotting the attention economy by withholding attention is the only action we can afford to take. Other times, we can actively look for ways to impact things like the addictive design of technology, but also environmental politics, labor rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, anti-racism initiatives, measures for parks and open spaces, and habitat restoration-understanding that pain comes not from one part of the body but from systemic imbalance. As in any ecology, the fruits of our efforts within any of these fields may well reach beyond to others.

"American Progress"

Odell also draws our attention to an 1872 painting by John Gast entitled, American Progress, and points out that ironically, “the white-robed woman in the painting [is] the harbinger of cultural and ecological destruction” that swept across America parallel to “progress” including, “waves of straight-up genocide that ravaged indigenous populations…[and trampled] on hundreds of species and thousands of years’ worth of knowledge.” Odell then describes an imaginary alternative painting in which a dark-robed woman “is busy undoing all the damage wrought by Manifest Destiny.” (see my crude sketch entitled, Manifest Dismantling)

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Critical Race Theory (commonly abbreviated as CRT) was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who was one of the early developers of the theory, along with scholars Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman, among others. It refers to a way of analyzing systems, institutions, and power through a lens of race and racism.

It emerged as an intent to understand and rectify the ways in which a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color in America has impacted the relationship between social structure and professed ideals such as “the rule of law” and “equal protection.”

While recognizing the evolving and malleable nature of CRT, scholar Khiara Bridges outlines a few key tenets of CRT, including:

• Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant. It recognizes that science (as demonstrated in the Human Genome Project) refutes the idea of biological racial differences. According to scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, race is the product of social thought and is not connected to biological reality.

• Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.

• Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.

• Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.

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The Democratic controlled Congress passed, and the Biden Administration signed into law, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. A tremendous accomplishment!

In the coming months — and years — federal agencies will distribute billions of dollars for everything from bridge repairs to public transit expansions to bike paths. Most of this money will go directly to state governments, which will have significant discretion over which projects they’d like to fund.

The state officials who oversee most civilian infrastructure projects will soon face tough decisions about which communities will get this money. Because the bill doesn’t include enough funding to cover the entirety of the country’s infrastructure needs, states and other regional entities will have to decide which roads get repaired, which lead pipes get replaced, and which bridges get restored, a process that has in the past left certain low-income communities and communities of color with poor access to adequate infrastructure.

President Biden is promising to address the racism ingrained in historical transportation and urban planning.

Biden's plan includes $20 billion for a program that would "reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments," according to the White House. It also looks to target "40 percent of the benefits of climate and clean infrastructure investments to disadvantaged communities."

Planners of the interstate highway system, which began to take shape after the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, routed some highways directly, and sometimes purposefully, through Black and brown communities. In some instances, the government took homes by eminent domain.

It left a deep psychological scar on neighborhoods that lost homes, churches and schools, says Deborah Archer, a professor at the New York University School of Law and national board president of the American Civil Liberties Union. Archer recently wrote for the Iowa Law Review about how transportation policy affected the development of Black communities. She says the president will face major challenges in trying to rectify historical inequities.

-Noel King, NPR

In conclusion, may we learn from the past, and in a spirit of compassion for all of humanity, find a common bond that propels us toward a new American Destiny.

CPW