Why Tucker Carlson mocked Pete Buttigieg’s claim of structural racism being baked into highway construction

R&I NV — The Biden administration wants to make US highways less racist. Tucker Carlson is scoffing at that. The disagreement illustrates what people mean when they say “structural racism,” and what some still don’t understand.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg raised the issue on Monday, when he touted the benefits of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package. “If an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach … was designed too low for it to pass by, that … obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices,” he said in a press conference.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson dedicated the final minutes of his Monday night show to mocking Buttigieg, saying the transportation secretary was one of the “dumbest people in the world” for claiming that inanimate infrastructure can be racist.

“Roads can’t be racist. You can’t build racism into a road,” Carlson said. “They are inanimate objects. They are not alive. That seems obvious, but apparently, Pete Buttigieg didn’t know it. Maybe he did know it, but he was afraid to say it.”

The exchange illustrates how the left and right can talk past each other on the issue of structural racism. The left sometimes employs the phrase to describe an impersonal force that results from bureaucratic decisions made decades ago. Carlson chooses not to tackle that head-on, instead reducing the phrase to a punchline.

While some infrastructure cash will go toward addressing such racist planning, it’s a tiny fraction of the entire package. Only $1 billion was allocated to the “Reconnecting Communities” program that aims to remove discriminatory infrastructure. That’s down from $20 billion in Democrats’ initial proposal, and less than 0.1% of the total package.

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Article URL : https://www.businessinsider.com/tucker-carlson-pete-buttigieg-racist-roads-structural-racism-infrastructure-plan-2021-11