It’s In the Concrete

Inequality is built into the infrastructure of Atlanta Georgia. Today, many people wouldn’t even notice this. However, this doesn’t only happen in Georgia. When referencing events in history, we can reach a cause for the deliberate racial discrimination within urban planning. Lawful segregation was commonplace for cities like Atlanta, so the people of the city were already living in the separate neighborhoods where urban planners preferred they remained. They were segregated majorly by white and black into neighborhoods that rarely mixed. There was little to no leakage between these neighborhoods due to social and economic pressures. So Interstate 20, the line cast between these two areas, was a way to make sure that these separations were more permanent within the city’s urban planning. By installing highways along these separation lines, it works as a physical way to keep black people in their place, which cements inequality into the city’s foundation.

The sociological impacts of these segregated living spaces greatly rely on what people think of these different areas. The separated spaces make the economic difference apparent, with white neighborhoods appearing more well kept, and black neighborhoods coming off more run down. This reinforces social stratification as it categorizes people of different races into rankings of who has more or less money, with white people on top and black people on the bottom based upon how well kept or updated an area is. Seeing the difference in “quality of life” between the neighborhoods feeds into this idea that “bad” neighborhoods, or more poor neighborhoods, are generally occupied by African Americans. This can also be said for “better” neighborhoods, which is commonly associated with white people or people with more money in general. This exemplifies the foundational inequities as the areas showcase a major wage gap between the areas as well as a gap in funding.

Both of these ideas tie into the political aspect of redlining, which is the practice of reducing the amount of funding an area can receive if it is considered poor or “risky”. This ties into the sociological perspective of the separation of the two neighborhoods as people view more poor areas as more risky and less valuable from a funding perspective. This is the most prominent form of inequality today because it can be framed as an economic pursuit when only marginalized people will live in these “risky” areas. Dually, looking from the historical perspective, we can see that these people were pushed into these areas and kept there in poverty. Once they couldn’t move, they installed Interstate 20 to truly keep them in these impoverished areas. So successfully excusing redling as anything less than a more subtle form of segregation is indicative of how ingrained these things are. These inequalities in Atlanta, Georgia are truly embedded into the concrete.

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