South Bend, Indiana; Washington, D.C.

Evidently, Pete Buttigieg felt the need to 'Splain himself, as Ricky Ricardo might have said, about his "racist roads" remarks of earlier this month. Looking at how he defended himself, he shouldn't have bothered.

But it gives me a Voxsplaining opportunity. Which means, if you have any anti-annoyance pills left in your stash, swallow one before you continue reading.

There seems to be this notion running around the American lamercon/normiecon sector that Buttigieg just very recently made this all up out of thin air, just to be woke for woke's sake.

I don't agree.

In reality, Buttigieg is merely bouncing off what has been an American left wing trope that has existed for at least as long as I can remember. The trope is that there is, in some way, some sort of causative correlation between urban freeways and interstate highways and rapid automobile infrastructure on the one hand, and urban black decay and dysfunction on the other hand.

That trope is so easy to refute. You can point to urban areas that are good on both sides of an interstate highway, and urban areas that are bad on both sides, and urban areas that are bad in spite of no interstate highway ever being anywhere nearby.

Sometimes, the left uses the trope in the sense that urban freeways that connected to suburban and exurban freeways made white flight easier, and we know that had something to do with white people shoveling all the magic dirt, bagging it up, and packing it in the trunks of their cars, then high tailing it out to the suburbs on the interstates. Or something like that.

But I don't think this trope is to be taken literally, especially now. I think there's a reason why Buttigieg specifically said this, beyond the mere fact that Ron Klain appointed him Transportation Secretary. And I think that relates to the reason why Klain made Buttigieg TransSec to begin with, in spite of his otherwise thin gruel of actual competency and qualifications. And that gets down to the subversive point of this missive. It really has nothing to do with black people, as such.

Modern day white liberal urban gentrifiers love this trope, even though the trope far predates them. Because it gives them a woke rationale and excuse for their pure NIMBY desires to dismantle unsightly urban freeways in and close to neighborhoods they have or want to gentrify. Just as these same people have been using a coordinated combination of woke bafflegab to get rid of all the black people in the urban areas they want to gentrify and unloading them on cookie cutter suburbs.

That class of people demographically comprise as a disproportionately high percentage of themselves a certain domestic lifestyle choice that they just so happen to share with Pete Buttigieg.

Pete Buttigeg yelling about "racist bridges and highways" earlier this month and then sorta doubling down in it later in the month, as well as his being TransSec to begin with, is designed to dog whistle to gay white urban liberal gentrifiers that his boss's infrastructure bill (and any subsequent infrastructure policies) isn't going to mean new eyesore freeways in their newly gentrified urban backyards.

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