Racism in Atlanta Transportation

In my previous blog post, I promoted walking and other forms of public transportation as superior alternatives to personal automobiles as a primary mode of transportation. My main reason for promoting public transportation over private automobile use was its accessibility to all, regardless of income. In a sense, public transportation minimized economic and racial segregation by giving transportation power to everyone. Unfortunately, transportation power isn’t everything. Class-based segregation and racism continues to exist and separate black and white Americans from each other, further spreading the discrimination of the white American upper class and the disadvantage of the black American lower class.

Class-based segregation is something that we’d all like to think we’re past, but the reality is that many of us are the ones promoting it. In class on Monday, we discussed our impressions of busses in Atlanta. Several students claimed that they felt dark, dirty, and unsafe, although they offered no concrete evidence of their assertions. The issue here is that lower class individuals are the ones who most benefit from bus systems like MARTA. Middle and upper class individuals can afford a wider array of transportation options, while many lower class individuals have no choice but to rely on MARTA. At any given time, a MARTA bus will be full of mostly lower-class people. Because the lower class is typically the class with the homeless, the gangsters, and the thieves, many middle and upper class people are frightened by the idea of subjecting themselves to public transportation when they could just as easily use their cars. Wealthier people may even view it as “lowering their standards” by resorting to a method of transportation available to everyone rather than using a method only available to those who can afford it. To put it simply, many wealthy people don’t like poor people because they’re poor. This mentality is one of the main reasons that class based segregation exists in our public transportation. Unfortunately, the class based segregation isn’t the worst of it all.

Racial segregation runs even deeper than class-based segregation, especially in public transportation. Andrea Bernstein and Nancy Solomon write about racism in Atlanta’s transportation system.

“Public Transit was equated with black people and poor people and crime and poverty. And when the Metropolitan Atlanta Transportation Authority was created MARTA, it was a running joke that MARTA” – he spells it out – M-A-R-T-A – “stood for moving Africans rapidly through Atlanta.” (Back of the Bus)

Most of the lower class people who depend on MARTA are black Americans. MARTA is funded and governed mostly by socio-economically advantaged white Americans. This is inherently racist because of a group of people primarily one race and class was governing a group of people primarily of another race and class. A vote was conducted when MARTA was initially put into place to see where it would station busses. In theory, this would’ve solved the aforementioned racism issue, but in Clayton County, which at the time was “a mostly white, rural place,” (Back of the Bus) but the majority voted against servicing MARTA because the white Americans didn’t want to attract minorities.

Regardless of what many Georgians and Americans would like to think, class-based segregation and racism is still an issue. Many of those who claim it no longer exists are the very ones propagating discrimination. As a country, we need to recognize that the first step to recovery is realizing and admitting our problem.

Works Cited

“Back of the Bus: Mass Transit, Race, and Inequality.” By Andrea Bernstein and Nancy

Solomon. American Radio Works. WNYC, New York. Podcast.