The Biden Administration’s $1.9 billion infrastructure bill is nothing short of massive. It will appropriate money to address broadband access, public transit, the electrical grid, electric cars, and clean drinking water.

One of the areas that got the largest amount of funding ($110 billion) are roads and bridges, and not just in the ways some might assume, like filling potholes, building new highways, and paving new roads.

A large amount of the money will go toward improving the impacts of highways and roadways on communities of color.

“Out my door, every day, I’m seeing 18-wheelers sort of barreling through my neighborhood,” said David Shuffler, a lifetime resident of the Bronx.

Since its construction in 1955, the Cross Bronx Expressway, an extension of I-95 that passes through the northern New York City borough, has plagued those who have lived near it with noise and pollution.

When the nation’s interstate system was constructed during the same time, many affluent white neighborhoods across the country were spared the construction of new highways. Instead, communities of color, which oftentimes had little local political sway, were chosen to bear the burden instead.

The connector divided neighborhoods as it displaced families through eminent domain and put physical barriers between neighborhoods. In the Bronx, the Cross Bronx Expressway invited dilapidation into the community, as well as some of the highest poverty rates in New York and some of the highest asthma rates in the country.

“I’d leave in the morning and there’d be a film on the window, and I’d clean this film off, and by the time I’d come home from work that film would be there again,” said Nilka Martell, another lifetime resident of the Bronx. “It wasn’t until years later that I realized that was the exhaust from the vehicles that are traveling across the Cross Bronx.”

Soot from vehicle pollution is still visible on buildings that surround Martell’s home. In the mid-2000’s she started Loving the Bronx, a community group that forced equity in a battle where it felt it had none.

First, came pressure on local politicians, then a park renovation, then another, and now, the group has landed a $2 million investment from the new Infrastructure Bill to see if the Cross Bronx Expressway can be capped so parks and homes can be built on top of it.

It is a move other cities like Boston, Seattle, and Denver have already taken on their interstates as they lower the highways below ground and “cap” it, allowing neighborhoods to reconnect.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information found in the long run, lives and money are saved through capping projects as there are fewer accidents, better air quality, and more outdoor activity.

“When, in 2016, we were advocating for this, everybody thought we were crazy,” said Martell. “You know, we’d speak to local politicians and other community leaders and they’re like absolutely not. We’re looking at it, you know, not just as capping a highway, but the potential of really transforming the Bronx.”

The $2 million will go toward feasibility studies to see how much of the Cross Bronx Expressway would be able to be capped, how much money it would cost, and how much time it might take.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. -- Tracey Williams-Dillard is the granddaughter of an influential journalist who gave a voice to black communities when they weren’t being heard back in 1934.

"He was righting the wrong,” Williams-Dillard said.

Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder

is the oldest black-owned newspaper in the state of Minnesota. It was born from oppression -- lifting up voices and stories that might otherwise go unheard. But as publisher, Williams-Dillard is afraid not too much has changed in 86 years.

“You just want everybody to have equal rights. You want everybody to be okay. But it don’t end,” Williams-Dillard said. “We’re talking 1939 youth stabbed, same thing we’re talking today. Shocking video shows Minneapolis police caused man’s death.”

She’s encouraged to see people in the community protesting in the streets.

“This is a peaceful protest," Williams-Dillard said. "This is because people want to see justice. They want to see something different from what we’ve been seeing for way too long.”

It hasn’t all been peaceful. Williams-Dillard was overcome with emotion when she saw her family’s building boarded up for the first time in its history.

“When I walk up to the black press and we realize that we’re boarded up too because the violence is out of hand,” Williams-Dillard said.

They sit only a few blocks away from where George Floyd took his last breath.

“This anger, this goes back beyond Minneapolis around the nation. Some people don’t know all this history, but they feel it in their bones because their parents have lived through it,” the paper’s community editor Mel Reeves said.

Reeves is also a human rights activist and says people of color are sick of seeing their brothers and sisters killed by law enforcement time and time again.

“If you kicked me and you said ‘Oh sorry Mel,’ and then you kicked me again and you said ‘Oh sorry Mel,’ and then you kicked me again…. I’d start to think ‘maybe you’re kicking me on purpose,’" Reeves said.

Even if people aren’t inherently racist, he believes prejudice has been built into American society.

“We’re taught to be racist," Reeves said. "We’re taught to hate ourselves. White people are taught to feel superior, and black people are taught to be inferior. And we know it.”

University of Minnesota professor

Edward Goetz

studies issues of race, class and access to affordable housing.

“Systemic racism refers to racism and disparate outcomes that are built into our systems. That may have been built into our systems for reasons that have nothing to do with race, but that in fact work now to reinforce racial inequity and inequalities,” Goetz said.

For example, in the 20^th century, Goetz says there were explicit forms of racial discrimination in housing. It was illegal for some people to occupy certain types of housing and it created great wealth imbalances.

Even though those overt acts of racism may not happen now, “What that has created over time is a huge disparity in wealth because there’s been a generation or two of white people who have been able to generate a lot of wealth from their housing and have passed that wealth onto subsequent generations,” Goetz said.

Many minority groups don’t have that same privilege. Another element of systemic racism has to do with rules that are built into our systems like the way we fund our local schools – most are funded by property tax revenues and local funds.

“So you have very well-endowed schools in some neighborhoods providing tremendous opportunities and experiences for students, and you have schools in other neighborhoods that are underfunded that don’t have the most recent textbooks or facilities, and this produces disparate outcomes in education which then goes on to have impact on subsequent earnings,” Goetz said.

It’s a cycle that’s hard to break, but systemic racism goes beyond housing and school. According to Goetz, for the same crime, people of color are arrested, prosecuted and jailed more than white people.

“Systemic racism and white supremacy isn’t just a white cop with his knee on the neck of a black man. It’s the system that creates that cop, it’s the system that tolerates that cop, and it’s the system that allows officers like him to escape punishment,” Goetz said.

Acooa Ellis

has also spent time researching systemic racism. She's the Senior Vice President of Community Impact at the

Greater Twin Cities United Way

.

“There are so many people whose heart is literally to protect and serve, but too many… too many where that isn’t the case, and that behavior goes unabated, and it spreads, and it becomes part of the culture,” Ellis said.

Ellis says there are possible solutions like training officers differently, or getting them connected with the community.

“There’s something about policing a person that could live around the corner from you, or go to school with someone that you love,” Ellis said.

Ellis says she’s optimistic change is coming soon. Williams-Dillard says Minnesota Spokesman Recorder will not stop its activism until that change is made.

“My hope for going forward is that we can just be real. Let’s get real about what is happening, let’s get real about our role to be a part of the change. And let’s stop having nice conversations, and have honest ones,” Ellis said.

“We gotta keep the news out there, we gotta remind people that these are real times, and we gotta talk about it,” Williams-Dillard said.

“At some point, we gotta lay down our prejudices and our assumptions about folks, and we gotta see each other as human beings. Can’t stress that enough,” Reeves said.

“I cannot breathe. My heart is so heavy. It’s just so heavy,” Williams-Dillard said.

 

Several studies show that Black people are disproportionately killed by police in the U.S. And leaders, including President Biden, are calling for change.

But Sen. Lindsey Graham says the U.S. doesn't have an issue of systemic racism.

"We just elected a two-term African American president," Graham said. "The vice president is of African American Indian descent. So our systems are not racist. America's not a racist country. Within every society, you have bad actors."

The police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, and several others have renewed the calls for a change in policing.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which aims to ban certain methods of deadly force by police, end qualified immunity, and improve training, has passed the House with support from President Biden and is now at the Senate's hands.