Skip to Content
Streetsblog USA home
Streetsblog USA home
Log In
Equity

PoC Leaders Demand Anti-Racism from Transportation Community

A group shot from the Untokening 2016 Atlanta Conference. Follow and support their work here.

People of color in the transportation industry are calling on their white counterparts to make concrete, public commitments to confront their history of racism and join BIPOC in building an antiracist transportation landscape — and shared many resources authored by their fellow PoC leaders to help them do that vital work.

Here's Tamika Butler, who is the director of equity and inclusion as well as the director of planning for California at Toole Design, sharing wisdom for organizations whose recent solidarity statements rang hollow. (Leaders outside the transportation space should listen to this message, too.)

Naomi Doerner, a core organizer of mobility-justice collective The Untokening, also challenged organizations to ask themselves a deeper set of questions in this public facebook post.

Source: Naomi Doerner
Source: Naomi Doerner
Source: Naomi Doerner

Keith Benjamin, director of the Charleston, S.C., Department of Transportation, gave white leaders an enormous gift: a playbook of resources authored primarily by people of color to help apply an antiracist lens to their work. Here's the start of the thread to whet your appetite, but we recommend clicking through and reading the whole thing.

Countless other resources are available on Twitter, including resources for those in all the built-environment professions who want to take antiracist action — we highly recommend exploring the Twitter feeds of leading BIPOC urbanists like these.

You can learn more about the work of Tamika, Keith and Naomi at their social-media accounts linked above, and you can become a sponsor of The Untokening here. 

Stay in touch

Sign up for our free newsletter

More from Streetsblog USA

Talking Headways Podcast: This Boat is Doing Something Amazing for Transit!

Could a simple sale of old train cars inspire a new generation of transit fans down in Lima, Peru? It's all part of a very special edition of our podcast.

September 11, 2025

In Trade Deal With Trump, Europe Sells Out its Pedestrians

The new trade deal between the European Union and the U.S. means that pedestrians from Lisbon to Helsinki will be endangered by big, American-made trucks.

September 11, 2025

Thursday’s Headlines Are Day Trippers

It took me so long to find out one-way streets are bad, but I found out.

September 11, 2025

Republicans Target D.C. Traffic Cameras and Right-on-Red Ban Amid Trump ‘Takeover’

Automated enforcement has been shown to work. But federal officials who drive everywhere don't like it. Welcome to the Trump administration's takeover.

September 10, 2025

Wednesday’s Headlines Are a Different Kind of Death Spiral

Transit funding cuts lead to faster climate change leads to economic catastrophe leads to more transit cuts.

September 10, 2025

White House Threatens Transit Cuts After Murder on N.C. Train

A top White House official signaled he'd capitalize on a recent murder on a Charlotte, N.C. train to cut funding to transit systems across the country.

September 9, 2025
See all posts