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

Friday’s Headlines Follow That Robocab!

Wired writes about a day in the life a self-driving Waymo taxi, and more in today's headlines.

November 22, 2024

California’s Federal Dollars Will Increase Emissions

In almost every state, federal funding on highway expansions far outstrips spending on transit, active transportation, electrification, and all other programs that aim to reduce emissions. And the Golden State is no exception.

November 22, 2024

Talking Headways Podcast: City Tech with Rob Walker

Author Rob Walker on how technology has progressed transportation policy in the last decade.

November 21, 2024

One Hidden Reason Why Your State DOT Isn’t Building Protected Bike Lanes

"Proven safety countermeasures" might sound like a wonky engineering term, but it could hold the key to unlocking money to save lives.

November 21, 2024
See all posts