To understand why the plan elicits hope, consider that it does something at once small and very big: It pays explicit attention to the variety of racial disparities bound up with the country’s infrastructure.
Already, the President seems determined to keep his word.
For close to a decade, Amy Stelly, an architectural designer, has fought to remove the Claiborne Expressway that runs through her Black neighborhood in New Orleans and leaves residents to suffer from highway pollution.
Biden’s plan mentions the highway by name as an example of a previous transportation investment that, over the decades, has harmed communities.
She added: “It’s great the federal government and this administration is recognizing that this is something that must be corrected if we are to be fair and just in America.”
In addition, Biden would spend $45 billion on replacing all of the country’s lead pipes and service lines because “no American family should still be receiving drinking water through lead pipes and service lines,” as the fact sheet puts it.
It’s not tough to grok how this move would improve the health of Black communities. The years-long water crisis that began in Flint, Michigan, in 2014, when the city started to take inadequately treated water from the Flint River, is still fresh in the US’s collective memory.
Speaking with Bloomberg Law, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, whose research detected the high levels of lead in Flint children, praised the President for viewing the crisis as a warning.
Amara Enyia, the policy and research coordinator for the Movement for Black Lives, echoed some of Stelly and Hanna-Attisha’s sentiments.
“It’s good that the US is actually on track to confront some crucial challenges with aging infrastructure — roads, bridges, those sorts of things,” she told CNN. “I was also excited to see that caregiving is part of the plan, because usually it’s not seen as part of the country’s infrastructure.”
Enyia expanded on the importance of the caregiving plank of Biden’s plan, which would provide $400 billion to “solidify the infrastructure of our care economy” via bolstering home care services, per the fact sheet.
The President would also increase the wages of home health-care workers, who make about $12 an hour, and create an infrastructure to give caregiving workers the opportunity to join a union.
Biden’s plan has symbolic value, too.
In other words, the image of the federal government as a guardian — as an entity that seeks to better the lives of the governed, including the most marginalized Americans — is nothing to scoff at.
Of course, history has made Black Americans keenly aware of how quickly promises to pursue racial justice can fall by the wayside, particularly in a strained political environment.
“We know that the plan is supposed to be big and bold, but the devil is always in the details,” Enyia said. “Implementation is where we’ll see whether the plan lives up to the hype.”
Source: CNNPolitics – Breaking News
