Oh man, this author didn't even cover one of the major ways that cars are racist, but did hint at it in other sections. The car-dependent design of suburbia that we have today was explicitly racist in intent. After the US Supreme Court ruled that housing discrimination was unconstitutional, local leaders had to figure out a different approach to enforce segregation, and they did it by using wealth as a proxy. Under the new zoning and building codes, they made minimum lot sizes big enough, and maximum occupancy low enough, that poor people couldn't afford houses in the new subdivisions. The need for a car to get around further added to the cost. Then, they offered subsidies (like the GI Bill) to poor white people, and not to poor Black people. Voilà! "Natural" segregation.
The handful of Black families that managed to amass enough wealth to move in anyway could be dealt with by more direct tactics.
