Dividing Lines

“Deborah Archer’s Dividing Lines demonstrates with great clarity that decisions about infrastructure in the United States have been anything but neutral. The placement of roads, bridges, and highways has often been in service of maintaining white supremacy—keeping Black people in their ‘place’ at the lower end of a yawning wealth gap, with fewer educational opportunities and less access to health care, and without the amenities that White communities take for granted. This is a brilliant and persuasive call to action for all who are concerned about creating a more just society.” – Annette Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of On Juneteenth and The Hemingses of Monticello“Deborah Archer offers an unsparing assessment of how twentieth-century transportation decisions have harmed Black communities, drained Black wealth, and shredded cohesive Black enclaves across the country. It is a quintessential example of how systemic racism affects contemporary Black economic vitality, richly documented and explained by Archer.” – Sherrilyn Ifill, former president and director-counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund“In America’s racial accounting, transportation policy has long been overlooked. Until now. In this revelatory book, Deborah Archer shows how racist decision-making has defined and designed the infrastructure—the roads, bridges, even the sidewalks—surrounding us all.” – James Forman, Jr., Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Locking Up Our Own

Deborah N. Archer is president of the ACLU, where she serves as chair of the Board of Directors and Executive Committee. She is a tenured professor and associate dean at New York University School of Law and the faculty director of the Community Equity Initiative at NYU Law. She lives in New York with her husband and two children.