As usual, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz apparently doesn’t see racism, understand systemic racism, or (the most likely) chooses to ignore the realities of racism in this country. 

During a White House press conference Monday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was fielding questions about the infrastructure bill when April D. Ryan, a White House correspondent for theGrio, asked:

“And also, can you give us the construct of how you will deconstruct the racism that was built into the roadways,” she asked Buttigieg, referring to an article on theGrio. “Can you talk to us about how that could be deconstructed?

“I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach — or that would have been — in New York was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices,” Buttigieg responded.

“I don’t think we have anything to lose by confronting that simple reality,” he added.  “And I think we have everything to gain by acknowledging it and then dealing with it, which is why the Reconnecting Communities — that billion dollars — is something we want to get to work right away putting to work.”

Well, Cruz was surprised. His tighty-whities went into a squeezed bunch because he went right over to Twitter to lodge his Brandon complaint. 

This simpleton boiled all of what Buttigieg—an Oxford grad and Rhodes Scholar who speaks half a dozen languages—said into two imbecilic sentences. 

“The roads are racist. We must get rid of roads.” 

“You see, we Hispanics are very, very tall, and we need rich, woke Dems to raise the bridges for us,” Cruz said in a follow-up tweet. “Without Pete’s condescending help, there’s no way we can get to the beach.”

Senator, the bipartisan infrastructure bill isn’t just about repairing roads and bridges, it also has earmarked $20 billion to fix Black and brown communities bruised and beaten by previous infrastructure projects—think poison-filled pipes in Flint, Michigan, and lack of WiFi and affordable housing. 

“I think that the conversation we’re having now about race, inequality, and infrastructure at this level is new, and to me that’s encouraging,” Eric Avila, an urban cultural historian and professor at UCLA, told PBS.

Perhaps Cruz has conveniently forgotten about the fact that often when highways are built in this country, they tear through communities of color to make way for construction.

Popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 established an interstate highway system in the U.S. that spanned 40,000 miles across the country from east to west. 

According to PBS, in a 2016 speech at the Center for American Progress, then-Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the first two decades of the federal interstate system displaced 475,000 families and more than 1 million people.

“The interstate highway system did not cause all the problems facing urban communities,” Archer wrote. “However, its construction compounded discrimination and exploitation and triggered a process that weakened urban neighborhoods, from which they have never fully recovered,” New York University law professor Deborah Archer told PBS.

The Reconnecting Communities Act will address the “legacy of highway construction built through communities, especially through low-income communities and communities of color, that divided neighborhoods and erected barriers to mobility and opportunity,” a statement from Sen. Tom Carter reads. Carter is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. 

The statement adds: “This legislation will support local efforts to reconnect and revitalize areas that were harmed by the construction of the interstate highway system.”