story: bricks, asphalt, wildflowers.

question: what road it this?

dream: connection / awareness of division

in east central spokane, just before the altamont exit, there’s a red brick building facing the road. I’d driven by it a hundred times before I noticed it. part of this is my fault. I am not at my most observant when commuting. I’m a bad driver and have to dedicate an inordinate amount of energy toward merging.

photo by colin mulvany / the spokesman review

part of all of this is my fault.

sometimes, I am a member of the freeway. with my presence in my car, I am endorsing the existence of the road. I-90 and my participation in it is far from neutral, innocent, or inevitable. the devastation of the freeway on the east central neighborhood has been documented recently in a project titled Neighborhoods Matter: The Impact of the I-90 Freeway on the East Central Neighborhood by spokane regional health district and frank oesterheld. the project states:

Of the three proposed routes - one winding over the South Hill, one travelling through the relatively flat lands north of the Spokane River, and the last cutting through the East Central neighborhood - the East Central option won early favor. It is not hard to understand why. From the beginning, national planners understood that the construction of a system of interstate highways would cause major disruptions; the only question was which areas should bear the burden. To many, the answer was obvious. Studies indicate that “the victims of highway building tended to be overwhelmingly poor and black” partly because these neighborhoods occupied the cheapest land and were usually sheltered by the weakest political representation. (Neighborhoods Matter)

when we consider the opportunities for growth in spokane, we also need to consider the human costs of these developments. a road is a decision made once in asphalt and again and again and again in what we consent to drive over or through. spokane has a history of inequity, but it is a mistake to consider the existence of a freeway as something static, not just because we have not learned our lesson and want to expand it at the expense of affordable housing units in our most vulnerable neighborhood but also because the roads and the decisions they represent continue to influence us as a community both consciously and subconsciously. similarly, when we consider the digital avenues for exploring projects in the humanities, we must be aware of the choices we are making and attempt to take the word choice in the broadest sense of the word. when we think about denaturalizing the print medium and everything that goes along with it, we should also be denaturalizing our own prejudices and the power hierarchies we uphold through our presence in an institution founded on layers and layers of inequity. when we think about digital advancements as inherently linear improvements, we can risk underutilizing a foundational component of the humanities: our own culpability. there is a short line to be drawn from the studies of literature and history and art to the blood that is on our hands as beneficiaries of a system founded on exclusion, isolation, and elitism. when we embrace new tools, we have the opportunity to embrace these contradictions in their totality but we also have the opportunity to create anew, to distance ourselves from this legacy. it feels incredibly important not to distance ourselves. transformation can happen when we understand our own placement in a given story. we need to know when we are on the freeway, when we are creating a freeway in the name of connection, when that connection will actually isolate, when we have a story within us that is a building that needs to be saved, when we are capable of saving something but don’t. when we have a tool that was built to be oppressive, the most natural course of action will be to continue the cycle of oppression. doing something different will require more imagination than we think.