SALENA ZITO: Ancient and lonely urban monuments evoke today’s political division.

Earlier this month, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said in an interview, “There is racism physically built into some of our highways.” But the problem is that when you make everything about race, you are often unable to reach people who would normally be sympathetic to your cause.

There is a fair enough argument to make that it is also elitism that is physically built into some of our highways, that dismissive contempt for working-class and low-income families of every color has always played a decisive role in infrastructure development and city planning. Because of that contempt, they could not stop the demolition of their communities, and lord knows they tried.

There is also an argument to be made that the seeds of our resentment we hold toward those cultural curators, such as the planning commissions that demolished the heartbeats of these neighborhoods, began when our parents and grandparents fought and lost the hard battles to save their communities. The division between insiders and outsiders continues to divide the nation.

Yes.