The Greenway isn't DEI and other stuff we already knew

Over the last few years, the co-host of Auto Asphyxiation, Lo, found herself in an unusual position. She was critical of the neoliberal version of DEI long before even the horseshoe-contrarian “left.” Her critique was never that diversity, equity, inclusion, or justice were bad goals. Her critique was that too many institutions treated them as branding strategies and money & (most importantly) NARRATIVE grabs rather than questions of power.

The money grab (NOT racialized people) by mainly wealthy people (OR BOARDS) with token fronts, because they know that racialized people, historically excluded people, can easily be silenced if starved of resources. If they made sure to not fund people unwilling to be obedient dog bodies, they could say whatever they wanted.

It wasn’t even about the money; the Greenway doesn’t need money; they need to control the message of what justice is and what cycling is.

In this episode, we take a closer look at the Greenway's sneaking away from JEDI language and what it reveals about elite capture in urbanism. From a Law and Political Economy perspective, the central issue continues to be who controls resources, funding, agenda-setting, and legitimacy and from the feminist urbanism perspective we amplify the questions of whose mobility is prioritized and whose voices are treated as universal.

We don’t even care that these neoliberal organizations are abandoning a framework, as stated earlier, we already were skeptical of; it is that the same people who dismissed our critiques and BLOCKED us from events and talks because we accused them of performative BS inclusion are now proving those concerns correct. OUR MAIN critics told us that even questioning institutional DEI was divisive.

Oh, we’re divisive?!

Yet when political conditions changed, some organizations quietly removed the language and moved on, revealing how little had actually been redistributed (again we already knew nothing had changed). But those of us without detachable vaginas can’t just pick up our toys and leave when it is no longer fun. We can’t step in and out of racialization, gender, or lived experience depending on the funding cycle.

So what this show is about—is power.

So jump on your bike, bus, or electric scooter while we examine the relationship between bicycle advocacy, nonprofit urbanism, elite capture, and the flesh-ripping tension between symbolic inclusion and democratic control over space, mobility, and public investment.