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Racism and Roman Roads
A semi-accurate historial account provides a powerful metaphor
Last week, Irish author and polymath Bill Holohan published a viral Twitter thread explaining that modern train rails are set at a particular width because that was the width of Roman chariots. If you haven’t already encountered it, the condensed version is that early train rails were designed to accommodate the wheels of horse wagons, which were designed so their wheels would stay in the deep ruts then common to European roads, which were worn by Roman chariots on the long-distance roads initially laid by the Romans.
Bill presented his thread as a sort of joke (chariots were made wide enough to accommodate two horses, therefore everything is determined by horses’ asses) and I’m obligated to point out that historians took some issues with his summary — but the point is, it got me thinking.
A few days later, I was in a group conversation about mass incarceration and the American prison system, where someone asked why the US approach to incarceration is so different from virtually every other Western nation. Again, for the unfamiliar, the US represents about 7% of the world’s population, but 22% of the world’s prisoners. For every one person in prison in most other countries, the US has five. After the United States, Cuba has the second-highest incarceration rate in the world; 36 US states…
