| Politically innocuous to some the site of U.S. urban mass transit is abundant with interpretative value. Throughout history, public transportation has served as a cite of social resistance for many, like Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders, while also simultaneously acting as a site in which the state exhibits social control and coercive power, for example through rapidly multiplying surveillance systems and other social control mechanisms on public transportation. Since antiquity, there has been a division between those with power and those without power--a hierarchical class system present throughout history that is made manifest and becomes the subject of contention in something so basic as the act of riding a public bus. Dividing the history of modern public transit into two periods (the 1955-2000 culture wars, and the 2001-present day post-9/11 period) this paper will provide a review of the theoretical implications of how everyday riders have experienced American mass transit over the last sixty years. Using a wide range of scholars my theoretical review will help inform the findings I will present from a ground-level survey of Denver-area mass transit riders that I conducted in 20102011, gathering data from several hundred riders of urban mass transit lines. This public transit study is very important to the future of America and how persons choose and or are allowed to live their lives in public. For example, it is impossible to avoid the view of the state while riding public transit as security cameras and armed security guards are everywhere. Security sweeps of light rail trains, undercover police checking fare, suspended riders lists, and internal transit spying programs, are all features of the modern transit security state intended on subjugating the public. Drawing on such trends, this thesis will argue that although de jure race-based discrimination on public transportation was made illegal in America 50 years ago, both class- and race-based discrimination is still alive and well, de facto, on mass transit systems, and is readily being employed by mass transit security enforcement officials nationwide. |
