> What if Americans got together, with a similar degree of concern about the public health risk that the current barriers to learning to swim present? What if we invited more of the community to use underused private pools? What if the U.S. government incentivized the construction of more public pools to serve especially underserved populations?
US used to have a lot of public swimming pools. The problem is racism and desegregation.
There is a great Marketplace podcast on this [0]:
> Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration received the official blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971. The city council in Jackson, Mississippi, had responded to desegregation demands by closing four public pools and leasing the fifth to the YMCA, which operated it for whites only.
> “Beginning in the mid-1950s northern cities generally stopped building large resort pools and let the ones already constructed fall into disrepair.” Over the next decade, millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with Black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs.
And more reading on the brutal history of integrated public/community pools in the US [1] with an infamous photo of a motel manager pouring muriatic acid into a pool where black and white demonstrators used a pool togther:
> ...those big public pools eventually became mixed-gender pools, unleashing even deeper-seated fears about what might happen if black men and white women went swimming together. "Whites in many cases literally beat blacks out of the water at gender-integrated pools because they would not permit black men to interact with white women at such intimate public spaces,"
A survey conducted by Northwestern University [2] found that there's a ~25% gap between Black and Latino children versus white children when it comes to swimming lessons.
So there you go; the reason we can't have nice things is because we have an abundance of racists in the US that would rather sabotage a resource for the community rather than share a space with another human being who happens to have genes for higher melanin content in their skin. If you ever wonder why we can't have nice things in the US as a society, it is often the case that there's probably a reason that's rooted in either racism or classism.
This a Book: The sum of Us - By Heather McGhee [0]
Here is an AI generated summary:
In "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together", Heather McGhee uses the metaphor of the public swimming pool to explain her thesis.
In the mid-20th century, thousands of public swimming pools were built across the United States for community enjoyment. These pools were often funded by tax dollars and were large, resort-style pools that families could enjoy. However, the vast majority of these public pools were segregated, barring people of color, specifically Black people, from access.
When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, ending segregation, many white communities didn't respond by integrating these pools; instead, they drained the pools completely. Some went as far as filling the pool with dirt or concrete, or letting them fall into disrepair. It was a drastic measure ensuring that if they couldn't have the pool to themselves, no one could use it.
McGhee uses this metaphor as a representative example of the zero-sum game mindset, the idea that any gain for the Black community is seen as a loss for the white community. It also highlights the cost of racism: communities chose to lose a valuable public resource (the public swimming pool) rather than share it equitably.
The public swimming pool narrative is a recurrent theme in the book. It illustrates how racism harms everyone, not just those being discriminated against. It's an example of the societal and communal self-sabotage that occurs when racism drives decision-making, showing that racism doesn't just hurt the targeted group but deprives everyone of shared public resources and opportunities.
There is a great Marketplace podcast on this [0]:
And more reading on the brutal history of integrated public/community pools in the US [1] with an infamous photo of a motel manager pouring muriatic acid into a pool where black and white demonstrators used a pool togther: A survey conducted by Northwestern University [2] found that there's a ~25% gap between Black and Latino children versus white children when it comes to swimming lessons.So there you go; the reason we can't have nice things is because we have an abundance of racists in the US that would rather sabotage a resource for the community rather than share a space with another human being who happens to have genes for higher melanin content in their skin. If you ever wonder why we can't have nice things in the US as a society, it is often the case that there's probably a reason that's rooted in either racism or classism.
[0]: https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/09/412913702...
[2]: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/12/racial-ethnic-...