‘Black people can’t swim’ Because until very recent memory, the US was an explicitly white supremacist authoritarian state, And access to public pools specifically Was one of the crowning achievements of The evil at the heart of this country. They destroyed every public pool that they couldn’t privatize. To keep segregation in place. And that’s why the US is still fucking segregated. The federal government stepped in until it wasn’t politically advantageous anymore and then they gave up And nothing had changed. They just declared victory and called white supremacy something else. If you look at US history, this is this is what the country is. This is the central pattern of what this colonial settler state is, And anything outside of that is fundamentally aspirational, divorced from the actual reality of the situation.

It’s really incredibly easy to say oh well it’s flawed, but it’s the best in the world, when it’s only people that you are OK with hurting that are getting hurt in the meantime.

  • glimse@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    Hadn’t seen this picture before so I looked into its validity (nothing personal, OP. Standard practice to check) and…yep, the text matches the image.

    News cameras began rolling. Brock told the white swimmers “you’re not putting these people in my pool”, and—“with exaggerated gusto”, suggests Warren —went to his office and brought out a 2 US gallons (7.6 L) drum of muriatic acid and poured it into the pool. This was a cleaning fluid, and Brock was “screaming that he would burn them out”, comments Branch. Brock also yelled that he was “cleaning the pool”, a presumed reference to it now being, in his eyes, racially contaminated.

    • alphanerd4@lemmy.worldOPM
      01·
      7 months ago

      I looked into its validity (nothing personal, OP. Standard practice to check)

      thats fine. My shtick here is radical reinterpretation of existing evidence. The historical events I draw on should be solid as a rock so i welcome a second pair of eyes.