‘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
    38•2 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
      21•2 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.

      • @glimse@lemmy.world
        8•2 months ago

        It certainly looked plausible but it’s a good excuse to learn more, anyway. The context makes it even worse than the image text implies.

        Some good reading on the wiki page I linked. It was apparently an on-going protest where even Rabbis were arrested!

      • @glimse@lemmy.world
        5•2 months ago

        The choice of liquid is almost irrelevant, it’s the performance of it that I really found shocking

        • @apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world
          4•2 months ago

          The choice of liquid is hyper relevant. The difference between water and hydrochloric acid is the difference between a racist gesture and scarring racist violence or perhaps death.

          • @glimse@lemmy.world
            4•2 months ago

            Sorry, I thought you were implying that the word choice was deliberate to imply it was a scarier substance or something. I didn’t mean that any liquid is equally bad, just that which specific dangerous chemical he dumped was less shocking to me than the added context.

    • @stoly@lemmy.world
      8•2 months ago

      Hadn’t seen this picture before so I looked into its validity

      I think that this is an excellent way to approach something like this. I am a bit surprised (not at you personally) that you hadn’t seen it before, though, it’s been making the rounds for decades.

      • @glimse@lemmy.world
        4•2 months ago

        I’ve seen tons of images from the civil rights movement but this one somehow slipped under the radar. I hadn’t even heard of the protests that led up to it!