cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14606887

‘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.

  • @hasnt_seen_goonies
    16•1 month ago

    That’s a great question. In this case (if I’m remembering the correct protest), this was a group of protesters that had gotten into a hotel(?) pool that had been marked as whites only. The acid the man is pouring in is a type of pool cleaner. The water would dissipate the cleaner, but it was slowly making the pool ph drop. I believe the kids that stayed in the pool the longest suffered burns.