I’m sure glad that the election of Barack Obama means the end of all racism. I mean, otherwise, one would read this article about a Philadelphia swim club that banned 60 paying African-American kids from their pool because they would “change the complexion” of the club and think that there was sure a lot of overt racism still going on in this country:
The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club. The Valley Swim Club is a private club that advertises open membership. But the campers’ first visit to the pool suggested otherwise.
“When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool,” Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. “The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately.”
The next day the club told the camp director that the camp’s membership was being suspended and their money would be refunded.
“I said, ‘The parents don’t want the refund. They want a place for their children to swim,'” camp director Aetha Wright said.
Don’t worry, though. There’s a perfectly logical explanation that totally shows this isn’t racist.
“There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club,” John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club said in a statement.
Well, yes, the complexion would probably change from lily white. Which is a bad thing because…uh…non-white people are inferior. But that’s not racist. As noted, Obama’s election has ended racism forever. And thank God, because otherwise, this kind of crap would make me ashamed to be a white person.
(Via Jill Tubman)
“this kind of crap would make me ashamed to be a white person.”
And I guess I should be ashamed to be a woman when women do crazy/stupid shit? Or people should be ashamed to be black when there’s a ghetto shooting that involves black gang bangers? Or… maybe… we should just put the shame on elitists and their little clubs.
This kind of comment is just another color of racism, IMO.
I think it’s worth noting, for irony’s sake if nothing else, that the valley club link is responding with the following:
Fate’s Lady,
I think you missed the humor in the remark. I thought Jeff was alluding to the fact that minorities quite often DO feel conscious about how their group will be seen based on the actions of a few members, whereas the majority rarely does because, well, it’s the majority.
I thought Jeff was alluding to the fact that minorities quite often DO feel conscious about how their group will be seen based on the actions of a few members, whereas the majority rarely does because, well, it’s the majority.
Exactly.
Sorry, friends, but I have heard that kind of comment made in all seriousness, and I don’t find it funny.
I have to be honest here. I grew up in Huntingdon Valley and attended the Valley Swim Club (though I was not a member; I went with friends who were). First, Huntingdon Valley is a pleasant suburb but it’s not the Main Line, it’s not the Richie-Rich area at all, so charges that these are the “elite” are nonsense. Second, there is nothing exclusive about the Valley Swim Club – there are ritzy country clubs in the area, but the Valley Swim Club is not one of them, it’s merely a pool that you have to belong to. Third, it is a VERY small facility. I can honestly see how 65 children would disrupt the club, no matter how well behaved. Of course, then, the fault lies with the management for agreeing to host 65 children. And, of course, there is no excuse for bigotry. But it’s not a large public pool. It really is a very small facility that probably shouldn’t have signed an agreement with a 65-child camp in the first place.
But it’s not a large public pool. It really is a very small facility that probably shouldn’t have signed an agreement with a 65-child camp in the first place.
Yeah, maybe they shouldn’t have. It doesn’t change the fact that the reason the dude gave had nothing to do with space and rowdiness and everything to do with ‘complexion.’
Before they take it down, this is what they currently have to say —
And I think this is what they mean by “multi-ethnic”. Their members are all white, but some of them are a darker shade of white. Like me, in this photo :)
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y57/FurryCatHerder/Family-1964.jpg
Pingback: Human Trend » Instant Racist Ignorant Dolts – The Valley Swim Club
At the risk of being swamped, as it were, with opposing views, I’m going to say that this really could be a misunderstanding. I used to swim at the local high school pool, which was open at certain times to any city resident who registered and paid a nominal fee. Now and then I’d be there, peacefully doing my very slow laps in your standard 8-lane, 25-meter pool, and the entire boys’ swim team would come charging in and basically take over the place, and the lifeguards (who were often students who were themselves swim team members or who knew the swim team) would herd everyone else into one or two lanes on the ground that we couldn’t swim in the “fast swimmers” area. The swim team guys would be fairly noisy and act like they owned the place and generally behave like normal teenaged males. The rest of us would usually try to get a couple more laps in without bumping each other too much and then slink off to the changing rooms.
So if I were doing the same thing in the Valley Swim Club, or if I were playing with my kids in the shallow end (taking Susanne’s word here that this is a smallish facility) and suddenly 65 kids came in at once and jumped into the pool, I’d be pretty annoyed, and the race of the kids would have nothing to do with it. I’d be worried that my kids might get hurt not because of any racism I might harbor but simply because if someone jumps into the water right on top of you, or ducks you with a cannonball, especially if you don’t swim well, you might get hurt. And I would very likely complain to management that they shouldn’t invite that many kids to use the pool at once without at least warning the rest of us.
I think the club president’s use of the word complexion was infelicitous to put it mildly, but it’s at least conceivable that he just meant that filling a building with loud kids, again of whatever race, inevitably changes the experience of anyone who’s already there — similarly to my preferring to swim in peace and quiet without the swim team (who as best I recall were all blond btw).
Lu,
A problem with your comparison is that there’s no suggestion that these kids were behaving poorly or posing an immediate threat to the safety of the folks already in the pool. Frankly I find it unlikely that you’d see the kind of privileged behavior you describe by the swim team among a bunch of children who are going into a new place and among strangers for the first time.
The other problem with Lu’s post is that no one that I’ve read have said that the KIDS from the camp were causing some kind of scene. The only people reported to have made a scene are the parents. The president used the word “complexion” in an interview after the fact.
There are some safety issues that have been raised, the number of children being one, the ratio of children to counselors another, and the number of children who were not swimmers being yet another. But causing a scene isn’t in that list according to anyone.
The club has supposedly invited the camp to return and use the facilities. How exactly that is handled will be interesting to watch. Especially since the camp in question is one of three that were turned away.
I didn’t mean to imply that the kids were causing a scene at all, or doing anything inappropriate. My point was that a pool can comfortably hold only so many people at a time, and if 65 kids are trying to use a smallish pool at once they almost can’t help disturbing anyone else who’s already there. It wouldn’t be their fault, simply a result of x number of bodies in y amount of space. Also, your average pool just by its construction (usually cinderblock/concrete) has horrible acoustics. You get more than about 15-20 people in there, and unless they’re trying very hard to be quiet, you’re going to have wall-to-wall noise — again, not because anyone is misbehaving, just the nature of the beast. (In the case of the swim team, I wasn’t annoyed with them so much, they were mostly doing laps and maybe yelling to each other more than might be strictly necessary, as with the lifeguards’ assumption that their job was to accommodate the team at everyone else’s expense.)
ETA: people generally get annoyed when the rules of a situation change for the worse on them, especially if they don’t expect it. Another example I can think of: there’s a weekly knitting night I often go to at a local coffee bar. When I first started going several years ago, we were often the only people there for much of the evening. As time has gone by others have discovered the place: it’s quite spacious for a coffee bar, and it has free wifi. Other groups meet there monthly or biweekly, so on a given night we may find ourselves cheek by jowl with Linux enthusiasts, libertarians, or who knows what all. If we can find a place to park we may go inside to find that we can hardly hear each other. We don’t say, “hey, where’d all these geeks come from?” — at least not loudly enough to be overheard — but we do kinda wish they’d go away sometimes. Conversely, usually there are anywhere from 3 to 8 of us, but once in a while the stars align and we are 15 or more, in which case I can well imagine that a couple of patrons who stopped in for a cuppa and a quiet chat might say, “hey, where’d all these knitters come from?”
Now, since this is a public place and we haven’t rented it for the evening, we have no right to kick anyone else out or even to resent their presence. If it were a club, even a club open to anyone willing to pay the dues to join, and then that club started renting to large groups without telling existing members, we’d probably feel different. There might be nothing in the contract that forbade it, but we might still feel that we’d paid our dues with certain expectations that were no longer being met. This is human nature, no more and no less.
Lu,
Implicit in that is that it’s the “new” kids who are causing the problems, however expected those problems might or might not have been. Fairness dictates that people who’ve used something — say, a swimming pool — longer than a different group should, you know, get out so others can use it. It’s called “Sharing” and Something I Learned in Kindergarten.
A better outcome would have been welcoming the new group, and asking kids who’d been in for a while to get out, and then making sure all the kids had a chance to take turns. We did this when I was a kid at the clubs I belonged to. It really isn’t that difficult.
I just want to point out, Lu, that while your attempt to look for alternative explanations may be well-intended, it has the effect of implying that people who are labeling this event “racist” are just looking for something to be offended about.
I mean, there is a rich history in this country of racist incidents around swimming pools. Trying to eliminate race as a concern and frame this as “just human nature” is… problematic, ahistorical, and a classic example of hearing hoofbeats and claming zebras, not horses.
FCH and Elusis, you are both right, especially about the sharing thing. When I say something is human nature, I don’t necessarily mean that’s a good thing! It’s human nature to fear people who are different from us and to resent changes in routine. It’s human nature to be selfish; that’s why we all have to be taught to share, and it’s why we do it grudgingly even though we (mostly) can put ourselves in the other person’s shoes and see that it’s right. All I’m saying here is that if I’m used to swimming with my kids in a not-very-crowded pool in the afternoons, and all of a sudden this big group of kids comes in, maybe I’ve been there a while and maybe I just got there, either way I’m not going to be happy. I hope I’d have the good manners to yield gracefully, to leave if I’d been there a while and to find a way to share if not. (We don’t actually know that all of the parents who were there behaved badly.) But my reaction wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with racism.
…or, then again, it might. Well, I would hope that I personally wouldn’t act that way, but it’s certainly possible that some of the parents’ reactions were (partly or wholly) due to racism. Likely, in fact, from comments like “where’d all these black kids come from?” (Leave out the word black and you have a much flimsier case. Leave it in and, while I’m sympathetic to someone whose swim time didn’t turn out the way they’d planned, I wouldn’t want to act that way, and I’d have sharp words with any child of mine who acted that way.)
(There is of course a big difference between thinking “where’d all these black kids come from?” and saying it out loud. I am sometimes racist inside my own head. I try not to be, and when that fails I try not to let it get out.)
Math to the rescue: assume a pool 25×15 yards, which I think is about right for your standard 8-lane pool. Multiply that and divide the result by 65, and I get about 5 3/4 square surface yards per person. I have swum in much more crowded pools than that — on a hot weekend day at the public pool we used to go to when I was a kid I would guess that there were not more than 2 square yards average per person. (Hence my remarks about people jumping in on your head. At that pool you really did have to keep your eyes open and your mouth closed.)
So… the best face I can put on it is that the parents were merely selfish and rude, and I don’t really want to defend people like that. So I take it all back.
Lu,
The pool is actually larger than what you described. It is a single “L” shaped pool, made up of two lap pools joined together, “overlapping” in the middle. So in terms of space per swimmer, there was more space. That is not the only factor — surface area — to be considered.
I also disagree, very strongly, that fearing “difference” is somehow human nature. Fear, including racism, has to be taught. I didn’t “know” that I wasn’t supposed to play with black children until my grandmother (born circa 1921 …) told me so. For the most part I ignored her, at the time, but over time more and more people told me I wasn’t supposed to play with black kids, then as I was older I was told more things. I had to make a conscious decision in my early teens to actively reject that indoctrination. That’s where the fear of “difference” comes from, not some kind of difference-fearing center of the brain.
Children are TAUGHT to hate and fear difference. Take a bunch of young kids of difference races, toss them in a play yard, and they will all play together. You might see behavior that adults think is rude (I’ve had very young black children of friends want to touch and feel my hair — rude for adults, natural part of learning for very young children). But what you aren’t going to see from young, pre-indoctrinated children, is the racist slurs used by adults, the racist behavior, the racist attitudes, all of the things that become more common as some children age. That’s why I said previously that it’s either the president / board’s fault, or the adult’s fault.
Having grown up in New Orleans, I’ve accumulated a lot of “nieces” and “nephews” who aren’t really mine. My black “nieces” and “nephews” think this is just the most normal thing in the world. I’m very close friends with their grandmother, so of course they are my “nieces” and “nephews”. That’s just the Southern way (or, the New Orleans way at least) But for the adults? Oh my G-d — something is definitely wrong with me because I’m this white woman hanging around all these black folk. And the older they are, the more wrong I am (on average).
Elusis,
You are, of course, absolutely correct, especially about the intersection of public pools and racist conduct.
However, I always stress patience when dealing with, or explaining things to, children. Children internalize what parents (or adults) say very readily. If this turns out, in the long run, to be some kind of mistake, getting those children to “un-have” the experience of racism will be much harder than if the parents said “I don’t know why, we’re going to have to find out what happened.” If it turns out to have been racist conduct by the pool members or board, there’s always tomorrow to tell the kids the sad facts about racism.
You raise an interesting point, FCH: you are correct that preschoolers will happily play together without caring about, or in some cases even noticing, differences of race, sex, disability, etc. (As a preschooler I had an experience similar to yours, only since there were very few African-American families living in the area it involved just one kid, and no one minded our playing together.) I wonder what happens as kids get older, though. The closer you get to puberty the more important it becomes to be just like everyone else. I was mercilessly bullied in junior high for being different from the other kids, although it had nothing to do with race. (I was your basic nerd, not smart nerdy, just plain nerdy.) You were smart/brave enough to reject racism consciously at around the same age; I don’t know you well enough to know if for you that was part of adolescent rebellion or if you’re just plain smart/brave.
Whatever the case, most adults do seem to fear difference, or certain kinds of difference, and to have to work at overcoming that fear. Is that just nurture or is there a nature component that develops with age? I really don’t know the answer.
Lu,
I think our experiences of not fearing differences as children pretty much proves that it’s “Nurture” and not “Nature”. At least, that’s the conclusion I reached as a young adult.
I wish I could say this realization in my teens was the result of some advanced level of enlightenment. It was much more a result of being teased for my appearance (see my comment @8 — by age 10 or so I looked less Anglo enough that I was routinely teased for it — “Jap-Flap”, for some reason, became a common taunt, only to be replaced by “Faggot” around 13 or 14.) and then being routinely gay-bashed starting around puberty. “Fear” as a learned response isn’t theoretical for me. It’s also not the result of being brave or smart. It’s just one of those experiences I get for free as part of my fucked up life.