‘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.
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.
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.
FYI: muriatic acid is simply a hardware store name for hydrochloric acid.
The choice of liquid is almost irrelevant, it’s the performance of it that I really found shocking
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.
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.
In my town, the only public pool was filled with cement instead of allowing black families to use it after laws changed to require it. It was 30 years before a new integrated pool opened.
Whatever became of racist James Brock?
King had attempted to be served lunch at the Monson Motor Lodge, but the owner, James Brock—who was also the president of the St. Augustine Hotel, Motel, and Restaurant Owners Association—refused to serve him. King was arrested for trespass and jailed; while imprisoned, he wrote a letter to leading Jewish reformer, Rabbi Israel Dresner, urging him to recruit rabbis to come to St. Augustine and take part in the movement. This they did, and at another confrontation at the Monson, 17 rabbis were arrested on June 18.
From a chemistry standpoint, it’s mostly symbolic. Unless the poor souls are very close to where he is pouring it in, they wouldn’t feel much if anything. It’s 2 gallons of at most 30% hydrochloric acid onto 10,000-15,000 gallons of water, the ph probably wouldnt measurably change. Still a total dick move.
](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5fbbc67b-2c33-4861-9a93-b4f9da327133.jpeg){kind=link}
Nothing happened. They stayed in and one of the protesters even took a sip to show that they were safe.
An (off duty) cop even jumped in and started beating them up. I too though it was dangerous because we all just read the word acid
I guess the media has always been media
The false belief that systemic racism is in the past is widely perpetuated, and (aside from the blatantly obvious police problem) many do not realize we are still very much a country which operates on white supremacy.
The most powerful book in transforming and informing my position on racism was DiAngelo’s “White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.” I highly recommend this to everyone.
Some other great books are “How to be an Antiracist” by Ibram Kendi and “Privilege, Power, and Difference” by Johnson.