A drained swimming pool shows how racism harms White people, too
CNN)If you're a White person who thinks racism only hurts people of color, the story behind an empty, abandoned swimming pool in Missouri might just change your mind.
The Fairground Park pool in St. Louis was the largest public pool in the US when it was built in 1919. It featured sand from a beach, a fancy diving board and enough room for up to 10,000 swimmers. It was dug during a pool-building boom when cities and towns competed to provide their citizens with public amenities that promoted civic pride and symbolized a perk of the American dream.
These public pools, of course, were for Whites only. But when civil rights leaders successfully pushed for them to be integrated, many cities either sold the pools to private entities or, in the case of Fairground Park, eventually drained them and closed them down for good.
These closures didn't just hurt Black people, though -- they also denied the pleasures of the pool to White people.
Heather McGhee tells the story of the Fairground Park pool in her powerful new book, "The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together." McGhee employs the metaphor of a drained, cracked public pool to make a larger point: White refusal to share resources available to all US citizens doesn't just hurt people of color. It damages their families and their future, too.
McGhee has a name for this pain. She calls it "drained-pool politics." If you want to know why the US has one of the most inefficient health care systems among advanced nations, some of the worst infrastructure and a dysfunctional political system, blame drained-pool politics, she says.
Those politics are built on a lie that many White Americans have bought for centuries: When Black or brown people gain something, White people lose.
Much more worth reading at:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/05/us/heather-mcghee-racism-white-people-blake/index.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Hard to be that active on DU without having an inquisitive mind.
Maybe some of us can't read due to physical limitations, but there are many ways to get edjukated.
that these were the same people who (depending on the part of the country) latched onto "separate but equal" and were willing to spend twice as much money to maintain that exclusivity - separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, separate entrances, separate rail cars, and of course separate schools, cemeteries, churches, and so much else - although their "colored" facilities and mechanisms were rarely maintained and permitted to go into disrepair.
Racism truly is a sickness.
And as a note about the young author cited by the article, I kept saying to myself - where have I heard her name???? 
And I hunted around and found that she has been a frequent guest panelist on various MSNBC shows and realize that I have seen her a number of times on those shows. 
Last edited Sun Mar 7, 2021, 12:10 AM - Edit history (1)
Well done 
Here’s to the next 12,000 
Thank for for pointing this out.
And thanks for the OP.